The Vampyre Read Free Page B

turning back round. ‘Goodnight.’
    Melrose stared after her with defeated eyes. ‘Goodnight,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’ And then the doors slid shut, and Rebecca was on her own. She hurried towards a waiting lift. Behind her, the doors of the office stayed closed.
    In the foyer, a bored security guard watched her as she left. Rebecca walked quickly through the doors, and then on down the street. It was good to be outside. She paused, and breathed in deeply. The wind was strong and the air cold, but after the closeness of the office, she welcomed the night, feeling, as she began to hurry down the street again, as weightless and storm-swept as an autumn leaf. Ahead, she could hear traffic - Bond Street, a gash in the darkness of people and lights. Rebecca crossed it, then turned back to the silence of empty mews. Mayfair seemed deserted. The high, forbidding street fronts were virtually untouched by lights. Once a car passed, but otherwise there was nothing, and the silence filled Rebecca with a strange, fevered joy. She kept the keys in her palm, a talisman, to quicken the rhythm of blood through her heart.
    By Bolton Street, she came to a halt. She realised she was shaking. She leaned against a wall. Her excitement suddenly frightened her. She remembered the lawyer’s strange words. ‘Drawn,’ he had said, describing her mother. She remembered how he had appealed to her, despairingly, not to visit Fairfax Street. Rebecca glanced behind her. The road she was on had been the haunt of dandies once, where fortunes had been lost, lives ruined, gambled away with the curl of a lip. Lord Byron had come here. Byron. Suddenly, the fever in her blood seemed to sing, with ecstasy and a quite unexpected shock of fear. There seemed no reason for it, nothing she could put into words, and yet, as she stood there in the shadowed silence, she realised that she was terrified. But of what? She tried to identify the cause. She had just been thinking of something. Byron. Yes, that was it - Byron. And there it was - the same fear again. Rebecca shuddered, and suddenly knew, with absolute clarity, that she would not, as she had originally planned to do, enter the chapel that night. She could not even take a step towards it, so paralysed was she, and exhilarated, by a terror she could feel as a dense mist of red, enveloping her, sucking out her will, absorbing her. She struggled to break free. She turned. There was traffic moving on Piccadilly. She began to walk towards the sound of it, then to run.
    â€˜Rebecca!’
    She froze.
    â€˜Rebecca!’
    She spun round. Sheets of paper, caught by the wind, were fluttering across an empty street.
    â€˜Who’s there?’ Rebecca called.
    Nothing. She tilted her head. She couldn’t hear the traffic now. There was only the screaming of the wind, and a signboard rattling at the end of the street. Rebecca walked down towards it. ‘Who’s there?’ she called out again. The wind moaned as though in answer, and then suddenly, just faintly, Rebecca thought she heard laughter. It hissed, rising and falling with the wind. Rebecca ran towards it, down a further street, so dark now that she could barely see ahead. There was a noise, a tin kicked, clattering over tarmac. Rebecca glanced round, just in time to see, or so she thought, a flitting silhouette of black, but even as she stepped towards it, it was gone, melted so totally that she wondered if she had seen anything at all. There had seemed something strange about the figure, something wrong, but also familiar. Where had she seen such a person before? Rebecca shook her head. No, there had been nothing. It was hardly surprising, she thought, the wind was so strong that the shadows were playing tricks on her.
    She felt breath on her neck. Rebecca could smell it as she spun round, acrid, chemical, prickling her nostrils, but even as she turned and held out her arms to ward off the attacker, she could see