The Tenants of 7C Read online

  There was a burst of clicking footsteps, like someone scurrying in high heels, and the door on the other side of the kitchen opened and a small head looked warily in. It was a little boy’s head, with dark, curly hair and big brown eyes in an olive-skinned face. It also had a pair of stubby horns.

  “Nick?” it said, in a small voice.

  “Hey, Yiannis, what’s up? Look, this is Clare—she’s, um … She might be our new roommate.”

  The rest of the boy came around the door. He was wearing shorts, but he was clearly a goat from the waist down, with black, knobby legs that bent in two places and ended in dainty hooves. He also had a little tuft of a tail, which he pulled at nervously while he stood looking up at Clare.

  “Hi,” said Clare, faintly.

  She wasn’t quite sure how she was supposed to take this. Frankly, she was dumbfounded. They had never briefed her on … satyrs? Was that what you called them? She wasn’t even sure if anyone in the office knew such a thing existed. As far as she knew, Stake dealt strictly with vampires. But the older boy seemed to expect her to take this in stride, the same way he had expected her to take what he said about the kitchen literally.

  “Nick, have you seen Susan?” the satyr boy asked, still looking nervously at Clare out of the corner of his eye.

  “Uh, which one is Susan?”

  “Susan! My yellow-haired doll. How come you can’t remember?”

  “You’ve got so many of them, Yiannis. I don’t know where she is. Maybe you put her somewhere and then it got changed around. Why don’t you ask Tacky? He can find things.”

  “He’s watching cartoons.”

  “Well—tell him to stop and help you find your doll. Honestly. He’s supposed to look after you.”

  Yiannis tugged discontentedly on his tail a moment longer, then turned around and clicked back out of the kitchen.

  “I’m going to go play on your computer!” he sang out from the hall.

  “Don’t you dare!” Nick shouted after him. He looked back at Clare and smiled wanly. “He’s actually cute, but … he’s kind of bored most of the time, because he can’t really go out. He’s just living here temporarily—Rose is trying to find proper foster-parents for him. It actually is Tacky’s job to look after him, but he’s basically useless, so … Um, I should show you the other rooms. Oh, I should mention—you don’t have a problem with sunlight, do you?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s just that the spare room has a big window, and sometimes it’s on the front of the house and sometimes it’s on the back, so you can’t really tell whether you’re going to get sun in the morning or in the afternoon. Cristina had that room before, and it used to make her crazy—she couldn’t even open the blinds at night in the summer. Right—I’m an idiot. You just came in from outside on a sunny day, so … ”

  “I’m not a vampire.” It was not something Clare had ever expected to hear herself saying.

  Nick smiled. “You totally don’t have to say, Clare. That’s like … Rose’s thing, kind of. You just don’t have to say. It’s all good.”

  He looked at her a moment longer, with an almost reassuring expression, as if he expected her to be comforted by what he had just said. Obviously he was himself. This, to Clare, was the most shocking thing yet. He thought she was some kind of … some kind of what? A monster, anyway. But it was “all good.” He used to live with a vampire; he lived with an orphaned satyr now. He clearly thought Clare had been referred here by Rose because she was some unnatural creature that could find no other place to live. What, Clare wondered, was he?

  He had gone out through the door Yiannis had come in by, into the hallway beyond, before Clare had a chance to try catching any scent off him. She followed hastily. The hallway was lined with closed doors on both sides, with a last door at the far end. The doors were oddly close together, but even so the hallway looked too long to fit inside one of the narrow row houses that Clare had seen from the alley. It was possible that the apartment might have taken up the second storeys of two houses—but somehow she had a feeling that wasn’t what was going on.

  “It’s bigger on the inside,” said Nick, grinning over his shoulder at her. “Do you watch Doctor Who?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Never mind. I just meant—we’re still in the same house, but there’s more on the inside than the outside. Plus the doors look closer together in the hall than they do inside the rooms. Oh, and it’s no good trying to put a sign on your door, or anything. It’s not the doors that move around.”

