There was another of those pauses during which Fool felt his world teetering. The demons glanced looks off each other, calculating, the humans backing away, trying to undo the notice they had brought upon themselves, and there were Fool and Summer, pivots around which everything seemed to move. Then, with a sensation like the slipping of some great weight, things untangled slightly. Claws retracted, the demons pulling themselves back a little.
“Let them in. Give them what they need.” A voice from above, from another of the little demons on the roof. Fool looked up at it; it was peering down at him and Summer with a strange expression in its baleful eyes. Hate? Fear? No, something else, something Fool had never seen before in a demon’s eyes.
Uncertainty. The situation was unclear to it, and it didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t in charge, and it didn’t like it. Things were shifting, new events occurring, events beyond its control, beyond all their control, and Fool and Summer and everyone else appeared to be caught up in them and had little choice but to move along with them and try not to get caught in the currents as they eddied and swirled. Nodding at the demon, Fool stepped across the porch and, with Summer at his side, entered the building.
Inside the boardinghouse, it smelled. It wasn’t a single scent so much as a mess of different odors, of fresh sweat and old sweat and cheap soap and burned hair and meat and food and piss and shit and other, less easily identifiable, things. The hallway past the entrance was narrow and cramped and without much light, the walls uneven and rough, hemming them in. Fool walked slowly along, listening to the sounds of the house around them. There were footsteps from somewhere ahead and above them, quiet voices, something being dragged slowly.
“What is it you want to know?” asked someone. A shadow moved at the end of the hallway, huge and indistinct, and Fool’s hand tightened around his gun. The shadow came toward them, collapsing in on itself, solidifying into a grossly fat human form. “Carter,” he said, holding out a hand that felt, when Fool reached out and shook it, like the cold and damp flesh of the body they had pulled from the river. The man stepped back to where the hallway opened out into a larger room, into the light, and Fool saw that he was very pale, almost white, and that his skin was greasy with moisture. “Carter,” the man said again, as if that explained everything.
“Who are you? What do you do here?” asked Fool.
“I run the house,” Carter replied. “For the Bar-Igura. I make sure the boys are clean and smart and ready for their work. I bed them down when they come back and turn them out in good time for the next work. I stitch them if they need it.”
“You’re paid for this?” asked Summer. “For preparing the flesh of other men for sale to demons?”
“Given board,” said Carter. “I do my job, I keep quiet, and I stay out of the way. I’m safe, the Bar-Igura keep me safe. I work for them. The flesh gets prepared for sale anyway, so best I do it. Best I get the benefits.” Fool could feel Summer trembling beside him, felt his own muscles tense. Carter wasn’t unusual, of course; they all worked for the demons in one sense or another, he and Summer included, but this was a job Fool had never considered. The man took his own kind and prepared them for possession by the demonkind that frequented the Houska, prepared them for penetration and burning and abuse. Fool wondered whether he sold them himself or left that to the demons, whether he had ever been sold or bought. Questions, he thought, I have questions. I’m investigating.
“You know all the boys? Who stay here?”
“My job to know.”
“You know if they all come back? After the night, I mean? When they finish work?”
“My job to know,” repeated Carter.
“Do all the boys go to the Houska?”
“All boys leave the house, the Bar-Igura tell them where to go. Places in the Houska, yes, sometimes other places.”
“Other places? Are there private sales? Outside the Houska?”
“Ask the Bar-Igura,” said Carter, glancing up to the ceiling. The demons on the roof, Fool thought. Gordie would have known, of course, would have recognized them and their name from all the books he read between shifts, would have known about them before they got here. He’d have known about Carter, or people like Carter, wouldn’t have been surprised by him or disgusted by him. Was there a Carter in every boardinghouse? In every boardinghouse in each of the Sisters? Hundreds of them? Thousands? How had Fool not known? What else didn’t he know? How much?
“There’s a boy missing,” said Summer, not a question but a statement of fact.
