Richard Theobald shook his head. I think he was becoming convinced that Calloway was a bit mad. “Is there a point to this cinematic reminiscence?”
“Oh yes, a very good point.” Calloway’s tone remained light. “Night of the Demon was based on ‘Casting the Runes’, a short story by M. R. James. In the tale, an occultist lays a curse on his enemies. The curse is passed on a ribbon of parchment which, once the victim has accepted it, is whisked away by a supernatural wind into the nearest fire. Consequently, the victim has no chance of allaying the curse.”
The bantering look faded from Calloway’s face and he became deadly serious. “You have just destroyed by fire a curse placed upon you.” He turned to me. “I think we’d better leave this room now, Roderick. Quickly!”
He hustled me towards the door. As he did so, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I could swear that the figure of Alchuan was starting to move. Calloway pushed me into the corridor, slammed the door behind us and turned the key in the lock. Enraged voices bellowed behind us. “What the hell are you playing at, Calloway?” The door was kicked violently from the inside.
“Reuben, I thought I saw—”
“Don’t remember seeing anything, Roderick,” Calloway admonished. “It will be better that way.” The shouts from inside the room took on a more frantic note, the kicks and blows to the door became more urgent, and then, abruptly, there was silence.
Elmore came gasping from the hall. “I heard yelling, sir. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know.” Calloway’s lie was glib. “Father Shea and I just came to investigate.” He turned the key and entered the room. “That’s strange, there’s nothing here.”
I followed him in. The room was empty, save for a collapsed heap of something on the floor near to the display table. A closer look and I recognised it as being Alchuan’s regalia. The costume was flaccid and empty and I no longer had a sense of it containing any kind of presence. I pulled back the curtains to find the windows closed and secure, the snow on the ground outside undisturbed.
“Someone’s been playing silly buggers in here!” muttered a disapproving Elmore.
I turned to Calloway who was standing musing by the diorama, drawing gently on his rekindled cigar. “Reuben, what happened to them? Where could they have gone?” I whispered.
He took the cigar from his mouth and after a moment’s thought, said: “I’m not sure, but I think I have an idea … Good grief!”
He pointed at the display table with the glowing tip of the cigar.
Before our astonished gaze that wonderful diorama was fading, fading until it had vanished as if it had never existed. The table was nothing more than an empty, glass-topped display cabinet.
*
The breeze blowing into their faces was hot, bearing with it alien odours, strange dry stenches of animals and vegetation, of dirt and death; while a furnace glare of sun beat down from a sky bleached almost white. Tall, waving grasses, sweeping to a far horizon, were pale brown and ochre, and the darker colours of thorn trees jutted starkly upwards, gnarled fists clutching at emptiness. Smoky clouds of dust flurried about the plain as the vast herds of herbivores wandered about in the eternal search for food. From somewhere close by came the coughing growl of an unknown animal quickly followed by answering noises.
Richard Theobald and Peter Lambourne gazed around in fear. “Where in the hell are we?” croaked Theobald. “And how the devil did we get here?”
Lambourne didn’t answer him. Instead he just pointed a terrified finger towards an acacia tree. At first, Richard Theobald couldn’t make out what it was his companion was indicating and then his eyes became accustomed to the glare. In the little island of shade cast by the acacia stood two figures, staring at them with unblinking intensity.
The one was tall and hideously emaciated, with pharaoh-like, elongated skull and skin dusty brown-grey in colour. Theobald was certain that there were no eyes in that sere and withered face although he could feel its relentless regard. The other watcher was more familiar. Tall, too, but less so. Skinny, also, but more naturally so. And clad in an old, blue dressing-gown. Sir Isaac Pryce, smiling at his killers with grim pleasure.
Theobald slumped to the ground and pressed his face against his knees. He was shaking now, and the more he tried to control it the more feverish it became. Lambourne still stood, unmoving, pointing, deep in shock. He was making low gibbering noises and tears flowed down his cheeks.
