“Yes! No! Isn’t that twenty-three?”
* * *
Cabal shrugged inwardly. They’d be all right. “And the other team?”
“Some of the Things from the Ghost Train — we got Dennis and Denzil fillin’ in while they gone,” Bones added quickly, anticipating Cabal’s question.
* * *
“What we have here,” said the skeleton driver of the hastily retitled Parapsychological Perplex Experience, “is some sort of demarcation problem. Now, I wouldn’t dream of turning up on the footplate of your locomotive. You’re supposed to be behaving ghostily, in there.”
He pointed into the shadowed entrance of the ride. Dennis and Denzil, firmly wedged into the tiny train at the head of the ride, followed the gesture, their necks creaking like new shoes. They turned back to the Ghost Train’s driver and shook their heads, squik, squik, squik. There was the faintest sound of something rolling around inside of Denzil’s skull.
“All right,” said the driver, “you don’t want to do this in a civilised way, we’ll do it yours.” Denzil and Dennis looked at each other and nodded triumphantly. Squik, squik, squik.
“Konga?” called the driver at the top of the structure. The enormous gorilla automaton who sat on top of the ride and threatened passers-by with a papier-mâché boulder — at least, the passers-by hoped it was papier-mâché — leaned over the parapet and looked inquisitively at the driver. Upside down, it looked a lot more threatening for some reason. “I’m having a little trouble with these two,” finished the driver, waving a thumb at Dennis and Denzil. The giant gorilla slid a contemptuous glare at them, bared its impressive fangs, and made a basso profundo growl that shook their teeth in their dry sockets. What was left of Dennis’s and Denzil’s eyes widened with much cracking of varnish.
* * *
Those are th’ two parties, but we also got all these kine people an’ stuff who can jus’ stroll round the place, nonchalant like.”
Cabal looked at them and sighed. Most of them couldn’t stroll if they had a handbook on the subject, never mind doing it nonchalantly. He also noticed that his gaze kept sliding over one part of the group. With a deliberate effort he concentrated on the spot and finally noticed a small man who was so nondescript that even “nondescript” was slightly too exciting an adjective to describe him. “Who are you?” he asked. Everybody around the man tapped their chests in surprise, and it took a few moments of “No, not you, beside you, on the other side, no, your other side,” before the man realised he was the subject of attention. Interestingly, several others continued to look through the man in puzzlement as if he weren’t there.
“Oh,” said the man in a soft, unaccented voice, “you mean me.”
“Yes,” said Cabal, working hard to keep his line of sight locked to the man. “Who are you? I don’t remember seeing you before.”
“My name is Alfred Simpkins, sir. You were kind enough to take me in when my colleagues and I absconded from Laidstone Prison.”
“You’re one of the murderers?”
“Yes, sir.”
“One of the serial killers?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So …” Cabal looked at the pale little man with his hair combed across his bald patch, his little moustache, his little glasses, his cardigan and cheap suit with the patched elbows. “What’s your interest in this?”
“You’re looking for Detective Inspector Francis Barrow, retired, are you not? I saw him in the Hall of Murderers earlier this evening, snooping, skulking.” Some colour almost came into his cheeks. A couple of his neighbours finally spotted him and yelped with surprise.
Interesting, thought Cabal, he’s only easily visible when he shows emotion. Otherwise he’s too bland to notice. “He caught you, didn’t he?”
“Yes, sir. With your permission, I’d like to kill him.” He said it in the same way others might say, “I’d like an extra pint and a carton of yoghurt.”
“If you find him, you report it to one of the others. I want him alive.” Cabal’s thoughts were still on the last unsigned contract. “No personal vendettas — I’ve got a business to run.”
“Very good, sir,” said Alfred Simpkins in a tone devoid of anything.
Cabal cast his eye over the rest of the group before nodding with some little satisfaction. “Very good. You know who you’re looking for. Find him. Dismissed.” As they left, he sought out Bones. “Mr. Bones, have you seen my brother recently? In the last hour or so?”
“Afraid not, boss. I see him round, you want me to tell him you asked?”
“Yes, if you would. Thank you.”
