Dark Detectives

by Stephen Jones

  She lingered at the table, turning the problem over, until the mutterings of the proprietor shamed her out onto the street again.

  It was late afternoon, and the weather was worsening. A woman was singing nearby, in Italian; some tragic aria. Tears close, Linda turned from the pain the song carried, and set off again in no particular direction.

  As the crowd consumed her, a man in a gray suit slipped away from the audience that had gathered around the street-corner diva, sending the youth he was with ahead through the throng to be certain they didn’t lose their quarry.

  Marchetti regretted having to forsake the show. The singing much amused him. Her voice, long ago drowned in alcohol, was repeatedly that vital semitone shy of its intended target—a perfect testament to imperfectibility—rendering Verdi’s high art laughable even as it came within sight of transcendence. He would have to come back here when the beast had been dispatched. Listening to that spoiled ecstasy brought him closer to tears than he’d been for months; and he liked to weep.

  *

  Harry stood across 3rd Avenue from Axel’s Superette and watched the watchers. They had gathered in their hundreds in the chill of the deepening night, to see what could be seen; nor were they disappointed. The bodies kept coming out: in bags, in bundles; there was even something in a bucket.

  “Does anybody know exactly what happened?” Harry asked his fellow spectators.

  A man turned, his face ruddy with cold.

  “The guy who ran the place decided to give the stuff away,” he said, grinning at this absurdity. “And the store was fuckin’ swamped. Someone got killed in the crush—”

  “I heard the trouble started over a can of meat,” another offered. “Somebody got beaten to death with a can of meat.”

  This rumor was contested by a number of others; all had versions of events.

  Harry was about to try and sort fact from fiction when an exchange to his right diverted him.

  A boy of nine or ten had buttonholed a companion. “Did you smell her?” he wanted to know. The other nodded vigorously. “Gross, huh?” the first ventured. “Smelled better shit,” came the reply, and the two dissolved into conspiratorial laughter.

  Harry looked across at the object of their mirth. A hugely over-weight woman, underdressed for the season, stood on the periphery of the crowd and watched the disaster scene with tiny, glittering eyes.

  Harry had forgotten the questions he was going to ask the watchers. What he remembered, clear as yesterday, was the way his dreams conjured the infernal brethren. It wasn’t their curses he recalled, nor even the deformities they paraded: it was the smell off them. Of burning hair and halitosis; of veal left to rot in the sun. Ignoring the debate around him, he started in the direction of the woman.

  She saw him coming, the rolls of fat at her neck furrowing as she glanced across at him.

  It was Cha’Chat, of that Harry had no doubt. And to prove the point, the demon took off at a run, the limbs and prodigious buttocks stirred to a fandango with every step. By the time Harry had cleared his way through the crowd the demon was already turning the corner into 95th Street, but its stolen body was not designed for speed, and Harry rapidly made up the distance between them. The lamps were out in several places along the street, and when he finally snatched at the demon, and heard the sound of tearing, the gloom disguised the vile truth for fully five seconds until he realized that Cha’Chat had somehow sloughed off its usurped flesh, leaving Harry holding a great coat of ectoplasm, which was already melting like overripe cheese. The demon, its burden shed, was away; slim as hope and twice as slippery. Harry dropped the coat of filth and gave chase, shouting Hesse’s syllables as he did so.

  Surprisingly, Cha’Chat stopped in its tracks, and turned to Harry. The eyes looked all ways but Heavenward; the mouth was wide and attempting laughter. It sounded like someone vomiting down an elevator shaft.

  “Words, D’Amour?” it said, mocking Hesse’s syllables. “You think I can be stopped with words?”

  “No,” said Harry, and blew a hole in Cha’Chat’s abdomen before the demon’s many eyes had even found the gun.

  “Bastard!” it wailed, “Cocksucker!” and fell to the ground, blood the colour of piss throbbing from the hole. Harry sauntered down the street to where it lay. It was almost impossible to slay a demon of Cha’Chat’s elevation with bullets; but a scar was shame enough amongst their clan. Two, almost unbearable.

  “Don’t,” it begged when he pointed the gun at its head. “Not the face.”

