Walking Shadows (10 page)

"I am no longer interested in my own continuation," he said.

"His - companion," Gary had taken a moment to find a satisfactory word, "died last
month. He's feeling a bit..."

"Mary wasn't the first," said Alberto abruptly. "She's the third I've buried. I
don't want to do it for a fourth."

"What do you mean 'companion'?" I asked incredulously. The way neither of them looked
at me told its own story. "She was your lover?"

I can't believe I ever berate Gary for being tactless.

Alberto narrowed his eyes at me. "Why shouldn't she be? Because she was human and I no
longer am? Because she was
old
?"

That distracted me. "Was she old?"

"She was 89," he said, still with that narrow look. "I offered to turn her. She
said she didn't want to be 89 for eternity." His almond-shaped eyes looked right into mine.
"And yes, she was my lover. For almost 50 years."

"How? What? I mean," I floundered trying to express the basic concept, which should
have been simple enough, of how the undead could raise itself, as it were. I suppose the same way
the undead could move any muscle - an act of will, animated by that weird stuff they had instead of
blood. Why, though, would they want to? Surely there wasn't any physical pleasure in it for them.
Belatedly I realised this question was far more personal than I really wanted to explore.

Alberto's smiled wryly. "What is sex, after all, but the exchange of bodily
fluids?"

"You
drank
from her?"

"We found it enhanced the experience."

I caught a glimpse of Gary. If he'd been alive, I imagine it would have been very funny to
observe his pop-eyed embarrassment and unsettled clearing of the throat to change the subject.
Somehow, he managed to convey the impression of both without doing either.

Flippancy provided a refuge from my embarrassment. "So, now she's dead and you want to end
it all?"

The disdain made a return engagement. Alberto looked acidly at Gary. "Did you bring her for
a reason?"

"I had to find my way here," Gary admitted quietly.

"Oh. Well, that I understand. Does she have to stay?"

"She helps me to think."

This was an admission that my input would be appreciated after all. I was sort of flattered, but
mostly aghast, particularly as I had only myself to blame.

"You and I," I said to Gary urgently, "need to talk."

He didn't protest, like I'd expected. He told Alberto he'd be back in a minute, and walked out
into the sunlight with me.

He looked up and down the roadway, stepped off the porch, crossed the dusty street and mounted
the steps into the little wooden church opposite before I realised where he was headed.

"What are you doing? You can't go in there!"

"Yes I can. Anyone can."

"No, I mean you're
allowed
, but you
can't
." It was one thing for him to
step into my house uninvited. I had no idea what walking into a church would do to him.

"Oh. That." He gave me a weary, crooked smile. "This isn't a proper church. Nobody
uses it for that. It's only a," he searched for the word, "prop. Stage dressing. I thought
you'd rather talk in private."

"Yes," I replied crisply, recovering from concern to rediscover my distress. And
distress made me angry. I followed him inside.

Gary took a back pew inside the little mock-church and sat studying the floor. I sat beside him,
trying to work out what aspect of this troubled me the most.

"Why do you let Mundy make you do these things?" I don't know if it was the worst
thing, but it was high up on the list. Gary was here at Mundy's bidding, after all.

Gary, however, is a lousy subject for getting mad at. It all washes off him. I sighed and sat
next to him. "You don't have to do this. Let's go home."

"If I don't, he'll do it the other way."

"What other way is that?"

He stopped hunching and leaned back on the hard seat to stare at the ceiling instead.

"You remember I told you about when I became a vampire?"

"You said someone came looking for a recruit."

That 'someone' was Gunther. He had found Gary, dying of a brain tumour and eager to hold onto the
life that was being denied him. It had all been a colossal cheat. Gary was still here, but his
undead brain couldn't absorb new information easily or make those imaginative leaps necessary for
creative learning. Gary dropped out of university, unable to keep up. His house was full of books,
their margins filled with notes, but progress was impossibly slow. He'd never be an engineer
now.

"Yeah. Well. Vampires are hard to kill," he said.

