Red Grow the Roses Read online

  This is terrible. I’ve still, despite everything, got an erection that could stand for Parliament. My balls seethe, swollen and tight with the urge to erupt and shed – well, I can’t even guess: the mirror-ghost has drained me dry and I ought to be shrivelled and flaccid but I’m not, I’m burning with arousal. Pulling Penny further up on to my lap I kiss her fervently and push her skirt up her thighs. She makes an incoherent noise that might be protest, but she kisses me back and clings to my neck. My fingers find the edge of her panties, and I pull at them, sharply, my hands clumsy and quivering. Her gusset is thick with the sanitary pad that I wrench aside. Then I pull her up and over my stiffy, impaling her slippery depths.

  ‘Richard!’

  ‘Please,’ I groan, my dry lips mumbling her in the half-dark, my breath coming hard and bitter. ‘Please, Pen.’ I have to: I have to slake this torturing tumescence. All my cum’s been drained already but I need to go again. Right now.

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Please. Yes. Oh, yes.’

  Grunting, sweating, clumsy – we slither together, frantic now. Penny’s thighs rise and fall and I grip her hips with desperate strength. She’s gasping. I’m nearly weeping with the need for release, because I can’t possibly come again, not now.

  But somehow I do. Riding a long white streak of pain I flood her, pulse after pulse.

  * * *

  And now Penny is pregnant. When she couldn’t have been fertile. When I had nothing left to give her, from testes inflamed with poison.

  Now I’m really scared.

  (Roisin)

  And this is Roisin, the mirror-ghost. She is the oldest of the vampires in the City: so very old that she hardly remembers her first life, so old that only her name remains to her. Her history has dissolved in the murk of years, her ambitions and personality washed away by the tide of time. She has forgotten almost everything. Her body too has surrendered its identity, even its reality. It has become as tenuous and fragmented as her mind.

  Matter is no longer material. The material is no matter. She is on her way to becoming a ghost, or a god.

  She remembers only how to love. The thirst for love still drives her. She doesn’t feed casually, not like Ben or Naylor, Reynauld or Estelle. She doesn’t choose a different lover every night then abandon them disbelieving and distraught before morning. When Roisin feeds, it is with passion. She falls for her lovers with the swift, heart-clutching imperative of romantic fervour. She becomes obsessed and will woo a new flame for weeks, lavishing her kisses upon them alone. She shadows and protects them, keeping them close, shutting the world with all its dangers and horrors away, spinning a cocoon of love to cradle them.

  And she will be gentle as she eats you. Tender as her lips wrap about your warm flesh and seek the throbbing pulse. She will mourn you with exquisite sorrow when you leave her bereft.

  Fear her love.

  Roisin will come to you out of a silvered glass. Be not too vain, or the white lady may spy you and want you for her own. Under the moonlight, she will stoop to kiss your flesh with her pale lips and fill you with her cold fire. In silent places she approaches, her presence marked only by the faintest whisper, a stir of chill air not strong enough to break the cobwebs spun on an autumn night. Her skin is whiter than porcelain, her lips full, her breasts small and soft, her eyes an empty void aching to be filled with the sight of you. She needs. She is the embodiment of need.

  She is beautiful, and she will break your heart.

  It’s hard to say what it is that attracts her in the first place: a look in someone’s eye, perhaps; a particular indefinable scent of skin or the sound of a racing pulse. It’s the indescribable chemistry of passion: a mystery. Perhaps she sees or tastes in them a faint echo of her first love. And yet every time she is betrayed; that is her tragedy. Her lovers grow wizened and ungrateful, dull as clods of earth where once they were brimming with life, and unresponsive to either pain or pleasure. Just as swiftly as she falls for them she inevitably finds herself one night, without warning, perplexed and frustrated and indifferent, and she turns away in search of new succour for her empty and aching heart.

  And she forgets.

