Dark Cities

by Christopher Golden

  Lumière nodded approvingly. “Very good, Inspector,” she said. “You’re getting the hang of this. A block away it was raining. I walked through it to get to the crime scene. The weather changes, as well as the buildings and the time of day. And as my last exhibit, suppose I were to ask you the name of this city? The one in which you’ve been living for—I would suppose—the last several years.”

  “I was born here,” I told her. “Right here in—”

  I had to struggle to finish the sentence. The word just wouldn’t come. I twisted my lips to form the opening consonant, fought to push the breath out of my throat.

  “Almost there,” Lumière encouraged. Or did she mock me?

  “Paris!” I yelled like a lost soul. “I was born in Paris!”

  Lumière clutched my shoulders, her eyes shining. I was wrong, there was no mockery here. “Oh, nicely done!” she said. “Excellent! This was Paris once. But it takes an exceptional man to remember that. I knew as soon as I heard your voice, Inspector, that you wouldn’t let me down!”

  I took no comfort from these words. Indeed it is hard to describe the anguish and rage I felt right then. I thought I was inured to sorrow, that it had become my element, but this new pain cut through the dullness of my despair like a scalpel. Paris was my home, my second mother, and she had been taken from me in the way a sneak-thief takes your wallet, en passant, leaving you none the wiser. I almost wept. I almost screamed.

  Lumière put a hand on my shoulder. “Bear up,” she told me, with gruff compassion. “There’s work to be done.”

  I shook my head, meaning both that I would survive the blow and that I did not believe her. “What work?” I asked her, when I trusted myself to speak. “What can anyone do against this?”

  “You’re a cop investigating a murder. So I humbly suggest that you investigate. I’ve given you pretty much everything I’ve got. Now it’s your turn. Maybe you can see something I haven’t. Something that will let us come at this from another angle.”

  I was about to say that I had nothing. It would have been true only an hour before. But I realised, with a startling suddenness, that it was no longer true. Lumière’s photographs had given me a fresh perspective on things I had thought I already knew. A kind of parallax. And from this novel position novel vistas were abruptly visible.

  “We must go to the precinct house,” I told Lumière. “I need to access my files.”

  We rode on a trolley car whose route, according to the sign painted on its side, ran along Van Ness and Market Street. Upon reading those words, alien geography stirred obliquely in my mind. We got out at the Boulevard Raspail, however, and it looked—praise God!—the same as always. We walked past the statue of Napoleon, eclipsed now by the huge memorial to the dead and undead of our recent war. Grieving citizens had heaped the steps leading up to the memorial (two men facing each other over an open coffin) with bundles of cut flowers or in some cases bare branches.

  I stopped to pay my respects. I did this nightly, seeming to leave behind each time a larger piece of my soul.

  “Did you fight, Inspector?” Lumière asked me.

  I shrugged the question away. “Of course. Everyone fought who could. I would have given my life to keep the city from succumbing to that plague.”

  Lumière nodded and asked no more.

  It was late. Or rather it seemed late. When we arrived at the precinct house there was no clerk on duty at the desk. We rode up in the rickety elevator, whose creaks have always seemed to me to be the complaints of an unhappy poltergeist. Normally I find that reflection amusing: just then it filled with foreboding those few hollows in my mind that were not already too full to take any more.

  “So this is where you work,” Lumière said, walking beside me down the rows of empty desks. “It’s charming.”

  “It’s an office,” I replied brusquely, in no mood for badinage. “A place of work. It’s not required to be charming. Only functional.”

  When we reached my desk I took off my jacket and the shoulder holster beneath it, hanging both on the back of my chair.

  I pushed armloads of open files off my desk onto the floor. Each of them represented a stranger’s life and some measurable part of my own, but right then they were unwelcome distractions. I unfolded the map on which I had plotted the current epidemic of murders, as a doctor might plot the spread of some actual epidemic. I added both today’s and yesterday’s to the tally, and then stood back to study the map at a distance.

