The Devil's Detective

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

  “Empty,” said the demon in its warping, breathy voice. “Empty. What did he do? What? What?” It was looking at Fool, creeping back from him and shaking its head without taking its eyes from his face.

  “Empty,” the demon repeated, its clawed hands gouging at the earth as it slithered back. Fool pointed his gun at the retreating figure, a pointless gesture; his weapon would not reload for several more seconds yet. He had asked Elderflower whether the delay could be lessened and had been told that a request would be put in. That had been almost a year ago.

  The demon spat, or at least tried to. A mass of bloody phlegm dripped over its teeth as it made a sound like the pneumatic pipes when they sucked away a canister, and then it turned and ran, following the curve of the lakeshore. Fool watched it until it was a distant blur and then, finally, nothing. For a moment he did not move, and then he let his gun drop and slumped to the damp earth, waiting for the shakes of old, unspent adrenaline to make their way through him.

  A hand fell on Fool’s shoulder, startling him, and he twisted, thinking that the thing had come back or that it had companions, but it was only Gordie.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I think so,” Fool replied. He raised his head, feeling something that had to be blood roll down the side of his face. He lifted a hand to it, finding a short tear just below his hairline, another wound that would scar to a keloid ridge and add to the story of his time here, a story written across his skin in the language of Hell.

  Gordie and Fool watched as the corpse was wrapped in heavy sheets that had once been white but were now a weary gray. Mud from Solomon Water’s shore smeared the material as the handlers rolled the body over and black water spilled from the dead man’s ruined mouth. The two attendants, their uniforms the same gray as the sheets, lifted the body and waited for it to drain before carrying it up the slope, threading through the trees and finally disappearing from sight. Fool rubbed at the bandage they had also taped to his head; it itched.

  “Are you sure you won’t go back to the office? Get some rest?” said Gordie, looking worriedly at Fool.

  “No,” said Fool, nodding in the direction of the departing corpse. “I’ll follow it to the House for the Questioning.” The two men began to move up the slope, following the attendants and their cargo. As they came close, Fool saw with surprise that there were people in the trees, that the man who had found the body was still there with some of the others who had formed the scrappy crowd. They were almost hiding, half lost in the shadows of the stunted trunks and twisting, bowed branches. The man, the witness, came forward as they approached, hunched and scuttling.

  “Yes, Mr. West?” said Gordie. Even after all this, thought Fool, he knows, without having to think about it.

  “You scared off that demon. You scared it, you shot it, and it left you alone,” said West, his voice not much more than a whisper. He sounded reverential, had a look in his eyes that Fool couldn’t easily identify. Awe? Respect? Surely not. “I’ve never seen that before. None of us have.” He gestured behind him, taking in the other figures.

  “Well, no,” said Fool. “It wasn’t me, not really. It was—”

  “It was. We all saw,” said West. He stepped closer to Fool and reached out, taking Fool’s hand. Fool saw his own hand in West’s clean white one, saw that there was dried blood on his fingers and mud scurfed under the nails, and was suddenly ashamed. He tried to pull his hand back but West held tight, as though Fool were a lifeline and he were drowning. “You scared it,” he said again, “and it ran. I just wanted to say thank you.” And with that, he let go of Fool and darted back into the trees. Fool looked at Gordie, who shrugged.

  “What was that thing, incidentally? Anything we know?”

  “Not a named one,” said Gordie after a moment’s thought during which Fool could almost see him flicking through the vast store of knowledge he had in that unassuming head. “Just a minor demon, although what it said about things from the lake being his reminds me of something, but I can’t think what. Perhaps I could go back and check?” There was hope in his voice, small and desperate. He hated Questionings, had vomited the first time he saw one and never really got over what Morgan and the other Questioners had to do, and tried every way he could think of short of asking to avoid them.

  “That’s probably sensible,” said Fool. “And check if we’ve had any other deaths here, maybe that we didn’t investigate. I’d hate to miss a pattern, if there is one.”

