Black City (The Lark Case Files)

by Christian Read

  'Fuck!'

  I can't believe this. Dropped trance. Rookie bullshit. Amateur, pussy bullshit. I ball a fist. Take a breath. Aggression is bullshit at a time like this. Imagine a flame. Burns up my thoughts. Trance.

  Point at the map and my finger finds her. She's protected, of course, but not from me. I can find her.

  I have to find her. Now. Right Goddamn now. The Old Man. The Old Man.

  She said don't go to her, go through her people. But that was before.

  Down the stairs, onto the street. There's a cab and I take it. Moving into mid-town where the money is, poverty raiding away from it so that uptown and downtown fray and get ragged with need.

  What the fuck is she doing in a place like this?

  Bright glass windows. Rich men and women on the street. Stores that sell coffee-makers, stores that sell plaid-patterned things. Restaurants with French maitre-d's. Menswear stores where they'll measure you, and shoe-shops for women that sell self-hate and demand cash for the favour.

  Out of my mind with fear. Is he following me? Staring out every window. Head on a swivel.

  'Problem, buddy?' asks the driver.

  I put a finger to my lips and he catches it in the rearview. He sneers. I pay him when we get there.

  I walk up to the restaurant. I can see her through the glass. Dinner with another couple. How fucking quaint. She's dressed in a fucking blouse. Her boyfriend is there. Who are the others? A fat old man and his too-young wife.

  She looks at me. Sees me. Drinks the white wine at her table. Makes sure I see her seeing.

  Wind is cold on the street. Blows my hair in my eyes, but there's no missing the next.

  She looks away, laughing politely at her boyfriend's joke.

  Right.

  Goddamnit. I'm here to warn you. Is that a lie? I don't even know.

  Stupid to be here. Why won't I learn? I light a cigarette. Walk to the station and take the subway. She thinks that was personal but it was business.

  But then, why didn't you call? Stupid, Lark. Stupid.

  Right. OK. Stop in at a store, and a Burmese man with one eye sells me smokes enough to fill my pockets. Beer, too.

  Drink one. Pretend to be drunker than I am. Slowly scan the street. There she is, under a bad cloaking spell. My friend with the snoop-spell at the meet. Do I confront her now? No. But she's not good at this. I can't see through her cloaking spell without ripping it from her, and I don't want her to know she's made.

  Besides. I get nervous out in the open. Ludo will have told the Old Man about me now. I don't like being out in the open. Move on.

  Get home and Bettina's finished her feast. Scarred but strong. So strong. Dressed in my old Misfits t-shirt that's too narrow across the shoulders and chest for her. She gets up and come to talk to me right away.

  'I'm leaving.'

  I nod.

  'I'm not getting in the Old Man's business.'

  I nod.

  'Neither should you. Your old crew might not have known what they were messing with, but you're in it now.' A third time.

  'I don't want to leave you in it, Lark. But the Old Man. You hear the stories, right?'

  'I heard.'

  We drink a beer. 'It's not me. But, my brother, you know? My sister. My old crew. I'm going. You should go now too.'

  But I can't leave the city. Cursed. If I leave, I'll go mad and be struck blind. They cursed me when I left the Library.

  I don't get up. 'Turn out the lights.' She looks at me long before she goes. Saying goodbye. No hug I wouldn't want. She locks the door behind her as she leaves. She's right to do it. She is. She's right to walk away.

  Still.

  Anyways.

  Smoke and drink in the dark. Flinching at noises in the night.

  The Black Mirror.

  Thirty

  Let me tell you about the Old Man and you will understand why I'm doing what I'm doing.

  Second year on the job, Mully sent me and Jon uptown. A civil engineer we'd been thinking of recruiting has himself a Frankenstein kind of idea. His boyfriend had died and the poor bastard was out of his head with grief. He'd been an unlikely magician, but he'd hooked up with some strange people through his fetish scene. Anyways, he was clever and had some strange ideas, so he rigged up a crazy temple, plugged it into the mains of the city and planned to resurrect the boyfriend.