  “Is there something I should be seeing?” Lumière asked me.

  “There is a pattern,” I said. “There was already the suggestion of one, but with these two latest atrocities it stands out much more clearly.”

  Lumière leaned over the map, glaring at it in deep concentration. “There’s no pattern,” she said. “The placing of the bodies seems almost random. The Marais. Bloomsbury. Greenwich Village…”

  My pride was a little restored at this proof that there were some things I saw more clearly than she did. “It’s not random at all. We can join all the crime scenes with a single line, thus.” I did it as she watched. “They are all, as you see, on the circumference of what one might loosely describe as a circle. Not a single body has been found within that circle. I am taking it for granted, of course, that the bodies are found some distance from where the victims were actually killed.”

  “Hence the lack of physical evidence.”

  “Exactly. So. The place where all these poor souls met their end must be somewhere within our circle,” my hand hovered over the map, “and probably close to its centre. The murderer may well have thought that he was placing the bodies at random. Certainly he chose a random direction in which to walk after each killing. But he walked for more or less the same length of time, the same distance—so keen to keep his location secret that he was impelled always to stay on a straight line that led away from it.”

  I took a ruler from the desk drawer. “It might be possible, therefore,” I said, “to use those same lines to track him backwards to his source. If we were to connect the dots through the centre, rather than around the periphery, we might be able to discern the centre of this atrocious web. The place where the spider sits.”

  “Do it!” Lumière urged me.

  It was a rough and ready form of divination, at best. I took the northernmost and southernmost points and drew a line between them. Then I did the same for their nearest neighbours, and so on, going clockwise around the edge of the circle. Fourteen murders produced seven straight lines. There was no common centre, but it was close. Very close. All seven lines passed through the Rue Garancière, most of them within a hundred yards or so of the point where it is crossed by the Palatine. Something about that location pricked my memory in a way that was far from pleasant.

  Lumière was staring at my face. “What?” she demanded.

  I tapped the map. “There was a murder at exactly this point,” I murmured. “Or at least, a possible murder. The body was never found. Only blood. A great deal of it. The man who called us said that there had been a body. That of a woman. But she was gone by the time we arrived. He said he had recognised her as one Sylvia Astor, a student of literature at the Sorbonne. I arrested and held him for a time, thinking that he might have killed and abducted the woman himself, but he knew no more than he had told us. And Sylvia Astor was not seen again.”

  Lumière’s fixed stare still interrogated me. I shrugged, for I had nothing more to add. “This was before Monsieur Crâne began his reign of terror, of course. That has somewhat monopolised our attention since.”

  “How long before?”

  “Five, perhaps six days.” I held up my hand, for she seemed about to break in. “Yes, Lumière, I know. The timing is perfect for Mademoiselle Astor to have been the first victim. And the place of her death, if indeed she was killed, was here. Here at the confluence of these lines, at the very centre of the web.”

  “The Church of St. Sulpice.”

  I nodded. “There i
s a stairwell at the side of the building, leading up from the crypt. The blood was pooled on the steps. If the woman had been attacked down there and then had tried— wounded, bleeding—to find her way back up to the street, that would match what I saw.”

  Lumière’s face was cold and hard. Once again she reminded me of a statue. “Is that enough evidence to call in a manhunt?” she demanded.

  “More than enough,” I assured her. “I will put it on my superintendent’s desk as soon as he arrives tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want to wait that long.”

  “No?” I confess I was not surprised. I felt the same impatience myself. “What should we do then? I suppose I could call on him at his home, and ask him to swear out a warrant tonight.”

  “Or we could go there right now, and make the arrest ourselves.”

  I pondered this invitation for several moments. It held some appeal. Clearly, however, I must not go to St. Sulpice without leaving some record of my discovery. I found a scrap of paper and quickly scribbled down a message, a letter to Superintendent Faber explaining the discoveries we had made and what we now proposed to do. I took it to his desk, found an envelope and addressed it to him.

