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Amazon
Mushroom Ebooks - Lucille and the Healers
Amazon
Category:
Horror
Publisher: Mushroom Ebooks
ISBN-10: 1843198584
Pages: 140
Copyright: March 14, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781843198581
London, 1929: Lucy Kitson, a poor but star-struck young flapper, finds her mother's new American lodger fascinating. Sadly, so do some sinister but well-connected scientists ...
London, 1929 – It isn’t easy being a fashionable flapper and emulating your silver screen heroines when you live in a poky East End terrace with your poor, widowed mother, your over-achieving sister, and such disreputable and drunken lodgers as you can find to help pay the bills, as sixteen-year-old Lucy “Lucille” Kitson can testify. However, their newest lodger – a young writer from the jazzy metropolis of New York – is far more to her liking, and it’s only a shame that he has to be concealing a secret that makes him a marked man, and endangers all who befriend him.
Pulled inexorably into a dark supernatural world, and into an even darker scientific one, Lucy Kitson finds her priorities and her survival equally challenged - hard lessons that she must endure if she is to help put an end to the “Healers”, their murderous nocturnal predations, and their sinister designs that threaten the lives and souls of thousands.
Excerpt
CHAPTER I
Stowaway
A few hours ago, the two men loitering at the Royal Victoria Dock had been subject to considerable curiosity. Their drab, near-identical clothing — both of them sporting brown trench coats and matching trilby hats — suggested the possibility that they were plainclothes detectives. On the other hand, the heavy leather satchels they carried, not to mention their twitchy air of nervousness, made the conclusion that they were not-very-confident burglars seem more likely. Some bets had even been taken, but the passage of time, not to mention the almost offensive dullness of the figures, had taken effect, and to most of the dockworkers they had now become as natural and uninteresting a feature of the background as the loading-cranes, the rusty barges, and the murky waters of the Thames. The loiterers themselves, however, were becoming more agitated with each passing second, and less cautious in their whispering. If any passing docker had still been curious enough, he might have heard the following without taking any great effort to eavesdrop:
“Damn Yank ship ought to’ve been in ages ago,” declared the younger of the two, glaring almost accusingly at his watch. “It’ll be past sunset by the time it puts in, if it ever does. What the ’ell are we goin’ to do then?”
“We do our job, lad,” answered his colleague, with rather forced calm. “This is your first field euthanasia, I suppose?”
“Yeah, and I ’adn’t expected I’d be doin’ it in the dead of night. If that blasted boat had come in on time—”
“We’d have ’ad an easy time of it, sure. Still, nothin’ like a baptism of fire, eh lad?” he commented, with an unreassuring smirk. “Just think: if you survive tonight—”
“It ain’t funny, you old—”
“Keep a civil tongue, boy. Dunno what you’re so jumpy for, anyhow. You got your Winchester, ’aven’t you?”
“Yeah,” he answered, grasping for the sawed-off shotgun beneath his coat. “But that’s goin’ to be a fat lot of good if we have to deal with it after nightfall, ain’t it?”
“Well, we’ve got the rest of the gear,” the senior man reminded him, hefting his satchel. “Ways and means, lad. Ways and means.”
“And what if it’s expecting us, and gets the jump on us first?”
“Bloody ray of sunshine, you are. The Ligeia ’asn’t reported no trouble, so that means it can’t have been feedin’ off the crew, or they’d have sent out an SOS. Can’t have ’ad more than a nibble, at any rate. So it’s got to be weak by now, right?”
“Right, not to mention bleedin’ ravenous. And what if she puts in after midnight? Didn’t the lady who gave us the briefing say they get stronger then, never mind whether or not they’ve been feedin’?”
“We got hours till midnight, you stupid son of—”
“Oh, you want to bet it can’t take that much longer?”
They both looked to the skyline, now gloriously dappled with rosy tints that the failing sunlight had painted across the vast canvas of London’s air pollution. It was a fit subject for Monet, but to these observers it was an evil omen indeed, and even the older man could not suppress a pang of nauseous dread. In all his days as a Healer, and in spite of his show of confidence, he had never before been required to perform field euthanasia upon a fully active carrier, not to mention a carrier that knew full well it was being hunted. Coward though he was, the youngster had a point, and the senior Healer could not help sympathising with his next wish:
“With any luck, the bloody ship’s sunk in the Channel.”
“God willing. You got any change, lad? I reckon I’ll call Radlett HQ — see if they’ve got any news on it. Meantime, you can chase up the harbourmaster. See what he’s got to say. Be discreet, mind. We’re customs men, remember? Special orders to search her for smuggled goods soon as she comes in. Got your official papers?”
“’Course I ’ave,” he answered, passing a few coins to his associate. “It’ll be alright with the harbourmaster, d’you think? No awkward questions?”
“Don’t fret. Major Drayton’s put the fix in at the Home Office. Getting aboard her’s goin’ to be the easy part, trust me.”
“Or not, as the case may be,” quipped the younger healer, gazing down-river upon a panorama that remained stubbornly free of American merchant vessels.
“Yeah. Well... let’s be about it, then,” ordered the senior Healer, who set off in search of a telephone box whilst his assistant made for the warehouses. When they were both out of earshot, a docker who had been unloading a nearby barge turned to his workmate and gave him his short but concise interpretation of the curious scene:
“Right. You owe me half a crown, mate.”
“Oh, and ’ow d’you work that out, then?”
“One of ’em said ‘Home Office’, that’s how. Means they’re coppers, sure enough, so I win the bet, see?”
“That so? And why would coppers be passin’ themselves off as customs men, or are you pretendin’ you didn’t hear that bit?”
“Well...” he replied, not very confidently. “It might be some hush-hush bit of business. Security, like. Maybe some foreign spy stowed away on the Ligeia, and they’re waitin’ to pick him up before he gets loose in the country.”
“Poor lookout for the country if you’re not talkin’ a load of old rubbish, Bill. The Ligeia stopped early, at Tilbury docks. Engine trouble, or so I heard.”
“Did it? Oughtn’t we to have told ’em, then?”
“Prob’ly,” he answered, without commitment, “but I’ve been hard at it all bloody day and if I don’t get some beer down me throat in the next five minutes I’m liable to bite me own arm and start drinkin’ the blood, like what the Ancient Mariner did.”
“You read too much, mate.”
“Might do, but at least I don’t read no rubbish about foreign spies ’n’ the like.”
“You’re not goin’ to pay up, are you?” asked Bill, slightly forlorn.
“Tell you what, Bill — I’ll stand you a round, then we can drink to your foreign spy. If he ain’t just your fantasy then I say good luck to the poor sod. Give me the pick of any country to be an outcast in, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be putting this one anywhere near the top of me list.”
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