Her Vampyrrhic Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

blonde,’ Jez said.
    â€˜Me, too.’
    â€˜We can’t let a girl stop us being friends, though, can we?’
    â€˜No, we’ll never do that. Never.’
    Shaun coughed inside the yellow box. ‘I’m really, really suffocating. You’re going to have a corpse on your hands, if you don’t let me out.’
    â€˜That’s alright,’ Owen told him. ‘We’ll leave your dead body inside the chalk outline.’
    Jez and Owen high-fived and laughed. Meanwhile, guys of seventeen and eighteen drove their cars up and down Main Street – just as their fathers did – and as their yet-to-be-born sons would do in the future.

TEN
    A t the same time that Owen and Jez sat on the grit bin to keep the prankster in captivity, Kit Bolter worked on the canister. He’d taken the mystery artefact up to his ‘lab’ in the attic. He never mentioned the lab to his friends; they’d only tease him, and make endless jokes about Doctor Frankenstein and Mad Scientists. Kit often felt as if he had no control over his life. Up here, however, in the attic of his mother’s house, he had his comfort bubble. Here he had his space. Here he was surrounded with computer parts, monitors, cables hung like black snakes from hooks that he’d screwed into the rafters – all neatly ordered for his work. Shelves contained lines of tools, neat as surgical instruments laid out in an operating theatre. Here he tinkered with pieces of electronic equipment. OK, he enjoyed repairing toasters, vacuum cleaners and so on for family members, but what he enjoyed most of all was composing pieces of music by modifying sounds made by ordinary things. He could record the sound his finger made rubbing the top of a wine glass, then multi-track it, and vary the speed until that humming sound of a wet finger on glass sounded as magnificent as a choir of angels.
    Kit didn’t think that there’d be any commercial application for his Noise Music – a homely name for something that was really quite special in his eyes – and ears. Maybe it was psychological. His parents tended to run wild. They took drugs, drank enough to knock a bull off its feet and got into fights. His father now lived in Leppington (after a stay in prison); nevertheless he still lived a wild life, just as he’d always done. So Kit Bolter had his Noise Music. He knew this had become a psychological compensation for growing up with unstable parents. His music granted him emotional stability. He controlled the sounds. Controlled what he heard. Made the music fast or loud, soft or harsh, or pleasantly melodic, or just downright doom-laden, if that was where his mood took him. Above all, however, he exercised control over his compositions.
    Tonight would be different. He had the pod to examine. Owen Westonby had told him he’d found the pod in the forest. It was a metal cylinder that had been crushed. Perhaps by a heavy weight, such as a tractor driving over the thing. So far, he’d managed to open up one end of the cylinder. Carefully, he’d extracted the electronics. They seemed in reasonable condition. The worst damage had been to what appeared to be a camera lens. So, a camera?
    At that moment, a text came through from Owen.
So what’s pod for?
His friend was keen to unravel the mystery, too. Kit texted back:
Should have answer soon. But not a bomb. Danby-Mask and your ugly face are safe from destruction.
    As he eased away the USB cable that had become detached from the electronics he murmured to himself, ‘I know, I’ll let you tell me what you are … all I have to do is replace the USB. After that, I’ll link you up to my computer; then you can show me what’s stored inside of you.’ He enjoyed this mystery … he loved the idea of activating the device so it would reveal its secret. He had control of this machine; therefore, he had control of his life. Even if only for a short