Dark Kingdoms

by Richard Lee Byers

  "Look," Bellamy said. "I don't believe in the 'paranormal' either. But in the course of investigating cult leaders and phony mystics, didn't you people ever discover a technique for making a man see things that aren't really there, or giving him a panic attack?"

  Dunn dropped the remains of his cigarette in a Styrofoam cup, extracted a leather tobacco pouch and a package of rolling papers from a pocket inside his jacket, and dexterously began to fashion another. "Sure. Any magician will tell you there're a million ways to make people see what you want them to see and feel what you want them to feel. But every trick requires either a prepared stage, the manipulator establishing communication with the manipulatee, or both. So I don't see how anybody could have used them on you."

  "Particularly since Waxman was in hiding," Hanson said. "Nobody besides you even knew where he was."

  "We don't know that for sure," Bellamy said.

  "I don't blame you for wanting to believe that some external agency was responsible for your experience," Nolliver said soothingly. "It's frightening to lose control. But look at it this way. You're a courageous individual. Since joining the Bureau, you've proved it time and again. No one could literally frighten you out of your mind by projecting a ghostly image on a wall, or popping up from concealment in a Halloween mask. Only a disturbance in your own psyche could upset you to that degree."

  Suddenly Bellamy felt tired. He could see there was no point in arguing any further, particularly when he didn't even have a coherent perspective of his own.

  "That's the verdict, then. You all think Waxman threw a scare into me, he dropped dead of natural causes, and I had a panic attack. Nothing that happened and nothing he told me had anything to do with the Atheist."

  Dunn struck a match with his thumbnail. "I'm sorry, but yeah, that's about the size of it."

  "But no one believes you're genuinely unstable," Nolliver said. "What you experienced was an isolated episode, and there's no reason to assume it will ever happen again. Not as long as we take the proper precautions now."

  Crap, thought Bellamy. Here it comes.

  "I've gone over your time sheets," Hanson said. "You work some very long hours."

  "Everybody around here does," Bellamy said.

  "Well, starting now, I want you to cut back to forty hours a week, and to meet with Dr. Nolliver as often as he thinks appropriate."

  "To discuss whatever you'd care to talk about," the psychiatrist said.

  "And finally," Hanson continued inexorably, "I'm taking you off the Atheist investigation. It's a gruesome case and it's possible you may have gotten too emotionally involved. Turn your notes over to Walter Byrd."

  Under the table, Bellamy clenched his fists in frustration. He understood that Hanson was trying to give him every possible break. The older man would have been well within his rights to place him on formal probation, or suspend him pending further medical evaluation. All the same, his decision had dealt his subordinate's career a devastating blow. Once the word got out, no one in the Bureau would really trust him.

  But he knew he couldn't talk Hanson out of it. If he tried, he'd just wind up looking like even more of a loose cannon. "I understand," he said, trying to keep his voice steady. "Is that everything?"

  "I believe so," Hanson said.

  As Nolliver hurried past the double doors to the morgue, he caught the stench of rotten meat, underlying the sharp antiseptic smell that pervaded the building as a whole. Once again he wondered if there was any chance at all that it was real.

  When confronted, the medical examiners insisted that no one else ever complained of noxious odors leaking into the corridor. They swore Nolliver was only imagining the stink, and after some reflection, he'd decided they were probably right. But he still smelled it every time he passed!

  He wished he could move his office to another area, away from the corpses, the labs, and the infirmary, but it would be a bad idea to request such a relocation. Some people already thought he was falling apart. He didn't want to give them any further cause for gossip.

  The smell of death lingered in his nostrils and coated his tongue with a vile taste. He needed a drink to wash it away. His hands beginning to tremble, he fumbled his key ring out of this lab coat pocket and unlocked his office door.

  Tendrils of pungent blue smoke caressed his face. "Good morning again," said Dunn.

  Startled, the psychiatrist flinched. Just a twitch, really, but he could tell from the way Dunn's smile widened that the: SAD agent had noticed. Nolliver scrambled into the room and locked the door behind him. "How did you get in here?" he asked.