  “Give me one good reason why not.”

  “You’ll need the bullets,” came the reply.

  Harry had expected bargains and threats. This answer silenced him.

  “There’s something going to get loose tonight, D’Amour,” Cha’Chat said. The blood that was pooling around it had begun to thicken and grow milky, like melted wax. “Something wilder than me.”

  “Name it,” said Harry.

  The demon grinned. “Who knows?” it said. “It’s a strange season, isn’t it? Long nights. Clear skies. Things get born on nights like this, don’t you find?”

  “Where?” said Harry, pressing the gun to Cha’Chat’s nose.

  “You’re a bully, D’Amour,” it said reprovingly. “You know that?”

  “Tell me …”

  The thing’s eyes grew darker; its face seemed to blur.

  “South of here, I’d say …” it replied. “A hotel …” The tone of its voice was changing subtly; the features losing their solidity. Harry’s trigger finger itched to give the damned thing a wound that would keep it from a mirror for life, but it was still talking, and he couldn’t afford to interrupt its flow. “… on 44th,” it said. “Between 6th … 6th and Broadway.” The voice was indisputably feminine now. “Blue blinds,” it murmured. “I can see blue blinds …”

  As it spoke the last vestiges of its true features fled, and suddenly it was Norma who was bleeding on the sidewalk at Harry’s feet.

  “You wouldn’t shoot an old lady, would you?” she piped up.

  The trick lasted seconds only, but Harry’s hesitation was all that Cha’Chat needed to fold itself between one plane and the next, and flit. He’d lost the creature, for the second time in a month.

  And to add discomfort to distress, it had begun to snow.

  *

  The small hotel that Cha’Chat had described had seen better years; even the light that burned in the lobby seemed to tremble on the brink of expiring. There was nobody at the desk. Harry was about to start up the stairs when a young man whose pate was shaved as bald as an egg, but for a single kiss curl that was oiled to his scalp, stepped out of the gloom and took hold of his arm.

  “There’s nobody here,” he informed Harry.

  In better days Harry might have cracked the egg open with his bare fists, and enjoyed doing so. Tonight he guessed he would come off the worse. So he simply said, “Well, I’ll find another hotel then, eh?”

  Kiss Curl seemed placated; the grip relaxed. In the next instant Harry’s hand found his gun, and the gun found Kiss Curl’s chin. An expression of bewilderment crossed the boy’s face as he fell back against the wall, spitting blood.

  As Harry started up the stairs, he heard the youth yell, “Darrieux!” from below.

  Neither the shout nor the sound of the struggle had roused any response from the rooms. The place was empty. It had been elected, Harry began to comprehend, for some purpose other than hostelry.

  As he started along the landing a woman’s cry, begun but never finished, came to meet him. He stopped dead. Kiss Curl was coming up the stairs behind him two or three at a time; ahead, someone was dying. This couldn’t end well, Harry suspected.

  Then the door at the end of the corridor opened, and suspicion became plain fact. A man in a gray suit was standing on the threshold, skinning off a pair of bloodied surgical gloves. Harry knew him vaguely; indeed had begun to sense a terrible pattern in all of this from the moment he’d heard Kiss Curl cal
l his employer’s name. This was Darrieux Marchetti; also called the Cankerist; one of that whispered order of theological assassins whose directives came from Rome, or Hell, or both.

  “D’Amour,” he said.

  Harry had to fight the urge to be flattered that he had been remembered.

  “What happened here?” he demanded to know, taking a step toward the open door.

  “Private business,” the Cankerist insisted. “Please, no closer.”

  Candles burned in the little room, and by their generous light, Harry could see the bodies laid out on the bare bed. The woman from the house on Ridge Street, and her child. Both had been dispatched with Roman efficiency.

  “She protested,” said Marchetti, not overly concerned that Harry was viewing the results of his handiwork. “All I needed was the child.”

  “What was it?” Harry demanded. “A demon?”