“Always boys missing,” said Carter. “They don’t come back after the night, too tired and too used up. Every day, new ones and lost ones.”
“No,” said Fool, remembering the Man’s information. “This is something unusual, a different thing.”
“What is usual? Boys vanish, boys come back. Usual,” said Carter and then, before Fool could stop her, Summer stepped forward and slapped him. The slap sounded heavy, and it was only when Carter dropped to his knees with blood pouring from a ragged tear in his forehead that Fool realized she had not slapped him but hit him with the butt of her gun. She knelt beside the man, jamming the barrel of her weapon into the side of his head and twisting it so that his skin bunched around its muzzle.
“There is a missing boy,” she said, and she was crying as she spoke, “missing this week, not just after being in the Houska but in some other way. He might look like this.” She dropped one of the few remaining sketches of the first victim onto the floor in front of Carter and used her gun to force his head toward it.
“Information Men are the only people in Hell to carry guns, you piece of shit. I’ve never shot a human with my gun, but I will if you don’t tell us what we need to know. Look at him, you fat turd,” she said. “Look! Who is he?” Blood from Carter’s head spattered down onto the paper, mingling with the tears that fell from Summer’s eyes to form a pale pink wash across the sheet.
“Summer,” said Fool.
“No!” she said, her tears falling harder. “He knows! He knows, and he’ll tell us.”
“Summer, he belongs to them!” Fool said. “If you damage him, they will take payment from you. From us. I’m not sure what’s happening here, but whatever protection we have, it’s fragile. Summer, please.” In his mind, he saw Rhakshasas, his entrails tightening and loosening in anticipation.
Slowly, Summer rose from her knees. Tears were flowing freely down her face and she was making a low keening, not quite a howl, not quite words. “Keep her away from me,” said Carter, his voice thick and slurred.
“Tell us,” said Fool, and then, as inspiration struck, “or I shall investigate the rest of the house by myself and leave you with her to talk.”
“No, please,” said Carter, “Diamond. It’s Diamond. He came back and then went out. Bad boy, I told him, stay to sleep and get ready but he said no and went.”
“When?”
“Two nights ago? Three? I cannot remember. So much always the same it is hard to remember, yes?”
“Did he have a room?”
At this, Carter raised his head. A flap of skin curled redly down from his scalp and his eyes were white within the blood running down his face. “He shared, had space in room three. They all share.”
“Show us.”
“There are boys sleeping in it.”
“Show us,” said Summer. She was no longer crying. “Show us Diamond’s space.”
Room three didn’t have a door, only a curtain hanging down from a piece of rope strung out along the top of the doorway. From beyond the curtain Fool heard snoring, flatulence, someone crying softly. When Carter pulled back the curtain, a ragged sheet threadbare with age, Fool didn’t at first understand what he was seeing. The room appeared full of distorted shadows, blotches that twisted weirdly around, not the sleeping figures he had expected.
“Wake!” shouted Carter, his voice still slurred. He reached into the room and pulled at something and the shapes collapsed in rapid succe
ssion. Wires, Fool realized; they had been sleeping standing up, leaning against wires crisscrossing the room at chest height. Carter had released the wire and now the sleepers were awake, sprawled across the floor, swearing and groaning and struggling to stand. “Is it time? Please, no, please,” someone called.
“Visitor!” shouted Carter and then said to Fool, “Diamond’s space on other side of room. Shelf with clothes. Help yourself.”
It wasn’t much, Fool found; two shirts, both brightly colored but fading, and a spare pair of pants. As he looked, the room’s inhabitants gathered around him.
“That’s Diamond’s,” said one of them. Another, looking at Summer, said, “Who are you?” There was no aggression in the voice, only a tired curiosity.
“I’m—” began Fool but someone interrupted him.
“It’s Thomas Fool,” they said. “He’s the human the demons are scared of.”
“No, that’s not true,” said Fool.
“They are,” said the same voice. Another called agreement and then everyone was talking at once, calling and asking and demanding.
“Please,” Fool called, and then shouted, “Please, let me speak.