  Sprawled on the leather couch, his scuffed brown cowboy boots propped up on one of the arm rests, Dunn shrugged. "I'm a detective. I'm supposed to be able to get inside places."

  "Well, you shouldn't have broken into this one," said Nolliver petulantly. He sat down behind his desk, unlocked the bottom drawer, and took out a pint of Johnnie Walker Black, noting automatically how much was left. About a fourth of the bottle, enough to see him through until he went out to lunch, at which point he could smuggle in a new one. "We shouldn't talk here."

  "I don't see why not," said Dunn. "We're colleagues, aren't we? We've worked cases together. Nobody's going to think anything about it."

  "You can't be sure of that." Nolliver raised the pint to his lips, tilted his head back, and took a long drink, shivering with relief as the Scotch burned its way down. "For all we know, someone could have bugged this office."

  "Wrong," said Dunn. "I do know. I checked. Are you going to give me any of that booze?"

  Nolliver glowered at him. "Is that why you're here? To cadge a drink?"

  Dunn shook his shaggy head. "Actually, I just wanted to touch baseband celebrate a job well done, but your pissy attitude is making it hard to bask in the glow."

  "I can't help it," Nolliver said. "I hate this." He realized that Dunn was looking pointedly at the bottle in his hand. And he supposed it would be foolish to antagonize him. Reluctantly he stood up, circled the desk, and handed the liquor over, wincing at how much his fellow conspirator guzzled down.

  Dunn sighed in satisfaction. "There's nothing like the good stuff, is there?" He held on to the Scotch for another moment, as if teasing Nolliver, and then gave it back. "I'll be damned if I know why you hate our little cleanup operation. You do remember how you got involved ?"

  Nolliver winced. "Of course."

  "Extorting sex from teenagers in exchange for a favorable psychiatric evaluation—"

  Only four times! Nolliver silently protested. And the first time, it was the boy's idea!

  "—abusing your tmst as a doctor and an officer of the court. Convincing judges to put dangerous youthful offenders back on the street. The last one even killed some people, didn't he? Just imagine what would happen if the truth came out."

  "I said, I understand my situation," Nolliver said. "There's no need to threaten me."

  Dunn raised his bushy eyebrows. "Who's threatening? I'm just making a point. When SAD uncovered your sordid past, our first thought was, now we can just blackmail the poor perverted bastard into doing whatever we want. But fortunately for you, we're nicer than that. You aren't just getting blackmailed, you're getting paid." "

  "For concealing the truth."

  "What can I tell you? People at the top level have decided that it isn't good for anybody who lacks the proper clearance, even your average, garden-variety FBI man, to get all hot and bothered about the paranormal. Unfortunately, every year or two, some Fed stumbles styexsomething spooky, and guys like you and me have to spring into action to put out the fire. Sometimes it feels a little slimy, but it's also our patriotic duty."

  I wish I could be sure of that, Nolliver thought. It would be comforting to assume that even when deceiving people like Bellamy and Hanson, he was still serving his country. But he often had his doubts, not that it mattered. Whatever the truth, he had no option but to cooperate.

  "We've wrecked that young man's career," he said som
berly. He took another drink. When he lowered the bottle, he was dismayed to discover that, somehow, there was only a swig or two remaining.

  "Bull," said Dunn. He blew a smoke ring. "We knocked him a rung or two down the ladder. If he's got the right stuff, he'll climb back up eventually. It's his own fault anyway. When he:saw which way the wind was blowing, he should have changed his story. Claimed he got hit on the head, and screw the medical report if it said otherwise. Hanson wanted to let him off the hook- He would have accepted any halfway plausible explanation."

  "Bellamy was too dedicated an agent to. lie," Nolliver said. At that moment, he, felt the agent's plight nearly as keenly as his own. "He was one of the best young investigators in VICAR If we hadn't discredited him, if I'd actually tried to help him recover his repressed memories: instead of burying them deeper, he might have caught the Atheist. The next time that monster kills someone, I'm going to feel like it's my fault again." His eyes throbbed as tears welled up inside them.

