Blood Work (49 page)

My shoulders
ached from having my arms stretched over my head and from being
jammed in a hole Mrs Arnold wouldn’t let me expand because ‘this
house is heritage listed, young man, have some respect for your
cultural foundations’. There were twinges in my neck that were
probably the start of muscle spasms. My right foot had gone to
sleep, thanks to being squashed between the wall and China cabinet
(which I was not allowed to touch either, ‘Wedgwood, young man!’).
And my freakin’ torch decided at that moment to die.

Between me,
the floorboards, the corner foundation of the house and the ground,
there wasn’t a lot of space left to shake the bastard thing, but
shake I did. Hey, it always worked in the movies. And sure enough,
a hard shake brought the light back on. Pity that it took a smack
against my head to work. And then the bloody thing was pointed
right in my eyes when it came on.

“Argh.” My
startled cry blew up a cloud of dust into my face, which I promptly
sucked in.

“Did you find
it?” Mrs Arnold asked through my ESP.

There aren’t
letters to express the true cadence of my response, so we’ll leave
it up to imagination. However Mrs Arnold’s imagination dealt with
it, her entire response was something about getting a real pest man
to come get rid of her problem. Ignoring her, I scanned the torch
around the dark crawl space.

The beam fell
onto a big lump that was even more out of place than the barbed
wire—or not, depending on what you expected to find in crawl
spaces, which in turn probably depended on the type of movies you
watched. I have a t-shirt that says ‘Attention ladies: I watched
“The Notebook”’. (Okay, I haven’t—watched the movie that is—but I
do have the shirt.) I’m firmly in the ‘fully expect to find ghastly
things in the crawl space’ camp, but I don’t admit that on first
dates.

Mr Wibbles, a
prize winning Burmese cat of remarkable proportions, was pretty
much reduced to mincemeat. If you liked your mince to have fur and
bones. I don’t and I’m guessing most folk don’t, but apparently
imps do.

The creature
crouched amongst the bloody remains, cheeks bulging with, judging
from the scraps it had yet to eat, liver. It was, from pointed head
to barbed tail, about a foot long, humanoid in shape and covered in
greyish-red, wrinkly skin. About the biggest feature on it, apart
from the tail, was its nose, which jutted out from its face like
Pinocchio at a sports-scandal press conference. It had a pair of
stubby wings on its back.

So far, the
imp hadn’t noticed me. It just kept stuffing its face, humming to
itself. Imp’s were even more totally self-absorbed than your
average paparazzi-baiting tween starlet. It was hard to get their
attention, and really, why would you want it? They were foot long
garbage disposal machines with less intelligence than a brain-dead
chicken. Still, they didn’t mix with human civilization too well.
When their natural food source ran short, they took to scavenging.
However, you didn’t find them head first in your knocked over
garbage bin. Rather, you often caught fleeting glimpses of them
while they were carting off your Chihuahua, or dragging your prize
winning Burmese through a hole in the floorboards.

Imps. Small
demons but they make up for it in ‘eww’ factor.

In the hand
not holding the torch, I had a tiny tape player. I’d gotten a very
strange look from the guy in the electronics shop when I’d rushed
in and demanded one. He’d tried to sell me an MP3 player with
speakers, and couldn’t understand why I thought that would be just
a tad clunky. When I’d rushed next door to the music shop, they’d
looked at me even more strangely when I asked for a cassette to
play in my hard won tape player. Luckily, there are some people who
still buy tapes, but probably owing to the personality type that
would refuse to move into the digital age, the selection of tapes
was thin.

I hit the play
button.

I’m a big fan
of music in general, and an ever bigger fan of good music in
particular. And, as in everything in life, each to his own, right?
Still, whoever had decided the world loved Irish folk songs enough
to keep releasing them should never have sold the rights to whoever
decided pan pipes were really cool.

Haunting,
breathy strains of ‘Danny Boy’ echoed in the crawl space. It was
all at once a totally absurd and eerie sensation—like elevator
music piped into your head after your brains have oozed out of your
ears. Whatever I thought of it, it worked.