“I’m Thomas Fool, yes, but I’m not special, demons aren’t frightened of me. I’m just trying to find out what happened to Diamond and another man, another boy like you. They were killed, killed horribly, and I need to know if you can help. Why did Diamond leave the house the other day, the day before he died? Where did he go? Do any of you know?”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Eventually someone said, “Why are you bothered?”
Because his soul was torn out of his flesh, because I’m learning to investigate, because I want to know. Because my friend died trying to find out. Because I’m a Fool, a little searching Fool, and the Man of Plants and Flowers wants entertaining and Hell wants me to provide answers for questions I don’t really know how to ask. Because. Because. Aloud, he said, “Because it’s my job. It’s our job,” indicating Summer, “and we’re trying to do it as best we can.”
“Did you shoot a demon?” A different voice.
“Yes, but that’s not why you should talk to me.”
“Did you kill it?”
“Does it matter?”
“Did you kill it?”
“Yes.”
“More than one?”
“Yes.”
Another silence, this one more speculative. Fool could feel their interest in him, feel their need for him, or for something he meant to them, these boys. He wanted to point to Summer and say, She did it, too, she killed one of the things on your roof, but didn’t.
“He was meeting a client,” said someone in the room, another new voice. “He said they’d spoken to him as he waited for a train.”
“Did he say who?”
“No. He said it wasn’t a usual client.”
“He said it wasn’t a normal client,” someone else said, clarifying. “That it was someone new.”
“He didn’t tell you anything else?”
“No. We don’t talk.” The interest in him was waning; Fool could feel it slipping away. Some of the boys had started to move toward the shelves, pulling shirts and pants off them and starting to dress. Killing demons was something to hear about; a dead Genevieve wasn’t. Their dismissal hurt, and they told him nothing else.
Later, during their journey back, Fool slumped in his seat on the train and thought. What had he learned? Really? That the first body had been a person called Diamond, that he had been, what? Solicited? Yes, solicited after finishing in the Houska, not in the Houska itself but away from it, in the darkness before the ride back to his boardinghouse. Could they assume the second victim had been gathered the same way? That Diamond was killed and his soul released before being dumped in Solomon Water like so much garbage, the demon then moving on to the second victim, that it made contact with them, lured them to one of Hell’s lonely places, and then took them without witness or obstacle? He supposed so; without anything to tell him otherwise, he would have to assume yes and move forward with that assumption. So, a demon prowling the edges of the Houska, unseen unless it made itself known, picking Genevieves, taking them away, and then tearing their souls from the flesh? Yes, yes, that made sense, it had a logic that Fool thought was sound. And if that was the logic of it, then could they step ahead of it, predict it? Yes, again yes, they could try to be where the demon was before it got there, could try to prevent it happening again. But how? There were no other Information Men to help, and the space around the Houska was huge, and how would he and Summer know where to go, to wait? There’s so much I should have asked, he thought as he fell asleep to the rattle of the train’s heavy wheels. Where did Diamond catch the train? Where in the Houska did he work? Where was he that night? Where was he when the demon took him? Where?
A new blue ribbon was waiting for them when they got back to the office.
13
Another of Hell’s houses, this one huge and abandoned.
Most of its facade had warped, slowly losing its battle against Hell’s heat and storms. Wood, stained black by exposure to the sun, had buckled away, revealing sticky shadows and struts beneath like bent and rotting ribs. Here and there, planking had come loose and was swinging, banging against its neighbors as though the building were holding down its fingers and tapping out its own slowing rhythms. There were larger holes in the roof, beams crossing the spaces. Chalkis, littler ones, had nested in some of the gaps, and their shit was the building’s only decoration, streaks of white and green and brown slathered down the tiles and gathered into solid lumps in the guttering.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” replied Fool, not looking around. “A farm ranch, maybe, abandoned when the land died.” Around them the low, wiry bushes that dotted the scrubland bobbed in the breeze. Behind Fool, Adam made an interested noise. The note had been in the tube, along with the details of the death. The delegation wishes to see an investigation. Pick them up and show them, Thomas. He wanted to argue with Elderflower, to ask how he could show them an investigation when he didn’t know how to do one himself, not really, when he was making it up as he went along. He hadn’t, of course, had simply obeyed, and now here they were.
