Arcane II (20 page)

“Ecch,” she says and toes the body with one oversized shoe. “You know, you never told me what you do with these after... well, after.”

I take man shape to answer her, though unlike Servia, I add organic fiber clothes to the form. On my way across the earthen floor, I heft a white cinder block from a pile of its fellows and allow it to drop alongside the body, evincing a heavy thud and a small cloud of billowing brown dust.

“As a rule, it involves one of these,” I say in answer to her question, “and a short trek to a very convenient nearby ocean.” Given time, of course, we could always take maggot shape and deal with the matter naturally, but I suppose there’s no need to apprize dear Madelyn of
all
our little secrets.

“Oh,” she says and blinks stupidly.

“You were many days late with this feeding,” I tell her, coming straight to the point. “Why was that, Madelyn?”

“Yeah, well...” She props one of her hands on the railing and stares down at the other one, examining her manicured nails. “That’s, uh... Well, that’s kind of what I came to talk to you about, you know?”

You know
is by far Madelyn’s most annoying speech habit. “If I knew,” I reply acidly, “would I need to ask?”

This appears to zip completely over poor Madelyn’s very vacant head. But she looks me in the eye nonetheless, and drops an entirely unexpected bombshell.

“I just came to say that you three are gonna have to find some other meal ticket, you know, ’cause after tonight I’m outta here. I, uh, got what you might call another gig, you know?”

For the first time in at least two millennia, I find myself momentarily lost for words. Servia and Spark adopt their human guises and move up to flank me, equally astonished at Madelyn’s bald statement.

“What did you say?” Servia demands in her very best peremptory voice.

Spark is trying to say much the same, but his new tongue gets in the way and he sputters a short burst of indignant nonsense instead.

“We have an agreement,” I remind the mortal calmly. Madelyn has suffered from cold feet before, a number of times. And always before, I have managed to convince her that such a decision is less than wise. “I don’t recall having altered it.”

“We didn’t,” Spark snaps, getting around his human tongue at last. “The agreement stands.”

“Huh-uh. Not any more.” Madelyn shakes her head so that her peroxide blonde curls bounce in their rhinestone-studded fastenings. “I’m done with all this stuff, you know?” She kicks the corpse once more for emphasis. “Finished. Kaput. You know what I’m sayin’? I got me a new gig uptown and a nice new ‘manager.’ A whole new life, that’s what I got, you know?”

I feel my companions bristle on either side, but I hold out a hand to each of them, a gesture of both restraint and placation. “Now, Madelyn,” I soothe, “is that any way to treat us after two years of such a mutually profitable relationship? Haven’t we protected you? Haven’t we kept you in clothes, cash and comfort for all of that time?”

She shrugs. “Yeah, well, Sergei can do all that for me too, you know? And for him, I don’t have to, like, you know, lock one out of every ten johns in the cellar for a bunch of little snot-nosed blood suckers. Cuts down on the client list kind of bad. Plus besides, Sergei’s got, you know, a nicer house in a better neighborhood and stuff. All around he’s got a deal too good for me to pass up, you know? So bottom line, rat-face—I am outta here.”

She jumps when I’m suddenly beside her at the base of the stairs, without stepping over the corpse, without seeming to have moved at all. “I’m afraid it’s not at all that easy,” I tell her. “The agreement was, if you’ll recall, that we keep you in your comforts, and you keep us in ours.” I glance pointedly down at the body on the floor. “We’re a comfort-loving species, Madelyn.” Of course,
species
isn’t really the right word, but for the moment it will do. “And our agreement is a long-term arrangement.”

“Very long term,” Spark says with a predatory grin.

“For life, as a matter of fact,” Servia adds. “That is to say, for
your
lifetime, anyway. Did we neglect to mention that minor little point before?”

“Perhaps we did,” I say, and reach out to stroke Madelyn’s lovely cheek.

She bats my hand away with a snarl. “Don’t touch me!” she snaps.

I smile and apologize, not for the touch but for the apparent misunderstanding. “I
am
sorry, my dear. But I’m afraid our agreement is, as our good friends the lawyers say, entirely binding.”

“Uh-huh.” She says that sarcastically, and looks back at me with more defiance in those cow-brown eyes than I’d have thought her capable of generating. “Well, you know, I guess we’ll just see about that.”

With that, she marches back up the stairs, slams the door behind her and turns the key with a deliberately loud rattle.

