Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman

by Duncan Eagleson

  I shouldered my way between the mutants, and ignoring the partner, who looked like a middle-aged lounge lizard with too much pomade in his hair, I walked to the one holding Farris.

  “What’s the problem here, guardsman?” I asked.

  “Guard business,” he growled. “Back off unless you want a...” At this point he turned and looked at me for the first time, and then trailed off.

  “It’s the Railwalker,” the gigolo said. The burly fellow, dark of hair and mustache as well as expression, shot a look at his partner, but didn’t bother to answer. Below his badge, a nametag read “C. Remming.”

  “Let him go,” I said quietly.

  “Drunk and disorderly,” said Remming loudly. “He was harassing people.” Then he lowered his voice, and said to me, “This is the mutie whose car hit Andy. We want to question him again about that.”

  “One of the investigators put you on that?” I asked.

  “Don’t need no authorization to question a fuckin’ mutie,” he growled.

  There was a shuffling noise, and I looked around. One of the watching mutants had raised a gun, and Rok had taken it away from him, putting the guy on the ground in the process. The crowd stirred. I heard at least three guns cock, and the lounge lizard went on high alert, gun ranging back and forth over the crowd. As he turned, I could see his nametag read “N. Turrin.”

  “PEACE!” I shouted, putting a Force into it. The guns all pointed to the ground, and the tension in the air dropped perceptibly. Rok grinned at me. I turned to Remming again.

  “In the first place,” I said, “I was just talking with this man, and he was perfectly sober. He didn’t magically become drunk in the few steps he took from there to here. In the second place, this man is now a witness in a Railwalker inquiry. Do I have to quote you the title and section that give me jurisdiction and authority in this?”

  He glowered at me a moment more, then grudgingly released Farris. The mutant nodded his thanks at me, then scurried off down the street.

  “What are you all looking at?” Remming demanded of the crowd. “Move along. Excitement’s all over. Be about your business.” As the people began to slowly disperse, he turned his glare on me again. “Good luck with your inquiry,” he said, with emphasis on the last word as if it were an insult. Then he nodded at his partner, and the two of them walked off.

  Rok stood beside me, watching them go. “Bay City’s Finest. Gotta love ’em.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “Hmm.” Rok pretended to think that over. “Guess you don’t at that.”

  The squat at Chalmers and A Street had been an office building at one time. The front doors were firmly boarded up, but in a trash-filled alley that stank of urine and garbage we found a side door that had been broken open. We ranged carefully through the building, guns drawn. Many of the rooms were scattered with trash, but the departing squatters had taken anything that might have been useful to them. There was no sign of their occupancy except for a few blackened spots where fires had once been lit and some empty tin cans and food packages.

  On the fifth floor we found it: a corner room, where pieces of the plas-ply boards had been removed from windows looking out over both Chalmers and A Street. There was a rickety card table with a few power bars and a couple of water bottles, several articles of clothing: some shirts, a pair of pants, and a couple of denim jackets on hangers hooked over nails set into the wall. A canvas duffle sat on the floor. Inside it was a uniform with “Andy” embroidered over the pocket.

  “No ID card,” Rok observed. The uniform by itself, even on a body that looked like Andy Foreman, wouldn’t have gotten him into the guard station without an ID card. The uniform was easy; the ID would have been the hardest part of an impersonation for a shapeshifter. Chances were the Beast wouldn’t use Andy’s identity again, but he’d have kept the ID card somewhere safer than the squat, just in case. “He’s probably not coming back here.”

  “We’ll have Gage put some surveillance on this place anyway,” I said. “You never know.”

  “Yeah,” said Rok, surveying the nearly empty room. “You never know.”