* * *
Barrow hid behind the Waltzer and considered his next move. He’d already made one terrible tactical error by not getting the heck out of the carnival while he had a chance. He’d managed to convince himself that help could be found here, however, and that had been a big mistake. He hadn’t seen a single person whom he felt he could trust to behave sensibly, or who wouldn’t simply be put in too much risk. When he belatedly realised this, he’d headed for the exit, only to find an enormous character whose head seemed to be constructed from animated stone standing by the gate, watching those going home with a close attention. Barrow didn’t believe that he could hope to go up against the stone-headed man armed with anything less than an anti-tank rifle. A cursory examination of the fencing that surrounded the Cabal Bros. Carnival indicated that he wouldn’t be getting out that way, either: twelve feet high and topped with razor wire. He’d assumed that the inward bend at the top was a mistake, that they’d put up the fence the wrong way around. After all, putting it up that way would be far better at keeping people in than out. Now he wasn’t so sure it was a mistake at all. He was trapped, then. In that case, he had no choice but to stay hidden until daybreak. From what he’d seen on his previous early visit, most of the carnival’s denizens weren’t very keen on daylight. He’d watched a group of flickering dark things pass across the roofs and hoardings a few minutes earlier. Only the fact that he was out of the bright lights himself had made them visible; the townsfolk below had remained entirely unaware of the lightly tripping mob of nightmare that had passed only a few feet above their heads, shielded by the brilliant bulbs, neons, and fluorescents that made the darkness beyond so much deeper.
Barrow looked back on the unpleasant feeling of foreboding that had been with him much of the day, the feeling that he had glorified with the word “fear,” and smiled. No, that had just been the collywobbles. Now he was afraid. They were throwing everything into the search, and that meant things that had only ever been catalogued in chained books in cathedrals. Things that were a long way away from the human monsters he’d spent his working life hunting and bringing to justice. Thinking of that helped him; perhaps he could find some strength there by remembering the predators he’d pulled out of the crowd and thrown into gaol? He tried it.
Smith, the insurance man who collected on a few too many policies for comfort. Yes, he could still remember the look on Smith’s face when the verdict came in, like a spoilt child who’d been found out. Jones, the doctor who started to play God with his patients’ lives and disposed of the ones he disapproved of. That had been difficult — Jones had been “assisting” the enquiry as an expert witness, and it was the alteration of a piece of evidence that had made Barrow look more closely at his involvement. Ye gods, the trouble he’d had convincing his superiors to probe Jones’s background more thoroughly. Brown, the hatter with the very private collection of busts he used to model his wares. If there had ever been a man to revel in his own insanity, it had been Brown. He’d actually become a hatter purely because of the association with madness. When he’d been sentenced, he’d asked to see his captor in private. There, as the Black Maria waited to take him away, he’d leaned close to Barrow and, laughing quietly to himself, whispered, “I’m not really mad. Only pretending, only pretending!” He was led away making shushing noises at Barrow — it was to be their private little joke.
And Simpkins, the man who killed because he could. They’d arrested him on fifteen charges, and he’d quietly suggested in the interview room that there were thirty-two missing persons that they might like to add to the tally. Barrow could still remember Simpkins in the dock while the charges were read, never showing a flicker of emotion but seeming polite, if a little bored. “Do you plead guilty or not guilty?”
Simpkins had pushed his glasses back up his nose, smiled slightly to show that he just wanted to help, and said, “Oh, guilty. Obviously.”
In his interviews, he would only talk to Barrow, and ignored questions from anybody else even if Barrow was present. “Why is it so important that you speak only to me?” Barrow had asked finally. “It’s very inconvenient.”
“Because you can see me, Detective Inspector Barrow. Other people start to lose interest after a while. You, delightfully, always see me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve gone through life as a piece of marginalia, faintly written in soft pencil. Passed by, overlooked, ignored. It has been of great personal distress to me, I cannot begin to tell you how painful. Since childhood, I was always the last to be chosen — if, indeed, they remembered to choose me at all. Always considered the wallflower, though I stood full-front and cried, ‘Me! Me! Me!’ Never loved, never despised, never anything to stir the emotions at all. Alfred Simpkins, the invisible man. After a while, it quite began to aggravate me. That’s when I started making people take some notice of me.”
“You started killing them.”
“Yes, I did. Even that was a disappointment. I’d hoped for some sort of great emotion from those whose lives I took. After all, being murdered for no other reason than because a pallid little man — I am under no illusions as to how you perceive me — wants to prove a point, you would think it would make people angry at the very least. It would seem unfair, would it not? But all I ever got was faint expressions of surprise. You know, I don’t believe they noticed I had murdered them. I really don’t. They just seemed faintly put out, as if it were a bit of bad luck, an act of God. ‘Oh, my carotid artery has been severed with an open razor. I knew I should have cut down on greasy foods.’ ‘Botheration, I’m being belaboured with a fourteenth-century battleaxe. What are the odds, eh?’ I was standing there in front of them with a sub-machine gun or backing over them with a rotary cultivator or whatever and shouting, ‘I am Alfred Simpkins! I am killing you! Will you please take a little bit of bloody notice, please?’ But they never did. So I kept going. Hope springs eternal, after all.”