  “Oh,” said Clare.

  He began opening doors. “Okay … linen closet … Yiannis’s room … bathroom—you really have to remember to lock the door.”

  “I usually do.”

  “Yeah! I guess that’s normal. It’s just because … people don’t always know it’s the bathroom. Some of the doors don’t have locks, either, so when the bathroom ends up behind one of those, you have to just shove the laundry hamper in front of it and hope for the best.” He opened another door. “Okay, that’s Yiannis’s room again.”

  “It’s in both places?” In spite of herself, Clare was becoming a little bit curious about how this worked.

  “No, it just moved. See, they only move when no one’s in them. One time, when I was late for school, I kept getting the linen closet behind every door, and I literally couldn’t get to my bedroom. I had to go to school wearing my pyjama pants. It was brutal.”

  “Wow.”

  “That doesn’t usually happen, though. Plus, Tacky can kind of control it. I don’t know, he talks to the house, or something.” He shrugged dismissively. “Anyway, this is the living room.” He opened the door at the end of the hall. “It’s always here, too, like the kitchen—it’s just not always the same.”

  The living room looked like something out of the Arabian Nights, or maybe the 60s: overlapping, threadbare carpets on the floor, heaps of cushions spilling off awkwardly low couches, hanging coloured-glass lanterns and shelves and shelves of books, with vases and statuettes and candlesticks wedged in among them. There was a television, with a DVD player and a game console, sitting on a coffee table with their cords trailing away behind them to the wall. Draped along one of the low couches in front of the television was a beautiful Asian teenager in jeans and a black V-neck sweater, lazily eating rice crackers out of a Tupperware container with long, slender fingers. It took Clare a moment to determine that he was a boy.

  “So the TV is supposed to be for everyone, but if you actually want to watch anything … ” Nick gestured towards the couch. “Good luck shifting this bastard.”

  The boy on the couch waved a remote irritably at the television and pushed himself up onto one elbow. He had silky, waist-length hair that slithered down around his shoulders as he sat up.

  “Hi,” said Clare, smiling, and then feeling a little foolish. He was obviously much too young for her; but he was just so pretty!

  He frowned at Clare. “Who is that?” he asked, looking at Nick. He had an incongruously deep voice, and an accent. Oh, swoon, thought Clare.

  “This is Clare. Clare might be our new roommate. Clare, this is Takehiko. Only, he actually really likes it if you call him Tacky.” This was obviously not true.

  “Takehiko,” Clare repeated. “Nice to meet you. Is that Japanese?”

  “Is what Japanese?” He was still giving her a very perplexed look.

  “Uh—your name? I just wondered.”

  Before Takehiko had a chance to answer, Nick, who had walked further into room to look at the television, burst out: “You asshole! Is this a new episode?”

  “Yes. Why will I be watching an old episode?”

  “You’re not supposed to watch any more without me! I thought you promised! Why don’t you watch your stupid samurai mecha thing instead?”

  “It’s finished. I watched all of it.”

  “Well—couldn’t you have waited?”

  “No. I like to watch it now. You are busy doing your alche
my homework.”

  “Algebra, you retard, not alchemy. Aargh! I bet Koga’s in this one, too. Koga’s my favourite character.”

  “Excuse me, Stupid—what is she here doing, again?” Takehiko pointed at Clare, who was still standing in the doorway.

  “I was interested in renting the spare bedroom,” Clare supplied cheerfully.

  “Renting?” Takehiko repeated. (When he said it, it sounded more like “Lenting?”)

  “She means she’s thinking of moving in with us,” Nick said hastily. “She doesn’t literally mean renting.”

  “You have talked to Lo-se?”

  “Who?”

  “Rose. He means.” Nick looked smug. “Hey, Tacky, if she does move in here, you’re going to have real fun trying to say her name. Culll-ay-rrrr.”

  “Please shut up. Rose”—he pronounced the “r” with an exquisite little growl—“did not tell me someone was coming.”