  Once outside of the fierce focused light of her love, the living are too ephemeral to make any impression on her memory. Roisin has lived so many years, seen so many faces, that mortals are like transient patterns formed by mud swirled in water. She finds comfort in places she knows, but even places change. Meadows are suddenly covered in swathes of housing, trees grow to giants and then vanish in the blink of an eye, skylines rise and fall like a tide. She clings to those people whose immortality – if not their permanence – makes them more than passing shadows, to Reynauld and Naylor in particular. They are the anchors of her disintegrating life. They are beacons in the fog.

  The present washes over her, too ephemeral to grasp. The past decays. She recalls … What? Fragments only.

  The smell of the wild briar roses after which she was named.

  A lead-weighted spindle hanging from her fingers, twisting flax to thread.

  The seep of bog water into leather shoes stuffed with fleece to cushion her numb toes. Hands heavy on her arms, marching her too fast through the puddles, the mud splashing up under her woollen skirt all over her bare legs.

  Long-handled, Y-shaped lengths of wood. They pushed her underwater, face down, pinning her limbs to the muddy bed. The water looked yellow as piss from below, and bubbles of air rose like golden balls from her open lips.

  She remembers love. It was love that destroyed her and love that kept her alive through death. She’d loved someone, though she can’t remember who – or what. Just the ferocious, all-consuming passion of his embrace; the terror and the ecstasy. Only that it made everyone afraid. That they’d met in darkness, though she cannot recall whether it was once or many times, and that dogs had been howling.

  Some things still prick her memory at odd moments, recalling briefly that first raw passion – strange things, like the lift of a white dog’s muzzle, or the feel of leaf mould under her nails, or the smell of wet and sweating horses.

  The first, fresh, coppery taste of blood.

  They staked her in the swamp because they were afraid of the one she loved. All winter she lay there, while the ice thickened over her head and in the tissues of her body. Nothing lived in that acid water: no fish or insect gnawed at her cold flesh. Nothing moved except the occasional bubble of gas ascending to the surface. Then when the spring thawed her out she rose from the mud, thrust aside the stakes and went home. Looking for love, hot and red.

  She became legend, but even legends are forgotten.

  Water is a gate to the Otherworld: that’s ingrained in the psyche of those who live in this country. Roisin’s people would break weapons in half and throw them in to propitiate the powers that lurked below, and even now the people make coin-offerings for reasons they can’t articulate. A creature of that Otherworld, Roisin didn’t dig herself a grave, not even when the sun became a torment to her. She returned to the water. It was a part of her death and it pervades her unlife too.

  Roisin is not urban by nature. It took centuries for her to become reconciled to the City, and even here in the heart of the metropolis she haunted those places that felt familiar to her: canals and duckponds, by and large. She would rest in pellucid calm far beneath the silver surface of one body of water or another, while overhead barges eclipsed the light or toy boats fled the wind. In the shadow of river bridges and inside tunnels she would lie motionless just below the surface, and those who spotted her would edge closer for a look and then flee in terror. Sometimes she would snatch a duck by its paddling legs and then people would start and ask themselves: Was that a pike? It’d have to be a bloody big pike to take a drake like that.

  Sometimes she’d take a child. They find water so alluring and drown so swiftly.

  Beware the depths beneath the still surface. The water may be shallow but the reflection is infinite.

  Still wa
ter is the only reflective plane in nature, but in time human ingenuity created new gates into the Otherworld, using glass backed with silver nitrate. At first people knew the dangers and would cover mirrors at night or when there was a death in the house, fearing quite rightly what they might see within. But it is the nature of humans to forget even the wisest precautions. Roisin retreated into the mirror world when she found she could live on one side of the glass or the other at will – and that behind the glass the sunlight did not touch her.

  Behind the glass is a golden gloaming; waving weed, skin textureless and yellow. A thousand drifting speckles of darkness suspended in the haze. There are things in here that never come to the surface. If it were not for her need for love, she would drift through the labyrinthine passages of the Otherworld and never come up.

  Cover your mirrors. Never look into one after dark.