The first lioness came padding silently towards the two men, tawny eyes narrowed, then another, and then two or three more, until the whole pride was circling them. The beasts were just curious at first, then rumbling snarls slowly became more savage, more menacing. One lion, bolder than the rest, patted tentatively at Lambourne with a great forepaw. When there was no reaction the paw struck again, harder, faster. At the smell of blood, the others joined in.
Richard Theobald raised a suddenly aged face and looked up. The lions were worrying at the now screaming Lambourne and several were looking towards himself. Yards away, jackals and hyenas were loping in, eager for scraps. High in the molten sky, Richard Theobald could see vultures gathering.
Harry D’Amour
LOST SOULS
by CLIVE BARKER
Harry D’Amour is a private investigator in his late thirties, with three days’ growth of beard and the eyes of an insomniac. He has a long nose, strong jaw, wide brow, with grey hairs and frown-lines well in evidence.
He is repeatedly drawn to the dark side against his will. Unable to change it, he is forced to walk the line between Heaven and Hell. It is his destiny and he must accept it.
A devout Catholic, he fights his war alone and in secrecy and his chosen battleground is the streets of New York. Among his few friends is Norma Paine, a black blind medium who owns thirty televisions and never leaves her apartment. She communes with the spirits who come seeking her guidance to find the Hereafter.
D’Amour’s cramped and chaotic office is near 45th Street and 8th Avenue. He depends upon a free Chinese dinner every week to vary his diet, drinks hard, hates crowds and carries a .38 pistol. His other weapons include nearly a dozen tattoos—talismans and sigils to ward off evil.
He is haunted by something that happened one Easter Sunday in Brooklyn. It was there, in a house on Wyckoff Street, that D’Amour first encountered the supernatural—a routine surveillance on an adulterous wife went literally to hell when her secret lover was revealed as a demon. The resulting confrontation left many people dead—including Father Hess, who had fought at the investigator’s side—and D’Amour with a fear of stairs and a relentless passion to seek out the demons and destroy them.
Clive Barker’s Harry D’Amour made his debut in the short story ‘The Last Illusion’, originally published in the sixth volume of Books of Blood (1985). The Christmas story published here first appeared in the December 1986 issue of Time Out and D’Amour then turned up as a minor player, older and certainly wiser, in the novel The Great and Secret Show (1989). He returned to centre stage five years later in the sequel, Everville, and D’Amour is pitted against the author’s demonic Pinhead and his fellow Cenobites in The Scarlet Gospels (2015).
In 1995 the character was portrayed by Scott Bakula in the movie Lord of Illusions, written and directed by Barker and inspired by his first story about D’Amour.
EVERYTHING THE BLIND woman had told Harry she’d seen was undeniably real. Whatever inner eye Norma Paine possessed—that extraordinary skill that allowed her to scan the island of Manhattan from the Broadway Bridge to Battery Park and yet not move an inch from her tiny room on 75th—that eye was as sharp as any knife juggler’s. Here was the derelict house on Ridge Street, with the smoke stains besmirching the brick. Here was the dead dog that she’d described, lying on the sidewalk as though asleep, but that it lacked half its head. Here too, if Norma was to be believed, was the demon that Harry had come in search of: the shy and sublimely malignant Cha’Chat.
The h
ouse was not, Harry thought, a likely place for a desperado of Cha’Chat’s elevation to be in residence. Though the infernal brethren could be a loutish lot, to be certain, it was Christian propaganda which sold them as dwellers in excrement and ice. The escaped demon was more likely to be downing fly eggs and vodka at the Waldorf-Astoria than concealing itself amongst such wretchedness.
But Harry had gone to the blind clairvoyant in desperation, having failed to locate Cha’Chat by any means conventionally available to a private eye such as himself. He was, he had admitted to her, responsible for the fact that the demon was loose at all. It seemed he’d never learned, in his all too frequent encounters with the Gulf and its progeny, that Hell possessed a genius for deceit. Why else had he believed in the child that had tottered into view just as he’d leveled his gun at Cha’Chat?—a child, of course, which had evaporated into a cloud of tainted air as soon as the diversion was redundant and the demon had made its escape.