  “Yeah, well?” Nick countered. “So what? She’s busy.”

  “She would have told me.”

  “Yeah? Maybe not, you know, because maybe you just lie around watching anime and playing Playstation all day, and so really, why would anybody tell you anything important? I mean, you’re supposed to be looking after Yiannis, so how come he’s coming to me to ask where his dolls are?”

  “Because that is his game. He has hidden the doll somewhere very clever and he wants you to look for it. He has played it with me already all day yesterday. Now he wants to play it with you, but you are too important, you are studying for your important alchemy test, and you are too busy showing girls around the house. Yes.” He dropped back onto the couch and pointed the remote at the television. “Go away. They are about to find Naraku’s castle.”

  The younger boy grabbed up one of the cushions and made what looked like a determined attempt to smother Takehiko with it. The Japanese boy pushed him off easily, but he upset the Tupperware in the process. Rice crackers bounced and rolled over the carpet.

  “Yahh! Now you make a mess! Stupid!”

  Takehiko swung the cushion by one corner and thumped Nick in the head with it. Nick staggered and threw a wild punch that connected with nothing.

  “Maybe we should go, Nick?” Clare called from the doorway. “You should show me the rest of the apartment?”

  “Oh, yeah—sorry!” Nick clumsily warded off another blow from the pillow. “I’ll deal with you later!”

  Takehiko dropped the pillow onto the couch and swept his hair back with one hand. Leaving the room, Clare looked back over her shoulder to see that he was still staring after her with a frown. He was almost onto her, Clare thought; or at any rate, he was suspicious. He was obviously smarter than Nick. She needed to get her information and get out of here.

  Only what information was she actually looking for now? This whole business had gone well beyond strange already. She had no idea how she was going to put any of it into a report for her supervisor.

  Nick was now discovering, to his annoyance and obvious embarrassment, that all the doors on the left-hand side of the hall led to Takehiko’s bedroom.

  “I don’t get it—my room has to be here somewhere. And Yiannis wasn’t in his room, which means that he was probably in mine, downloading some shit onto my computer—”

  “I tell you what,” said Clare, taking pity on him and thinking of a way that she might use this to her advantage at the same time. “What if I go into Takehiko’s room, and while I’m in there, you open the next door. That way, Takehiko’s room can’t move—right?”

  “Brilliant!” Nick beamed at her. “Wow, Clare, I think you’re really going to fit in here.”

  Ugh, thought Clare. Perish the thought. She stepped inside Takehiko’s room and looked around. It wasn’t any of the things she had hoped for. It was full of shelves of Japanese comics and elaborate electronics, with posters of spaceships and cartoon samurai neatly arranged all over the walls. A futon was folded tidily in one corner of the room, and next to it a lacquered breastplate, rather like the ones that the cartoon samurai in the posters were wearing, only real and old-looking. And propped next to it was a sheathed sword.

  “Clare! I found the room!”

  She came back out into the hall, and the door to Takehiko’s room swung shut behind her. Nick was hanging out the doorway two doors down. That must mean the one in between was his own room. She guessed it wouldn’t look much different than Takehiko’s. Probably just messier.

  “So … here’s your room—I mean, the room that … The spare room. It’s kind of full of stuff right now. Some of it’s Cristina’s, that she’s just storing here, and some of it’s Rose’s.”

  There wasn’t much to be seen here. It was an ordinary room, cluttered with the sorts of things that people leave in spare rooms. Since she was supposed to be interested in living here, Clare made a pretence of looking around. Someone—Rose or Cristina—seemed to have a penchant for sunflowers. There were sunflower curtains folded in a pile, and a really awful sunflower clock on top of a rickety chair.

  “So how much is the rent?” Clare realized as soon as she had said it that she shouldn’t have. Nick had already said something about that. She doesn’t literally mean renting.

  He gave her a funny, worried look. “Rose didn’t … really tell you very much at all … did she?”

  “I meant to ask—but she was really busy.”