  Lumière was at my shoulder the whole time, full of urgency. “Let’s go, Philemon. You know there’s going to be another murder tonight.”

  I hesitated, uncertain of where the letter would be the most likely to be seen. Finally Lumière snatched it from my hand and tucked it under the arm of the winged Victory statue of which the superintendent is so inordinately proud. “I said let’s go,” she repeated. Her voice had a grating edge to it and her eyes were dark. There was something personal at stake for her in this, clearly. Well, so there was for me also. I was desperate to see the face of the killer who was murdering not just my city’s inhabitants but—however insane it sounded—my city herself.

  The trolley car or the Métro would have taken us to St. Sulpice, but Lumière set off at a brisk walk, almost a run. It seemed the urgency of our business and the agitation of her spirits would not allow her to wait. I fell in beside her.

  “When we get there,” I told her, “you should wait out on the street. It’s unwise for both of us to go inside.” She made no answer to this, but only speeded up her stride.

  It was now well past midnight, if such terms retained any of their meaning. The streets were all but empty. Here a demimondaine staggered home from some sordid tryst, tottering on dysfunctionally high heels. There a homeless drunk sorted through the rubbish behind a trattoria in hope of finding either a late supper or an early breakfast. Nobody accosted us, or even seemed to see us.

  The church’s frontage, that breathtaking arcade with its towers and doubled array of columns, was completely dark. It had been closed by order of the city some years earlier, after a fire had all but destroyed it. It looked most unwelcoming. If a building could be said to have an aspect, the aspect of this one was solitary and introspective.

  I approached the main doors, Above our heads, in faded black paint, was the legend that had been added to the façade in the days following the revolution. Le Peuple Francais Reconnoit L’Etre Suprême Et L’Immortalité de L’me. It is good to be explicit about such things. A thick chain had been threaded through the handles of the doors and secured with a heavy padlock. There was no getting in that way.

  “The crypt,” I said, “is to the—” Lumière did not wait on my words, or my pointing finger. She led the way around the building to the north side, where a flight of marble steps led down into profound darkness. By the time I reached the top of the steps she was already at the bottom, invisible to me. Her voice floated back up to me. “There’s a door!”

  I followed, taking the steps with care. Even so I almost tripped and fell when I reached the bottom, the sudden levelling of the terrain deceiving and unbalancing me. I groped around until I felt the outline of the door Lumière had described. It stood open. From beyond it came a whiff of immemorial dust and damp.

  Had I searched the crypt on the day when Sylvia Astor’s body was found? I could no longer remember. Too many other bodies had intervened.

  “Over here,” Lumière’s voice said from the pitch dark.

  “I can’t see you,” I told her.

  “Follow the sound of my voice.”

  I drew my service revolver and advanced. One step, a second, then a third. My skin was prickling, wanting to recoil from a touch it had not yet felt. There might be a murderer in this room with us. Monsieur Crâne, with his inexorable hammer and his burning madness.

  “To the left,” said Lumière.

  I turned and moved in the direction of her voice.

  I had gone perhaps two steps further when something bit down on my leg just above the ankle, all the way to the bone. The shock was almost as terrible as the pain. I screamed aloud, and fell to the stone floor, clutching at my injured leg. A band of thick metal had closed on it. Or rather two half-bands, for there were hinges or brackets at either end.

  As I wrestled in vain with the trap, an electric torch clicked on a few feet away from me. Its beam was pointed directly at me so I could see almost nothing beyond it: only the vague outline of a shape that had to be Lumière.

  “Sorry about that,” she said.

  I took aim with my revolver and fired it repeatedly. The forlorn click of the hammer striking an empty chamber sounded with each stroke of my finger on the trigger.

  “Emptied it,” Lumière said. “Back at the precinct. While you were writing this.” She set the torch down, and an envelope right beside it. The envelope bore Superintendent Faber’s name, in my own hand.