Now, after almost three weeks of vain pursuit, it was almost Christmas in New York; season of goodwill and suicide. Streets thronged; the air like salt in wounds; Mammon in glory. A more perfect playground for Cha’Chat’s despite could scarcely be imagined. Harry had to find the demon quickly, before it did serious damage; find it and return it to the pit from which it had come. In extremis he would even use the binding syllables which the late Father Hesse had vouchsafed to him once, accompanying them with such dire warnings that Harry had never even written them down. Whatever it took. Just as long as Cha’Chat didn’t see Christmas Day this side of the Schism.
It seemed to be colder inside the house on Ridge Street than out. Harry could feel the chill creep through both pairs of socks and start to numb his feet. He was making his way along the second landing when he heard the sigh. He turned, fully expecting to see Cha’Chat standing there, its eye cluster looking a dozen ways at once, its cropped fur rippling. But no. Instead a young woman stood at the end of the corridor. Her undernourished features suggested Puerto Rican extraction, but that—and the fact that she was heavily pregnant—was all Harry had time to grasp before she hurried away down the stairs.
Listening to the girl descend, Harry knew that Norma had been wrong. If Cha’Chat had been here, such a perfect victim would not have been allowed to escape with her eyes in her head. The demon wasn’t here.
Which left the rest of Manhattan to search.
*
The night before, something very peculiar had happened to Eddie Axel. It had begun with his staggering out of his favorite bar, which was six blocks from the grocery store he owned on 3rd Avenue. He was drunk, and happy; and with reason. Today he had reached the age of fifty-five. He had married three times in those years; he had sired four legitimate children and a handful of bastards; and—perhaps most significantly—he’d made Axel’s Superette a highly lucrative business. All was well with the world.
But Jesus, it was chilly! No chance, on a night threatening a second Ice Age, of finding a cab. He would have to walk home.
He’d got maybe half a block, however, when—miracle of miracles—a cab did indeed cruise by. He’d flagged it down, eased himself in, and the weird times had begun.
For one, the driver knew his name.
“Home, Mr. Axel?” he’d said. Eddie hadn’t questioned the godsend. Merely mumbled, “Yes,” and assumed this was a birthday treat, courtesy of someone back at the bar.
Perhaps his eyes had flickered closed; perhaps he’d even slept. Whatever, the next thing he knew the cab was driving at some speed through streets he didn’t recognize. He stirred himself from his doze. This was the Village, surely; an area Eddie kept clear of. His neighborhood was the high Nineties, close to the store. Not for him the decadence of the Village, where a shop sign offered EAR PIERCING. WITH OR WITHOUT PAIN and young men with suspicious hips lingered in doorways.
“This isn’t the right direction,” he said, rapping on the Perspex between him and the driver. There was no word of apology or explanation forthcoming, however, until the cab made a turn toward the river, drawing up in a street of warehouses, and the ride was over.
“This is your stop,” said the chauffeur. Eddie didn’t need a more explicit invitation to disembark.
As he hauled himself out the cabbie pointed to the murk of an empty lot between two benighted warehouses. “She’s been waiting for you,” he said, and drove away. Eddie was left alone on the sidewalk.
Common sense counseled a swift retreat, but what now caught his eye glued him to the spot. There she stood—the woman of whom the cabbie had spoken—and she was the most obese creature Eddie had ever set his sight upon. She had more chins than fingers, and her fat, which threatened at every place to spill from the light summer dress she wore, gleamed with either oil or sweat.
“Eddie,” she said. Everybody seemed to know his name tonight. As she moved toward him, tides moved in the fat of her torso and along her limbs.
“Who are you?” Eddie was about to inquire, but the words died when he realized the obesity’s feet weren’t touching the ground. She was floating.
Had Eddie been sober he might well have taken his cue then and fled, but the drink in his system mellowed his trepidation. He stayed put.
“Eddie,” she said. “Dear Eddie. I have some good news and some bad news. Which would you like first?”
Eddie pondered this one for a moment. “The good,” he concluded.
“You’re going to die tomorrow,” came the reply, accompanied by the tiniest of smiles.
