Scan McMullen - Slow Famine

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Slow Famine

by Sean McMullen

other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *

I do not enjoy stalking the undead. That may come as a strange admission from someone who has

done so for nine hundred years, but it is true. The thought weighed heavily on my mind as the Alpha

sailed slowly up to the Melbourne Town wharves through the midwinter drizzle of 1842. According to

Roberts, the Alpha's master, the place had been forest a mere seven years earlier, but now over 10,000

souls lived there.

I hired a pony gig at the wharf and bundled my luggage onto it.

"Do you know Melbourne Town well?" I asked the driver. "I have just arrived from Launceston."

"Been here from the beginnin'," he drawled in a Midlands accent. "Came over with Fawkner's people

on the schooner Enterprise in '35."

"Then take me to a good hotel and be quick about it, if you please."

"Why be hurried, sir?" he asked as he flicked the reins and set us rattling along the street. "Nobody's

a-hurried in Melbourne Town."

Sir. I generally go about as a man to have greater freedom, but even after so many centuries the

assumption can surprise me.

"I have a debtor to catch," I explained. "If I'm not quick he will hear of me and abscond again."

"An elderly gent like you, a-huntin' debtors?"

"Age is no hobble," I replied, displaying the Colt five-shot beneath my coat.

"Ah ha, fine machine. Melbourne's the world debtor capital, did ye know? Many a fine gentleman's

bought Melbourne land on notes o' credit, but now land prices be down and they all be debtors."

He gestured down Elizabeth Street as we passed. It was wide and well appointed, but the surface was

a quagmire of mud and ditches where dogs and goats scavenged.

"No money for the public good, sir. Why only last month another child drowned in one o' those

ditches. 'Tis a wild place, Melbourne Town, with but few honest constables for 10,000 souls. Aye, and

so many rogues among 'em."

A wild and lawless boomtown, that suited me well for I was a killer and outside the law. Melbourne

was a melting pot of the dynamic and hopeless: the pioneers who wanted to carve a future out of the

bushland, newly released convicts, dispossessed Aborigines stupefied with rum, government functionaries

building a curriculum vitae to take elsewhere, speculators growing rich on credit, and speculators going

bankrupt for the lack thereof.

* * *

The Albion Hotel was just like an English coaching inn, and attracted a good and prosperous clientele.

I was given an upstairs bedroom lit by a dormer window, and I was relieved by the clean comfort of the

place after the turmoil and squalor of the streets. In the early afternoon I began my search, but it got off

to a bad start. I wandered the streets until I came upon the Red Lion Inn, a humble little place at the west

end of town. I ordered lunch, and as it was served I asked the publican where houses of pleasure were

to be found. His wife, a most fearsome woman, overheard and let fly with such a tirade against loose

morals that I abandoned my lunch and fled. At the Lamb Inn I had better luck, but it was tempered with

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Scan McMullen - Slow Famine

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