Absit Omen RPG
Role-Play Boards => London => Muggle London => Topic started by: Nemo on October 30, 2018, 04:26:04 PM
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18 November 2011
Midnight
Tower Bridge, London
With a crack and a gasp, Nemo appeared at the top of the north tower of London’s historic Tower Bridge. The wind was stiff and frigid and nearly tossed her back against the steep roof. She’d chosen a spot between one of the spires and the large protruding turret window. A row of battlements stood waist high and were enough to hold onto.
She was standing nearly on top of a row of lights aimed up to illuminate the roof in grand nocturnal display; her small human frame, barely seen above the battlements, barely cast a shadow.
Nemo pulled her stocking hat down further, gribbed the cold stone, and leaned out to look down.
“Whoa…”
She had to be two hundred feet above the road. Cars looked like toys so far below. The sounds of the city were dulled by the distance and cold November wind. The clouds lit up by London’s lights moved rapid overhead.
“Whoa…” she said again, this time with a proud sort of wonder. She’d done it. She’d Apparated to the top of the Tower Bridge.
“I am!-- ” she yelled, but stopped short. Her voice, usually trained to project her voice through busy city streets barely made it past her lips.
She took another deep breath and tried again. “I am! I am! I am!”
A more satisfying effort! Overcome with feels, she put her gloved hands on her cheeks and laughed against the cold and dark. Where else could one feel this feeling? Seeing it all, being completely untouchable. Separate. Powerful.
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Lazarus Blackburn leaned over the rail in the middle of the pedestrian walkway of Tower Bridge. He looked westward at the clouds moving in. He wasn’t cold. Wasn’t warm either. The wind seemed to blow right through him without even harassing the curl of smoke from his cigar. He’d long gotten used to hearing every footstep in gravel, every whisper, every low frequency rumble of the train underfoot. Now it filtered itself into a textured white noise, an easy spread from which he could choose something worth noticing.
And there. Something worth noticing.
High overhead a clean clear voice where there shouldn’t be one. A woman’s voice almost carried away by the wind. “I am! I am! I am!” she called. Lazarus smiled, curious about the poetic reference this cold night on Tower Bridge.
He waited for a break in the traffic, just a moment he needed, and disappeared into the tiny form of a little black bat. Fuzzy, undignified, with a leathery flitting flight. Zip, zip, up he went following more clearly the sound of someone moving around on tower-top.
The vampire made his appearance, seated above her on the small ledge of a window’s casing.
“Sylvia Plath,” he said, his voice nasal and as graveled as ash.
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Nemo startled and found herself staring up at a gargoyle of a figure. Who was he and how did he find her in the tower? None of the possibilities made sense. Not a ghost, nor a muggle, and if he’d Apparated there’d have been the crack of brimstone. She found her wand and pointed it at him.
“What did you say?”
“Sylvia Plath,” he repeated, then lifted his hand to his shoulder. “Don’t shoot.”
Nemo, still worried, drew back with a furrowed brow.
“Sorry?” He’d only spoken a few words but he wasn’t a Londoner. “Uh, yeah. Bell Jar. You’re not a muggle. You’re not a wizard. How’d you get up here?”
Nemo’s initial jumpiness started to ease. She could easily Apparate away if he so much flinched toward her. He’d just appeared there as if summoned, sitting on his ledge like a trickster god.
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“Neither are you,” he rumbled, a little amused. Neither muggle or wizard was she. A little witch on a perch calling in the night with a voice bigger than her form.
“The swallows are flying so late,”[1] Lazarus said in a little cadence, waving his hand in a languid little circle, tracing a ring of smoke. “So can’t be that. If you know how I got here, then you know what I am.”
He moved the cigar to his mouth, his person untouched by the wind. Nemo, on the other hand, her clothes and blond hair whipping around.
“You play in Camden. Little songbird. What’s your name?”
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Nemo rolled her eyes. He was another damn vampire. She dropped her wand to her side. She hadn’t had the best luck with vampires, which was more of a sore point than a dislike.
“Nemo,” she answered. She wasn’t worried about handing it out; it wasn’t her real name anyway.
“Nobody,” the vampire chuckled, hoarse and raspy
“Yup, that’s me. What do you want? Did they send you?”
“Who?”
“Who else. Camden Town Hookers.”
Nemo crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows. She’d thought she’d settled things with the coven; the odds of her running into a vampire by merely chance were ominous. It was her distinct impression that she’d earned good graces only as far as ‘tolerated’; she hadn’t anticipated they’d have any wish to see her again.
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“I would if they did, but they didn’t. It’s only me, curious. Not a lot of reasons to climb a tower.”
Lazarus crossed one loose leg over another so he could rest his elbow on his knee.
“Curious,” Nemo explained breezily. “What’s your name?”
“Lazarus,” said Lazarus. “I know, I know. Nearly as portentous as ‘Nemo’. My mother Blackburn the missus was, eh, covering her bases, I guess.”
This caused Nemo to crack a smile. “Why are vampires so extra?”
“Practice,” Lazarus rumbled, his amusement tempered. Existing as long as a vampire could, the charm of the elderly’s lack of inhibitions and their long view was only longer and longer developed. That tranquility mixed with the desperation of a possibly endless life made for what the human youth called … ‘extra’.
“Have you been in London long, songbird? Lusting after the bridge?”
She couldn’t be more than two decades breathing, and her accent put her origins far across the sea. He wished he could remember his youth in anything other than dreams, and even then he didn’t know if they were real or imagined.
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Nemo relaxed and leaned against the roof. She picked at the cuff of her sleeves which was worn from frequent wear. She loved London and was always happy to talk about it, but questions about London always turned to ‘why’, and then ‘from where.’ Maybe someday the distance of time would let Nemo think of home again, but she needed to Become Herself away from there. Reject every last piece of it; then maybe one day she could take back the parts that were warm or useful.