Like a meerkat
on look out, the imp sat up on its haunches and peered about. It
saw me and tilted its head. Strings of livery flesh hung from its
mouth, blood and gore splattered across its body. Slowly, it crept
down from the mound of its meal and inched toward me. It came in
hesitant bursts, rushing forward, stopping to look around for
danger, then forward again, panicking and darting back.

Music was the
one thing guaranteed to hold an imp’s attention, other than its
stomach, of course. The little demon scuttled forward, tail
swishing, head cocked to locate the source of the music. It didn’t
notice me putting down the torch. Heck, it probably didn’t even
realise I was there at all.

As soon as it
got close enough, I made a grab for it. The imp realised too late
and couldn’t evade me. I caught it around its scrawny neck and it
squealed. The high pitched, eardrum-bursting cry drowned out the
music. My teeth resonated in my head on a frequency set to
crystal-shattering. The creature’s claws raked at my hand, its iddy
biddy teeth tried to dig in. Imps are stronger beyond their size
would have you believe, and they’re fanatically ferocious, but the
most they can down are your average household pets. It had no
chance against me. Besides, I was wearing thick welding gloves.

Wriggling
backwards, I hauled my upper body and imp out of the hole. We came
out in a burst of dust and cobwebs and
fingernails-down-the-chalkboard wails. Mrs Arnold gave her own
little scream, back peddled quickly, hit her floral-patterned
recliner and sat down so hard the footrest popped out and shot her
legs into the air. Eyeballs full of grit protected her from any
impropriety on my part.

Working blind,
I groped about for the cat carrier I’d brought along. I found it
and shoved the imp in and jerked my hand out a second before
slamming the door and securing it. The demon cried some more, then
stopped. A moment later, the sounds of eating emerged from the dark
corner of the carrier.

No, I hadn’t
killed a poor defenceless animal for it to eat. It was cat
food.

“Oh my, oh
my,” Mrs Arnold was saying when my ears recovered.

“It’s okay,
Mrs Arnold. I got it. It won’t be bothering you anymore.”

She floundered
for a moment, then managed to get the footrest down and the chair
swung forward so she could look at me. Her eyes were wide and her
hair pretty much stood on end. One hand fluttered at her chest.

“Are you
feeling okay?” I hauled myself to my feet and went to check her
pulse.

She slapped my
hand away hard enough to make me yelp.

“Don’t you
touch me, you pervert!”

“I’m not a
pervert, Mrs Arnold. Honestly.” I stepped back and held my hands up
in unconditional surrender. “I just wanted to make sure you’re
okay. I’m a trained paramedic.”

Feisty old
eyes narrowed. “And you sideline in pest control? I shouldn’t think
so.”

“Hardly pest
control,” I muttered. I could show her the imp in the cage, but if
she wanted to delude herself into thinking it was a big rat, then
who was I to counter that? Probably better that she believe it was
something completely normal.

“Now, did you
see my Mr Wibbles down there? Is he all right?”

“Ah, yes, Mr
Wibbles is down there.”

“Then back you
go. Bring him up.”

I cringed.
“You might not want to be here for that.”

“Why ever
not?” Even as she asked, she understood. “Oh. No, I think I should
be here.”

My mouth was
open to protest, but she cut me off.

“Now, young
man, I’m eighty-two years old. I’ve been around the block a time or
two and I’ve probably seen some things to make you wet your pants.
Mr Wibbles stuck with me when Mr Arnold passed and through my hip
replacement. The least I can do is be here for him now.”

Ten minutes
later, I was back in the hole, fishing around with an old hockey
stick, dragging the bits and pieces of Mr Wibbles into range of the
bucket I had to put him in. I mean, I couldn’t have left the
carcass down there to rot and stink out Mrs Arnold.

I was scooping
the last of Mr Wibbles into the bucket when I heard something. A
little mewling sound. From the outside world, there came an
answering cry from the imp.

What the…?

They poured
out of the shadows of the crawl space like a red tide. Tiny, tiny
little imps, screaming tiny, tiny little supersonic war-cries. I
gurgled a surprised scream of my own and hurried out of the hole.
They came flocking out, wings buzzing like a swarm of killer wasps.
The full grown imp in the cage set to caterwauling once more. The
result was a cyclone of bone-rattling sound pitched at the very
upper end of the human compatible range.