  “Yeah. Um … well, she doesn’t charge us rent. Me and Tacky, I mean. He’s been here longer than I have, and I don’t know exactly what his arrangement is—he sort of takes care of things around the house. Not that he could really do anything else, because he doesn’t actually go out. I work for the bakery—that’s my arrangement. Cristina too. I mean, she still works there, but now she just gets a paycheque. I don’t work in the kitchen—I’m no good at cooking or anything. I do deliveries.”

  “You mean that bakery actually gets orders from people?”

  “Oh, sure. Rose does a good business. There’s something about her baking that’s irresistible to all kinds of Others. You can tell, right? She doesn’t know what it is—it’s just like a talent, or whatever. She told me a story about how when she was a little girl she used to make cakes for the fairies in the parking lot behind her apartment building. It started as just a game, only there really were fairies, and they couldn’t get enough of her cakes.” Nick stopped talking suddenly, and looked at her for a moment with a new, wary expression. “I don’t—I don’t want to sound like Tacky, or anything, but … You did talk to Rose, right?”

  “Of course. Yes. I mean—” Clare decided to go out on a limb. “I couldn’t have got in here if I hadn’t, could I?”

  Nick gave a relieved laugh. “Yeah! You’re right! How could you have got in here? Sorry about that! Um … do you want some tea or something?”

  Oh, not tea again, Clare thought disgustedly. What was it with these people and tea?

  “Sure,” she said. It seemed like the best excuse for lingering in the apartment.

  Others. That was what he had said: all kinds of Others. You could tell it had a capital O, just from the way he said it. Was that what they called themselves, then? Well, obviously, Clare thought, they weren’t going to call themselves “targets”; that was just Stake’s terminology.

  Something else was bothering her—something that Nick had said. No, she realized, it was what she had said, and then Nick had just confirmed it: How could you have got in here? How had she got in here? She hadn’t actually talked to Rose. Except that Rose was presumably the pregnant woman in the bakery, so actually she had … But somehow that didn’t seem right.

  Clare sat at the kitchen table while Nick put on the kettle and fussed about looking for clean mugs. She tried again to catch some sort of scent. The kitchen would be the logical place, she thought, if it was the only bit of the apartment that didn’t shift around. Sure enough, the kitchen was full of scents. Too full, in fact. There was a bright thread of the green scent from the potted plants by the door, a
nd a hint of a sort of old wood smell from the hallway with the moving bedrooms. There was a fairly strong animal smell that she could not quite identify, and there was something else: an old smell, a smell of ink, and rice, and something that she could only describe as magic.

  “Tired?”

  Clare’s eyes popped open. Nick was smiling at her sympathetically as he set a pair of mismatched mugs on the table.

  “No, no—well, maybe a little bit.”

  “I know how it is,” he said, looking at the table. “I mean, trying to find a place to live, and … everything. It’s pretty hard. Oh—let me get that stuff out of your way!” He reached across to gather up the math homework that was spread out next to where Clare was sitting.

  “I guess you’re in high school,” said Clare. She thought it might be a good idea to remind him just how much younger he was than she, before he tried to take this misguided camaraderie any further. She was beginning to find it tiresome.

  “Yeah.” He closed the math textbook and began rummaging in a drawer for the tea. “I bet you’re wondering why I’m not in class now, right?”

  “I suppose you should be.”

  “Actually it’s one of my days off. I go to this alternative school. You only have to go in three days a week, in the morning. The rest of the time you have to study on your own, and stuff—it’s hard work. But it’s better than a regular school—well, it’s the only thing that works for me. At a regular school, you can’t pass your courses if you keep missing class, and … if you’re like me … you end up missing a lot of class.” He had stopped searching for the tea and was now just staring into the drawer. The kettle began to whistle, and he recalled himself to his task with a little start. “Do you want jasmine tea, or Earl Grey, or … something that doesn’t seem to have any English on it at all, or—”

  “Earl Grey sounds fine,” Clare said at random.