  You can bring the dead back. It's a big deal, but you can do it. You can even bring them back whole and, if you're lucky, sane. But it's a feat, you know? This guy couldn't do it, no way, no how. He'd make the horror movie mistake and boyfriend would come back sourbrained and possessed. We though the guy was ok, so we weren't there to off or punish him. Just talk it through and maybe scare him some. Mully even gave me a grief counsellor's card if the guy wanted it. Mully thinks like that.

  Uptown warehouse. Cement and steel everywhere. Two in the afternoon and a flat slap hot summer's day, the sky a dirty blue. We wore sunglasses.

  'Over there.'

  Jon pointed at the bolt cut chains. 'Someone here before us.'

  His hand slid in to his suit coat. Switchblade he carried there.

  Walked into the warehouse, letting eyes adjust. The smell hit us first. Think about what's in a human body. Imagined that opened up to the air. That's what a good vivisection smells like.

  Boyfriend was hooked up to a machine made from engine parts, suspended from chains. Dead, naked and the spells that prevented him rotting, hard spells to maintain, coming undone.

  The engineer was splayed out before us. His city uniform was laid out. He'd stripped. Someone taking their time. Gag, choke. Try not to puke. Jon walked over and knelt down beside the gutted man, handkerchief over his face. Stylish fucker kept a handkerchief, and, then, I envied him.

  'Look at him, please Lark.'

  It took a while, I was rattled and still a little sick.

  Jesus.

  The place was warded. If we tried to scry out what happened here, we'd spring traps, information burning down until we caught madness. Spirits ready to pounce, as patient as tigers.

  But there was something else. There was malice here. A wet hatred, hot as wolf breath. Human. Someone loved doing this. I didn't believe in evil then, but I do now.

  This was one of ways it chose to reveal itself to me. And make no mistake, evil is a human trait.

  We called in a couple we knew who clean crime scenes. They'd done this sort of stuff before for us. We kept them in contact with the spirits of their kids. Played them honest. We unhooked the machine the dead man was lock up in, after documentation. It never happened. The engineer? A missing person. No one would be too surprised he took a header from the bridge. He was a man in mourning. No body found.

  Went back to the chapterhouse and took a meeting with Mully. Jon smoked one of his cigarillos and looked cool. He was always tougher than me. Mully drank water and looked out over the garden, admiring his lemon trees.

  'I was afraid something like that might happen. We were too late.'

  Jon glanced up. 'Who did that?'

  Mully sighed. His clipped English was lightly accented and educated. 'There's a group. They serve a man. A man who is obsessed with life and death. They are very dangerous. The old man who runs them... I cannot conceive of a man more dangerous.'

  He closed his eyes. 'If you work cases uptown, and they have elements of this. Life, death, necromancy. Watch out for his work.'

  The cunning man was right. Always was, always is.

  Vampire run-in, two years after that. We were hunting the fucking thing, but someone took it off the street. The same appalling competence in hiding their actions. No one just takes a vampire off the street. It's like using a hand reel and fishing up a thresher. Easter morning after that and a Christian cult were executed at dawn. The neo-thuggees. That was the worst. Got the shakes now, watching the cigarette smoke stutter, remembering that.

  The lucky one was dragged five miles behind a truck. The lucky one. I remember Scarlet cryi
ng that night, asking to be told, begging to help me. No one who could call themselves a man, call themself stand-up, would share what we saw. Found out later the neo-thugs were on some Hitler-Kalki death crusade, looking for a powerful sacrifice. Jesus. Even Jon had a bad time with that one when we found the kids. For me, it was the animals. I don't know why, but the hissing of the blowtorch and the sounds the goat made, still horribly fucking alive, that stays.

  He left someone behind to tell the story. I remember that thing that used to be a woman, fingerless, noseless, eyelidless, whispering to us that they had heard of the Old Man, the Ancient, they called him, thought he'd be a good way to make their rep. Please their God. Locate the biggest motherfucker in town, take him out, your bones are made. She would have lived if the Hollow hadn't covered her nose and mouth as if he was a kind man.

