Hale, Ginn

by Wicked Gentleman (lit)

  The sweetness of them both made me sick and slightly jealous. I searched ahead to the details that Harper had mentioned. Roffcale was more skilled at writing about murder than he was at love poetry. He was familiar with the sight of beaten corpses of whores and cum beggars. He described the bodies in the same simple way that he might have given directions to a bakery.

  Her belly was slashed under the ribs and then down to her crotch. That was a mess. All sliced up and the inside pulled out. Lots of pieces of her were missing. Her guts were all spilled out of her. The bastard who did it rooted through her insides like he was looking for hidden treasure. Rose was the third one and I don't want to see it done again. It was ugly work just looking at it. Come back.

  I'm begging now. Please come back.

  Roffcale had described the condition in which Harper and I had found his own body quite well. I felt a slight coldness seep up from the page of Roffcale's letter. It had the sharp sting of premonition. Roffcale had feared he would die this way; perhaps he had even known it. I turned back to the first page of the letter.

  Roffcale had scrawled a few lines in the margin. I had mistaken them for poetic gibberish at first glance. Now I realized that he had written them in the only empty space there was left after the letter had been finished. The writing was worse than usual.

  I had a dream

  that I was the fourth one

  laying there

  with Lily and Rose

  all cut apart

  Come Now.

  It struck me as odd that he would constantly ask her to come to Hells Below. The murders seemed to have been taking place there or close by. Why would he want Joan Talbott to come there for protection when she would have been far safer in her husband's home? If Roffcale knew he could not save his own life, what protection did he think he could offer Joan, I wondered. I frowned and gazed at the lines of old ink.

  I'm begging. Please come back.

  It hardly sounded like a promise of protection. In fact, it seemed like the opposite. Suddenly, a thought came to me. What if Peter Roffcale had not been offering his protection, but begging for hers? I glanced at the date on the letter. It was quite recent, only a day before Joan Talbott had disappeared. I folded the pages back into a bundle and slid them into their rough pulp envelope. The postmark on the envelope showed that it had gone out the next morning. Joan Talbott would have read it only a few hours before she vanished.

  "So?" Harper's voice caught me off guard. I almost jumped, he was so close behind me.

  "So, what?" I replied as coldly as I could. I turned back to him slowly.

  Harper had located his clothes and dressed. Only his cap was missing. I caught his puzzled glance toward my hat rack. I smiled at that. The night before I had stuffed his cap into one of the spider-infested filing cases under my bed.

  Harper's hair tangled around his face like a thorn briar. His eyes were red, rimmed, and bloodshot from the excesses of the evening before. Without a cap shadowing his features, his exhaustion and youth were easy to see. He seemed vulnerable despite the hard black lines of his Inquisitor's coat. That almost made up for him surprising me.

  "What do you think?" he asked.

  "I think that we need to go to Roffcale's residence at Good Commons." I stood up, grabbed my coat and smoked-glass spectacles, then glanced back at Harper. "Are you hungry?"

  "Not right now," he replied.

  "Badly hung-over?" Perhaps I sounded a little too pleased, but Harper didn't seem to care. Perhaps taunting was what he expected of my kind, even after a night spent together.

  "No." Harper pushed his fingers through his wild hair. "I just haven't had much of an appetite lately."

  Of course not. His sister was missing and quite possibly dead. It was no wonder that I had been able to get him so drunk, so easily. He probably hadn't eaten in days.

  "It'll only get worse if you don't eat something." I reluctantly found myself picking up my own black wool cap and tossing it to Harper. "We'll stop in at Mig's. They have decent beef pies there."

  Harper turned the cap over in his hands and then put it on. It fit about as well as his old one had, though this cap was more scuffed. It smelled lightly of my hair. I wondered if Harper noticed.

  "Before we go..." Harper adjusted the cap so that his eyes were once again shadowed.

  "Yes?" I was already at the door with one hand wrapped around the knob.

