Take No Prisoners

by John Grant

  Or so I'd believed before now. Now I saw the potential flaw in my judgement of such matters: the fact that, not being human myself, I was ignorant of the human experience. For a few seconds I felt guilt about those I'd murdered in my sport – but then I thrust the notion away. There was enough of human soulstuff in me to know that my earlier instinct had been the correct one. The Dross, being chaotic, has not attained such cruelties as The World knew – just their enactments, for the human beings peopling the Dross are only wraiths, their sensations of pain and pleasure merely paper thin. Maybe it will change later, but now, while the Dross is still young, you can set a person ablaze and they feel no more agony than if it were a picture of them you'd lit. The passions of humans are dilute. How can there be cruelty when the victim suffers so little? To be sure, the folk in my torture chambers scream lustily – but that is because they adore the drama of it, of occupying center stage. Even their deaths are of little genuine consequence to them, for they're only a fraction alive.

  "Those are old sufferings your cards recollect," I said. "Old crimes. The deeds that took place in The World are less than dreams to us here in the Dross."

  She smiled skeptically. "That thought will make your next card easier for you," she said, flicking it towards me.

  The sounds of blood and excrement and the stench of screaming fill the world. The men came to our village this morning, arriving as if from the sky, they were so sudden. They dragged us all – save the women and girl-children, for whom worse awaited – around the hill to the forest of stakes they'd secretly erected. I'm one of the last to be raised until the sharp wooden point can be slotted into my rectum ...

  "No!" I bellowed yet again, standing up, throwing the table and all it bore clean through the window. Beyond anguish now, I was a flame of rage. I reached out a hand to throttle my adversary.

  She was no longer before me. Instead, she was over by the bar, straightening the position of the grinning oaf there, as calm as if she were attending to housework.

  "You'll not harm me," she said over her shoulder, "so don't waste your effort."

  I let out a truly bestial cry.

  "A poor loser," she observed. "How human."

  Had I had a sharpened stake to hand ...

  "You've lost the game. It might have been the other way around."

  I merely snarled at her. She placed the mindless figure to her satisfaction. The eyeshade was gone, as was the copper cap of hair – her head was egg-bald. Her eyes were dancing with mirth, as if pain were jest.

  "And now it's time to settle up the winnings," she added, materializing a stool and perching on it. "You've lost because even a moderate amount of pain was too much for you to tolerate. I had hoped it would be otherwise."

  "What winnings?" I growled. "What losses?"

  "Your role in the Dross, of course – did I not intimate as much?"

  I shook my head, aware as ever of its clumsiness.

  "Come, calm yourself and sit down beside me."

  I shook my head again. "Tell me," I commanded.

  She shrugged: clearly she was not much concerned by my roughness. "Any universe must have its Principles of Good and Evil," she said. "That's more than theology: it's a truth. If they're not there, they'll in due course be manufactured: they're required. It's as valid for the Dross as for anywhere else, which is why I came here, to seek out two individuals who could adopt those posts. But all I found" – and here she nodded her head forlornly – "was yourself, Piggy. The humans have been leached by the loss of The World, and the animals likewise. Only you, neither human nor animal, are still altogether here. You may not wish it, but you're the Dross's sole spirit, its genius. Sole. Are you sure you won't sit down beside me? We're friends again now, are we not?"

  I glowered.

  "Have it your own way." She intertwined her fingers and stretched her arms, looking at the backs of her knuckles. "It had been my desire that you might be divisible, so possibly giving to the Dross its twin but opposed Principles – yet you are far better integrated than your origin would suggest. And then I thought that at least you might be fitted to become the Dross's Soul of Good; the prospect of the Dross stumbling along for a while without an Evil Principle to hate dismayed me less than it should have, I confess. But, alas, you showed in our card game that you're unqualified for the task."

  "I told you before," I said, "I'm just a humble beast. You cannot expect too much of me."