  Sudden eruptions of violence. Always necromancy bullshit. The same unmistakable signature that was no signature at all. The clear warnings, writ with such strength. Even try to find out what happened, it will cost you.

  I talked to the old-timers. Sebastian, who retired from the Library the year I joined, a formal man with the bearing of a Colonel who did my job from the seventies on. He brushed his moustache with a knuckle and told me other stories. Farrago, who was dying at the time, she had a brush-in. Said she thought she saw him, one time. 'Like staring into a heat haze.'

  And that's what I know of the Old Man. Half a legend, but whatever he is, whatever the feral legend conceals, there's something out there. A renegade cult that reaches out, now and again, to close its grip around atrocity. That's him.

  The long shot is, I'm not going tangle with this man. Not for money. Not for revenge. Certainly not for curiosity's sake.

  Even though I'm wondering. What the fuck can the Old Man want firing off a cult war? What's it to him? He's been invisible forever. He's been apart, operating under the radar, seemingly only interested in other magicians when they had what he wanted. So, what's he want?

  No.

  Fuck it.

  I lock my doors and windows. Won't stop the Old Man, of course. Ludo, if he comes back. But I might be gone a while. I move slow. Smoke slow. I think of all the things I've seen this Old Man do and I refuse to put myself on that chopping block. Not even for love.

  He strikes me as the kind of fellow won't accept an apology. Should I grovel? Jesus Christ. Anyone came to me like that, no respect. I'd hate them just for their lack of guts, so imagine what he'd do.

  Can't take a bus, can't hire a car, can't walk across the bridge north, can't catch a boat. Can't leave the island. Stuck here with him. Cursed.

  And that's fucking on Everett. Who arranged them to put the curse on me. Who called me 'an asset'. Scarlet, I hate your boyfriend more than you know.

  But there's one place I can go where I'll be a hell of a lot harder to find.

  Upstairs I take the sheet from the Black Mirror. One of my finest tools. Six foot tall, three foot wide of black, reflective glass. Where do you get a hold of such ancient, exotic pieces of arcana? It's a few dozen expensive bits of bathroom tile.

  But it looks fucking badass.

  Dark glass. Shine. See beyond the mirror. Push my sense past my reflection. Cold. Looking for another city. Anti-city. Negative metropolis. Reality gets thin. I shut down my senses, no longer having need for aught but eyes. The taste falls out my mouth like a liar's dream teeth. Scent slides down the back of my throat. Ears stoppered. Meditate on my mirror-eyes, feeding back. Locked in a contest.

  The mirror changes. Mirror. Window. The sad, scared image of me fades. I see reflection of my sanctum writ as photonegative. The chiaroscuro greys. I'm absent from the mirror.

  The window.

  Step through.

  Into the Black City.

  Thirty-One

  Wick is busy.

  She's got the shape of these letters down now. She's not even sure how she knows this is text, but it is. It's like a poem or a song or something, this scroll. But imagine song lyrics could be haunted? Is that right? Whatever. Something squirms in the meaning and syllables of the scroll. Whatever language this is, it's more than letters. Little pictures. She's experimenting with putting them together in new ways.

  Beautiful pictures and creepy meaning. She's happy with the colours she's chosen. She's working in iridescent shades. It's harder than it looks to make the colours glow, but she's been at this awhile.

  Wick tags a bus stop and the next day, three people throw themselves in front of the crosstown 8:02. She feels so proud when she sees her images. Feels connected to this city, from the southern tip of downtown, where the junkies buy sleep and a safe place to nod and the dogs have learned to take trains. To the eastside docks, where sailors buy women and boys, and the community housing turns into a death-trap for a happy life. To midtown where the rich live, smiling and enjoying their worth and work, to the north, under the great bridge, where the immigrants battle the immigrants and the air smells of strange dinners and a hundred different languages argue.

  She travels all around, loving it, marking it. Her hand grows steadier and the tags more powerful.

  The side of a gym, an old school one where they still coach fighters. That's a good target. One man hangs his trainer, a seventy year old man, from a weight machine, leashing his throat to four hundred kilograms with a jump-rope.

