: Anthony Burns
: Lucille and the Healers
: Mushroom eBooks
: 9781843193968
: 1
: CHF 3.90
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 200
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

London, 1929 - It isn't easy being a fashionable flapper and emulating your silver screen heroines when you live in a poky East End terrace with your poor, widowed mother, your over-achieving sister, and such disreputable and drunken lodgers as you can find to help pay the bills, as sixteen-year-old Lucy 'Lucille' Kitson can testify. However, their newest lodger - a young writer from the jazzy metropolis of New York - is far more to her liking, and his only shortcoming is that he is concealing a secret that makes him a marked man, and endangers all who befriend him.
Pulled inexorably into a dark supernatural world, and into an even darker scientific one, Lucy Kitson finds her priorities and her life challenged equally. She must endure hard lessons if she is to help put an end to the 'Healers', their murderous nocturnal predations, and their sinister designs that threaten the lives and souls of thousands.

CHAPTER II


The Lodger


At about one-thirty in the morning — certainly no later than two, Lucille hoped — the bus pulled up on Stepney Green and she alighted. This was not the closest stop to her home in Peony Place, but it enabled her to pay a quick call on a dear old friend, a cast-iron Victorian hand-pump on the street corner, that had long been Lucille’s trusty ally on these occasions, helping her to wash off all traces of eyeliner, lipstick, and other offending cosmetics before she had to risk facing her loved ones. This would help to smooth things a little, even if painful scenes were a certainty. After about a minute of vigorous scrubbing in the bitterly cold water, she took her hand mirror from her horribly depleted purse and examined the results. As far as she could tell by the wavering light of a gas lamppost, her skin was now purified of all illicit substances, and she was as well prepared to face the music as she would ever be.

Although she dreaded what the morning would bring, she did not harbour too many regrets about the evening. There had been some small unpleasantness when Vera’s intoxicated male chum had become a little too friendly, dancing, or at least rhythmically staggering far closer to Lucille than she had felt comfortable with, and whispering unwanted compliments to her between songs. Fortunately, he had soon drunk himself into a horizontal state, and after the bouncers had deposited his semi-conscious form in the street, Lucille quickly recovered her enjoyment.

Even though the atmosphere of the club was not so much elegant and sophisticated as it was desperate to be thought of as elegant and sophisticated, it still came a lot closer to her personal heaven than the mean little pubs and coffee-houses where most of the population of Stepney did their socialising. The jazz music, at least, had been truly sublime, lifting her soul on heavenly strains of saxophone, clarinet, and trombone, beyond time and space to mystical realms of beauty, romance, and youth eternal.

Back in the real world, alas, time had ticked on regardless, and might even, she suspected, have spitefully accelerated. Since she had no wish to increase her family’s inevitable disappointment in her by missing church tomorrow morning... or this morning, in fact, it seemed that her only option would be to spend the entire day half-asleep. That did not bode well for her homework, but at least she would have the opportunity to make it up to everyone the following weekend.Like it or not, she reflected gloomily, while attempting to calculate how long it would take her to save up enough money for another evening on the town.

At the next street corner she turned off Stepney Green, and after a short walk and another turning she arrived in Peony Place. Anyone else would have been hard-pressed to tell that little street apart from most of the others in the vicinity, flanked by terraces of grim, narrow, grey-brick houses, identical except for their door numbers. Number 14 was no different from the rest, with two