Black City (The Lark Case Files)

by Christian Read

  I nursed such thoughts of her.

  Then, after nine months of politely thanking her for the books, she disappeared. I didn't see her for half a year and was mildly distressed. Other women, my studies, none of it completely distracted me from thoughts of her. Then one day I went to one of the weirder bookshops, getting texts the public system don't carry, and there she was, handing me my order.

  'Oh hey! Library guy! I was hoping you'd turn up here. This place seems like your prowl. Besides, I missed copying down the names of the books so I could check them out when you were done.' Stunned and shy, I thanked her. And left.

  Two weeks later, she told me that I must be a student who graduated now I could buy my own books. I told her 'Art historian.' A good excuse for any magician to explain what lurks on your shelves. 'Oh,' she said, a clear invitation for more discussion. Never picked up on it. Smooth, young Lark. Smooth.

  That was the last year I studied with Mully. We. Me and Jon. I don't want to say apprenticeship or initiation. He never gave us black belts or mortar boards to throw in the air like a couple of pricks, but we studied under him for certain. Yeah, Mully schooled us as sure as sure. Slung the devoirs on us. Made sure we practiced our meditation.

  They were also the rockabilly days when I could fit into stovepipes and pointy boots or two-tones and chain my wallet to my belt and slick back my hair.

  'None of that caterwaul for me,' Jon would say each time I invited him to a club. Jon's tastes ran to the classical and fancy Euro trance.

  So I'd hit up the clubs all alone, dancing like lightning to the sounds of double-bass, drinking Mexican beer and smoking unfiltered Camels back then, toe-tapping, always up the back. Always up the back. Whip thin back then. T-shirts with skulls on them, and pin-up girls too. The clubs were sweaty, the acoustics terrible and the bathrooms an abattoir, but the music was so good and the women made you want to die under their boots, they were so beautiful.

  Then, one day, as the band finished its last, I decided to stay for an extra beer. I always got out before the crowd, afraid I looked foolish to the men with quiffs and ducktails, not as cool as the mechanics and tattooists who made up my peers in musical taste. Me, with my bookworm tan, nervous in a crowd. I still believed in authenticity back then.

  And there she was. Little black dress with cherries on, her long hair all pinned up, makeup thick and strange and cool, drinking a cocktail from a straw to spare the glass her fire-engine lipstick. The girl from the lending library. She was like a fire, face hot from dancing and eyes wild from adrenaline and booze. Her lips. Sometimes, alone, I still think about the colour of her lips that night.

  'Hey, it's the art student. Fancy meeting you here.'

  She eyed me up and down. 'Keep this quiet don't you?'

  I nodded. I had no idea what to say. Made a move to leave but she just raised an arresting eyebrow. 'So why don't you tell me why you really get all those weird books out?'

  'I just... like it weird.'

  She glanced around. 'Who doesn't? But it wasn't art history, was it? That's not what those books are for.'

  Her friends waved at her to go, onto parties or happier bars, places I couldn't follow. She waited for my response.

  'No. Not art history.'

  'Didn't think so. So tell me, do you know what Spielwerk means?'

  I should have shut my mouth. 'Spell work. Country folk magic.'

  She lit up a long thin cigarette and stared at me across the length of it.

  'Give me your phone number.'

  Didn't have one. Address. Two weeks later, she knocked on my door and the hellish little apartment I kept. She asked me questions and good ones. Turned out she'd come down from the mountains where the old ways sometimes flourish. Her old man did some pow-wow business, and her grandma. Scarlet left when he started drinking but could never forget his weird old words. Never stopped wondering why the creepy medicines that he got himself up from herbs could even work.

  I know all about that stuff. Did even then. We talked through the night. She took off her stockings and smiled at me when we were done talking. 'Come here. You're going to kiss me.' Ah.

  We were together eight years.

  I peel away to naked and grab a shower. Close the blinds and don't sleep for a while. I listen to Tom Waits and smoke in bed.