  Marchetti shrugged. “We’ll never know,” he said. “But at this time of year there’s usually something that tries to get in under the wire. We like to be safe rather than sorry. Besides, there are those—I number myself amongst them—that believe there is such a thing as a surfeit of Messiahs—”

  “Messiahs?” said Harry. He looked again at the tiny body.

  “There was power there, I suspect,” said Marchetti. “But it could have gone either way. Be thankful, D’Amour. Your world isn’t ready for revelation.” He looked past Harry to the youth, who was at the top of the stairs. “Patrice. Be an angel, will you, bring the car over? I’m late for Mass.”

  He threw the gloves back onto the bed.

  “You’re not above the law,” said Harry.

  “Oh please,” the Cankerist protested, “let’s have no nonsense. It’s too late at night.”

  Harry felt a sharp pain at the base of his skull, and a trace of heat where blood was running.

  “Patrice thinks you should go home, D’Amour. And so do I.”

  The knife point was pressed a little deeper.

  “Yes?” said Marchetti.

  “Yes,” said Harry.

  *

  “He was here,” said Norma, when Harry called back at the house.

  “Who?”

  “Eddie Axel; of Axel’s Superette. He came through, clear as daylight.”

  “Dead?”

  “Of course dead. He killed himself in his cell. Asked me if I’d seen his soul.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I’m a telephonist, Harry; I just make the connections. I don’t pretend to understand the metaphysics.” She picked up the bottle of brandy Harry had set on the table beside her chair. “How sweet of you,” she said. “Sit down. Drink.”

  “Another time, Norma. When I’m not so tired.” He went to the door. “By the way,” he said. “You were right. There was something on Ridge Street …”

  “Where is it now?”

  “Gone … home.”

  “And Cha’Chat?”

  “Still out there somewhere. In a foul temper …”

  “Manhattan’s seen worse, Harry.”

  It was little consolation, but Harry muttered his agreement as he closed the door.

  The snow was coming on more heavily all the time.

  He stood on the step and watched the way the flakes spiraled in the lamplight. No two, he had read somewhere, were ever alike. When such variety was available to the humble snowflake, could he be surprised that events had such unpredictable faces?

  Each moment was its own master, he mused, as he put his head between the blizzard’s teeth, and he would not have to take whatever comfort he could find in the knowledge that between this chilly hour and dawn there were innumerable such moments—blind maybe, and wild and hungry—but all at least eager to be born.

  Sally Rhodes

  SEVEN STARS EPISODE FIVE

  MIMSY

  by KIM NEWMAN

  Like Anthony Boucher’s Fergus O’Breen, Clive Barker’s Harry D’Amour and F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack, Sally Rhodes is a private eye in the Black Mask tradition. But her world has even darker darks than Philip Marlowe’s or Sam Spade’s, and because of these frequent incursions of the unbelievable, her stories also have a more pronounced streak of black humour.

  Sally’s great inspiration in the PI business is not Marlowe, but Jim Rockford. She often solves her cases by wandering through a mystery until someone takes pity on her and explains the whole thing.

  Born of filth in 1961, Derek Leech emerged fully formed from the River Thames, destined to found a multimedia empire from his dark domain, the steel and glass Leech Pyramid, in the heart of London’s Docklands.

  Sally Rhodes first appeared in Kim Newman’s short story ‘Twitch Technicolor’ (Interzone #28, 1989), followed by ‘Gargantuabots vs the Nice Mice’ (Interzone #33, 1990), ‘The Man Who Collected Barker’ (Fantasy Tales 4, 1990) and ‘Mother Hen’ (Fantasy Tales 6, 1991). The author gave her a slight career change and a baby in ‘Organ Donors’ (Darklands 2, 1992), in which she first encounters evil media mogul Derek Leech, and the two crossed paths again in the novel The Quorum (1994), where she meets Neil.

  Leech himself originated in ‘The Original Dr Shade’ (Interzone #36, 1990) and he has reappeared in ‘SQPR’ (Interzone #52, 1992), Life’s Lottery (1998), the ‘Where the Bodies Are Buried’ quartet published in the anthologies Dark Voices and Dark Terrors (1993–96), ‘Another Fish Story’ (Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, 2005), ‘Cold Snap’ (The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, 2007) and ‘Sorcerer Conjuror Wizard Witch’ (Mysteries of the Diogenes Club, 2010).

  ONE DAY IN Spring, the Devil called her.

  “Sally Rhodes Investigations,” she said brightly into the phone, trying to sound like a receptionist.

  “Miss Rhodes,” he said, voice distorted a little, perhaps addressed to a speaker phone, “this is Derek Leech.”

  She hung up.

  The voice had scraped her bones.

  She looked from the office half of her front room to the living-room half. Jerome, her son, was building a Lego robot, notionally supervised by Neil, her boyfriend, who was curled on the ancient sofa, making notes on a scribble-pad. Neil was still assembling an argument for the book he’d been thinking of starting for three years. Lego structures spread about the floor, weaving around the cat-basket and several of Neil’s abandoned coffee mugs.

  Normality, she thought.

  Kid. Man. Pet. Toys. A mess, but a mess she could cope with, a mess she loved.

  The phone rang again. She let it.

  The office half of the room was ordered, different. A computer, a fax, files, a desk. This was where she thought. Over there, on the sofa, amid the lovable mess, was where she felt.

  She was breaking her own rules.

  The ringing phone jarred on her emotions.

  At her desk, she was in business. She had to be harder, stronger.

  She picked up the phone, but didn’t announce herself.

  “Miss Rhodes, for every second you don’t hang up, I shall donate one hundred pounds to your favoured charity, which is, I believe, Shelter.”

  It did not surprise her that Leech knew she supported Help for the Homeless. The multimedia magnate knew everything about everyone. Atop his Pyramid in London Docklands, he had all the knowledge of the world at his disposal.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  “Regardless of our past differences, I admire your independence of spirit.”

  “Thank you. Now what is this about?”

  “A friend of mine needs your services.”

  “You have friends?”

  She imagined Leech had only acolytes, employees and possessions.

  “The finest friends money can buy, my dear. That was a joke. You may laugh.”

  “Ha ha ha.”

  “My friend’s name is Maureen Mountmain. She has a daughter, Mimsy, who has gone missing. Maureen would like to retain you to find her.”

  “You must have people who could do that. If this Maureen Mountmain was really your frien
d, why don’t you turn the dogs loose?”

  “You have resources no one I employ could have.”

  That was the most frightening thing anyone had ever said to her. Leech let it hang in the air.

  “Sally, you’ve inconvenienced me. Twice. Your life would be much easier if you had chose not to stand in my way. You have something of the purity of a saint. No one in my organisation can say as much. Only someone of your virtues could handle this job. I appeal to you, as a secular saint, to help my friend.”

  She let seconds tick by.

  “Do you accept?”

  She counted slowly up to ten in her mind, making a thousand pounds for the homeless.

  “I’ll take the job,” she said, “on the condition that I’m retained by this Mrs. Mountmain …”

  “Miss.”

  “… Miss Mountmain, and not by you personally or any sneaky subsidiary company.”

  “You’ll not take the King’s shilling.”

  “Cursed gold?”

  Leech laughed, like ice cubes cracking in a bowl of warm blood.

  “Once this call is completed, your business is with the Mountmains. I act, in this instance, only as intermediary.”

  She knew there was a hidden clause somewhere. With Leech, nothing was straightforward. His way was to rely on the fallibility of those he dealt with. Despite his stated opinion, she knew she was as likely to be gulled into a moral trap as anyone else.

  Jerome pestered Neil for his expert opinion on the robot spider scuttling around the floor.

  “My associate, Ms. Wilding, will give details of the appointment she has arranged for you with Miss Mountmain. I have enjoyed this conversation. Goodbye.”

  The phone clicked, and a woman came on. Sally took down an address and a time.

  When she hung up, she realised her heart was racing. It had been a while.

  She’d been working on everyday stuff these last few years. As it happened, she’d done a lot of work with runaway children. Though sometimes she walked away well-paid and satisfied from a tearful reunion, she more often traced some kid caught between a horrific home life and an ordeal on the streets, then wound up sucked into an emotional, legal and ethical Gordian knot.