I lay flat on
my back, staring in disbelief at the baby imps spinning around the
room. They weren’t terribly coordinated and they flew into walls
and furniture with little thumps of impact. The figurines scattered
throughout the room didn’t survive so well either. There was a
tinkling crescendo of shattering porcelain.

Mrs Arnold was
back in her chair and copped a fair few of the baby demons in her
hair. They thrashed about and got hopelessly tangled. She sat in
open mouthed shock. By good luck or sheer bad aiming, none of the
imps flew into her mouth. I didn’t want to have to explain to
anyone that I’d had to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre in order to
dislodge a demon.

Thanks to the
poor directional skills of the imps, it didn’t take long for them
to batter themselves into unconsciousness. The last buzzed around
the ceiling for a bit longer and then in a fit of panic, flung
itself at the window. It smacked the glass hard and tumbled to the
sill, where it sat and swayed before toppling over.

The adult imp
was still kicking up a fuss in the cage, so I gave it sharp boot
and knocked the cage into the wall. The imp crashed against the
hard plastic and fell,
splot
, face first into the dish of
cat food.

Sitting up, I
surveyed the damage. A hasty count later, I pulled out my receipt
book and started writing.

“Right, Mrs
Arnold. That’s sixty-four--” A twitter under the China cabinet
caught my eye. “Sixty-five… pests. My initial estimate may have
been a bit short.”

Oh come on.
Like I was actually going to charge her extra. I even threw in the
removal of the unconscious imps for nothing. Of course, she had to
give me Mr Wibbles’s old carrier to put the overflowing bodies in.
All in all, it was a very tidy room I walked out of two hours
later. A trifle bare of ornamentation, but demon free, and that’s
always a plus.

I shoved the
two carriers full of slowly awakening imps into the boot of the
Monaro and slammed it shut before they could deafen me. I selected
some soothing music and the imps shut up for the trip home. It was
heading toward sunset when I pulled into the driveway and clicked
the garage door opener. I slid the black car in beside the Moto
Guzzi and closed the garage.

Inside, I set
the carriers down beside the stereo, tuned them into a classical
station and went into the office to check messages.

“You have no
new messages.”

“Really?”

The answering
machine failed its basic programming and didn’t answer.

It had to be
faulty. Why else wouldn’t it record the many, many messages left by
all the callers I’d diverted from the work mobile while I did an
imp-ectomy on Mrs Arnold’s living room? I checked the mobile. The
divert was fine.

Still, I went
into Mercy’s room and, ignoring the snoring lump in the middle of
the bed, rummaged around in the dirty clothes on the floor for her
mobile. I rang my mobile on it. The house phone rang and after
three rings, the answering machine clicked in. I left a message and
went to check the machine.

“You are a fun
and considerate guy. Everyone loves you,” came through loud and
clear on the machine. The up vibe of my message evened out the
depression brought on by the fact nothing was faulty. It was true.
No one had called.

I wasn’t about
to say business was bad, but, well, it was. Six months since I’d
proven my brass balls on the Primal calling itself Heather
Veilchen, six months since I’d started a battle between two rival
vampire clans. Six months since I’d had a decent job. There’d been
the odd vampire slaying or two and a brief and dirty plague of
sprites up the road at the Sunshine Coast. Of course, the imp
population had been on the increase for a while. I didn’t want to
get bogged down playing lullabies for piddly little demons though.
There was little profit in it, and no need for me to cart Mercy
around the countryside. She was getting lazy.

Case in point,
she was sleeping in a lot. The sun had set and she was still in
bed. Once upon a time, she would have bounded out of bed with a
spring in her step and blood lust in her eyes the moment the sun
dropped over the horizon. Not so much these days.

I went back
into her room. “Mercy, time to get up.”

The lump under
the blankets shifted a bit and mumbled something.

“Come on, up
and at ‘em, girl. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.” Even my best drill
sergeant voice got nothing more than a little white hand sneaking
me the finger.

I went into
the cage and ripped the blanket off the bed. Mercy spluttered and
hissed, moving into a crouch with liquid ease. Her dark eyes
flashed silver.