  She used to let me smoke everywhere in the house but the bedroom. This place stinks. I fade away angry at myself for letting this place get to hell, promising to air the place out and clean up my files and mop the kitchen.

  Freedom.

  Twenty

  Wick looks for some payback.

  She's never been violent. She's not a pussy or anything, but she just never liked it. Never wanted to hurt anyone really. Wick just wants to do her tags, share her art and be left alone. Sometimes she thinks about going back to school. She liked it sometimes. Even though the guys fuck her work up all the time, she just wants them to stop. Doesn't want them dead or even punished.

  But something's telling her that it doesn't matter. That pain and suffering are no big deal. Come to everyone. Might as well get some respect.

  Deenate is his own tag, his name is recognised amongst the crews. Sixteen, skinny, from out of the Philippines originally she thinks. Best artist she knows and he hates her and thinks her work is stupid and weird. Laughs at her and hunts down her work. Wick thinks that he doesn't like girls very much, but what does she know? Maybe he just hates her work that much and there's no reason for it other than that.

  Under the Winterline Bridge is where he did his best work and he's putting some finishing touches on it. She gets in early in the morning, tags it with her own eerie patterns. Signs her name. Let's see how he likes his work messed with. Inside her, it agrees. Deenate knows where to find her and, by mid-morning, there he is. Her mum is away and so Wick has redecorated. She pulled away the furniture from the walls, the old black-and-white TV, and scrubbed the place, making the surfaces clean and ready for her masterwork.

  Then she consulted the scroll, and it changed in front of her eyes, she reckons, sensing her desire. The new patterns hurt her eyes, and she threw up a bit at first. But Wick has the sight. She can get used to anything.

  Soldiering on, despite the black stuff that's started crusting her eyes, she got the paint on the walls. It was like being on the inside of a cubic spiderweb moving weird in time. Like, if time goes only forward, this thing goes diagonal. Wick didn't need precision in her concepts. She just wants people to feel things.

  When Deenate comes, she opens the door. He's screaming at her but it's like he's doing it through water. He calls her the names men like him have always called young women. He's going to hit her soon, she knows, and she can feel his excitement like she feels an old muscle-tear.

  So small, says something to her. Let him see your work.

  Wick walks back into her house, turning her back. He's just a barking monkey. Suddenly, she can't even remember why the hell she ever even worried about him.

  Her city. Her art. If she lets them take it, she deserves to lose it. No one like Deenate is ever going to tell her what she can and can't do ever again.

  Deenate walks all the way in and his yelling stops. He looks around at the art on the walls. He asks her some questions, stammering like a misfiring gun. She doesn't care to answer him. Suddenly she's sure that he's as likely to understand this work as a cat shown a sum.

  Watch carefully, it whispers, avid. And... there it is. Deenate sort of... something like a bubble bursts inside him somewhere deep and essential, provides the voice. There's nothing that really shows it on his body. No screaming or a sci-fi airlock explosion. He just stops being himself and, as he zombie-shuffles out the door, Wick watches him carefully, afraid he's faking. By the time he's left her apartment and she can see him on the street through paint-taint windows, he's punching himself in the head and she relaxes. It worked. Something inside her hisses pleasure.

  She just watches him then, lighting up one of her mother's ciga
rettes and resting her forehead against the window, watching Deenate just wail at his own temples. People try to stop him but he bites them and continues. His fists give out before his skull, and she knows he'll never tag again. Knuckles slurry. He'll be lucky if he holds a pen.

  Ambulance. Cops. Ice overdose, they think, and they all ready to shuffle him off to plague the day of some nurses who deserve better than another fucking tweaker. He'll die in there, Wick knows. He's seen something terrible that he'll never come back from.

  Wick contemplates cleaning the walls. It might be dangerous to leave them out.

  She cooks some soup. Then a bit later, her mother fumbles the keys and walks in the door. Wick jumps up to stop her coming in, seeing the web that wounds the world, wound about the walls.

  Is it so great a loss?

  Nah. And Wick knows that's true.

  She closes the door on her way out, throwing a blanket over the ruin of her mum. She feels sorta bad.