  Dunn grimaced. "Will you get over yourself? IV you think I'd ask you to hide the truth if it meant letting a serial killer go free? I'm a cop, too, you know. I told you, SAD knows exactly what happened that night, and it had nothing with the Atheist. Bellamy and Waxman were just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

  "How can yOu know thai lor certain?" the psychiatrist demanded.

  Dunn exhaled a plume of blue smoke. "It's like our friends in the Company say, Doc. I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you."

  A long, cream-colored sedan turned onto the wet, gleaming street in front of the speeding taxi. The cab driver, a stocky Middle-Eastern immigrant with slicked-back pomaded hair, squawked, stamped on the brake, and wrenched the steering wheel. The taxi spun out of control, narrowly missing the white car but whirling to the left side of the highway. Luckily, there was no traffic coming the other way.

  Montrose was sitting in the back seat beside the paying passenger, a thin, scholarly- looking young mortal currently frozen with terror. As the taxi came to a halt, the Stygian wryly reflected that travel was becoming interesting again. After a series of uneventful flights, he'd stowed away on the cab with as little difficulty as he'd boarded the airplanes. But it had soon become apparent that his chauffeur could teel his presence, though probably without comprehending precisely what he was sensing. He'd started sweating, flooding the car with the stench of his perspiration, and his aura had glowed orange with anxiety. He'd kept twisting his head to peer into the back of the vehicle, and his driving had become increasingly erratic.

  Montrose supposed he'd better take his leave before the Quick man wrecked the cab. Now that he'd recovered his vitality, it shouldn't be any hardship to finish his journey afoot, Indeed, he'd be virtually tireless unless something injured him, or he expended too much energy practicing the arcane arts. He slipped through the side of the cab, then watched it lurch into motion and speed away. His body tingled as the raindrops plummeted through him.

  He walked on through the benighted streets, peering about, not much liking what he saw. Even allowing for the distortions of the Shroud, the Earth seemed a vile, decaying place, its gutters choked with reeking garbage, its streetlights broken, many of its shop windows covered with plywood and the rest armored by rusty steel grates. Periodically, guns cracked in the distance or sirens wailed. Nihils—cracks and holes in the surface of Shadowlands reality, breaches opening on the Tempest— seethed and glittered everywhere, a few conceivably large enough for a Spectre to wriggle through.

  Edinburgh had been bad enough, and this Natchez looked even worse. Montrose wondered if the Shadowlands had been quite this unpleasant on his last visit forty years ago. He thought not. Perhaps, as some wraiths believed, the destruction of Charon had shifted the balance of power between Being and Oblivion. Perhaps the universe was crumbling away, dropping bit by bit into the Void.

  He scowled and tried to shove the notion out of his head. It was Heretical, and the gloomiest, most defeatist kind of heresy at that.

  Ugly or not, the stigmata of urban decay had their uses. Shadowlands wraiths tended to establish their communities in the most desolate portions of mortal cities. There, they didn't have to coexist with the Quick when they weren't in the mood. Moreover, such places frequently radiated a palpable atmosphere of misery on which the dead could feed, it being one of the ironies of their existence that joy and love didn't invest a place with the same emotional residue as fear, grief, and despair. Thus, the increasingly empty streets and the multiplying stands of condemned buildings were like signposts, pointing the way to Natchez's Necropolis.

  A strain of sprightly but oddly dissonant violin music skittered through the air. Hands clapped, raggedly keeping time. Quickening his pace, Montrose rounded a corner. Before him, a narrow cobblestone street ran up a hill. A number of wraiths, many masked, their clothing a hodgepodge of styles from the last three hundred years, stood clustered here and there.

  Some had gathered around the fiddler. Another group were inspecting the meager selection of goods—many no doubt forged in Stygia, the remainder cherished possessions some dying soul had managed to carry into death—laid out in an open- air market. Still other loiterers gawked as a petite blond flesh sculptor stroked a customer's features into a new configuration. Suddenly his whole head bubbled and flowed at once, the tide covering or simply annihilating his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. The customer, a burly black man, made a muffled squealing sound, jumped up from his seat, and began to flail around. Now looking panicky, the Masquer tried to push him back down and was knocked sprawling for her pains. The spectators laughed and jeered.