She answered at last.
“A year.” Nemo looked up happily at the night. “I like to be places I’ve never been. Who in this whole city has ever been up here?”
“You’re alone,” Lazarus intuited. What kind of parents let a teenage girl out so late at night? They would know there were creatures afoot.
Nemo had learned from Tristian and Terrance at Camden Town Hookers what that kind of statement could mean. She crossed her arms, choosing to ignore the implicit threat for now.
“I have my friends and support myself with my music. I don’t need much. Materialism is a lie. They just want us to buy more stuff - they don’t want us to be happy. I try to be free of stuff, right? A house, furniture, all of that, it ties you down. Like a chain.”
She lifted her chin and looked down at the sparse cars on the road, the offices that still had lights on. Nemo took pride in being more enlightened than the average young adult, removing herself from the rat race.”
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Lazarus took a draw on the cigar, long and deep. The smoke filled his unbreathing lungs and he let it out. He liked how it looked, curling in eddies. He nodded seriously.
"You can't take it with you."
His kind, some of them, didn't feel constrained by the adage and so amassed all the objects they could. Decades to build and lose fortunes. Magnificent bloated hordes. Hit or miss if the stash gave them any pleasure.
"Nope, no, no. I feel you, sparrow. I never carry anything."
Nemo smiled flatly.
"You know..." Lazarus said and sat up straighter. "You know.... Say, sparrow, do you need any help? I'm trying something new."
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Nemo leaned back and laughed nervously.
"What are you talking about? No, uh, I'm good, dude."
The vampire didn't laugh, but lifted his eyebrows. Earnestly, he said, "I mean it. I'm getting into the helping game. " He scratched absently at his neck.
"Where were you last week..."[1]
Lazarus perked up. Nemo saw and rolled her eyes.
"Don't worry about it."
"If there's nothing ... " he said almost melancholy looking at the glowing end of his cigar.
Then Nemo had a thought. She stood up carefully and found her violin in her magical bag.
"There's one thing," she said tuning it a little. "Something reminded me of a song. You know that feeling? Like a smell of a song. You didn't know you even knew it but something brings it back."
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Lazarus furrowed his brow and tilted his head. Curious. He had no idea what mortals wanted, this he never would have guessed. An ear he had, though, and a century of songs.
He said nothing but sat quietly, so still he could have disappeared. Not even a heartbeat gave him away.
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Nemo settled the instrument loosely under her chin so she could look easily down the neck with soft eyes. The bow she left alone, and began gently plucking a line of evenly spaced notes. Each lyric almost a question on top.
"Come ... and ... pray with me... May ... we ... never see ... not in dreams ... or though our eyes ..."
She paused, fingers curled brow creased.
"Dementors ... darkening ... the sky ..."
There it was. Then her plucking notes changed, increasing in tempo, the melody line more complex as if switching from chorus to verse. She was more confident with this part because it had the peculiar word that Virgil knew.
"Once a time, of bone and flesh...severed now, never rests... these broken folk, once warm and gentle, now wraith's feast. A pity. A pentral..."
Nemo broke off the last note early and lowered the violin. She looked up at the vampire with a daring gaze. "So, oh, ancient and helpful one ..."
She hoped he knew it only as much as one hopes a little that cats go to heaven. She wondered how old he was, really, and where he'd been. And if he was still planning to eat her.
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A song, not what he was expecting, but maybe he should have. A little witch who said she wanted nothing would only have troubadour's desires. It was patches of a song, like it was brought in by an inconstant breeze.
“Hmm…” Lazarus scratched his jaw. “Hmm…” He looked out over the river.
“That’s an old one.”
Nemo watched him mumble through it, patient.
“Pentral pentral pentral. My mum the Mrs. Blackburn, she called those banters. Taught me always, and I still remember, cause she drilled it into my head, keep your mouth shut to keep souls in.”
He paused, cocked his head to the side. “And suppose the Dementors out. Not that we had those…”
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So did he know it?
Nemo couldn't think of where she'd have ever learned it. Her mother hadn't hummed or sang, and nothing like a music class in Magic School. In the streets of the Old Market, maybe, something on the tongue of a street performer? Something in the old black-and-white theatre in the gentrified North Downtown? The underground gallery filled with junked cars and scap metal monsters? Searching her young past for anywhere a snatch of melody would have weedled it's way in. She came up only with an unwanted nostalgia.
"C'mon, old man," she coaxed. "You must have been everywhere. You've heard it."
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“I suppose I have,” he purred at last.
“Read it, I think. Been ages. Let’s see, found this old hymnal, pre-Statute, ye ken? In the York Minster most holy, tucked away.”
He sat back and crossed his arms. A very light rain began to fall, more of a heavy mist than rain, really.
A vampire in a cathedral - he’d been uncharacteristically daring, but he was in want for something to read. The book had been crumbling and preserved behind glass, but Lazarus had read it just the same. It was filled with pius caution, Biblical psalms made to melody, but also what were clearly local wisdoms touched by Christianity to be made intersessional.
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Nemo didn’t miss that the rain avoided Lazarus. While the drops beaded up on her shoulders, the vampire remained dry. But she had her answer. She smiled in thanks as she slid her violin back into her bag.
“Shut the shutters and lock the doors,” she said, remembering more lyrics. “Close your mouth to save your souls.”
Nemo wondered if he had one, a soul, that is.
She hoisted up her bag and looked down over the crenelations. It was time to Apparate back down before she got soaked. It was late anyway, and she’d already met a vampire. Busy day.
“Good night, good Lazarus.”
Fin