  Then she gets creative. She studies the scroll and a voice instructs her. She walks fifteen blocks downtown and finds an abandoned store. The owner just walked out one day and no one ever rented it. Lots of places like this in this neighbourhood. She looks it up in the city map. Tags it. Checks the map, can't even find the street. She grins. That's a good trick.

  For a while she contemplates more revenge. Nah. Who cares about those little shits any more? She's got a bigger job.

  City streets can dance for her. Reality is a lot softer than she ever thought.

  What should we do?

  She asks the scroll, aware now that it might not have a mind but it has wants.

  Go somewhere ugly and lost.

  She finds a section of the city that used to be a depot. Now it's just wasted ground and dust, chain-link fenced with sad meaningless white markings on the ground. The city pays for watchmen to protect empty air. In the autumn air, she tries something new, a conglomeration of meanings. She finds an old workshop, clambers to the top and waits. Soon, a guard comes, swearing that some fucking graffiti kid got in here.

  He stares it angrily, but it just blows him out like a candle. She feels herself rush in to fill him up. Her and It. True magic, eating his personality.

  She is taken aback by the muscles in his chest, the weight of his gut. She blushes when she realises she can feel his dick, his balls. She's seen them, of course. The guys love to pull them out and chase her with them out and flapping. She's unimpressed by them, suspecting she's gay, which would have been a whole other headache if she is and had to tell her mum. But that doesn't matter now, she supposes.

  Get another, says the voice. It's so easy to work the body, but weird to have two minds, four eyes. Weirder still, she's not confused by it.

  She blathers at the other guard, a woman who bitches about her stupid children, who she thinks are too pale-skinned and unattractive. Wick searches her own guard's mind and realises the woman is thick and slow and stupid. Just come see! The woman complains, belts on her taser and torch, brings a tube of food.

  Then Wick has six eyes to see with. Three heads to think with.

  Until It takes one and talks to her. The stupid woman's face is suddenly still, her attention sure and pinching.

  This is what I can give you. Dominion.

  She feels it slip away. It is still too big. Too diffuse, to operate in a world of humans and atoms and the real. Its three heads are a crack beneath a door when It needs to pass through. But a crack they are.

  Wick contemplates the boys who tried to scare her away from the gangs with cocks and scorn. The girls who only care if you're pretty
and cool, not what you can do. Her mother, sneering at her pictures. Her father, dead and blue with a needle in his arm, her stepdad who thought it was funny to literally kick her arse.

  Who'd fuck with her if she can take their heads away and fill them up with her art? Mark them like she marks her city? Don't these stupid, pointless people just get in the way of her city, her lovely canvas?

  'What do we do?'

  Thirty-Two

  There are other places. Other worlds. They overlap ours and weave onto ours and seep in like venom. Our world can infect theirs too. There's many worlds. Some are towns and some are universes and some just hang out in our head.

  This is the Black City. The shadow of our world, this city, cast against another, higher world. This place is dark, everything made of shade. An ink city, floodlit by a white that cannot be marred. A Shadow-puppet photo-negative city, exaggerated. Buildings curve, angles stretch. Everything is flatter, somehow. There are black cars. Black trains. There are citizens here. Long figures, often in hats, although who knows why.

  And there are predators.

  It is cool, here, not chilly. Noir weather, noir mood. A beaux-art heaven.

  I can stay here for a long time. Let things tide over. They'll move against me soon, with force. But if they can't find me, perhaps the worst will be done. Perhaps. But at least I'll have time.

  My place is downtown, which is how I could afford it. I rent on it, slowly working magic to erase its existence. Former restaurant. Shut down the bottom area, enter up the alley entrance. Live on the floor, sanctum up in storage. Love it. Been there nine years now.

  The Black version of my place is a fortress. All the wards I've put up there over the years reflect here. I like that. It's solid and vast, gridded and riveted. Barbicans and murder holes. Deco citadel.

  But I get bored. I'm on the streets, soothing my eyes with darkness and light. My neighbourhood is poor, gentrification fading away, and the Black City reflects that. Holes in the shadows like membranes stretched too thin. Film, left in the sun.