  13. BAY CITY

  Sometimes John Hamblin thought they ought to just hose the damn locker room down with disinfectant—then he’d remember that Andy actually did pretty much exactly that every other day, and it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference. The place still smelled like... Well, like a locker room; what else would describe that perpetual dirty socks-and-jocks funk? He closed his locker and hooked the hanger his uniform was on through the latch while he finished changing into his civvies. Hamblin took his uniform home each night, because otherwise it picked up the funk of the locker room, and he’d have to smell it for the first hour or so of his shift till the stench wore off. It was partly the damp, he thought. He could hear the shower still running, and he could smell that funny herbal soap Nick Turrin, who was always longest in the shower, was using. It was the steam, he thought; the steam carried that funk, caused uniforms and other absorbent materials to pick it up. Behind him Remming was still holding forth. Blunt, bald, mustached and bullet-headed, Cort Remming always seemed to be angry about something, and today it was the presence of Railwalkers in Bay City.

  “You think this looks good for the guard?” Remming was demanding. “These fuckin’ outsiders comin’ in to do our job for us?”

  “Hey,” said Hamblin, turning to join the discussion, “maybe they can actually help. They know about shit we don’t.”

  Cort Remming rolled his eyes and slammed his locker door. It sprung open again, spoiling the effect somewhat. “Oh, man,” he said. “Tell me you don’t buy into that spooky horseshit.”

  The shower cut off. Hamblin shrugged, and Calb Whaling offered, “The new chief said they talked to the Old Man’s ghost.”

  Remming turned on him. “Get a clue, moron. Gage fuckin’ worshiped the Old Man. They coulda waved a picture of him and had somebody say ‘not on my watch you won’t’ on the intercom, Gage woulda peed his pants and bowed down.”

  Looking over his shoulder, Hamblin could only see the back of Calb Whaling’s curly blond head. Big as he was, Calb seemed to shrink before the shorter, darker Remming’s anger. It was an old sore point. Whaling was notoriously naïve, willing to believe, as the Old Man had once said, six impossible things before breakfast. Whaling wanted to qualify for investigator in the worst way, but no one believed he’d ever make it. Naiveté was not a desirable quality in an investigator.

  “Hey,” said Nickas Turrin, who had just come around the corner wrapped in a towel, “Gage is alright.” He opened his locker, took out a bottle of aftershave, and leaned against the row of lockers as he twisted off the cap. Hamblin thought he looked like he was striking a pose, waiting for someone to challenge his assertion, but the effect was spoiled when he surreptitiously checked his reflection in the mirror hanging inside the locker door.

  “Yeah,” Whaling added, “Gage is street.”

  “Damn straight,” said Turrin. He straightened up, slapped on some aftershave, then dropped his towel on the bench and started dressing in his street clothes.

  “Yeah, yeah, fine, Gage is a right guy,” Remming allowed. “But we’re not talking about doin’ something about Gage, are we? We’re talkin’ about them fuckin’ high-hat Railwalkers. I say we oughta show ’em whose city they’re in.”

  “Same city we’re in,” said Turrin. “Micah Roth’s fucking city. And Roth invited them here.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Remming, “I’m sure he meant well, but Roth don’t know shit about guard work. And neither do them fuckin’ Railwalkers. I dunno about you guys, but the streets I know, that weirdo shit don’t cut it. You need to know what you’re doing out there. You gotta hang tough. These Railwalkers dunno shit from Shinola when it comes to the streets of Bay City, and we’re supposed to kowtow to them? Fuck that! I say we teach ’em a lesson.”

  “He may have a point,” Turrin offered. “I mean, lookit what happene
d last spring at Hicks Junction. I heard it was the Railwalkers screwed the pooch, led the guards from Monteague and Santa Brita right into a trap.”

  “That’s just what I’m talking about.” Remming slammed his locker door again. This time he held it closed as he gave the combination lock a twirl. “These arseholes think just because they can play sheriff with those hicks out in the zones, they got the moves to come into a place like Bay City and lord it over the regular guard?”

  “I dunno, man,” Whaling said. “Fuckin’ with a Railwalker, that’s like fuckin’ with a priest. Besides, I heard they got all sorts of special training and fancy moves.”

  “What, you’re afraid they’re gonna turn you into a newt?”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about, man. They’re not just, like, spooky stuff, y’know? I mean like, serious martial shit. My cousin Fred seen...”

  “Your cousin Fred don’t know crap,” Remming interrupted. “Ain’t he the one got took in that pyramid scheme last year?”