  Roisin was already an inhabitant of the City when Reynauld arrived from France. Younger than her, he wooed her with some caution. But his wariness was wasted effort; Roisin has no interest after all these centuries in anything so complex as temporal power. She hardly noticed when he demarcated his territory. They are still lovers, upon occasion, but their mutual heat is chilled by an instinctive tristesse: she is reminded by him of the vitality she has lost, and he sees in her what they all must become.

  Reynauld grants Roisin more latitude than any other vampire in his domain. It is even possible she recognises this, though it is hard to truly say what awareness still flits through her empty mind.

  In another century she will be nothing but a chill in the air, a persistent feeling of being watched, a rumour attached to some particular building or location: Bad things happen here. Pets go missing. There are cot-deaths: too many of them. People go a bit, you know; mad. There are stories …

  Mirror, mirror, on the wall.

  3: Eight for the April Rainers

  The railway line had been taken up years ago but the bridge over the River Lea remained, its dignified Victorian ironwork acned with graffiti tags. Rubbish and leaf mould had accumulated on the span, deep enough to support the growth of elder bushes and a few spindly birches whose newly unfurled leaves drooped now in the rain. It had been raining most of the night and all this morning, and even before Lilla reached the bridge her clothes were soaked through. She paid it no attention.

  The bridge was closed off at each end, of course, with heavy chain-link gates, but the fans of iron spikes that were supposed to stop kids climbing along the outside of the girders were rusted and broken, and in some cases had been hacksawed off. It was enough to give her room to swing herself round the safety barrier, the skirt of her black coat flapping and sodden. Kidskin gloves – an eBay purchase – gave her some grip on the chilly metal, though she scowled at the marks left on them once she’d found her footing again: rust and dirt and pigeon shit.

  She kept to the side of the bridge as she worked her way along, setting her feet over a main girder. She didn’t want to fall into the river below. Not yet, anyway. Not until the right moment.

  From the centre of the span she could see down the river toward the plastics factory, and to both banks. To the left, from where she’d come, the flat land was occupied by an industrial estate and beyond that the bulwarks of high-rise flats. This wasn’t a fashionable part of the city. To the right the line of the dead railway skirted a brick wall; a very old brick wall with no windows that encompassed a triangular piece of land between the track and the river. Inside the wall was a large building with a jumbled roofline and tall chimneys, built of the same small greyish bricks. It looked like a prison. In fact it had long ago been the Stratford Fields Lunatic Asylum, and nowadays the front door bore a small brass plate inscribed ‘Wakefield Specialist Roses Ltd’. Lilla knew all this. Her research had been very thorough.

  Right now, defying the overcast sky, there was a dull bloom of light in the high window of Wakefield Roses. It was almost the only sign of life in the wet and dreary landscape. Lilla forced herself to look away from it, down at the river. The water looked grey-green and filthy; the drop made her feel sick. She slipped under an iron strut and inched out on to a protruding beam. Her little cross-laced boots gave her almost no purchase and her velvet coat felt heavy, like it was pulling her to the water. She knew she must be very obvious to anyone watching: a black flag flying from the grey beams. Cowardice fluttered in her belly but she swallowed it down.

  For a long while she hesitated.

  Better this way, if there was no alternative. Better death than being cast out as nothing. Betrayal coated her insides; she could feel its tarry blackness eating at her throat and stomach. She’d wanted to love him, for ever and ever. His cold expression as he’d dismissed her was burned into her memory, his disdain turning her blood to acid. In the cold April wind tears prickled at her eyes.

  Crouching, she found an eye-hole in the beam and slid her fingers into it. Then she eased her weight to her knees, wriggled – and dropped to hang from that hand, her boot-heels kicking over the centre of the river. She grabbed on tight with the other hand too and then, as panic surged through her veins, screamed. She screamed until her lungs were empty. Then she just clung on, while the pain grew unbearable in her shoulders and her wrists, while her fingers slipped on the rusted metal.

  And then, just as she thought, Too late, a hand closed over her wrist and wrenched her into the air. She caught a glimpse of a man’s pale face before she was crushed against his torso, and as he lurched back into the safety of the bridge’s iron beams she burst into sobs. The tears were real, the relief genuine and overwhelming. She’d been rescued.