  “What about the blue flash?”

  Fool had forgotten that, and it was his turn to think. Blue flashes were a sign of the Fallen, so it was said, but could anything else specific generate them or were they another of Hell’s turbulent, maddening occurrences? “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Check that as well. The flashes never amount to anything, not that I remember, but my memory isn’t always perfect. See if there’s anything in the records about them.”

  “Should I speak to Elderflower? Ask him?”

  “No, I’ll do that when the Questioning is over.” Fool rubbed at the bandage again, pressing at the wound through the rough material. The pain that flared briefly across his temple made him think of the battered features of the dead man, and he exhaled. Another corpse, another collection of injuries to note and collate, more questions, more unspooling lines of investigation that would probably lead nowhere. More fuel for the Flame Garden. Fool had little hope that they would solve this murder, just as they failed to solve most of the murders that came through to them, but he would try. This is, after all, Hell, he thought bitterly. What else can I do? We have little hope, but we are doomed to try. Little trying Fool.

  Solomon Water, once a bowl of flame in which sinners burned but now still and black, watched him, impassive and silent.

  3

  Fool, mostly, liked his job but never admitted it out loud or even to himself except in his most private hours. Admitting any kind of pleasure would be to raise his head above the parapet, to invite the notice of Hell and its closest attentions. Better to keep low, to keep hidden, and to keep any pleasure a secret, buttoned-down thing. Like everyone, he had been born to his role, assigned it once his newly fished flesh had stopped shivering, and he thought in his darkest hours that in his work, he might be one of the few humans in Hell who had some sense of purpose. Despite this, though, he did not like Questionings.

  When he arrived at the Questioning House, Fool found Hand and Tidyman in the building’s large foyer. They were arguing over the body, which was still wrapped in the gray tarpaulin but had been placed on a gurney that was too short for it; it sagged over one end, dribbles of muddy water pooling beneath it.

  “He’s mine,” Tidyman was saying as Fool entered, “I’m on the rota next.”

  “You can’t have him,” said Hand. “I’ve a new idea about how we might question this type of flesh and I need him to experiment on.” The men ignored Fool, which suited him well enough; he disliked them both. Hand was fussy, endlessly tinkering with the techniques of the Questioning without ever apparently improving the result, and the less said about the incompetent Tidyman the better. The argument went back and forth for several more minutes, Tidyman querulous and Hand insistent, before Fool finally interrupted.

  “Is Morgan available?”

  The two men turned to look at him, and for a moment neither spoke. Then Tidyman said, “It is not Morgan’s turn. He is not on the rota until after both myself and Mr. Hand.”

  “Nonetheless, I’d like him if he’s available.”

  “He’s not,” said Hand, turning back to Tidyman, dismissing Fool. Tidyman, however, carried on looking at Fool as though studying some particularly interesting dead meat.

  “Why Morgan?” Tidyman asked.

  “Because he’s quick,” said Fool, unable to tell them the truth, that Morgan was the only one he trusted, and seeking an excuse, “and I need answers fast. The Bureaucracy has demanded answers.” Besides, he liked Morgan, and he respected his handling of the fles
h of the dead. Compared with the two men in front of him, Morgan was quick, as well as far more professional. There were only three Questioners in Hell, one House for all the abused and torn meat that Hell created.

  “You cannot demand,” said Hand, turning back, speaking as though he were swatting at an insect with his voice.

  Fool sighed, seeing himself reflected in the gleaming surface of the House’s marble walls, rich with veins that crawled across the image of his face. He was pale and dark-eyed and his hair was shaved close, revealing the contours of his skull and its palimpsest of scars, older than some people in Hell but younger than others. He had been born from Limbo into his flesh in a place where age meant little and how people looked was mostly lost under layers of grime and pain, fished from the ocean outside to wear his skin and act out his role without choice. He was an Information Man, one of only three in Hell, and he ached and he was tired of things being put in his way.