  "Perhaps you are far more than I expected," she said quietly, and for once her catly eyes looked soft. "It depends on how you look at it. Whatever the case" – with a dismissive wave of a small hand – "it's the inescapable truth that you're incapable of carrying the burden of human pain that a Principle of Good must bear. Even a small fraction of it came closer to destroying you than you yet realize."

  "I am glad I cannot stomach your twisted nightmares," I said.

  "In a way, I'm glad, too – glad for you." Her eyes were saying otherwise. Softly she added: "But they weren't dreams."

  "Then what of me?"

  Another sorrowful smile. "It's obvious, surely? You must become the Dross's Principle of Evil, must you not?"

  "But ..." My crudely molded hands were all that I could see. The sausage fingers flexed of their own accord. I had accepted my humbleness, my insignificance in the scheme of things, my baseness – yet until this moment I had never thought of myself as being particularly evil. Nor particularly good, come to that – neither. Now I saw myself as not even granted the virtue of insignificance: I was vile.

  "You're not vile," she said, plucking the word from my thoughts. "Do not see yourself as so. And neither are you evil – rather, you're too virtuous, Piggy. A less meritable individual than yourself might have borne the burden of pain with insouciance, might have laughed their way through my simple trial. A Soul of Good must either be infinitely compassionate or completely heartless. You showed yourself to lack the degree of charity to have pity on the tormentors the cards brought to you; yet you were not heartless enough to contemplate dispassionately the sufferings of their victims. In all the universes, I know of no Principle of Good who has come to the post through compassion: all have hearts of stone, and would not survive otherwise. Piggy, stop weeping like this: is it not a fine thing to be, to be more virtuous than a god?"

  It didn't seem to me so: was I not less, even, than a human?

  "Come here." She said; this time it was no request. "Stop weeping." Likewise. "Sit down."

  At last I looked up from my hands. Quite predictably – I say that with hindsight, of course – we were in a great dining-room, like one of those that had become so popular in the later days before The World deserted us, and even a little after, until they were dissolved by Drosshood. No, it was huger by far than any of those could have been: the furthest wall ahead of me was a hazy patch, almost too small to be seen; small clouds lurked in the moldings of the ceiling, far above. Waiters with horns and arrow-head tails and grins like that of the tavern's oaf sped up and down the length of the hall's single table, at whose head sat I. At the very most remote end from me, yet seemingly no more than touching distance away, sat the beautiful entity.

  She smiled and raised an empty glass, then drank the air from it. At her signal, the other diners down the sides of the table straggled to their feet – white bibs and black lapels and stupid little ties and elaborated bodices and oh-what-a-plunging-cleavage-that-tart-has-dears and all – and raised glasses charged with something more spiritous than mere air. Red, but not like blood.

  They were cheering. Half a million cheers or more. They were gulping their liquor back. Half a million of them – it was almost as deafening as the cheering had been.

  "Drink, Piggy!" called the being.

  "Yes – drink!" came the bawl from omnes. "Drink! Hail to you, our Gloried Soul of Evil!" All that sort of human guff.

  "I would drink up if I were you, dear Piggy," whispered the being in my ear, even though she was kilometers distant. "You'll find it'll hel
p. These formal affairs are such a bore. And, as an immortal – oh, did I forget to mention that? – you have an eternity of them facing you."

  Like my tankard in the tavern, so my glass here.

  And some time later I awoke and found me there on a cold hill side.

  Hung over.

  ~

  Who knows who she – who it – was? That she was not of the Dross was obvious, and much that she said persuaded me she was not of The World, either. And who gave her the permission to visit this curse upon me? Or was she herself the highest authority?

  Not here. Not any longer. There is but one Highest Authority in the Dross, is there not? Even I dare not deny myself in that.

  Yet ... yet, while I have lost that ridiculous humbleness I once felt towards humans – or, more precisely, towards the human soul and all the marvels I attributed to it – still I do not know but that I wouldn't go down on my knees before her, if that were what she desired me to do. Like I once might have before my maker, as his dutiful, adoring, infinitely inferior beast.

  Despite the fact that, as the Dross's appointed Soul of Evil, I'm no longer a beast.

