The Clueless Dead

By Keith Greenwood

The Clueless Dead is written as a vampire story from the perspective of a newly made Vampire. Michael is an ordinary guy, a rock journalist and professional musician (but not a rockstar). He is transformed into a vampire as a result of a series of unlucky accidents.

He then must deal with the consequences of having vampire powers whilst to all around him he is still the same Guy. He has to find a way to hide his new state as well as the temptations involved in possessing the ability to mentally manipulate people. In addition he faces the moral quandary of being a vampire and remaining a decent human being. All this without a vampire mentor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Feb 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493137510

Keith Greenwood

Keith Greenwood was born in 1985. He has a bachelor’s degree in creative arts (creative writing) and also a bachelor’s degree in arts history from Wollongong University. The first novel he ever read was the Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. He reads multiple genres of fiction. Keith has written short stories and plays and performed with local theatre groups. He began writing The Clueless Dead in 2010 to explore aspects of vampirism he felt had been ignored or not looked at from different perspectives. He suspects that he might go crazy if he didn’t spend so much time writing.

Book preview

The Clueless Dead

Keith Greenwood

Copyright © 2014 by Keith Greenwood.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2013923040

ISBN:               Hardcover                           978-1-4931-3750-3

                         Softcover                             978-1-4931-3749-7

                         Ebook                                  978-1-4931-3751-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 1/06/2014

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris LLC

0-800-443-678

www.Xlibris.co.nz

[e-mail]

519933

Dedicated to Evan Greenwood

Rock on Little Brother

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1   Hangovers

Chapter 2   Twilight Reflection

Chapter 3   Awakening

Chapter 4   Reality Check

Chapter 5   Temptations

Chapter 6   Questions

Chapter 7   Study

Chapter 8   Complications

Chapter 9   Confrontations

Chapter 10   Interrogation

Chapter 11   Following

Chapter 12   Scary Face

Chapter 13   Let’s All Calm Down Here

Chapter 14   Examination

Chapter 15   Tests and Sketches

Chapter 16   Rip Him

Chapter 17   Meet the Parents

Chapter 18   Pursuit

Chapter 19   Revelations, a Bitch

Chapter 20   The Discussion

Chapter 21   The Hunt

Chapter 22   Decisions

Epilogue

For he shall come again to judge the living and the dead.

(The Apostles’ Creed)

Prologue

Have you ever wondered how the greatest, most significant moments in your life aren’t always apparent at the time? Only on looking back with the bitter clear vision of hindsight do you realise it was at that moment that it began. The course of events that has led to your life being utterly different to how you envisioned it. Yes, that was it. That was the day my life was completely fucked-up.

It was a dark and stormy night. Lightning ripped across the sky as rain smashed down on the cobblestones of London like a falling bathtub. I was very glad not being out in it. Inside the club the pop music played, mixed with the thump of dancing feet and the hum of conversation as the after-party of the biggest international rock concert of the year kicked off. Rockers and groupies with shoulder-length hair, bright blue locks, and shaved scalps danced to recordings of music they’d been screaming for only an hour before, while I stood there taking notes.

My name is Michael Taylor. I was there working as rock journalist for the Terramuse Music Magazine (yes, they’re into heavy metal), writing up articles on new musicians, old stars, gossip, and concerts trends. It’s not always the glamorous job some would think it would be. Interviews are fine, but I’m not high up enough to rate really famous singers even when the paper gets a chance at them. Mostly, I deal with the up-and-coming singers when they’re successful enough to be on the edge of making it big or staying where they are to eventually fade into obscurity. Or I just write small pieces for a half dozen other rock and guitar magazines, and since I’m a musician myself, it makes it easier to understand how things work for them. The rest of the time involves playing music at weddings and bars and outdoor events with my band. Since I’m paid per article, it’s not really the money that keeps me on the job.

I’ll be the first to admit that the articles I write are hardly groundbreaking news. I’ve always been considered to be chiselled rather than handsome, and my success with women has often been inconsistent. I was born tall and just got bigger. Put me in a fedora and trench coat, and I could dwarf Sam Spade. I have blue eyes (my mum calls them sapphire), and as soon as I got out of high school, I grew my black hair past my shoulders. What I do have is an honest-to-God love of music in most of its forms (but mainly in rock) and the ability to wheedle information out of people without them even realising it. After all, concert parties such as the one I was attending are often a gold mine for a rock journalist. For this is when people’s tongues (as well as other things) loosen, letting you pick up plenty of juicy information or photographs that you’d never get in interviews and which have nothing to do with the performers’ music.

Making sure you find the right party is the trick. There are dozens of parties after a concert, and you have to divide the ones with people worth writing about from the ones with people no one knows about. Of those you then determine which ones need an invitation, which ones you can sneak into without an invitation, and which one;s bouncers have really big muscles, knuckle dusters, and a large dumpster out back. Fortunately, I no longer had to worry about hiding a bulky camera under my coat. The modern mobile phone is a blessing for a reporter. Switch it to silent and you have a digital camera. I’m still waiting for them to install phasers and a teleporter. However, plying the inebriated for information only works so long as you remember not to become as drunk as the person you are interviewing. I had forgotten this cardinal rule just prior to calling the host of the party a retard for knocking over my (shudder) warm beer. I was flung out in into the skin-stripping rain in time for the hail to begin hammering upon my head.