  She sat down facing me, almost close enough to touch. But the leg-trap, I saw by her torch’s light, was secured by a chain that was embedded somehow in the floor of this wide, lowceilinged room. My freedom of movement was not very much.

  “I hate to lie,” Lumière said. “Especially to a man like you. A native. It goes against the grain. And since there’s no need for it now, let me tell you that my name, when I was alive, was Sylvia Astor.”

  I must have groaned or cried out at this. Certainly I felt a movement of despair. We had fought so hard, so bitterly, to scour our city of the zombis, and now they were back.

  “It’s not as you think,” Lumière assured me quickly. “Let me explain. You deserve that, at least.”

  What she told me was simple enough, and terrible enough. The undead had indeed been defeated, and eradicated. But their infected bodies had been laid in mass graves hastily dug in the city’s many parks. The gardens of the Luxembourg Palace, the Champ de Mars, the woods of Boulogne.

  The infection had continued to spread, unseen. It sank into the soil.

  “The city got sick,” Lumière said. “With the zombi sickness. It forgot what it was. It thought it was other cities of which it had heard or dreamed. Fantastic places with names like New York. London. Lima. Dublin. Some of the undead had been tourists. Perhaps the city could not tell their memories from its own.

  “And it hungered, with the zombi hunger. It ate me first, after I committed suicide on the steps of this church. It drank from me and clutched me to its heart. I became its servant. Willingly. My memories of my old life were gone. I was reborn in that moment, a part of something very old, very strong and very beautiful.”

  Lutetia, I thought. The Roman name for Paris. And my city has always been called the City of Light, which is what lumière means.

  “I procure the bodies, for the city to eat,” the pale woman went on. “But I’m very careful. I have to get to know them first. Only native Parisians will do. Only those who can remember the city as it used to be. That way, when it assimilates your cerebral tissue it takes your memories too and is able to claim back some portions of itself.” She smiled sadly. “I showed you the photos out of sequence, Inspector. I hope this will console you. The changes… they’re going the other way. Paris is remembering. With each death, each feeding, as she eats the brains of her citoyens, she heals. Recovers some
of her lost memories.”

  “But the hotel,” I objected. It was hard to think through the pain, but I wanted very much to understand. “The Belle Époque. It changed into a building from New York.”

  “Well that was me cheating,” Lumière said. She actually blushed, which produced a strange effect on those bleached-bone cheeks. “The building didn’t change at all. I just took down the old plaque and put up a new one. I paid the doorman ten francs to look the other way. I needed you to believe me, and to believe me you had to see with your own eyes. Or think you had seen.”

  She reached into the darkness beyond the torch’s beam and retrieved, from somewhere, a sturdy hammer whose head was foul with blood and brains. “I use this,” she said. “Mostly it’s enough. The leg trap is for those who are biggest and most dangerous. To hold them still while I strike.

  “I smash the skulls and pulp the brains. The brains are the part that matters, of course, and a semi-liquefied state seems to be best from the point of view of absorption. I scrape them up, take them away in a bucket or a picnic hamper and sow them in the parks and gardens where the zombis were buried. Apply the medicine to the site of the infection, as it were. Je sème à tout vent, like a good daughter of the Republic.”

  She paused, and regarded me. After a long moment she reached out to touch the back of my hand. “I really am sorry,” she said softly. “You’re wrong when you say that everyone fought against the zombis. A lot of people just ran and hid. I hate to take someone like you, who did his duty and never asked for thanks. But your memories are very vivid. You still speak French, which almost nobody else does. You eat croissants. You have a hip flask which I would bet good money is full of cognac. You’re just too tasty, Inspector Philemon.”

  “That is not an accusation I’ve ever had to defend myself against,” I answered her. Lumière laughed, but her face was sad.

  “It’s all right,” I told her. And it was almost true, although I was afraid that having my brains bashed in would hurt. “Do what you have to do, Lutetia. I like the sound of being part of… what was it you said?”