“Oh my, oh dear, oh my,” Servia clucks, her eyes glinting red in the dark. “We really do need to have a heart-to-heart talk with dear Madelyn.”

“We just had one!” Spark grouses. “Something tells me it didn’t sink in, though.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I opine. “Seems to me it sank just fine.”

“Hmph!” Servia huffs. “Well, if it didn’t, then something will just have to be done, that’s all. And by the by, just what precisely is a ‘new gig?’” She pronounces the last two words as though she were trying to spit out an unsavory mouthful of food.

“Ah, Servia.” I shake my head at her in mock scolding. “I realize that it might require wearing clothes, but you really must get out more, you know, as Spark and I have done, and soak up a bit of the local color—not to mention parlance.”

She snorted. “And learn to speak as our dear benighted Madelyn does? No, thank you. I don’t wish to ‘get out more.’ And I don’t want to move again. I
like
it here!”

Servia seems to need rather frequent reminding of just where our priorities lie.

“Now, now,” I admonish. “The locale scarcely matters, my dear. You know that. San Francisco is positively brimming with century-old houses replete with lovely dank cellars underneath them. So are most cities in the world, for all of that. What does it matter which one we’re in, so long as it’s dark and the food supply is there? Dark and food. Food and dark. All we’ve ever really needed. So long as those are constant, we’re fulfilled.”

“That’s true enough,” Spark agrees. “But for that to happen, little Madelyn will have to remain constant, too. It’s an odd thing, though. Have you noticed that constancy and whores seldom seem to work well together?”

I sneer at his sarcasm. “She’ll come around,” I insist. “You’ll see. I can be
very
persuasive.” My compatriots both look decidedly unconvinced, so I am compelled to add with a savage certainty, “Madelyn will
not
walk out on us!” I leave the rest of my thought unspoken:
Not—and live
.

“Well,” Servia drawls, and with a lazy stretch she re-forms her nude human figure back into its rat shape. “We’ll know before too much longer, then, won’t we?”

And true enough, we do. It isn’t even two full nights until Madelyn ushers another inebriated meal down the basement stairs. First late and now early. Well, the timing is a trifle odd, we admit, but we’ve never been three to turn down a tempting dinner invitation.

Of course, as some wise mortal somewhere once said, there’s always a catch.

One taste of him, and we know precisely what dear little Madelyn’s been up to. Not that it really matters. Her misguided intentions notwithstanding, we feast anyway and then gleefully harvest the john’s oh-so-ripe soul. Then, when we’re sprawled across the cellar floor snoozing it off, rat bellies bloated, ears and whiskers flexing in lazy, sated rhythms, Spark moans. It’s a long, guttural, rat-snorty sort of a moan, and he says, “Hell, Slash. You
know
how much I hate the taste of arsenic.”

“She must have put rat poison in the john’s glass of booze, in order to taint his blood.” Servia hiccups loudly. “Not exactly subtle, is she?”

“Mmrph,” I reply, not with my usual articulate aplomb. I am about to expound further when a sound from upstairs makes all our ears twitch up.

“Just give me five minutes, okay?” Madelyn’s excited voice echoes from the entry hall overhead. “Believe me, babe, it won’t take me any longer than that to get all the stuff I need out of this stinking dump.”

“No problem,” a male voice responds. “Take your time, girl. We got all night.”

A great deal of thumping and banging ensues, undoubtedly Madelyn gathering together her few earthly treasures.

“So much for the agreement, and for those much-vaunted powers of persuasion you’re so proud of,” Servia grumps. “The bitch is deserting us after all!”

In a proverbial flash the three of us are nose-to-crack with the base of the cellar door. We can smell him out there, waiting in the hallway. Leather shoes, a crisp new suit, expensive aftershave lotion. Quite a fumacious find, this one. Madelyn’s highly-anticipated new “manager,” perhaps?

“You’re gonna like it in my stable, Maddy,” he says, and now I’m sure he must be the “Sergei” she spoke of three days ago. “Good pay, better hours, a hell of a lot better neighborhood. There are plenty of johns up there with plenty of loose money, lemme tell ya. And best of all, no more of these twenty-dollar-trick gutter rats for clients. Hm-mm. Not for you, babe. No more rats at all.” At the crack below the door, three rat noses wrinkle in indignation at his choice of words. “From now on,” he says, “you are strictly uptown, babe. First class all the way.”

“Grmph,” Spark mutters, being oh-so-articulate again. “Slash, have I told you lately that I’ve always liked the way these uptown ‘managers’ taste? Something about all that first-class living, I guess. Sweetens the blood.”

