The Night Inside by The Night Inside (epub)

Author:The Night Inside (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771481892
Publisher: ChiZine
Published: 2014-01-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

The sleep was heavy and dreamless. She woke in the same position in which she had gone to sleep, curled fetally behind the furnace.

Ardeth lay still for a moment, tasting her new awareness. She sensed the emptiness of the house and, beyond its walls, the heavy heartbeat of the city. She felt, deep within her, the faint stirrings of hunger. It is strongest in the beginning, Rozokov had said. She remembered the first taste of Peterson’s blood, the dizzying sweetness, and sat up, shivering suddenly, torn between anticipation and a soul-deep revulsion. But that would have to wait, she thought with relief. There were other things to do first.

She glanced at the stolen Rolex and realized that she had slept for two days. The long night of her rebirth must have drained her more than she had thought. The hunger stirred again, more insistently, stretching in her gut like a waking cat.

She shrugged off the dust from her hair and jacket, left the house the same way she had entered, and began to walk south towards Queen Street. The back streets were quiet, but she could see the figures passing back and forth on the street ahead of her.

Queen Street. Sara’s street, she thought suddenly and remembered her old, half-recognized envy of her sister’s ease here, of her sister’s presence here.

But now . . . now Ardeth had a power her sister had never dreamed of. Now the street could be hers. Any of its black-clad citizens, in all their power and style and pretension, could be hers.

Be sensible, her reason told her, stay away from here—where Sara could see you. But the remembered taste of Peterson’s blood in her mouth, the remembered feel of Roias’s mouth on her thigh, told her otherwise.

It was early evening and, even though it was Monday, the warm weather kept the street crowded with people. In the city’s often careful divisions of neighbourhoods, this was the home of the artistic and the left-wing, where appearance became a statement of purpose and the graffiti had a decidedly political bent. It was home to some of the city’s coolest clubs and to a number of musicians, artists and designers. Or those with aspirations—or pretensions—to any of those callings.

Ardeth recalled Sara complaining that the second-hand clothing stores were vanishing in favour of expensive designers (albeit ones to whom black never went out of fashion), the used-book stores had gone, victim of rising rents, and the restaurants were attracting as many slumming yuppies as the genuine avant-garde. Ardeth had restrained herself from asking how one told the genuinely avant-garde from those who merely had the right clothes.

She smiled at the memory as she glanced down the street. The difference between the pose and the person, the artistic and the artificial, held little interest for her now. What mattered was the ever-shifting population of the street, by nature transient, and the loud darkness of the clubs, where people pretended, with pale faces, black-lined eyes and a carefully cultivated boredom, to the state in which she now found herself.

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