  Hamblin was starting to feel pretty uncomfortable with the whole trend of the conversation. He swung his legs over the bench, turning around completely to face the others. “How tough they are isn’t the point,” he said. “The point is, Nick’s right. The Railwalkers are here because Roth invited them. It ain’t our job to second guess the city boss.”

  “Fine,” Remming growled. “You just go ahead and let these outsiders walk all over you. Some of us have some pride left, and the balls to do something about it.” He stalked to the door.

  The Tankard was just around the corner from the CA Tower, seven steps down from street level, a long, narrow, low-ceilinged room with the bar running down the left wall and a line of booths down the right, two pool tables and a few more booths at the back. Later on, the clientele would consist mostly of city guard and a handful of private security people, but at just after six P.M., the place buzzed with the noise of the more mixed early evening crowd.

  “What’s Dobbs doing here?” Nickas Turrin elbowed Cort Remming and nodded toward the door. The two guards peered through the smoky atmosphere at the lean figure of the proprietor of the Bar of Gold as he surveyed the small crowd, noticed Remming and Turrin, and headed in their direction.

  “We’ll know in a minute,” said Remming.

  As Dobbs pulled up to the bar, Turrin asked, “Whatcha doin’ here, Dobbs? Wanted to find out what real liquor tastes like?”

  Dobbs ignored the dapper guard and focused on Remming. “We need to talk.”

  Remming looked pointedly at his beer and said, “So talk.”

  “Privately.”

  Remming looked at Dobbs, then nodded to Turrin and led the way to an empty booth at the back. “So,” he said when they were settled, “what’s up your backside?”

  Dobbs took out a cigar and lit up. “Suppose I were to tell you that I could lead you to the Beast?”

  “I’d ask what the hell you’ve been smoking besides that foul cigar.”

  “I’m serious. Word on the street is, the Beast is a skinwalker—a shapeshifter.”

  “And you believe that scuttlebutt?”

  “There’s a mutie comes into the bar...”

  “Is this a joke?” asked Turrin. “’Cause I think I heard this one.”

  Dobbs glared at him, looked back at Remming, and continued, “Something about him struck me wrong, so I had him tailed. Turns out he’s a shapeshifter. He goes about disguised as a normal.”

  Remming snorted.

  “You saw him change?” Turrin asked.

  “No, but I know it was him. Went into a public jakes, came out as a normal. Nobody else in or out in that time.” It had been Evans who saw this—or didn’t see it, as the case may be—but Dobbs didn’t see why he should let the guardos in on that little detail. He was certain, after all, that was what had happened.

  “He shaped normal? No tail or nothing?” Remming asked. Dobbs nodded. “Don’t have to be no supernatural thing to put on some makeup, look like a normal.” Remming turned to Turrin. “What do you think?”

  Turrin did his best to disguise his surprise at Remming actually asking his opinion. “Me? I dunno. Could be he’s the Beast, could be he’s got some other sort of scam going.”

  “Yeah.” Remming glowered at Dobbs. “Of course, there ain’t actually any law against a mutie going about disguised as a normal. Now, if he stole some normal’s identity, that would be something else again.”

  “But guaranteed something’s not right about it,” said Dobbs.

  Remming shrugged. “Why bring this to me?”

  “Why not? We’ve had arrangements in the past. Just because I’m a legit businessman now, don’t mean we can’t still do business. If I manage to win a seat next election, it couldn’t hurt to have friends in the guard. And it couldn’t hurt a guardsman to have a friend on the council.”

  “So this mutie—assuming he really is the Beast—what’s he gonna cost me?”

  “Nothing. Nada. Free of charge. Just remember who pointed you to him. Be good for my press, come election time, if it’s known I helped the guard nail the Beast.”

  “You know, you’re not real popular around One City Plaza these days. Gage and some of the others think your Citizen’s Safety Committee are just a bunch of damned vigilantes, deserve to be popped.”

  “Exactly my point. If the chairman of the Safety Committee contributes materially to the apprehension of the Beast, a lot of that bad press could just go away.”

  “As far as the public’s concerned, maybe.”