  The stranger didn’t set her down: it was obvious that she wouldn’t be able to stand. He cradled her to him, wet clothes plastered about her limbs, and she buried her face in his chest as he walked. Lilla felt herself swimming in and out of consciousness as the blood squeezed back into her wrenched arms, but she didn’t care now. It was all like a dream. Dimly she heard metal protesting as a gate was forced wide. She heard a latch fall. She heard feet pacing across wooden floorboards, and then up stairs, and then muffled on a carpeted floor. Finally he stooped, and she was laid out on what felt like a hard couch. Her gloves were peeled off before her hands were vigorously chafed.

  ‘Lie still,’ said a male voice as she tried to force her fluttering eyelids open. ‘Just relax.’ But as he moved away she won the battle and brought the room around her slowly into focus. Dim pools of light created shadows that clung to secrets. It was particularly hard to make sense of the scenery because it was so very cluttered: furniture everywhere. Pictures in gilt frames crammed on to every inch of the walls. Pot plants, a piano, ranks of porcelain ornaments, a tiger-skin rug that looked threadbare but authentic. Oil lamps burning on the velvet-draped tables. All very Victorian.

  Then her rescuer came back with a small crystal glass in his hand, and he looked threadbare and Victorian too, in the style of a Romantic poet. He even wore a frock coat of some sort – its colour an indefinable faded murk, gone to splits at the elbows, the cuffs frayed. The cravat wound about his high collar was growing ragged, his waistcoat was down to the warp and his trousers were creased. But his face was strikingly attractive, even framed as it was by long greying hair: his pale-blue eyes were both haunting and haunted and he had the rumpled, eccentrically handsome features of a Shakespearean actor. And he took himself just as seriously, it seemed. ‘Drink this, for your health’s sake,’ he told her, helping her to sit up. It was sherry, Lilla discovered as she took an obedient sip. She had to force herself not to spit it out – she hated sherry, especially the sweet stuff.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, and burst into tears as the strain found release at last. He rescued the glass from her grasp and as she pitched forward against him he laid a hand lightly on her hair and stroked it.

  ‘There, there: you’re safe now.’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ she wailed. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’

  ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry.’ He
rocked her ever so slightly.

  ‘I’ve got you all wet!’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  Choking down her sobs, she sat up. She knew the mascara she’d applied so thickly that morning would be tracked down her cheeks and she tugged at the bright blonde tresses of her hair, trying to make them look less dishevelled and succeeding not one whit. The man was studying her, his brows knotted.

  ‘Now why were you on that bridge? Don’t you realise how dangerous it was?’

  Lilla lowered her eyes and looked up at him through her wet lashes. His face was set in a look of sympathetic concern, but his gaze was drifting all over her: throat and breasts and hands and back to her throat. Possibly he wasn’t even aware of it. Her heart juddered, quickening. ‘That was the point,’ she answered with a tremulous smile.

  ‘My poor girl …’ His voice was low and pleasant despite being so weirdly formal: a voice made to whisper in maidenly ears and make suggestions to turn their owners pink. ‘Is it that bad?’

  She covered her mouth with her hand, unable to answer.

  ‘A man?’

  ‘My boyfriend. He threw me out.’ The words were inadequate to express her feeling of betrayal, but the wobble in her voice and the quiver of her lip made up for them a little.

  ‘Are you … in trouble?’

  ‘Not in that way.’ She shuddered. ‘I’m cold.’

  He glanced apologetically at the fireplace which, behind its guardian chinoiserie brass lions and its polished grate, was empty. ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t lit a fire in months …’

  Lilla thrust her hands into his, searching for warmth, but they were as icy as her own. He jumped a little at the contact, and his eyes widened. ‘Please light it,’ she whispered: she really was shaking now, the waves of trembling rippling across her shoulders. ‘I’m freezing here.’

  He frowned. ‘The boiler is on in the rose house. Do you think you could make it there?’