“It is inside?” asked Balthazar.
“He is inside,” said Adam. “He is inside, Balthazar, or she. It is a human being’s end we have come to see, not mere meat or goods.”
“Yes,” said Balthazar, but he did not sound contrite or convinced.
Rusting machinery lay in the house’s front garden, collapsing slowly into the earth and threading with weeds and dirt like the skeletons of long-dead beasts. Fool led the delegation along the path to the building’s doorway. The door was closed, sticking when he pulled on it, and opened only after several hard yanks.
“Where?” asked Balthazar, stepping past Fool and into the house.
“I don’t know,” said Fool. “The information wasn’t that detailed. We search.” Fool walked past Balthazar, and Summer followed.
Inside, the house was in as poor shape as the outside suggested. Its walls bowed into the rooms and the floors were patchworks of holes and rotted wood. Fool went gingerly along the hallway, his shadow moving ahead of him, testing the floor with his advancing foot before settling his weight anywhere. Summer stayed close behind him as, farther back, the angels watched. The glow sweating from them, unnoticeable in Hell’s sunlight, pulsed a pale bluewhite in the gloomy space, making Fool’s shadow waver. The building was silent apart from the noises Fool and Summer made as they moved into its interior.
There were rooms and other corridors off the hallway to either side, near empty and filthy. In one a pile of old oilcloths was crumpled into the corner, covered in dust, and in another was the remains of a fire, a blackened circle scarred into the wooden boards and the smell of old smoke thick in the air. Fool went past them and carried on to the passage’s end. It opened out into a large kitchen that smelled of burned food and mo
ld and soured meat. A table stood in its middle, furred with dust and grease, and an old metal cooker thick with rust and soot was pushed up against the far wall. The shells of cupboards lined the walls, their doors and shelves long gone, their wooden bones warping into slow curves. The floor was bare wood, its carpet of dust and grime undisturbed.
On the other side of the kitchen another doorway yawned, and beyond it stairs led down. At their bottom something rippled and glittered in the angels’ light as it came around Fool and fell into the space. Fool reached for the wall, found the cord that he knew would be there, and tugged on it. Sparks of light jumped in the cellar below them, gone as briefly as they arrived. He tugged again, and this time the sparks staggered to a sulphurous, greasy light as the gas lamps caught aflame. Behind Fool, Adam clapped his hands delightedly and said, “Such ingenuity, even in Hell!”
“I’m surprised they work,” said Fool, “given how long this place looks to have been abandoned.”
“Perhaps God is assisting,” said Adam. Fool looked about him at the decay and said nothing.
The steps proved solid, thankfully, but the cellar was flooded, thick oily water swirling over the bottom risers and swallowing them. Crouched on the step closest to the water’s surface, Summer and the angels to his back, Fool saw that the cellar ran under the entire length of the building. It was now a huge pool of gently undulating water whose surface danced with the orange and blue reflections of the lamplight. Most of the lamps lining the walls hadn’t lit; some had rusted to flaking metal lumps, others were caked with dirt, their glass broken or missing. The air smelled of stagnant water and the sharp odor of gas.
The body was floating in the middle of the cellar.
At first, Fool didn’t see it and then the way the water broke around it and over it gave it shape, made the humps into the curve of a back and the outstretched arms of a person drifting facedown. Fool stepped gingerly down another step, thinking of Solomon Water and the little things that lived in it, and hoped that none were here. The water lapped over his feet, cold, patches of oil on its surface breaking around his shoe, glimmering in rainbow constellations before fading. Another step, deeper into it now, the water coming to his knees, and then Balthazar stepped down next to him.
The Devil's Detective Page 13