“You knew you’d be caught, surely?”
“Well, one would think so, wouldn’t one? Do you know, I’ve sat in my living room covered head to toe in blood, cradling the murder weapon in my hands — already labelled ‘Exhibit 1’ — and been interviewed by your colleagues. Had I seen my next-door neighbour recently? Indeed, I had. A little under three hours previously, when I’d bludgeoned her to death with this very knobkerrie, officer. Well, sir, we have other enquiries to make. Good day. They hadn’t noticed. Nobody notices me. Except you, Detective Inspector Barrow. You notice me. The first time you saw me, you knew I’d done it. Do you want to know what I would like to do more than anything, Detective Inspector Barrow?”
“No.”
“I’d like to kill you.” Barrow had looked at Simpkins hard. “No animosity. Simply because you would notice yourself being murdered. That would be my little bit of affirmation of my existence. Then I would never have to kill again.”
Barrow had denied Simpkins’s request and not been diplomatic about it. Simpkins was sent down to Laidstone for so many life terms that, even with good behaviour, he was unlikely to be out before the next ice age. Simpkins’s attitude towards him had changed then; it had become personal.
Barrow paused, curious, and wondered why he was thinking about Simpkins just now, of all times. Perhaps it had been that little man he’d seen walk by in the crowd. He’d been the absolute living spit; the resemblance had just started all these thoughts rolling around his head. All of which was very nostalgic in a forensic sort of way, but it wasn’t getting him any closer to finding somewhere safe and stopping Cabal. “Stopping Cabal” seemed very simple when it was only two words. The implications were horrifying in their complexity, however. Stop him how? Stop him from doing what? Stop him when? First things first, he thought, and broke cover.
Walking like a man who has every right to be going into the back of a sideshow, he went into the back of a sideshow. I just need a dark corner, he thought, somewhere I can … He paused, inhaled through his nose. What was that smell? An odd, synthetic sour odour. He had a rapacious memory, in that once a sensation had been experienced it was held for good, and so he knew he’d smelled something similar before. Unfortunately, his rapacious memory hung on to the details, too, refusing to pass them on to the cognitive centres, and so he couldn’t quite recall where. He twitched a curtain gently to one side and peered through the gap. What he saw rooted him to the spot. He was on the wrong side of the velvet rope that separated the visitors from an exhibit, if that was the right word. Actually, on this occasion, it was definitely the right word. Most definitely. Exhibitionism was the whole point here.
On the far side of the rope, Barrow could make out the shadowy forms of the paying customers. They clung to the area of low light — dim, flickering electrical faux candles showing only form but no detail — loath to be seen and identified. This was a place that many wanted to visit but nobody wanted to be caught in. The reason for the guilty interest lay languorous and lithe upon a chaise-longue, regarding the gawking and sweating mass with an insouciance that slid easily beyond human limits. Since his conversations with the brothers Cabal this evening, it was as if the scales had fallen from Barrow’s eyes. For example, he knew without hesitation — as surely as Horst had known about Cleopatra earlier the same evening — that, whatever else Layla the Latex Lady was, she wasn’t a lady. She wasn’t even human.
There was something in the way that she moved, slowly and deliberately and without apparent recourse to such human fripperies as joints, that was reptilian yet still warmly mammalian enough to provoke a low hum of sighs and wetting of lips from her admiring audience — the white noise of desire. Her skin was dark, dark grey, smooth and gently reflective like that of a young seal fresh from the sea, and as she moved it made a gently organic noise, surface whispering over surface. Barrow inhaled again. That was the sour smell, rubber, and the slightly sweeter smell was talcum powder. She must get through pounds of the stuff every day, he thought. The smooth skin ran over every square inch of her body except her neck and head, which rose from the encompassing sheath like the painted portion of a gunmetal statue. As he watched her, he realised, without any particular sense of surprise, that there was no clear interface between the rubber and flesh: one simply seemed to merge into the other. The only details upon her body were the high heels that seemed to grow organically from her feet, as if part of her biology — as, indeed, they were. No other detail was sharply delineated, not even her fingernails.