  “Public are the ones who vote.” There was a long pause. Finally, Dobbs said, “If you’re not interested, I could take this to Kabanov.”

  “Right.” Remming laughed. “That’d do wonders for your PR.” Kabanov ran the Russian mob out of the northeast quarter.

  “Let me tell you something, guardo.” Dobbs leaned across the table, punctuating his points with stabs of the cigar. “I’m a selfish man. I know which side of my bread is buttered. The Beast is bad for everybody, not least of all for my business. I want to see the Beast go down. Kabanov’s got muscle, and he’s got a vested interest in this city. He’ll want the same. If I can get some good press out of this, fine, all the better for me. If I can’t, that’s just peachy, too—as long as the Beast ends up gone.”

  14. WOLF

  Summersend morning found me sitting in the main room of our suite, surrounded by a mess. I had printed out a lot of the records and pictures of the victims and the murder sites, and they were spread around the living area of our rooms, piled on chairs and table, sideboards and sofas.

  “Festive Summersend,” Morgan said from the kitchenette, where she was brewing coffee. “Get any sleep at all?”

  “Yeah, some,” I said. I had napped for an hour or two, but before the sun had risen I’d found myself wakeful again and abandoned my bed to study the evidence. The coffee smelled great. Like the hooch Roth’s people had left us, the coffee we’d found in the kitchenette was high quality, maybe half real coffee, as opposed to the seventy percent chicory you got in most places. Carrying two cups of the fragrant black brew, Morgan stepped carefully between piles of photos and transcripts and handed me one. It was nicely warm in my hand.

  She peered around the room. Rok had occasionally grumbled about the mess, but Morgan would just dump whatever inconvenienced her off a seat or a table, though she was careful to put it in an appropriate spot. One-handed, she shifted the treasurer’s photos off a chair and slumped them against a pile of transcripts of interviews with his associates. She plunked down in the chair and shoved some files aside to set her cup down on the table.

  I sipped appreciatively at the coffee. Remembered belatedly to mutter, “Thanks.”

  Morgan chuckled. I could hear Rok stirring in the other room, and the shower went on.

  “You getting anywhere?” Morgan asked.

  “Dunno yet,” I muttered. “Maybe.”

  Morgan nodded, got up with her coffee, abandoning any attempt at conv
ersation. She knew what I was like at times like this. “Parade’s at ten,” she said, heading for their room.

  “Ceremony is at four,” I said. I had my dress tunic already laid out on my bed. “I already told Roth we might not make the parade. You go without me if you want.”

  Morgan laughed. She knew I hated parades. She said something else as she vanished into the room she shared with Rok, but I didn’t catch it. I was already back to my contemplation of the Beast’s calendar.

  When the Beast takes his first victim, the fishing boat captain, Summersend is five weeks away. It’s not quite first quarter past the full moon, a Thursday. It would have been bright that night, the three-quarter moon shining off the water. The Beast walks onto the boat and kills him there. Eight days later he takes the teacher, Juan Castro. The weather was bad that night, no view of the last quarter moon. Castro was killed in an enclosed bridge between two of the college buildings. Private, like the boat, and indoors. Fitch, the guardsman, is taken the night before the dark moon, a Sunday night. He’s on patrol, apparently gets dragged into the shelter of a tramway station. This is a little bolder, more exposed. He’s taking his victim off the street, not coming to him in a place he thinks of as secure. Then nothing for almost two weeks, the whole of the waxing moon, until two days before full, a Monday. That’s when Suzi Mascarpone of the Harlot’s Guild gets taken in the street, out in the open, and Auden attempts to capture the Beast. The timing blows the “waning moon, baneful magic” connection all to hell. Two days later, the Beast walks into the guard’s wardroom and kills the chief. Moon’s just past full, waning again, one week to Summersend.

  If you’re looking for baneful magic, you usually look at the waning moon first. But could the Beast be running on the sun instead? Midsummer is the equivalent of the full moon, while Summersend is the equivalent of a moon in its first waning quarter. I wondered what, if anything, we could expect of the Beast on Summersend.