  Twenty-One

  Phone call at two in the afternoon and it's a quick job. I contemplate telling them to fuck off, but a gig is a gig. Sage-burning bullshit exorcism in an art gallery before a show. Someone's made the wrong video installation, having recorded the wrong bum screaming the wrong thing on a bad night. I tell the artist that certain words have certain powers, but she's too fried on ambition, arrogance and MDMA. Her work is rubbish and I leave her, sure she'll be insane in a year. Serves her right. The homeless guy is an old-school shaman, intentionally given himself over to crack and nighttrain and eating rats and licking hamburger wrappers. But she doesn't know that, she just sees a crazy man saying something interesting, willing to cash in on misery.

  She can overdub the guy in ten seconds, but she thinks it's better this way.

  Fuck her. The people who see the show will go home to nightmares and a few pointless possessions by stupid spirits. The artist, hearing those words on loop over and over? She'll die.

  I warn the gallery owner and he agrees, shamed by his own credulity.

  I'm leaving the gallery, angry, when I see them, across the street.

  Slow grin. This is just what I need to cheer me up.

  It's Viniter, who started out strong when I was still teaching for the Library. Started out that way, but the second it got hard, she quit. Only had about four lessons with her, but it was enough to see she wasn't going to last.

  And, yes, there he is.

  Bianco. The peacock. Rosengarten's chum.

  They spot me and Bianco taps his partner's arm. She turns and swears. Pass through cars backed up at the lights and when I get closer, I can see there's a scar on her face now. Two ugly keloid gashes. Someone's hooked into her and pulled towards her ear.

  'Mr. Lark,' says Bianco, blinking behind glasses.

  Viniter says nothing. Tough and sexy-looking in leather jacket and black jeans and the spikey jacket, but she never made the scene when I knew her. None of them worked as hard as they needed to, and I didn't hear from a single one of them after I left.

  I want to fuck with them. They were punching above their weight, trying to join up with the retrieval wing of the Library. They were putting themselves in danger, putting the organisation in danger and putting me in danger. They were supposed to be exceptional. They were just good. Good is enemy of the great.

  But it will get back to Scarlet if I make fun of her troops. I don't need the headache.

  'Investigating the gallery thing?'

  'Yes. Umn, Scarlet told us about it last week but we've been running behind.'

  'Right. Bar.'

  Viniter gets ready to throw down about it, but I just shake my head at her. 'Not now. Bar.'

  We find something two blocks away, silent till then. Viniter refuses to look at me and her anger vibrates hot. Bianco keeps looking over his shoulder at me, running his fingers through his beard.

  The place is anonymously Irish, with some hockey fans barking like animals up the front. We take the pool table. I'm ok at the game, but Viniter is excellent. She still doesn't speak, just plays with smooth economy. Bianco, wisely, gets me a scotch and dry. Talk while we play.

  Bianco drinks deep of his stupid umbrella thing for Dutch courage. Not a drinker.

  'Mr. Lark, we, er,' he waves a protective hand in front of him. 'We don't answer to you anymore. So, well, this is a professional courtesy. Understand that we -'

  Stare at him.

  'You were late to the show. I picked it up and did the job. And what was your plan anyway?'

  Bianco is Librarian to the core, a man in love with indicia. You call on him when you want a man who'll drive, find a book, photograph two hundred pages of it, compare editions page by page, line by line. That's what he's good at. He's just got the ego to think he can retrieve and enforce.

  Like what he's doing now.

  'Well, we would have carefully questioned the artist. We would have tried to take the tapes and carefully reviewed them. Then we would have petitioned Scarlet and the Librarian General to perform an exorcism.'

  Laugh.

  Viniter sinks the black smoothly, then looks up at me. She hasn't said a word. I'm three up to her.

  'You would have had a room of people who saw something bad tonight if you moved at that pace.'

  Viniter takes my coins and racks up again.

  'We have procedures, Mr. Lark.'

  I shrug.

  'We have procedures.'

  I sip and look at him over the rim. 'You shouldn't be doing this job. I think you know that.'