"I've noticed." I thought of Angela Priestley's drawn out, ugly, pitiful, pitiless
death. Sometimes I relived in it my sleep.

"And the older they are, the more difficult it is. The skin gets really tough. So suicide is
really, really hard. Our bodies can mend quickly, unless we've actually lost pieces. And
self-immolation is awful."

I had seen a vampire burn. I couldn't imagine any of them choosing it as a method of
self-destruction.

"So if one of us wants to end it, someone else needs to help. We have the strength to get it
done fairly fast. Most won't do it."

"And Gunther said he'd turn you if you killed him afterwards."

"Yes."

Gary's voice was very calm. He stared into the middle distance, that slow blink of his betraying
thoughts bubbling underneath.

"What happened?" I asked.

He took a long time to answer. "Dad had to help me. Gunther let us tie him down in the shed,
and we used a mallet and some tent pegs."

I tried to imagine Gary's father doing this appalling thing. Hell, I couldn't even imagine Gary
doing it.

"After I changed, I tried to back out, but Gunther said he'd go for Mum."

Ah.

"He told us what to do. After we staked him, I cut out his heart and we used kerosene to
burn it in one of Mum's old cooking pots. The rest of him shrivelled up like a husk. We had to cut
him up and hide the bits in garden rubbish to take to the tip."

Gary's hazel eyes rested briefly on my face, registering how I was taking this. "It wasn't
so bad," he said lightly, "No blood, not very messy."

"Gary, that's hideous."

"Yeah," he said, looking away again.

That light in my head brightened by several watts, as I remembered the peculiar grammar Mundy had
used to talk about it
. He's prepared to make someone to do it for him.
"Alberto has
threatened to make an executioner of his own if you don't do it. Is that it?"

Gary nodded. "That, or go on a killing spree. To give him something to do for the next few
hundred years, he said. It's hard to tell with Alberto. He's always kept to himself here. He hasn't
killed anyone for a long time. He might have said it just to make a point."

"Mundy wouldn't let him do it anyway, would he?"

"That's why Mundy sent me."

Melbourne's oldest vampire didn't like the attention that came from unfettered blood-sucking. It
was too troublesome in these heinous modern times.

"Even if Alberto found someone who wanted to turn," Gary continued, "there's no
guarantee they would survive the process. I don't know how many people might die before he finds
someone who could make it. And who knows what they'd be like, afterwards?"

That was another point. Gary was the only member of the undead fraternity I knew who did not
habitually drink blood. Since they claim to drink it for the buzz, how long would it be before a
new-made vampire decided to supplement immortality with getting to feel alive about it too.

"I see the problem," I conceded, trying to keep the repugnance out of my tone.

"I don't want to do it." The statement was delivered, bare and flat. "But I have
to."

"I'll help you if I can." I didn't want to either, but I didn't want to let him do this
alone. If Alberto wanted to die, and planned mayhem if he didn't get his way, helping him go
certainly seemed the least intolerable option.

"No." Emphatic didn't begin to cover it.

"Well, why did you let me come to Ballarat with you, if it wasn't so I could help somehow?
You're the one who said I help you to think."

"It, I…" He sighed unhappily. "I didn't want to be alone afterwards. I
thought I'd like it if you were there."

I placed a hand over his. "I can do that. I can be with you afterwards."

He nodded. Rose. "I'd better get back to Alberto."

"Yeah."

Again, I could have let it go. Should have. Speaking of Mundy, however, had brought recent events
rushing to my attention once more. Wider issues were pressing on us and Alberto, being older than
Gary, might know a scrap or two of information about it.

I returned to the shop with Gary but loitered out of the way while they put their heads together.
A few visitors who had made the walk to this shop stuck their heads into the carriage area only to
withdraw hurriedly. No doubt Alberto was treating them to an unwelcoming scowl. Not too many people
were here yet, though. This early in the day, I guessed that the other shops and activities were
more enticing than looking at static coffins and carriages at the far end of the town.

