Playing Dead: Book One of The Whitechapel Chronicles

Chapter 30

The walls were whispering. Ghosts of whispers and whispers of ghosts.

With my knees pulled up into my chest, I sat with my head leaning against the wall, my ear pressed against its cold surface and I listened to them, breathing their painful lament out through brick and mortar. Their bodies might have been long free of this place, but their souls weren't. They were trapped within these walls, scratching at cracks that spread out across the flaking plaster like spidery thread veins, fighting to be heard, fighting for someone, anyone to listen.

And so, I listened. I closed my eyes and breathed in the voices. The latent screams of vampires, so many of my kind, mutilated, pulled apart and left for dead, only the biggest tragedy was that they hadn't died when the Varúlfur had come for them. If they had, then they would never have become trapped here in these walls of death, imprisoned forever and unable to escape the unbearable agony of their dark fate.

And before that, before this place had become a makeshift vampire hospital during the days of the Great Cleansing, I could hear the screams of the asylum patients. Horrible, ear splitting cries as if their very souls were being ripped apart, torn into a thousand pieces and devoured by demons. Screams of such spine chilling terror as the asylum doctors sought to torture them all in the guise of curing them of their madness. And even worse, babies. I could hear the first guttural cries of babies, their howls mixing together with the enduring screams of their committed mothers as they were taken from them seconds after birth and cursed with the same sickness. There had been no nursery here. Just bones, upon bones, upon bones.

In the middle of the room, a half-collapsed rusted steel gurney stood alone and the smell of the rust mixed with the smell of old blood, that infused the air everywhere in this building. It was engrained in every floor, every wall, every ceiling as if someone had painted this place in vampire blood. In my head, the walls were not institution-grey; they were red, a deep pulsating red that throbbed like the beating of some great heart threatening to burst.

After a while, he came to find me as I knew he would but if I had expected heart-felt apologies or regretful looks, I got none. Harper's face was as hard and as cold as it ever was and where I thought I would see sadness, I saw nothing but anger; deep-rooted rage that revealed the beast underneath, as twisted and blackened as the tattoo that curled around his hip.

I glanced at him with disinterest and turned my head back to the wall and paid court to the ghosts of those who had perished here. Their tortured cries deserved my attention more than he did.

He stood in the doorway for a few moments, watching me with wary eyes before crossing the room and sitting a few feet away from me, his back poker straight against the wall and his hands resting on his knees. I wanted the dead ones to break through. I wanted so much for their cold, rotting hands to grip him and pull him back into the walls, where he would spend an eternity suffering in their company. But they didn't of course. And he remained where he was, studying me with those eyes that could spew hate, lust and lies in such equal skilled measure.

"You know, I think I underestimated you," I said, idly running my fingers over the cracks in the wall, wondering if my touch could soothe the spirits within.

"Really?"

"Yes. There I was thinking you were just this hateful creature driven by nothing but base emotions, living off of my pain and my suffering because you just happened to be some kind of sick sadistic pervert. You know, the type of guy who has everything going on between his legs and has absolutely nothing going on up here." I tapped my forehead slowly. "But you surprise me; you really do, because behind all the need to get yourself off, you actually had a plan. You didn't turn me on a whim. It was always your intention to turn me. Well, fucking congratulations my darling, I hope your celebratory hard-on keeps you awake every night for the rest of your pitiful existence."