  "About last night..." Harper shifted slightly. "I think it would be best if we got it clear between the two of us—"

  "I have no intention of telling anyone, if that's what you're worried about." I smiled so that Harper could see my long teeth. "And I don't think you're likely to be bragging about it, so what's left to say?"

  "No, I meant between us.. .We were both pretty drunk. I just wanted you to understand that..." Harper paused, unwilling to go on. Steadily, the pause began to spread into a lingering silence. He seemed unable to make himself speak of the night before. It amused, but didn't surprise me.

  "You wanted to make it clear that it was just a drunk fuck?" I filled in for him at last.

  "I'm not sure those are the words I would have used," Harper replied.

  "It was a good tumble, Captain. But rest assured, I haven't fallen madly in love with you. Just forget about it, and let's get on with our business." I turned the knob experimentally, feeling the latch slide free and then slip back. Discussions after sex always ran the chance of turning ugly. Or worse, sentimental. I pulled the door open just a crack.

  "I just wanted to make sure we were of the same mind," Harper said at last.

  "Well, I've told you what I think. So, are we agreed?" I asked.

  "Yes," Harper said.

  "Then that's all there is to say about it," I said.

  Harper nodded and I opened the door with a sense of relief.

  It was pleasant to find another man as willing to let go as myself. Others had lingered in my bed and concerned themselves with the syringes scattered across my desk. They had clung to me as I descended into ruin. Some had attempted to save me. I had been wept on, slapped, and pulled into a dozen chapels by men who had mistaken me for their true love.

  None of them had understood that my moments of sweetness were pure ophorium. Everything that they seemed to love about me came from the needles they detested. The man they desired was an illusion, an ugly stone made briefly beautiful by a trick of the light. In their own ways, each of them had fallen as deeply in love with my addiction as I had. None of them had known how absurd they were, begging me to leave behind the drug that was the source of all they loved most about me. My kindness, my calm, even my careless ease. Ophorium made me their perfect lover because it erased the truth of what I was.

  When it coursed through my body, I burned free of thought and memory. That radiant absolution was far more consuming than any number of desperate climaxes against another man's sweating flesh.

  I doubted that Harper concerned himself with any of this, but at least he didn't care. We descended into the evening with a comfortable distance between us.

  Chapter Five

  Ghosts

  The sun sat back against the horizon like a bloated foreman refusing to end the day. It poured its yellow heat across the city streets, baking the horse shit and mud into a steaming soup. Flies, dogs, and filthy children zipped through the hot muck while horse carriages and wagons stirred it into a seeping river. It stank in a way that fans and perfume-soaked kerchiefs couldn't begin to disguise. The radiant sunlight only made things seem worse. It illuminated each fetid detail of day around me. The bare ugliness of everything under the sun repulsed me.

  I strode toward the staircase ahead. A massive granite arch rose up over the wide stone steps, which lead down into humid blackness. It was one of the thirteen gateways that lead down into the Prodigal ghetto. The actual gates had been removed, but the engraving in the archway remained: They who were lost shall be found.

  I imagined that the men who wrote those words ha
d higher aspirations than most of us who passed beneath them into the city below.

  Some optimistic bishop had christened the place Hopetown. Anyone who had ever gone there called it Hells Below. That summed it up well enough.

  It might have been beautiful three hundred years ago when the Covenant of Redemption had brought my fallen ancestors up from Damnation. They abandoned their great kingdom of endless darkness in exchange for the promise of Salvation for themselves and their descendants.

  The walls of the staircase were adorned with mosaics of the Great Conversion. Ashmedai, Sariel, Satanel. The pride and glory of hell had come in their robes of fire, in their chariots of beaten gold. Some were adorned with jewels, while others wore the polished bones of the angels that had fallen beneath their blades. They had each bowed down before the Silver Cross and submitted to baptism at the hands of the Inquisition.

  The brilliant glazes were darkened with lamp smoke and factory grease now, but the images were still discernable. Some-where among the glittering host of demons, one of my own ancestors stood. They all looked fierce and beautiful. I found it difficult to imagine that I could have descended from such creatures.