  “Then I ask, not demand, that you’d please get him. Now.”

  “There’s no need,” said a third voice; Morgan, coming down the stairs from his rooms above. “If you’d like me to speak to this poor thing, I will. Tidyman, I know this is out of rota order, but we can rearrange things. Hand, you can have the next one. Agreed?”

  Fool had never worked out whether there was an official hierarchy within the House, but the unofficial one seemed to be that Morgan was first among equals. Tidyman certainly deferred to him without question, and Hand also fell back after a tense moment in which his mouth opened and closed and his brow furrowed, but he ultimately said nothing. Morgan smiled and took hold of the gurney’s handle, starting to wheel it about. “Let us see,” he said, “what he has to say.”

  Morgan moved into the House, leaving the atrium and passing under a sign that simply read FLESH before going along a short corridor that was clean and sterile and lined on either side with closed doors. Fool followed, remaining silent as Morgan opened the last door and pushed the body inside. Glancing back along the corridor, Fool saw a trail of filthy water, as though the dead man had left himself a path to follow so that he could escape the House. Given what was about to happen, Fool wouldn’t have blamed him.

  “He’s a Genevieve,” said Morgan once he had the body unwrapped in the Questioning room. “There’s damage, old damage, to the inner cheeks of the buttocks and scarring around the anus. I’ll bet when we roll him over, I’ll find injuries on and around the penis.” Fool, remembering the bites, nodded in agreement.

  The body was lying facedown on Morgan’s table, and Morgan was pointing as he walked around it. “There are old marks on the shoulders as well from where they hold on as they fuck.” “They” were demons; the dead man had been a prostitute whose clients had been demons. Fool had no idea why prostitutes were called Genevieves, but it was the term everyone used for them and had as long as he remembered. It might make identifying the corpse easier, knowing that, but it also confirmed what he had already been expecting: that this case was going to take him down into the Houska.

  “Will you help me turn him?”

  Without waiting for a response, Morgan took hold of the dead man’s shoulders and lifted. Fool took his legs and, clumsily, they rolled the body over. More water spilled from its mouth, leaving new black trails down its chin. The water pooled under its head as though its shadow were escaping, coagulating. “My word, he took a beating, didn’t he?” said Morgan. Fool didn’t reply.

  Leaning over the corpse, Morgan gently pressed on its chin, opening its mouth. After a few seconds, he said, “There’s terrible damage in here. Apart from the teeth and cheek, the tongue’s been torn partly away. He won’t talk easily, I don’t think. Still, I can try.”

  Fool watched as Morgan bustled around the room, gathering pieces of equipment and chemicals. Some of them he recognized—scalpels, needles and thread, a vial of something that looked like cloudy urine—but most Fool had no idea about. Each Questioning was different, was unique to the corpse, and Morgan rarely chose to explain himself. Now he dripped a tiny bead of the discolored water into the corpse’s mouth and then closed the jaw, pressing the lips together with his fingers. The dead man’s throat bulged as though he were swallowing a bolus of something solid, and then settled back. Morgan let go of the lips and said, “Can you tell us what happened?”

  The room was silent.

  Morgan repeated himself, listened to the silence again, and then leaned over, looking into the mouth. “Interesting,” he said quietly. “I wonder.”

  “Wonder what?” asked Fool.

  Morgan didn’t reply. Instead, he asked the question a third time, this time pressing hard under the corpse’s ribs and forcing air and strings of discolored, foul-smelling water up out of its mouth. It bubbled out past the teeth and lips with a sound like shit slipping into water. There were no recognizable words in the sound.

  “Wonder what?” asked Fool again, seeing the look of confusion on Morgan’s face.

  “I’m not sure. Even with the damage to the tongue and the jaws, we should be getting some kind of response, whether it’s understandable or not, but there’s nothing. It’s unusual, but not insurmountable; we’ll just have to try something different.”