Rain smashed down onto the stones like the wrong end of a storm drain. The wind picked up the water and flung it back into my face like a hail of knives, all the while howling in my ears like a dog in an iron maiden. I crawled on through the night, moving on all fours, glancing around for some shelter in the endless bone-chilling flood with only faint sounds of music as a guide. At the end of the street, there was a phone booth, but for some reason, the door kept moving around the edges, or was it the handle? Finally, squinting through the hail, I saw an open door under a verandah beckon. Deciding that they must have chosen to let me in, I stumbled through the doorway.

The air was still and chill, the music low and soft. The shaded lamps overhead cast shadows that wrapped around people’s forms like black silk cloth. Pale-skinned people danced slowly to some kind of classical music and sipped red liquid from blurry glasses with two arms; some even had three heads. All of them seemed to be watching me. I grabbed two wineglasses (or was it four?) and started looking around for someone to start a conversation with. There were some stunning redhead twins looking very lonesome next to two tall dark men in the corner. As soon as I turned to them, I tripped, and I recall the sound of breaking glass, the sight of shards cutting flesh, and two very bright eyes.

Pain. The sharp sensation of a screw being hammered into my forehead by a rhino’s arse made me rise up and immediately fall back as it got worse. I was lying on a simple black-sheeted bed in a room lit by an ornate lamp hanging overhead. The walls were painted pale cream, split by dark yellow stripes and curves from the shadows of the lamp shade. A dressing table with a single mirror stood by the black door with its paint peeling. The only sound in the room was the harsh ragged rasp of my breathing. I reached for my forehead but missed and hit my chest – my naked chest. I was starkers. Scratches and tiny bites ran across my torso and legs. No sign of clothing anywhere. ‘Oh shit!’ were the only words I could get out of my red throat.

Desperately thirsty, my gaze turned to the scratched wooden side table on which sat a glass, long and slender, filled with a deep red liquid in which swirled traces of black. I pulled it towards my mouth, desperate for something to ease the burning pain in my throat. It was wine, but something else, something thick and bitter, was mixed with the sharp fruity taste – a vile essence that went down the throat and seemed to wrap around my heart, choking breath, making the limbs shake and the glass shatter in my clenching fist as the light of the lamp burned into my eyes before I blacked out.

Chapter 1

Hangovers

Light. Piercing light was burning my eyes as I struggled to open them, even as a long low beep was knocking in my head. My head felt fine. It was just the rest of me that felt like manure. My throat felt like it’d had industrial turpentine poured down it. Every muscle burned, and every bone ached like a hot iron rod. I struggled to stand up but had to lean over the edge of the bed and release my dinner onto the floor. I leant forward to rest my head on my hands only to miss and fall sprawling into the fetid pool. The acidic smell slashed through the mist in my head, letting me see that my clothes were stuffed under the bed. I wiped the vomit from my face with the back of my hand and croaked, ‘Help, help! Anyone there? Anyone?’

Only silence. Eventually, I forced myself up to the side table to look in the mirror. I saw dark scraggly hair hanging over a thin chiselled head, the flesh pale with dark circles under bloodshot vacant dark blue eyes. My neck felt numb for which I was glad because it looked like a dog had been at it. I wasn’t bleeding anymore, but the whole side of my neck was bruised black and blue, and at the centre, there was red flesh exposed where skin had been stripped off with teeth marks clearly visible. Below lay a thin body muscled over a taut frame. Thin smears of blood lay across the torso and lower thighs with scratches running down the centre line of the chest. Turning away from the mirror, a quick check of the pants’ pockets confirmed that nothing was missing: wallet, with the cards present, phone, pen, spare digital camera, and the all-important notebook intact with my scrawlings on the pages. A quick look at the state of my handwriting showed how my mind had been deteriorating towards the end of the night.

Ralph Phillis making out with his groupies on the sofa . . .

Is he still married to Marie Waltz? Better check if I got photos of that. The demon guys from the Eurovision concert drunk and singing ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ . . . humour potential.

A few pages down it got to . . .

God, that woman in the pink dress looks like Legally Blond Three. The drinks here are terrible. That bald guy in the corner has nice shoes. There was just one word loopily scrawled as the last entry across half the page . . . Sharp teeth. The slow ache forming in my abused neck muscles seconded that.

Turning back to the reflection in the mirror, damn you must have been totally pasted, were all the words to come. I looked like something not even the cat would drag in. Clearly, that woman must have rocked my world. If only I could remember it! I glanced at my phone. I hadn’t changed the time when I flew over, so there was no way of knowing how long I’d been out of it. The peeling yellow paint and black wooden side table did not resemble those at the hostel I was hanging at. Oh, well, let’s just lie down and Dah nah, nah nah, nah nah nah nah . . . What the crap? Oh. It was just my mobile phone tone with the theme from Tenacious D: The Best Song in the World.