  The blood had certainly thinned.

  The carved temples and catacombs that had once been a city of hope had decayed into dank ghetto. Hundreds of tunnels riddled Hells Below now. City sewer pipes and massive gas lines invaded every space and dripped with condensation. The lattice of temple walls had collapsed. Now, vast caverns gaped wide with tenement houses and ore sluices. The children of hell's greatest lords had been bred down into coal miners.

  Relegated by law to the confines of the capital city, few Prodigals even attempted to leave Hells Below. They stayed down where they at least had each other for company, as well as the comfort of cavernous darkness. Only the worst of our kind lived in the city above. Criminals, exiles, and addicts. I supposed I fit all three descriptions at one time or another.

  "Did you want me to carry this beef pie around for some purpose?" Harper asked.

  "I thought you might want to eat it," I replied, though in truth I had just wanted to get rid of it.

  "One was more than enough." Harper suddenly turned and rushed back up several of the steps. He stopped in front of a woman who had been working her way up the stairs and handed her the pie. Then he strode back down beside me.

  "Well, that takes care of that," he said.

  "Was she a Prodigal?" I glanced back quickly at the woman, but the sun from above burned out most of my vision. All I had noticed as she passed me on the steps had been the numerous lace shawls that hung over her back and arms. She moved slowly, as if she were either extremely old or extremely drunk.

  "Bright yellow eyes and fingernails blacker than yours," Harper commented. "I couldn't see her ears, but I don't doubt they were pointed. Her teeth sure as hell were. She hissed at me too." He seemed amused by this.

  "She probably thought you were handing her poison." I looked meaningfully at the silver eyes of the Inquisition that glinted from either side of Harper's collar.

  "Not every man joins the Inquisition just to burn Prodigals. We uphold the law as well," Harper said as we continued down the stairs. "Sooner or later, some of you are bound to figure that out."

  "I wouldn't bet my bread money on that." I had to glance away to suppress the flare of anger that rushed through me. I knew quite well how the men of the Inquisition dealt with Prodigals. I had been burned once myself, but that was long past and none of Harper's business.

  "We are a surprisingly stubborn bunch," I said.

  "So you are." Harper smiled.

  We stepped down into the heavy darkness of Hells Below. The warm air hung over us in swathes. The thick flavors of so many Prodigals living so close saturated every breath with a taste like a heavy chemical perfume. The scents rolled into each other, smell-ing by turns of violets, sulfur, urine, and fragrant lamps. It wasn't easy to take in. Each breath was like a long drag from a cigarette. I had forgotten how familiar its taste was.

  Harper coughed and had to take several slow breaths before he adjusted to the air.

  As we walked, I noticed the skin on his exposed cheeks began to take on a pink flush as though it was sunburned. His eyes seemed irritated also. Harper just pulled his cap a little lower and continued moving as if it was no trouble to him at all. In fact, he seemed as familiar with the place as he had been with the bars of Brighton.

  He strode through the narrow streets with the natural ease of a man who had been here before. He took alley shortcuts without glancing up to check a street name or number.

  "Do you come here often?" I asked as we trudged down a narrow side road. The gaslight of the streetlamps flickered. Drops of condensed breath, sweat, and steam spattered down on us from the cavern ceiling far above.

  "Have I surprised you?" Harper glanced sidelong at me.

  "No." I didn't like the smugness of his tone. "I just thought that you would be more acquainted with Brighton than Hells Below."

  "I did my first three years of foot patrol down here." Harper stepped onto a walkway of planks. I followed him. Oily liquid lapped up from just below the wooden boards as we walked over them.

  "Did you make many Prodigal friends while you were here?" I asked, knowing that he couldn't have.

  "Of course not." Harper looked back at me. "Did you ask just to hear me say so?"

  "That could very well be the case." I grinned, showing Harper my long white teeth.