  Taking a piece of equipment that looked like a flattened spoon, Morgan placed it under the dead man’s undamaged eye and then, with a swift, sharp movement, prized the eyeball free. It came out with a sound like a nauseous swallow and lay, quivering, on the spoon as Morgan severed the optic nerve. He took another bead of water from the vial, letting it drip down in the top of the eyeball, and then placed it on top of a glass pane held horizontal in a metal frame. Above the pane was a lamp, which he lit, moving the lens so that the light angled downward, shining through the eye and onto the desk below. Morgan moved the lens several times, then shifted the eye around on the pane before stepping away and saying, “No. Nothing.”

  “No images?” Sometimes the dead held images of the last thing they had seen in their eyes, frozen into the jelly, able to be seen when projected by the lamp.

  “No, not even something that makes no sense, which I might expect. Just light.” Morgan sounded intrigued now, his voice distracted, distant. He didn’t look at Fool as he spoke. Removing the eye, he placed it on a sheet of heavy, absorbent paper and slit along its length, letting the thick mass of its insides spill out. When it had soaked into the paper, he held the sheet up in front of the light. The damp areas glistened.

  “Recognize anything there?” he asked Fool.

  “No.”

  “Me neither. This is very unusual. Someone really didn’t want this poor fellow talking, did they?”

  “How could they stop him?” asked Fool. In all the previous Questionings he had attended, no corpse had ever been completely silent. Many were garrulous in death, the words coming from their mouths in long, breathless streams, their eyes full of images or descriptions or names.

  “I’m not sure. There are ways, one in particular. I’ll check in a moment. First, though, there are other things I’d like to try.”

  None of them worked; the dead man’s hands refused to write, he would not smile or frown in response to even the most elementary yes-or-no questions, and his fingers would not tap out answers. Finally, Morgan took a small bottle of clear water and held it gingerly in front of him, removing the stopper and dripping a small trickle of water onto the corpse’s forehead. It rolled down its temple before dripping off and spotting onto the table under him, where it steamed. Then he took a small white disk from a drawer and smeared it with something that smelled, to Fool, like excrement. This Morgan inserted up the corpse’s rectum before standing back and asking, again, a question. The dead man did not move and the question remained unanswered.

  “It’s like his whole mind has been taken away,” said Morgan eventually. “There are no answers because he hasn’t anything left with which to comprehend the questions. It’s not his brain, as that’s essentially unmarked, undamaged, but it’s what drives the brain that’s mi
ssing.”

  “Drives the brain?”

  “Yes. Tell me about how he was found. What do you know?”

  Fool told Morgan everything that West had told him, and then about the nameless demon by Solomon Water.

  “Ah,” said Morgan slowly after Fool had finished. “I understand. I thought perhaps I did, but I wasn’t sure. It’s a very rare thing, what’s been done to this man. I’ve certainly never seen it before, only read about it in some of the older books. Well, if we can’t ask the intellect, then we must ask the body.”

  “What’s been done to him? Rare how?” asked Fool, but Morgan again ignored him. Instead, he clamped poles to the table by the dead man’s shoulders and hips, each pole topped by a short chain at the end of which hung a small hook. Then he quickly slashed a cross into the flesh of his chest and belly, the two lines crossing each other just below the base of the sternum.

  “This is an older method of Questioning. It’s very basic, and very crude, but it may work and the answers it gives are usually accurate. You have four questions, Fool. Keep them simple and use them wisely.”

  Fool thought for a minute. The man was likely a Genevieve, Morgan had said, so his first query was simply “Were you killed by a client?”

  Morgan took one of the flaps of quartered flesh and pulled it, stretching it away from the corpse and up to the hook, pushing it onto its sharp tip. The chain wobbled and tautened before settling to stillness, the hook punching through the skin easily. The flesh twisted but didn’t tear, remained held up away from the body.