Bad Little Girls Die Horrible Deaths: And Other Tales of Dark Fantasy

by Connolly, Harry

  “Miss Carly!” he shouted while she was still on the stairs. “Miss Carly, look at this.” He held up the end of the canvas leash to show her the clean cut. “How could this have happened, Miss Carly? With that knife lying on the grass right there? Whose fingerprints would be found on that knife, do you think?”

  It was always Miss Carly with this guy, but no other signs of respect of any kind. Not ever. Carly stepped onto the bark chips and picked up the knife. “Oh, you mean this knife?”

  The black web appeared again, but by now it seemed almost commonplace. Carly could see her neighbor had connections to people inside the house, and also to the east. Some of the strands plunged into the ground—it took her a moment to realize he probably had family back where he came from, India or Bangladesh or whatever. Worst of all, there was a connection between her and him.

  Like the one between her and David, it wasn’t based on warm feelings: her neighbor hated her and Carly didn’t feel much more kindly to him: The guy left his dog outside in the middle of the day in August, for god’s sake. Still, it was a connection, and it had to be destroyed.

  Just as Carly let her thoughts take hold of the cord between them, a man came up the walk. She’d barely gotten a sip before the distraction broke her concentration.

  Still, her neighbor staggered. Then, suddenly, he snatched the knife out of her hand.

  “Hey!” the tall man shouted. Startled, her neighbor retreated wordlessly to his front door, clutching his chest and holding up that metal-stamped knife as though warding off an attack. Asshole.

  Carly glanced at the approaching man and her immediate thought was that he was a cop. No, that couldn’t be right. He was too good-looking, for one thing. If David had been half a McConaughey, this guy was at least a point nine if not a full. In fact, it occurred to her that he looked very like the driver of the Dodge Sprinter, the one she’d seen out in the desert.

  But no, this wasn’t him. That other guy had been a lean, muscular, good-looking, dark-haired white guy with a little knife scar on his cheek, and this one was a lean, muscular, good-looking, dark-haired white guy with a little knife scar on his cheek. Obviously not the same. It’s funny that she could have mixed those up.

  Most importantly, there was no web around him.

  He called her name in a questioning tone. Instead of answering, Carly focussed all her attention on him. Strands of web—black cords that ran through the streets and houses, connecting strangers she couldn’t even see—where everywhere, but the tall man had no connections at all. No cords emanating from his body. No black web. It was real. He was not connected to anyone.

  He pressed his fingertips to the spot below his right collarbone as though an old injury pained him, then he called her name again. This time she answered. “That’s me.”

  “Are you okay? It looked like that guy was about to attack you.”

  “Thank you. I’m okay.”

  “He wasn’t bothering you?”

  “That guy bothers the whole world. He leaves his dog chained up outside no matter what the weather and he throws stones at my window whenever I play music without headphones. It doesn’t even have to be loud! If he can hear it, it’s like a crime in progress.”

  The guy quirked his head a bit, as though Carly was not behaving the way he expected her to. “I know the type. I’m Ray.”

  “I’m… oh right, you already know my name. How do you know my name? I assume it’s not because you’re here to protect me from the creep next door.”

  Ray took a deep breath. “Actually, I’m trying to find out what happened out in the desert with you and David Collins. That was you, wasn’t it?”

  Carly’s first instinct was to brush him off. All she really wanted was to get away. From everything.

  But this guy—this odd guy—had no connections to anything or anyone else in the world. In fact, there was something about him that made her trust him. He smelled like sharpness.

  “God, there’s nothing to tell,” she said. “David slipped some kind of drug into the Camelbak he gave me and I’ve been hallucinating all day. Just now I was thinking that you smelled like sharpness, of all things. Either that or I have a rare case of late-onset-synesthesia, which I don’t. So, I had some hallucinations and the guy played a stupid prank on me. But you know what? That’s not even the worst date I’ve ever been on.”

  It was a lame joke, but he smiled. “The cops found a body out there.”

  “A real one? Not the fake one I saw?”

  “Are you sure it was fake?”

  Considering it was wearing her clothes… “Yes. Absolutely sure. Is that why the cops are calling me and coming to my apartment? Christ. None of this makes any sense! Why me? Why do I have to be caught up in this bullshit?”

  “The whole world is made of bullshit,” Ray said. He looked warily around. “If the cops are looking for you, we should probably not just hang around out front of your building.”

  Interesting. “You’re right. Let’s go.”

  She led him back to the Ramirez house. Part of her knew it was a terrible mistake to go into an abandoned building with a guy she’d just met, but there was no denying that she felt safe with him. They were unconnected. She was sure that, if he meant her some kind of harm, she would see a black cord between them.

  Unless the cords were just hallucinations. Which they weren’t. She knew they weren’t but it made no sense to talk about them as though they were real. Besides, who would believe her?