  I am Beast.

  I've cheated the system, of course, as I think I was intended to do. The Dross could do worse than having me – rather than anyone else – as its Principle of Evil and so, however I'm tempted to find a final relief from the loneliness and the pain, I take very great care of my life. To judge by the mess that the humans are making of the simple task of creating a Principle of Good for themselves, they'd make a real shambles of replacing me as their Soul of Evil – a loud ugh! to the thought! I've walled myself away here in Starveling, which I've transformed through brutal measures into a remote and impregnable castle, and the guards who shield me die in imaginative torment should I indicate to their officers even the vaguest, most unjustified scintilla of suspicion that one of them might not have my personal welfare as his highest priority. After all, while their pain may not be fully pain, as mine is, I know that they do not like to die.

  Imagine how much worse it might be if I were to be replaced by someone without compassion. Cruel enough for a world that its Principle of Good should be like that.

  There are compensations to this miserable existence. I have all that I could ever want by way of fleshly pleasures, and I find some joy in the exercise of my tyranny. If only rarely, sometimes I can distinguish that transcendent music which the more artistically minded of the dying make a part of their screams. And I gain some satisfaction from knowing that, in a backhanded fashion, I am indeed serving the Cause of Good.

  But all of these are trivial rewards, save one, already adverted to and here easily enough delineated.

  There was a time when I was ashamed of myself – ashamed of being Beast.

  I feel nothing of that now.

  By contrast, I am proud to be Beast. Indeed, let me shout it so that the rafters of Starveling ring: I am proud to be Beast!

  (Starveling: a castle built of winds and rains ...)

  I am glorious in my own wildness, in my savagery, in my brutality, in the power of my self.

  I am a fitting pivot around which all of this battered world, the Dross, the scraps that The World sniffingly discarded as too poor and inconsequential for its infernally fastidious consideration ... I am the pivot around which all of the Dross must perforce turn.

  I am not only the Soul of Evil, I am this world's soul.

  I am the driving force that keeps the Dross alive.

  I am Beast.

  Let me bellow it again, in a voice so drink-thicked and rejoicedly guttural that it is impossible for anyone save myself to understand my power-hallowed words:

  I

  A M

  B E A S T !

  ~

  But ...

  I am unhappy as the echoes fade.

  Drunk, I guess.

  Time for bed.

  For a moment the empty bottle is invisible, and then I hear it shatter on the flagstones below.

  A Case of Four Fingers

  They'd engraved the tombstone of Pretty Polly McTavish with the parrot's tragic last words: "Hello Sailaaargh."

  It was a touching gesture, and I don't think there was anyone among the small huddle of mourners at the pet cemetery who didn't have a tear in their eye as the Reverend Jeremy Harcourt-Fruitcake plummily read out the last rites. Pretty Polly had sacrificed her life so that Miss Grimthorpe, the so-called Pantry Detective, could solve her forty-seventh and best-selling case to date, the grisly Who Slew the Cockatoos?

  The grim service over, I headed off alone down Curling Lane to my home and workplace at the edge of the village.

  Birds sang.

  Bees buzzed.

  Trees rustled.

  Clouds did whatever it is that clouds do.

  It was Indian Summer, always a busy time in the village.

  Always a busy time for me.

  Today I was going to have to process Pretty Polly McTavish and, if memory served aright, half a dozen other carcasses. Human ones.

  But first I needed a cup of tea.

  Strong tea.

  Later I sat on my porch, savoring the Broken Orange Pekoe, looking at the sky, wondering if it was time yet for me to start searching, just out of interest you understand, through the Sits Vac columns in the newspaper. Ten years – ten years I'd been doing this job, and that's a long time out of anyone's life. Especially since, if you looked at it another way, I'd been doing the job for something like a century. And despite the fact that even a long time doesn't take much of a chunk out of eternity.

  But the century felt like an eternity in itself, is what I'm getting at.

  The village always looked good in Indian Summer, which lasts about half the year in these parts. Christmas takes up a good part of the rest. Halloween lasts a week and a half.