“Now, let’s not be too hasty,” I caution, though I must admit that his proposition is more than a little tempting. “It occurs to me that this could just possibly lead to more than a tasty repast for the night.” My rat ears flutter in anticipation, and my eager companions crowd closer, their whiskers trembling.

“What are you thinking?” Servia wants to know.

“That this could mean a comfortable, new long-term arrangement for us—uptown. A new location. Some new blood. And since Madelyn seems so terribly anxious to leave us, perhaps a new host as well. I do rather like the stench of him. Don’t you?”

“Mmmm.” Servia’s earlier objections to moving now appear to have evaporated altogether. “He said he has a stable. Does he really keep horses, here in the city?”

Spark snickers at her with his huge front teeth. “Nah,” he grunts. “That means he keeps lots of whores. And lots of johns, too.”

“Dozens,” I concur, imagining the ecstasy of a steady, inexhaustible food source. “What say we opt for a change of cellars, then?”

Servia’s naked pink tail lashes twice back and forth. “Not much time,” she says. “They’ll be going soon. And we haven’t cleaned up after this night’s meal yet.”

I smile at her; a rat’s smile is a wonderful thing to behold. “That will be dear Madelyn’s problem, won’t it?”

“But she meant to kill us,” Spark points out. “Won’t she have plans to dispose of the meal herself if she thinks we won’t be here to do it?”

“Perhaps,” I admit, though privately I doubt Madelyn possesses such foresight. “But before she can do that, a little black bird—or perhaps a mysterious stranger making an anonymous telephone call—may just whisper its location to the local gendarmes. Tsk. Poor Madelyn. Such a messy business to explain, a body in the basement of your former dwelling.”

“Fine by me,” Spark finally agrees, and he sniffs again at Mr. Uptown still standing just beyond the door. “But I still want a taste of him. Just a nip. One for the ro-o-o-o-oad.”

His last word fades to a faint squeal as his rat form begins to fold in upon itself. Tail, paws and whiskered snout shrivel into a tiny black speck with multiple legs, and this new form promptly scuttles under the door.

Spark’s crab louse has always been exemplary.

Servia’s spider—black widow, of course—is equally exquisite. She follows Spark just before I, re-shaped as a splendid brown cockroach, follow her in turn out into the hall.

Spark is already mounting the pimp’s leather shoes, making his way up toward a tasty sample of our newfound host. Servia spies the pasteboard box into which Madelyn has tossed all her worldly possessions and hurries up the chair it rests upon to crawl aboard.

I choose yet another transport: Madelyn’s silly little gold-sequined purse that hangs on a peg by the door. Its clasp never has closed tightly, and once I’ve scurried up the wall and across its metal rim, there’s plenty of space for me to squeeze through and drop inside. I fall into safe, welcome dark amid the lovely, oily odors of face powder, lipstick and cheap perfume. The latter reeks from a wrinkled dime-store handkerchief with cheap lace edging. I crawl in between its smudgy white folds and settle in for a cozy ride.

“Can’t say I’ll ever miss this old roach trap, for sure,” I hear Madelyn’s shrill voice announce, and my conveyance is suddenly pulled free of its peg, faux gold chain clattering. “It really does have roaches, you know. And rats. Really
ugly
rats.”

“Never mind,” the new manager says dismissively. “From now on, babe, you won’t have to live with rats or roaches ever again.”

“I wouldn’t bet my uptown rent on that if I were you,” I hiss. They can’t hear a cockroach voice, of course. Just as well.

I settle in as the purse finds its customary place under Madelyn’s arm, the chain slung over her shoulder. I can feel her warmth through the thin rayon lining, hear her heartbeat, smell her blood.

The box that is Servia’s transport rattles as it’s lifted from the chair. The front door opens, creaks shut, latches. And we’re on our way uptown to a new life.

It will be a delicious life, too, filled with plenty of meals, a new host, and most important of all, comfort.

I wriggle deeper into my perfume-stenching nest and twitch my roach’s antennae in delicious anticipation.

We
do
love comfort.

Once we arrive, though, we have to endure a lengthy wait until Sergei has finished giving Madelyn the tour, presumably introducing her to his “stable.” When at last she’s alone in her lovely new room, we happily crawl from our respective concealments, morph back into our favorite rat shapes, and form a handsome rodent trio on the satin-covered king-sized bed.