Saving The Book Tart- Excerpt from Tracey Sinclair’s A Vampire In Edinburgh + Contest!

In fairness, Cain also had to admit that this wasn’t, strictly speaking, a dungeon, either, and he was in a position to know, having seen more than enough dungeons in his time to make a fair comparison. Edinburgh was a city blessed with an abundance of vaults and cellars, and this one had presumably once served as a storage space of some sort, which accounted for the fact it clearly wasn’t designed for habitation, so managed to be both stiflingly hot and dank at the same time; he could see condensation clinging to the stone walls, and he kept his hand over his drink, lest the moisture dripping from the low ceiling watered down a beverage that already tasted suspiciously pre-enjoyed. Looking around, though, most people didn’t seem to mind. The cellar was packed with punters, the array of people that even after only a couple of days he recognised as standard Festival-goers. A bunch of shrill, braying, ex-public schoolboys stood perilously near to him, their laughter getting louder the more they drank, while around them milled a motley assortment of tourists looking for cheap entertainment, actors there to support or malign their competitors, and a huddle of whey-faced individuals who Cain had come quickly to identify as reviewers, easily spotted by the shell-shocked expressions of those who not only had to sit through hours of this crap every day for the month-long duration of the Fringe, but also then write something coherent about it; almost uniformly they sported the unhealthy complexions of people who hadn’t been outdoors in days and were subsisting on a diet of cheap wine, strong coffee and chips. Several were dazedly consulting notepads, as if checking what they were actually here to see, which Cain had some sympathy with: he had been in the city less than 72 hours and was already starting to know how they felt. There was also a smattering of what Cain believed were called Goths, though with their hair frizzing in the humidity and their eyeliner running in the heat they looked a pale – ha!, he thought, darkly amused – imitation of their namesakes. Cain had run into a few Visigoths in his time, and he couldn’t help wonder what they would make of the fact that their legacy had been to label a bunch of over-sensitive teens with a taste for dreary music. Not that big on sensitivity, the Visigoths, as Cain recalled. Still, it meant he’d come to the right place.

The Goths, he assumed, were drawn by the same thing he was, though he imagined they had a very different purpose in mind. Unfolding the cheaply printed scrap of paper from his pocket, he scowled as he read again about tonight’s ‘entertainment’ – ‘No, No, Nosferatu!’ it exclaimed (he had learned quickly that exclamation marks were considered almost compulsory at the Festival), promising ‘A macabre musical masterpiece with a soupçon of sinister farce’. Cain wasn’t even sure he understood what some of those words meant, but none of them sounded good. Then a thin, lanky boy, stooping under the low roof, moved aside, and something caught Cain’s eye. All of a sudden, the game had changed. 

© Tracey Sinclair