  'If not him, then who?' Viniter. Finally. Smoky voiced and flat with repressed anger.

  'No him. And not you. Lazy.' Point at her. 'Undisciplined.'

  She moves her head to the side then back. Her anger is clear. Bites it back.

  'You son-of-a-bitch. I was slogging my guts out, working two jobs, looking after my dad and studying as hard as I could. Trying to touch something better than cleaning up bedpans and changing infected dressings. You couldn't have given less of a fuck about that, us, then. Don't pretend to give a fuck now.'

  Excuses.

  'You commit, or you don't play. You'd gotten into the Library, showed you had what it took to be in the game. Don't blame me if you couldn't step up to the next level.'

  'Fuck.' She turns back to the table, finishing the rack.

  Bianco actually waves at me like a schoolboy getting permission.

  'You have a point Mr. Lark but, well, we can't all just walk into a place and throw weight around. Most of us can't really afford to risk arrest or making too much of a scene. And Rosengarten has probationary measures if we don't do things by the book. We need to log events, we go over them forensically.'

  'Untrained.'

  'Whose fault is that?' Viniter again.

  'I needed certain things from the Library. They wouldn't provide them. And I wouldn't have finished your training if I'd stayed. You're killing yourself out here.'

  'Do you even know how selfish that sounds?'

  I think of the Hollow and how I begged the Library to help us. Shrug. Let them go on thinking what they like. I stopped justifying myself a while back.

  'Why isn't Mully training you?'

  They look at each other. Something's up. Bianco takes off his glasses, wipes em. I remember the gesture. Buying time to phrase something delicate.

  'The Library no longer allows guest lecturers.'

  Shutting shop. No tourists for the new Library.

  'Last question. How often do your procedures get people hurt? How often did you want to move on something but couldn't because of rules?'

  Bianco wavers. Sighs. 'Too often, Mr. Lark.'

  'We have to,' says Viniter. 'Things are weird at the moment. Something is going wrong, once, twice a week. There's spirits and fucking hell, you should see what we found in the sewers. And if we go in half-cocked, people die. Did you hear about Straw?'

  Nod.

  'You're lucky, Lark. No one likes you or expects anything from you. You walked out on us when we ne
eded you. You're alone, but you're out of the game. Just on the edges, no sides picked. But something has gone wrong and you're not there for us.'

  She's up in my grill. Whisper. 'Are you listening to what I'm saying?'

  I hear that they're in trouble and that they blame me. I twist it for them, letting them know what I think if their fucking judgements. Let them feel some of what I felt.

  'All I hear are more of your excuses. Again.'

  Throws up her hands and curses. 'Come on Bianco.' They're gone.

  I finish the game alone. And their drinks. Then I go home.

  Twenty-Two

  I get a message on the phone. Check my email. I boot up the old computer and ignore 171 emails.

  to: lark@emailprovider.com

  from: weirdseriesofsigilsmostwouldignorebutiunderstand@

  ispyourecogniseandtrust

  Subject: information

  Lark

  Scarlet has tasked me with providing you this information.

  Ludo, known as Marc Ludovitch or Ludovico Davide or Kim Ludowski, is a foreign national operating...

  I recognise the tone at once. A fawning little effeminate who used to annoy me with his sucking up, who showed his true colours when I went out into the cold. I didn't like him them and I fucking hate him now. He'll get his. Scarlet always loved him and I never once understood why.

  Guess calling the house really was too much. She's pissed at me. Ah, she'll calm down.

  I look over the email. Ludo's ex-something alright.

  Ex South African head-kicker, right out of the football clubs. Stint in the army, discharged. Joined up with a private security concern in time for the tail end of the first Gulf War. Tooled around the world for a bit, nothing much there, goes back for Gulf War 2, making the fat cash beating the shit out of Iraqis presumptuous enough to live in Iraq.

  Then a year in Afghanistan.

  Now he's back in the country and, about nine months ago, moves to the City.

  So what's the link to him stirring up the cults out here?

  Possibilities: