Dark Detectives

by Stephen Jones

  “It’s the end of it,” she says. “Mimsy must be stopped.”

  A young man Geneviève does not know has appeared. He wears cycling shorts and a baggy T-shirt. Very 1990s. His temples are shaved.

  “Who are you?” she asks.

  “Despatch, love.”

  He opens a shoulder-bag, and looks for a parcel.

  The final member of the seven is Dr. Shade, the comic-strip avenger. He emerges from the last of the red mist, cloak trailing. His face is covered by a surgical mask and goggles.

  A fictional character?

  “That was a rush,” says Dr. Shade. “Gené, you bit me. You really bit me.” It is Jerome. He pulls down his mask, and presses his tongue to his teeth.

  “But I’m not a vampire,” he says. “What am I?”

  “You look like Dr. Shade,” she says.

  “That makes sense.”

  “I’m glad it does to someone.”

  Death has made Jerome jauntier. He isn’t the serious Information Analyst she remembers. He has inwardly taken on some of the aspects of the pulp hero whose uniform he wears.

  “We’re the old world’s last hope,” Pai-net’em says, not out loud but in their minds. “We are to check the plagues, and destroy the jewel.”

  The bike messenger, in particular, looks appalled.

  Jerome’s mind still races, dragging Geneviève who is still aware of the ties of blood between them along behind him.

  “I know who you are,” Jerome says to the messenger.

  “I’m Connor,” the cyclist says.

  “You’re my dad,” Jerome says. “You died.”

  “We all died,” Edwin says.

  “And we will all die again,” says Pai-net’em. “Our sacrifice will heal the world. Pharaoh can rule again, justly.”

  Pai-net’em had a lot to learn about Derek Leech.

  “Why us?” Jerome asks. “Why us seven?”

  “Because we’re all responsible for it,” Maureen says. “We touched it and it touched us. We died so that the Seven Stars might rise, in the body of my daughter. Some of us were destroyed long before our bodies were broken.”

  Barrymore nods, understanding.

  “And now we’re going to die again?” says Connor. “No, thank you very much. I didn’t lay down my life to redeem the world. I was knocked over by a fucking van.”

  “Dad!” Jerome says, shocked. He is older than his father got to be.

  “You lived on in him,” Geneviève says.

  “Big deal. He’s dead too, right? What a mess. I wasn’t going to ride a bike all my life. I was young. I could have made it. I had projects.”

  “Excuse me, Connor,” begins Edwin. “Few of us are here by choice. We all resisted being part of this Circle. We didn’t volunteer. Except for the first of us.”

  He looks at Pai-net’em, the Pharaoh’s minister.

  “And the last,” Geneviève adds, remembering Jerome baring his throat.

  “And who are you all?” Connor asked.

  “We’re the psychic detectives, Dad,” Jerome says, sounding more like Dr. Shade than ever. “We’re the Three Musketeers and the Four Just Men, the Seven Samurai and the Seven Sinners. We are the masked avengers and the spirits of justice, protectors of the innocent and defenders of the defenceless. We are the last hope of humankind. There are mysteries to be solved, wrongs to be righted, monsters to be vanquished. Now, are you with us? To death and glory, for love and life?”

  Barrymore looks as if he wished he’d made that speech.

  Maureen wants to make love with this masked man, now!

  Edwin is quietly proud. Jerome Rhodes would have been Diogenes Club material.

  “If you put it like that, son,” Connor says, “include me in.”

  The Seven are whole.

  Complete.

  She feels their strength growing.

  They stand together, in a circle. They link hands, and their strengths flow into each other.

  “Pardon me for intruding in this inspirational moment,” Leech says, through a loudspeaker, “but we are on a timetable.”

  *

  Leech has made available to them a customised short-hop skimmer. Jerome recognises the lines, and realises it is a Rolls-Royce ShadowShark, melded with an assault helicopter and a space shuttle. It is sleek, black and radar-invisible.

  Geneviève imagines Leech must be a little sad at parting with it. It is a wonderful toy.

  Jerome, of course, knows how to fly the ShadowShark.

  The flight is already keyed into the vehicle’s manifest. She could have guessed where it is supposed to end. It is where it all started.

  Egypt.

  She is the last to board.

  Leech is there to see them off. She knows that he wishes he were part of it.

  Some would have traded with him if they could. From her, they knew what NostreDame foresaw for them. To succeed in this, they would have to die. Again.

  “I will see you when this is over,” Leech says.

  “If Michel wasn’t playing a joke.”

  She climbs into the ShadowShark.

  *

  Continental Europe is mottled with fires. Rockets streak in from the Urals. Jerome easily bests the missiles. There are flying creatures, nesting among the cloud-shields. The skimmer takes evasive action.

  The Seven no longer need to talk.

  Geneviève, used to touching the minds of those she feeds on, is knotted emotionally by how much more complex, more vital this is.

  For the first time, she is alive and aware. Going on alone afterwards will be a tragedy. She will be haunted forever by the loss of this companionship, this clarity, this love.

  She senses the bindings growing. Between Connor and Jerome is a rope of blood kinship. She is strung between Maureen and Jerome, both of whom have given life to her. Pai-net’em and Barrymore and Winthrop fit into the circle, perfectly. Their similarities are bonds. Their differences are complements.

  They drink of her memories, the many lives she has sampled. She lets Pai-net’em’s ancient history and Barrymore’s blazing talent flow into her. She knows their loves: Edwin’s lifelong irritated devotion to Catriona, Maureen’s hot burst of generous desire with Jeperson, Connor’s calculated but real attachment to Sally.

  Throughout their times, the Seven have revolved around the Jewel of Seven Stars, closing in on a tiny constellation. Between them, they understand the bauble, a lump of red malice tossed at the Earth, and know its limitations.

  As they close on the Nile, they become more aware of the pulsing thing at the end of their flight path. They are hooked, and being reeled in.

  If she could stop time, this is the moment she would pick.

  Before the holocaust.

  *

  By the bubbling waters of the Nile squats a clear ruby pyramid, in which burn the Seven Stars.

  At first, Geneviève thinks the jewel has grown to giant size, dwarfing the sphinx and the old pyramids, but it is a solid projection.

  The jewel is inside.

  Multitudes gather on the shores of the great river. In the past months, cults have sprung up for the worship of the Seven Stars, or emerged from historic secrecy to declare themselves the Acolytes of the Plagues. Oblations are offered up to the Red Pyramid.

  Occasionally, swathes of death are cut through the crowds. That merely encourages more to gather, pressing closer, praying and starving and burning and rotting. Robed priests ritually cast themselves into the boiling river.

  Having been dead, twice, and begun to form a sense of what comes after, Geneviève at last knows the Jewel of Seven Stars is not a magical object. It offers only random cessation, cruel and needless.

  It does not create anything.

  Pai-net’em, who lay with the jewel in him, listening through the years to its insectile whisper, thinks it was a machine. Barrymore, who tore genius from himself as he was driven on by the jewel, feels it to be a malign imp. Maureen still believes it the catspaw of the Elder
Gods for whom her uncles devoted their lives to blaspheming. To Edwin, it is a puzzle to be solved and put away. To Connor, it is unjust death, robbing him of the future. To Jerome, it is all misinformation, all garbage, all lies, all negatives, all deadtech.

  And to her?

  It is her enemy. And her salvation.

  She knows now why the first curse—the Plague of Dogs—was aimed at her. Mimsy must have accessed the suppressed quatrains, probably when she took over the premises and archives of the Diogenes Club. Mimsy Mountmain had enough of a human mind to know that the vampire who had left traces of herself in her veins was the focus of the Circle of Seven, the only force which could break the weirdstone.

  She’s still my daughter, thinks Maureen.

  Geneviève is infected with love for the girl in the Red Pyramid. The girl who looks so like her, as she was before the Dark Kiss, who has also been robbed of a life, of love and a world, by the Jewel of Seven Stars.

  Mimsy is going to die too.

  *

  The ShadowShark settles by the Red Pyramid, on a stretch of sand blasted into glass. There are corpses set in the glass, staring up at the red sky.

  They get out of the skimmer, and look at the Red Pyramid. The Seven Stars shine, trapped inside.

  Geneviève feels assaulted in her mind, as when the whine that maddened dogs was killing her. The steel plate in her skull grows hot.

  Pai-net’em wipes the sound from her mind.

  She stands, propped up by Maureen. Her mind feels clean, invigorated. Together, they are strong. Barrymore and Pai-net’em open a portal in the side of the Pyramid, extending their hands and willing a door to appear. On the lintel, Barrymore creates masks of Tragedy and Comedy, which Pai-net’em equips with sphinx bodies.

  Barrymore gives a theatrical bow.

  A whip-like tendril shoots out of the portal and lashes the actor. His flesh explodes, bursting his doublet and hose. His skull, still moustached, looks surprised. He collapses. His voice dies in their mind.

  It is a needle of pain. The loss is a devastation.

  Pai-net’em grasps the tendril with both hands, and yanks hard, wrenching it loose. As he pulls, a grey wrinkling runs up his arms. His face withers to mummy-shape, and he crumbles again, coming apart as dust and dirt.

  Coming hard on the first loss, this knocks the Circle back. Only Jerome is strong enough in himself to support the others.

  They are all going to die. She had known that. But these first deaths are still deadly blows.

  Her heart is stone.

  *

  Edwin takes the lead, and steps over the still-twitching tendril. She follows, and the others come after her.

  Connor, she knows, wants to turn and flee, to go far from the Pyramid, to make a life here, in this world, to have all the things he missed. Only his tie to Jerome, which he doesn’t understand, keeps him on course. To him, it is possible that this is some dying fantasy, as Edwin had thought his whole post-1917 life was, and that it doesn’t matter.

  A tunnel leads straight to the heart of the Red Pyramid.

  Statues look down at them. Faces that mean something. Voices plead and threaten.

  To Edwin, it is Catriona above all. Also Declan and Bennett Mountmain, Charles Beauregard and Mycroft Holmes.

  To Maureen, it is Mimsy, Richard, Leech.

  To Connor, it is the agents and producers who could have opened a life for him. Contracts are offered, cheques processed, projects green-lighted.

  To Jerome, it is Mum, Neil, Sister Chantal, Roger Duroc.

  To her, it is the Three.

  Forgotten lives, taken in red fugues. Dafydd le Gallois, Sergei Bukharin, Annie Marriner.

  And Jerome. Not Three any more, Four.

  Her dead call to her, cajole, promise, abuse, fret.

  There are others, a myriad bled and sampled and absorbed. They bother her like gnats. She is torn into by Chandagnac, the minstrel who had turned her and been destroyed when she might have saved him. And all those she had known and let die by not passing on the Dark Kiss, all she had let grow old and die by not succouring them with her blood.

  She is a selfish parasite. She should not continue this charade of heroism.

  The world is well lost, and her with it.

  *

  Jerome saves her, this time. The most recently dead, he has less time to brood, to adjust, less sense of business left unfinished. Bolstered by those aspects of Dr. Shade he has taken into himself, he fights off his temptations first, and is available to help her through.

  He doesn’t blame her. He is grateful to her.

  In this adventure, he has finally come to know his father, to understand his mother, to get out of his monad and become a part of something greater than himself. At last, he has found a realwelt as vital to him as the InfoWorld.

  She climbs along the thread of his love. She leaves her dead behind.

  The silencing of the voices comes at a cost. Connor is empty and dry and old. Edwin riddled with bullet-wounds, choking on poison gas, caked with the filth of Flanders. They are not destroyed, but they can go no further.

  “Go, for us, as for yourselves,” Edwin says.

  Jerome stands between Maureen and her. He takes their hands, and leads them into the centre of the Red Pyramid.

  A final door opens.

  *

  The Jewel of Seven Stars is wearing Mimsy Mountmain. Geneviève feels, after 600 years, that she is looking into a broken mirror. Mimsy’s hair is still long, and her face is a perfect thing of tiny jewel facets of red fire.

  This is where the plagues came from.

  “Mimsy,” Maureen appeals.

  The Jewel Woman turns, red-screen eyes noting their presence.

  Jerome raises Dr. Shade’s gas-gun and fires at the Jewel Woman. His pellet shatters against the gem-shields over her face. Once, there was a girl. Her tiny wishes and frustrations, nurtured by the jewel, powered the thing, pouring energy into it like a battery, subtly shaping the forms of the plagues it wreaks. Now, that girl is gone, a footnote. This is an alien. Geneviève isn’t sure whether it is a creature or a machine, a god or a demon. If it has thoughts, they are beyond her understanding. If it has feelings, they are unearthly.

  Maureen tries to love the jewel, to venerate it, to wake her daughter.

  If it had fallen on another world, among other beings, would it have been different? Was it humanity that used this gift to unleash plagues? The first time, when Pharaoh gazed into its depths and wished to extend his rule beyond the known world, it was an accident, but man’s character had let loose something that was somehow deserved.

  Now, could Mimsy really be responsible? She had been shaped and robbed of choice as much as anyone else. Nostradamus had seen her fixed course too. The shadowmen that had taken Edwin were accumulating, in other forms, in this Red Pyramid. Mimsy was already wrapped in darkness.

  Maureen touches Mimsy. The Jewel Woman thins.

  “It’s all right, love,” Maureen says. “Let it end.”

  Mimsy’s face, soft and bewildered, is clear. The jewel carapace is gone. Jerome shoots her in the head.

  Geneviève feels the pellet passing into her own brain.

  Eyes alive with betrayal, Mimsy falls, the Jewel of Seven Stars rolling from her chest. The years, held back by the spell, surge like a tide as Mimsy grows old and dies within seconds. She is a corpse before the discharge from Dr. Shade’s gas-gun dissipates.

  Maureen sobs. Geneviève hugs her, pulled close by their blood-bond. They are both ripped open by the death of the girl who had come from both of them.

  The jewel is still active. It had been inside Maureen when Mimsy was conceived, when Geneviève tasted her blood. It is the dead girl’s heart. The Seven Stars throb inside it, like drops of glowing blood.

  The Red Pyramid is collapsing around them. Scarlet dust cascades.

  Jerome picks up the Jewel of Seven Stars. Its lights reflect in his goggles. Through him, Geneviève feels its tug. It opens up poss
ibilities. It is a source of great power. If they keep it, maybe it can be focused. For good. The world need not be left for Leech.

  Jerome might become Dr. Shade, not just dress as him. No, says Pai-net’em. He is still part of them, freed if anything by his second death. Not yet. Perhaps never. The stone is at its weakest, emptied of plague, its host torn away, its influence overextended. It can be ended. Now.

  Maureen is dead in Geneviève’s embrace. She lays the woman down, brushing white hair away from her beautiful face. She has tried to do her best, to escape her family’s past, to find something of worth in her inheritance. Of them all, she has loved the most.

  There is night all around. The pyramid is thinned to a structure of fading light-lines. The jewel-worshippers wail at a sensed loss.

  Jerome makes a fist around the jewel and squeezes. The red glow is wrapped in his black leather gauntlet.

  She hears the first crack. Jerome squeezes harder.

  “Get out of range, Gené,” he says. “When this goes, I go with it. I have to die again, mind. You get to live forever. Tell Mum Connor was one of the good guys …”

  The others are growing thin in her mind. Loneliness is gathering like a shadow.

  Without the Seven Stars, how will humankind fare?

  What is left for her?

  “Go on, Gené. Run.”

  “No,” she says. “It’s not fair.”

  She takes the jewel from him. She is far stronger than him. Vampires have the grip of iron.

  “You died for me last time,” she says, kissing him. “Now, it’s my turn. Give Sally your own message. And watch out for the world. Try not to let Derek Leech get back too much of what he had. And play outside sometimes.”

  *

  She leaves him, faster than he can register, darting with vampire swiftness through the transparent ruins. She runs out into the desert, fleet enough to skim over the soft sands. The Jewel of Seven Stars screams in her mind as she squeezes it. The faults grind against each other, the starfires boil.

  It is not too late to give in.

  She could use the weirdstone.

  Other voices give her strength.

  There is a loophole in NostreDame, as usual. If she dies a third time, the obligation is lifted from Jerome.