  At the top of the street rose a jumble of massive brick buildings that might have been an abandoned factory, a collection of warehouses, or some combination of the two. Sentries armed with crossbows prowled the rooftops. Torches ringed the entire complex as if to define a perimeter. Clearly the site was a Hierarchy Citadel, and Montrose's ultimate destination.

  Smiling, he started up the street. Half a block from the top, he spotted a slender young woman, dressed like a flapper except for the gold and ivory crucifix hanging around her neck. Perched on a tenement stoop, she was haranguing several other wraiths, ranting in a shrill, excited voice about Christ, faith, and "Transcendence, our doorway out of this purgatory and into bliss."

  The Stygian's smile twisted into a scowl. He took a stride toward her, intending to drag her off the stoop and take her into custody, before his better judgment reasserted itself. At the moment he was scarcely well equipped to arrest anyone, particularly when it might entail facing down a mob. Hoping that the preacher would set up shop here again, he marched on toward the top of the hill.

  Since his death, Montrose had seen any number of gruesome and, by Quick standards, unnatural spectacles. He liked to believe that he'd grown blase about such things. Even so, he didn't care for the sight of Stygian torches. The brand in front of him now was typical. A Masquer had paralyzed some poor slave, stretched his body nine feet long, melted his legs into a single rigid shaft, and fused his arms to his sides. A corona of amber barrow-flame whispered around his head, slowly, slowly burning his substance away. His mouth gaped in a silent, endless scream. Montrose shivered as he passed. He told himself it was only due to the chill radiating from the fire.

  He walked on toward the two sentries flanking the nearest door into the Citadel. One could argue that it was idiotic for Shadowlands wraiths to pay any attention to doors. As Montrose had rediscovered in St. Giles's, they didn't need them, nor, in the general run of things, did they even open them. They just glided through them as they would any other barrier. But security considerations mandated that everyone enter and exit a Hierarchy stronghold through one of a few checkpoints. Any ghost who opted to do otherwise was automatically considered a thief, an assassin, or a spy.

  The guard on the left leaned on a long spear and wore a Bowie knife on his belt. He'd stitched a patch with the black raptor emblem of the Fifth Legion to the breast of his khaki fatigues. A M
asquer had pulled his lips into an exaggerated jack-o'- lantern grin, a common symbol of fealty to the Smiling Lord. His companion was dressed in buckskin and carried an AK-47. The question-mark brand on his cheek signaled his allegiance to the Beggar Lord. Both soldiers had a green sash emblazoned with a black hourglass, evidently the regalia of the fortress at their backs, draped over their right shoulders.

  "Good evening," Montrose said.

  "I don't know you," growled the sentry with the brand. "Have you got a pass?"

  Montrose hadn't expected them to recognize him or show him any deference, not while he looked like a mendicant, but he was surprised by the overt hostility in the other wraith's tone. Either the fellow was having difficulty controlling his Shadow, he was subtly unhinged, or he was simply in an uncommonly foul mood. "No," the Stygian said, "but I do have legitimate business inside. I'm an Anacreon, newly arrived from the Isle of Sorrows, and I have business with your commanders."

  The man with the brand sneered. "Sure you are, and I'm the Lady of Fate! Get out of here before we send you back to Stygia in chains."

  The spearman cleared his throat. "You know, he seems harmless enough, just a little crazy. We could ask the Centurion of the Watch. Maybe he'd okay it for him to come inside."

  The wraith with the brand rounded on his companion. His arms jerked as if he wanted to swing his gun up and slam the butt into the other spirit's teeth. "No!" he shouted. "Rules are rules! If he can't prove he belongs, he can't enter!"

  "Okay, okay," said the spearman, shifting back a step. He looked at Montrose, the wariness in his eyes an odd contrast to the artificial hilarity of his rictus. "I'm sorry, pal. Maybe you should come back some other time."