  "You really are quite unique, aren't you, Mr. Sykes?" he said.

  Harper's words satisfied me strangely. If he had complimented my wild black hair or my butter-colored eyes, I would have thought he was mocking me and hated him for it. If he had called me twisted or perverse, I would have secretly thought of jabbing him in the eye. But somehow he had known just the right words to give me a burst of warmth. I glanced ahead to the street number on one of the gray shale houses, deliberately ignoring Harper so that he would not know how his words pleased me.

  "That's the one." I pointed to the hulking blue building just ahead of us.

  "So it is," Harper replied.

  The woman who answered the door looked at Harper intently for several moments before she let us in. She was tall, pale, and waxy. There was a transparency to her skin. The lamplight in the house seemed to glow through her. The shadows she cast were faint.

  She walked us down a narrow hall and into a large, window-less waiting room in absolute silence. Her pale yellow dress didn't even rustle as she walked.

  The waiting room seemed like it had been nice a long time ago. The chair I sat in rocked on its uneven legs. A dust of incense ash rose up from the upholstered arms. Harper seated himself on the high-backed settee across from me. Its red upholstery was dappled with faded shades of pink and brown. Dozens of mismatched candles covered the heavy wooden table in the middle of the room. Dried spills of wax drooped over the edge of the tabletop and clung to the carved legs.

  There was a deeply familiar scent in the air. Something like mulled wine. I had smelled it before, a long time ago. I took a deep breath and held the taste in my mouth. It was smoky and warm. Tiny tongues of scent and heat caressed the insides if my mouth. It tasted like demonic conjuring. Uneasiness seeped through my muscles.

  The woman who had shown us in pulled the door closed. She flipped the lock and stared at Harper, her waxen features melting into an expression of rage.

  "So, Captain, have you brought this man in exchange for Roffcale?" She waved her hand at me. "Did you think that's all it would take for you to walk back in here and get out alive?"

  "This is Belimai Sykes." Harper's eyes were once again hidden. His mouth was as expressionless as a gash. "He's a private consultant whom I have hired to investigate the circumstances of Joan's disappearance."

  "And what about Peter, you bastard?" She raised her thin white hands. Her black nails glittered in the lamplight like chips of flint. "You said you'd have him back by morning. You said he'd be fine."r />
  "I'm sorry about Roffcale, Mica." Harper's voice was flat, the same way it had been when he had first hired me. "There's an internal inquiry going on right now. We'll find out what happened and the guilty party will be punished."

  "What? Is that another of your promises, Captain?" she snapped.

  "I can't give you more than my word, Mica." Harper leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He steepled his gloved fingers beneath his mouth. "You know as well as I do that I didn't kill Roffcale."

  "How do I know that?" Mica demanded.

  "I wouldn't be here if I had." Harper let out a tired sigh. "Mica, someone got to Roffcale in prison, and the same person took Joan. I have to find out who it was. I need help to do that."

  "I should tear you to pieces," Mica said.

  "Help us find Roffcale's murderer," Harper said quietly. "Then you can rip me into as many shreds as you like."

  "I just might, Harper." Mica glared at him, then glanced away. "So, what do you want? More of our people to sacrifice for your sister's sake?"

  Harper didn't respond to the accusation. He simply answered her first question as if she hadn't said anything else.

  "I just need to talk to Nick," Harper said.

  "You honestly think he'll do anything for you, after this?" Mica asked.

  "I'm the lesser of two evils. If he doesn't help me, then he ensures that these killings go on."

  "You're a heartless bastard, Harper."

  Harper said nothing. At last Mica turned the lock and opened the door.

  "I'll get him." She left the room.

  "You take me to the nicest places," I whispered to Harper.

  "You're the one who decided we should come here." Harper leaned back into the padding of the settee.

  "You might have mentioned that all the members of Good Commons were going to want to kill you before we walked in."

  "What's life without a few surprises?" Harper flashed his hand up at me. "Don't answer that. It was a rhetorical question."