  Maybe I'd better explain.

  Maybe I'd better not.

  Not yet.

  I drained the last of the tea and flicked the cup so that the damp leaves at the bottom flew to land among the oleanders. God alone knows how they flourish so well, all year round, since I hate gardening. It's the digging. Makes me feel creepy.

  Superstitious.

  But that's the way I am.

  The cup washed and put away in the cupboard, I sauntered from the house across to my workshed. It was tatty, corrugated-iron-roofed, wooden-walled, brown and greasy, just like it had been yesterday. Along one side of it were the heavy green plastic hoppers where the remains of the deceased were regularly dumped by the Authorities. One hopper per corpse. In Indian Summer it can get so busy that I need a dozen hoppers, but today, according to my accounts book – more accurate than my memory – there were only eight corpses to deal with. Still quite a number, but not as bad as it sometimes is.

  Hopper number one. Accounts book and pencil out of pocket. Tick off Pretty Polly McTavish in the RECEIVED column. The brute had dispatched her with a baseball bat, so she wasn't a pretty sight. She'd require stitching before she was ready to be seen out and about again.

  Hopper number two. The first body of a set of five, I knew. This one and the other four had been exotic dancers, all stripped naked except for skimpy red underwear, all slashed and mutilated in inventive ways. Dave Knuckle had been in town for the Case of the Parboiled Detective, soon to be published as Smack My Butt, Babe. Which of the mangled bimbos had been actual victims and which were merely his discarded girlfriends was always a tough one. Best left to the Authorities.

  Hopper number seven. Tick went the pencil. The by-product of an ongoing case for Sir John. An Ashmolean subcurator smothered by having a rolled-up paperback copy of Piers Plowman rammed down his throat. The acne scars were as livid as vintage port.

  Hopper number eight.

  Empty.

  I coughed into it to listen to the little echoes confirm the evidence of my eyes. I stared at my accounts book in histrionic disbelief – these things should be done properly or not at all. In my own neat, crabbed writing the
entry was there, just as I'd written it down the night before when the Clerk of the Authorities had dictated it to me over the telephone.

  "One corpse, male, with severed hand. Identity: Gerald G. Dukes, a.k.a. The Even Mightier Spongini. Profession: Stage magician. Age: 28."

  There followed a few further personal attributes. The Clerk would have been bound to mention it had invisibility been one of them.

  No, the hopper was definitely empty.

  There'd never been an error before – not in the whole long ten-years-that-was-really-a-century-that-felt-like-eternity. Never could be.

  But I ran to the house and the telephone to call the Clerk anyway.

  Just in case.

  ~

  And now maybe I better had explain. About the village of Cadaver-in-the-Offing, and about the way things are around here, and perhaps a bit about myself as well – even though I don't like the, you know, limelight.

  Nestled among the rolling hills of Barsetshire, one of the lesser known Home Counties, Cadaver-in-the-Offing is a sleepy little place – two shops and a pub and a scattering of houses, not to mention the church and the vicarage – but behind this veneer of tranquillity lurk seething passions and unfettered violence. More passions, more violence than in the rest of the country put together.

  Because Cadaver-in-the-Offing is the place where detective stories happen.

  The village has a population of about two hundred, if you look at it one way, and about two hundred million, if you look at it another. There have to be enough people so that the lesser characters in detective stories – the victims, the witnesses, the murderers, the romantic leads, the local color – are always different. But economies can be made, and usually are, by recycling those characters.

  Endlessly.

  Who can honestly recall the countless lusty young men who've accompanied Dr. Gideon Fell or Sir Henry Merrivale, and who've waltzed off with the pretty, young but feistily independent ingenue at the end of the case? Who can recall those ingenues either, come to that? The victims in Perry Mason's cases form a long train of utter anonymity, as do the various gorgeously pneumatic soubrettes who clutter up the proceedings. Who didn't commit the murder or solve the case in The Nine Tailors or The Sign of Four or Inspector Queen's Own Case or The Mysterious Affair at Styles or ...