Tales of the Slayer Vol. 2 by Various

Author:Various [Various]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Alone in his room again, Charlton Muzzlewit, from a long line of watchers and a fine London family, sat in a plush armchair, wishing the dawn were upon him. His teeth had taken to chattering, as they often did if he went too long without sleep. He gripped the arms of the chair and tried to push himself deeper into the soft cushioning, to make himself as steady as that fine bit of furniture, which, he couldn’t help thinking, probably cost more than a month’s rent for Catherine Hogarth’s family—a sum which they no doubt scraped together with great pains sometime well after the first of each month. “Still, let the ungrateful peasant be damned” he muttered. “Hadn’t she said herself that I’d done her a favor bringing to her attention the destiny of the Slayer? What hypocrisy, then, for her to curse me for it to God Himself!”

And cursed he’d be, as cursed he was. He had not known happiness in all the years of his adult life, and so no happiness had he brought to others. His misery held no glory, as in Job’s refusal of Satan; Charlton Muzzlewit was a living martyr to the secret cause of vampire slaying. He had not a heroic bone in his body. Would an eternal reward come to him for his lackluster service, his joyless isolation from all but a doomed fifteen-year-old girl? Throughout these shadowed hours between midnight and dawn, he tread the yawning chasm of his own existence, and that empty feeling which had made him always shun the dead of night—thereby allowing poor service of his duty and his Slayer’s duty—only reflected his deficient soul.

Then, by the window, he spotted a short but trim figure, its back to him. Wrapped in a long black sheath of leather, with yellow hair tied up on the head in the manner of the Chinese, the creature did not move, just stared out to the street below.

“Speak, O Spirit!” he cried. “What revelations do you have for me?”

“London?” said this third girl in a questioning tone, but from which Muzzlewit could infer no actual inquiry. “I so believed the hype. And this is like the upscale hood. Why the Mr. Hanky swimteam backstroking down the street?” With this she turned to him, extending a hand. “Howdy, trembly British guy. I’m Buffy.”

“You . . . what . . .,” he stammered, as uncertain of what he wanted to say as he was of what she’d just said. The black leather coat she wore clung tightly round her narrow hips, and from underneath poked pantlegs; this most bizarre of slayers, whom he could only assume came from some disastrous future, had resorted to the same subterfuge as Edward/Elizabeth Weston, but with present company any such illusion was compromised. The hair was as yellow as Weston’s, but long and tied in an Eastern fashion, the face lovely but painted in a style slightly more gaudy, or perhaps clownlike, than that of a London lady—though decidedly feminine.

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