There was only one person I knew of who would be ringing me knowing the time difference. Oh God, please don’t let it be her. I picked the phone up, and God wasn’t listening.

‘Michael, you awake?’ It was my beloved boss, Martha Stibbons, the editor, a woman with a sadistic penchant for asking the obvious.

Oh to yell out, No, I’m not. Why are you ringing me when I could be deep asleep, you evil and murderous bitch? Instead, I said, ‘Yes I am awake.’

‘Where the hell are you?’ Hmm, say I have no idea and sound like a fool or . . .

‘I’m about to go to sleep at my . . .’

‘You’re leaving earlier. Jonathan’s sick with meningococcal. You’re covering Airbus, remember?’

Oh damn. Jonathan was the reporter doing a short piece on the first Airbus flight direct from London to America to Sydney. A see how the rockstars fly sort of thing. I’d agreed to fill in for him when he got hospitalised, since I got to fly back on a first-class ticket as opposed to the economy class I’d had to take to get to England.

Plus, how well my work panned on this trip would determine whether I got to have a more permanent, and thus higher paying, job at Terramuse. Think fast, think fast.

‘If you’ll let me finish, I’m just waiting for the cab to take me to the airport. In fact, I think I see it now. Gotta hurry, bye.’

Crap! For all I knew, I’d missed the plane already. She’d bought my bluff for now, but I was assuming she didn’t know when the plane left, not very likely. I’ve got to get out of here.

It then occurred to me that I was not sure exactly where here was.

Presumably, it was the building I’d passed out in. My memories were fairly hazy, but looking at them without the effect of drunken cleverness, it was clear that the party I’d stumbled into was not the one I’d been covering. Well, only one way for me to find out.

Having gathered what was left of my dignity, and clothing, I staggered out the door. The hallway was empty. Peeling flower wallpaper and identical black doors led down to a stairwell at the end.

‘Hello.’

Again the words echoed unanswered. I staggered on, and by the time I’d reached the bottom of the stairs, the pain in my joints was almost gone. No one noticed. There was no one to notice. The place was empty – chairs and tables stacked up against the wall, lights off and no music or any other trace of life. The windows were buried behind black curtains. The door at the far end was closed tight and locked. I pushed against the door in frustration. Of course, it would have to be locked. It wasn’t like the people here would be anyone who’d care about the poor fools locked inside this dismal building; it was so damn typical.

SNAP. The door lurched open into the freezing air, and I stumbled forward onto the steps and then down the steps, my face rolling across the wet concrete with the rest of me.

I turned around to see that the wood around the catch had splintered, letting me force the door open – talk about cheap doors.

The sky was still a solid sheet of black clouds although now the rain was miserable not cyclonic. England in the summer. God help them. The street sign at the corner read Belgrave Square, confirming I was still on the same street as the party. Although all the buildings looked the same. So I didn’t even know which one I’d just stumbled out of. One thing I do before going info fishing for information is to look up the convenience stores and resting places nearest to where I’m going – a habit useful in the event of unexpected eviction. And once again that information had proved useful. After a few minutes trudging through the drizzle, I reached a cheap twenty-four-hour store with windows so dirty they were nearly opaque. The short portly man behind the counter had a slightly disapproving look as he enquired about my health.

‘You feeling all right, sir?’ A grunt for the price of a Coke was all he got in reply.

More polite was my slurred question through a scorched throat. ‘Pard’n me,’ I coughed, ‘cul dyer tell me what de time is?’

He pointed at the clock above the store. It was Three in the afternoon. I’d been out of it for nearly a whole day. Clearly, the stuff I’d drunk must have been fairly powerful. My thoughts caught up with me. Three o’clock! The plane boarded at Seven o’clock!

Having the address of the newsagent, I called a cab and sat under the awning, aware of the very real danger of screwing up my first overseas job. Twenty minutes later, the taxi turned up. I gave the man the address of the hostel I was staying at and crashed out unconscious the moment I climbed in.

Blood and music danced in the darkness. A million wine-filled glasses fell in front of my eyes to shatter and transform into a pair of full red lips. The press of naked flesh on flesh flowed out into a torn notepad that broke apart into paper wings that fell down to make a stage on which Kate Beckinsale and Bela Lugosi played guitar to the singing of Lestat, who was dressed in Goth punk gear.

The harsh sounds of pop music echoed around a room with walls of newspaper articles written in red ink. I followed a dark lady upstairs, who yelled out the words, ‘Sir, wake up we’re at your stop.’

Damn, I hadn’t even realised I’d passed out! I made a note to myself to find out what that stuff was so I would never drink it again.

I paid the man and asked him if he’d wait to give me a lift to the airport. Nothing doing. He’d just finished his shift. The bus would get me there though.

I took stock of the hotel across the street, A small converted building on Cromwell road, Earls Court. It had an annoyingly bright and cheerful looking sign. I rushed up the cracked grey steps of the hotel with its blurred windows and opened the door. The