  They slipped into the house and shut the door. “Damn,” Ray muttered, wiping sudden beads of sweat from his forehead. Carly should have been sweating in the stifling heat, too. Why wasn’t she? What had happened to her today? It was almost as though she’d acquired really stupid superpowers.

  “Can you get me fake ID? I know that seems like a weird question, but the way you talked about cops made me think you have a reason not to like them. You know? Can you get me a fake ID so I can get out of Nevada?”

  “I don’t know anyone in Vegas,” he said.

  “Where then? I can get money. Not a lot but it should be enough. God, I can’t go to jail, okay? I can’t be arrested. Being among all those people… It would destroy me.”

  He looked at her quizzically. “What happened to you? What did you see out in the desert?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “It was just a stupid prank.”

  They heard sirens approaching. Ray moved a little closer, which Carly didn’t mind. He was already what she wanted to be. “Tell me.”

  So she did. It turned out to be surprisingly easy. Desert hike. Weird fake body. Spinning sensation. Coming to without her own clothes. David shitting his undies and running away, abandoning her in the heat. Surviving only through sheer luck.

  “That’s it.” Carly peered through the curtains at the police cars as they screeched to a stop in front of her building. Her stupid neighbor rushed out to talk to them. Double asshole. “I swear that’s everything. There’s no reason for all this drama.”

  From behind her, Ray’s voice was quiet. “The cops think the body they found in the desert is you.”

  She whirled on him. “It’s not me! I’m me. I remember everything about my life! I eat rice with breakfast every day because wheat is supposed to be bad for you. I took care of Shelly’s cat last month when she took a job in Portland. I got fired from my stupid supermarket job because I yelled at a customer who pinched me. As a kid I took ballet lessons and I’m scared of horses and smoking weed makes me nauseous and this is my life! I remember it all. I’m me. Aren’t I?”

  There were tears on Carly’s cheeks, but she wasn’t sure why. She was herself. Still. So why did she feel she had to insist on it so ferociously? So why did it feel as though she was about to go away?

  “Oh my,” came a voice from the darkness of the other room. A tiny silhouette came forward, moving into the light of the window. It was the little red-haired homeless woman from the supermarket, the one who had been so surprised when Carly had b
roken her grip. “Is this sob story going to make things too hard for you?”

  She wasn’t talking to Carly. She was talking to Ray. They knew each other. They were connected, but Carly couldn’t see the black cord.

  Carly focused her attention on them again, trying to see the web that bound them together, but there was nothing.

  Nothing except a pained wince on Ray’s face, and tension in his shoulder. Could it be that her attempt to see the black cords in his body hurt him? Was his web hidden?

  “Not this time.” Ray took something from his pocket, and Carly could suddenly smell it strongly. It was just a piece of laminated paper, but the incredible alluring scent of sharpness came from it. It was like some kind of magic… no, it was like magic designed to cut things apart. Carly could not help feeling a sudden longing for the edge of it. She was a creature made to split apart what had once been joined, and the concentrated power in that tiny sheet of paper called to her. It was as if she was a goldfish whose bowl had been placed within sight of the ocean.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she heard herself say. She understood then that Ray and this other woman had been hunting her, and she almost wanted them to succeed.

  “Of course not,” Ray said, then he threw the laminated paper at her like a playing card. When it touched her, she came apart as easily as a tower made of a child’s building blocks. All of her memories of Carly’s life—and of Bill’s before that, and a dozen more beside—popped like bubbles in a rainstorm. She fell free of the world around her, of all thought, all memory, all sense, all life, until she had nothing left but a peaceful oblivion that belonged to no one but her.

  Author bio

  Child of Fire, Harry Connolly’s debut novel and the first in the Twenty Palaces series, was named to Publishers Weekly’s Best 100 Novels of 2009. The sequel, Game of Cages, was released in 2010 and the third book, Circle of Enemies, came out in 2011, as did a prequel (cleverly) titled Twenty Palaces.

  King Khan, a pulp adventure novel based on the role-playing game Spirit of the Century, was released in the fall of 2013 by game company Evil Hat.

  In the summer of 2014, he will also release his epic fantasy trilogy called The Great Way. In the fall of the same year, he will release the pacifist urban fantasy A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark.

  Harry Connolly lives in Seattle with his beloved wife, his beloved son, and his beloved library system. You can find him online at: http://www.harryjconnolly.com

  Praise for the Twenty Palaces novels:

  “[Child of Fire] is excellent reading and has a lot of things I love in a book: a truly dark and sinister world, delicious tension and suspense, violence so gritty you’ll get something in your eye just reading it, and a gorgeously flawed protagonist. Take this one to the checkout counter. Seriously.” — Jim Butcher

  “Connolly doesn’t shy away from tackling big philosophical issues … amid gory action scenes and plenty of rapid-fire sardonic dialogue.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review), on Game of Cages

  “An edge-of-the-seat read! Ray Lilly is the new high-water mark of paranormal noir.” — Charles Stross