“That’s good?” he said.
“Paradise awaits your immortal soul …” she murmured. “Isn’t that a joy?”
“So what’s the bad news?”
She plunged her stubby-fingered hand into the crevasse between her gleaming tits. There came a little squeal of complaint, and she drew something out of hiding. It was a cross between a runty gecko and a sick rat, possessing the least fetching qualities of both. Its pitiful limbs pedaled at the air as she held it up for Eddie’s perusal. “This,” she said, “is your immortal soul.”
She was right, thought Eddie: the news was not good.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a pathetic sight, isn’t it?” The soul drooled and squirmed as she went on. “It’s undernourished. It’s weak to the point of expiring altogether. And why?” She didn’t give Eddie a chance to reply. “A paucity of good works …”
Eddie’s teeth had begun to chatter. “What am I supposed to do about it?” he asked.
“You’ve got a little breath left. You must compensate for a lifetime of rampant profiteering—”
“I don’t follow.”
“Tomorrow, turn Axel’s Superette into a Temple of Charity, and you may yet put some meat on your soul’s bones.”
She had begun to ascend, Eddie noticed. In the darkness above her, there was sad, sad music, which now wrapped her up in minor chords until she was entirely eclipsed.
*
The girl had gone by the time Harry reached the street. So had the dead dog. At a loss for options, he trudged back to Norma Paine’s apartment, more for the company than the satisfaction of telling her she had been wrong.
“I’m never wrong,” she told him over the din of the five televisions and as many radios that she played perpetually. The cacophony was, she claimed, the only sure way to keep those of the spirit world from incessantly intruding upon her privacy; the babble distressed them. “I saw power in that house on Ridge Street,” she told Harry, “sure as shit.”
Harry was about to argue when an image on one of the screens caught his eye. An outside news broadcast pictured a reporter standing on a sidewalk across the street from a store (AXEL’S SUPERETTE, the sign read) from which bodies were being removed.
“What is it?” Norma demanded.
“Looks like a bomb went off,” Harry replied, trying to trace the reporter’s voice through the din of the various stations.
“Turn up the sound,” said Norma. “I like a disaster.”
It was not a
bomb that had wrought such destruction, it emerged, but a riot. In the middle of the morning a fight had begun in the packed grocery store; nobody quite knew why. It had rapidly escalated into a bloodbath. A conservative estimate put the death toll at thirty, with twice as many injured. The report, with its talk of a spontaneous eruption of violence, gave fuel to a terrible suspicion in Harry.
“Cha’Chat …” he murmured.
Despite the noise in the little room, Norma heard him speak. “What makes you so sure?” she said.
Harry didn’t reply. He was listening to the reporter’s recapitulation of the events, hoping to catch the location of Axel’s Superette. And there it was. 3rd Avenue, between 94th and 95th.
“Keep smiling,” he said to Norma, and left her to her brandy and the dead gossiping in the bathroom.
*
Linda had gone back to the house on Ridge Street as a last resort, hoping against hope that she’d find Bolo there. He was, she vaguely calculated, the likeliest candidate for father of the child she carried, but there’d been some strange men in her life at that time; men with eyes that seemed golden in certain lights; men with sudden, joyless smiles. Anyway, Bolo hadn’t been at the house, and here she was—as she’d known she’d be all along—alone. All she could hope to do was lie down and die.
But there was death and death. There was that extinction she prayed for nightly, to fall asleep and have the cold claim her by degrees; and there was that other death, the one she saw whenever fatigue drew her lids down. A death that had neither dignity in the going nor hope of a Hereafter; a death brought by a man in a gray suit whose face sometimes resembled a half-familiar saint, and sometimes a wall of rotting plaster.
Begging as she went, she made her way uptown toward Times Square. Here, amongst the traffic of consumers, she felt safe for a while. Finding a little deli, she ordered eggs and coffee, calculating the meal so that it just fell within the begged sum. The food stirred the baby. She felt it turn in its slumber, close now to waking. Maybe she should fight on a while longer, she thought. If not for her sake, for that of the child.
Dark Detectives Page 40