The row of photographs I found on a shelf in the back of the shed puzzled me at first, and then
disquieted me profoundly. Three photographs of women with long wavy dark hair, a wide mouth and
light, sparkling eyes. It was easy to mistake them for the same person at first glance but closer
inspection revealed the differences. The photos were clearly taken decades apart. The first was a
sepia-toned and stiffly-posed picture of the kind you find in books about Australia's colonial
history. The next was very
fin-de-siecle
, and the third was post-World War II and was
inscribed, 'To Alberto, eternally, your loving Mary."

Who was the first prototype, I wondered, emulated in every woman since? Were those lovely women
his 'type' or did their resemblance indicate an attempt to simply replicate his first lost love?
After all, he had come to live in Sovereign Hill so he could pretend his environment was unchanged
from when he'd been alive.

The thought made me sad, for Mary and for Alberto. You can't make your world stand still. All you
can do is try to keep up with it every time it changes.

"Lovely, weren't they?" came that soft, exotically accented voice in my ear.

I jumped. Alberto, like Gary, had a very quiet tread.

"This was Eloise." He ran the tip of his finger over the first image. "Afterwards
came Clara." His trailing finger moved across the top of the photo frame, then whipped away as
though the metal burned him. "I had letters once. Mice nested in the boxes and shredded all the
words we sent to each other. The photographs are all I have left of them. Even the memories are
fading. It is the curse of a mind that struggles to learn. Memories fade. Mary will fade too.
Perhaps not for decades, but in time. They are all gone now. I cannot find it in me to seek
another."

"You can't remember them?" The idea of that made my heart shiver. If I lost my memories
of Belinda, Paul and Nanna, I would really lose them forever.

"I remember Eloise best. I knew her before I changed. Those memories still seem so very
fresh. As for the others… there are snatches. Moments. Sometimes I am not certain which of them
is in the memory." Then his voice hardened. "It probably doesn't really matter."

Not knowing what to say, I said nothing.

He scowled and turned away. "We are leaving now."

"Wait!"

Alberto tipped his face slightly in my direction, his expression becoming flintier still.

"There are these guys attacking vampires in Melbourne," I blurted, "They nearly
burned Thomas to death and one of them hurt Mundy. Last night they burned down Magdalene's
place."

His cold eye now encompassed Gary. Obviously, Gary had not brought up this topic.

"Is that so?"

"And I thought you might know something about it."

"Such as?"

"Is this anything to do with the hunters that drove Mundy out of Europe?"

"Is he still telling that story?"

"Apparently."

"I remember Gunther," said Alberto, and it surprised me that they'd known each other,
before realising that it would have been more surprising if they hadn't. There weren't so many of
these guys in Melbourne that they didn't learn of each other eventually. Plus there was Mundy, with
his nose in everybody's business, keeping tabs on them all. "I believe he once told me that
hunters were after him as well."

"One of the guys was at the Gold Bug. A blond boy called Abe."

Alberto's eye glittered speculatively, like there might be something in it, then he sighed.
"Gunther was a hundred years older than Mundy, and he was travelling in China at the time. The
same people could not possibly have been hunting both of them. Certainly, they are not the same
people now."

"Perhaps it's more of a secret society of vampire hunters." He smirked at me. "Or
something. There is a vigilante out there," I insisted.

"And you worry about that?"

"I worry about Gary," I admitted.

Alberto gave Gary an 'I told you so' look, but Gary was busy looking as though it was occurring
to him for the first time that he himself could be a target.

"Good luck to you, then," said Alberto, the interest he had shown subsiding into
boredom. "Time for us to go, sir."

Gary held something weighty in his hands, half hidden behind his back so I couldn't see.
"Back in a little bit," he said.

They left. From the verandah, I watched them walk down the dirt road to the fringe of the mock
town, and continue into the trees.

They had almost vanished before dread seized me. Gary was going into the scrub to reluctantly do
this terrible thing, and it made me feel sick with fear. Not of him. How could I ever be afraid of
Gary? But
for
him. It felt wrong to let him face what he had to do all on his own.