Barrow was sorry for that. More detail would have allowed him to close down the whole carnival on public-morality grounds. No such luck; Cabal wouldn’t make a mistake like that. Still, he found himself wondering what kind of details they might have been. Her body was like something that Vargas might have dreamt on a particularly humid night. He clenched his eyes shut and told himself that there were people out there, and possibly in here, who would cheerfully see him dead, and a little bit of focus would be gratefully received.
Layla watched the audience with amused arrogance. A typical crowd: mainly men, with a few women, some of the latter asking themselves confused questions. She breathed in and tasted their pheromones, borne by the faint breezes that moved sluggishly through the sideshow. Their scent was fainter than usual, the wind was from the north, but she detected something else, and it was delicious. She found the chemical traces in the air and assiduously picked them out
with the tip of her darting tongue, to muttered approval from her admirers, then drew them along the roof of her palate as a connoisseur takes time with a fine wine. Fear. Somebody there was in fear of his or her life, and the taste of it was exquisite. She closed her eyes and allowed the flavour to separate into its components: male; middle-aged; occasional pipe smoker; behind her. She knew all about the search tonight, and now knew exactly where Frank Barrow was. She also knew that she had less than an hour’s existence left. Really, she should alert Johannes Cabal; that was the right thing to do. On the other hand, she had sprung from Satan’s very own personal blood, and this meant that the right thing to do wasn’t always the thing that was done. Let Cabal rage. She was going to have some fun.
Barrow watched as Layla gestured to the bodyguard who stood to one side and whispered in his ear. “Right, show’s over,” he was bellowing at the audience even as he straightened up. “Ain’tcha got homes t’ go to?” His manner implied that if anybody didn’t, then he knew a nice hospital that they could spend the next few weeks in as an alternative. With a collective sigh and many wistful glances, they filed out, followed by the bodyguard.
The main door closed with a final click. Barrow didn’t know whether this was a good thing or not. Layla, on the other hand, seemed to know very well. She rolled onto her back and straightened one leg and ankle, admiring the way the light reflected along her thigh, shin, and foot in a single, unbroken bar. She slowly turned her head until she was looking directly at Barrow.
“Hello, Francis,” she said.
Barrow decided it was a bad thing after all. He stepped back from the curtain and opened the rear door of his covert entry. Barely a few inches wide, the door was abruptly slammed shut from the other side, and he heard the lock turn. He rattled the door and heard a laugh. Then he heard the bodyguard say, “Have a nice time, Mr. Barrow,” and walk away, laughing the whole while.
Barrow was one of those people blessed with a mind that works faster under stress. It was working very rapidly now, looking for some sort of handle on Layla’s likely personality, her possible behaviour. In his uniformed days, he’d been involved in a raid on — delightful old-fashioned phrase — a house of ill-repute. The girls — no matter what their age, they were always “girls” — had shown a certain ennui at the raid and sat around on the stairs smoking and chatting amiably with the young and easily embarrassed coppers. Barrow had been struck by their marked lack of obvious sexuality; despite various stages of undress, leather hip boots, and bullwhips, despite the girls in school uniforms, nurse uniforms, and, confusingly, police uniforms, the house still gave the impression of just being a place of work. They rented out their time and their bodies and their theatrical skills, but that was all. He’d got talking to a tall brunette who wore a long peignoir over some article of clothing that creaked threateningly when she moved. She’d asked him for a light, and while they waited for developments in the raid, which seemed to have stalled for some reason, they talked about this and that. Feeling fired by a faint moral indignation, as he was, after all, a policeman and still believed that his job was to act as society’s conscience, he asked her why she did what she did. She had seemed nonplussed. “Why do I do this generally? For the money, of course. Why do I do this specifically?” At this point, she’d opened the gown, and before he averted his eyes, he caught a glimpse of something Byzantine wrought in leather. “Because I don’t have to touch the gentlemen hardly at all. They do it all themselves, on the other side of the room, while I tell them how bad they’ve been. The hours are good, the money is excellent, and, apart from the sheer tedium of it, it’s the best job I’ve ever had.” At that point the chief constable of the district had turned up in his pyjamas with a raincoat thrown over the top and demanded to know why the raid had been planned without him being told. The operation was stepped down in some haste, and they were all sent home. Interestingly, the tall brunette with the creaking lingerie seemed to know the chief constable by his first name, although she also called him “Patricia” at one point.
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