Noir Fatale

by Larry Correia

  I respected her more for it than if she’d given in. I parked the car in front of her door and walked the little path to her house. Her roses, in her tiny little yard, were full abloom.

  The door was opened by a young woman in a severe skirt suit, who gave me a tiny smile before whispering, “Miss D’Orio” and stepping out of the way to let me enter a tiny, oppressively clean living room.

  She then walked through an arch to a hallway, murmuring something about “telling Mother.”

  I didn’t know if Mother Turner was her mother or her mother-in-law, and suddenly it occurred to me, more urgently, I didn’t know if Mother Turner was even awake. I’d been so taken with my ideas, with the need to let Arty go, I’d forgotten it might be dinnertime or later. Certainly, it was full night outside.

  I was relieved when Mother Turner came back with the young woman. She had obviously been awake. She’d also obviously been cooking, judging by the apron she was removing as she walked towards me. “Now, Miss D’Orio, it sure has been a long time,” she said, handing the apron to the younger woman, who then vanished back into the back of the house. “Sure has.” She extended her hand to me, then frowned a little when I shook it and a little more as she looked at me. She muttered, “Oh, my,” under her breath, and sat down on her sofa, while gesturing for me to sit. “I see you’re in trouble. Tell me your story, honey. Just tell me.”

  So I told her. From having decided to let Arty go, to the things that had happened today since I woke in that closet. Because I’d worked with Mother Turner before, I didn’t even hold back that Ale was a bad ’un or that he was involved in this. One had a feeling she had to know already.

  After I’d stopped talking—I must have talked a long time, because my throat hurt—she looked at me a long time. She whispered something about not knowing what to do, then she asked, “What would you have me do, Miss D’Orio?”

  I shrugged. “Something to find Ale maybe? Or Griffin, wherever he has him? You see I feel I must save him, and I also understand what Ale thinks and how he works, while Arty doesn’t. He doesn’t. I’m afraid Arty will get hurt.”

  Mother Turner took a deep breath. “Very well,” she said. “I can make you a charm to find your brother. But you must do me a favor in the meantime.”

  “Find you something of his?” I said. “I was afraid—”

  She shook her head. “No. Not that. That won’t be a problem. I have a way. No, Miss. I was wondering if you’d eat something before you go, because I can see you haven’t eaten in a while.”

  I would have liked to say no, but I was starving. While Mother Turner disappeared into one of the back rooms, the younger woman brought me rice and beef stew, and then, afterwards, a pastry dusted with powder sugar and a cup of coffee. I felt a new woman when Mother Turner came back.

  The charm she’d prepared was a little bit of string, which rose like a charmed snake and pointed in a direction. “That’s where he is. Just follow it. You’ll find him.”

  And then before I left, she touched my shoulder. “God bless you, Miss D’Orio. You’ll need a lot of courage.”

  I thought so too, and it would help if my stomach didn’t feel like jelly. But damn it, for all of Pater’s failings, he’d raised me to be a lady, and a lady doesn’t let a man who she’s fairly sure loves her, go and kill himself out of being a chivalrous fool.

  I set the thread on the dashboard and followed its pointing as much as the roads allowed. I got gas when it became obvious we were headed out of town and north. And then, in the dark, in the narrow mountain roads, I followed the thread.

  It took me ever higher, and then down a road that, honestly, was more of a goat track or likely a mule track, used long ago by miners’ mules.

  Even that ran out, so I grabbed the thread and my purse and continued on foot, cursing myself for seven kinds of fool for not having changed shoes. At least I was going to face death dressed to the nines. It might be some kind of consolation.

  The track descended down the rock face, in a narrow, winding path. And below, almost like a ghost, I saw something shine. It appeared and disappeared depending on the rain, and maybe on someone moving it.

  Getting closer, I saw it was the entrance to a mine. Colorado is full of abandoned mines. Some played out after the gold rush, when it became too hard to extract what precious metal remained in the rocks. And some…well, some were silver mines and still full of the metal, but silver price had fallen too much to be worth working.

  They usually had romantic names like the Lucky Strike Mine, or the Lost Hope Mine. This one could be any one of them. I approached cautiously. So Ale was here. That almost for sure meant Don Griffin, or what remained of him, was here. Good.

  At the door, there were two sentinels, I saw. One was fully visible to me as he was holding aloft a lantern, which must be the light I’d seen. Behind him was another man. I knew them both though not their names. They were part of Ale’s entourage, his goons to do with as he pleased. They dressed in a cheaper version of Ale’s finery: dark suits and screaming ties, and almost for sure fake jewelry.

  The guy who wasn’t holding the lantern told the other, “Stop swinging it around, fool. As well hang a sign saying we’re here, and you won’t see anything more than light reflecting on the rain.”

  “But Ale said—”

  The other guy cursed. “I don’t know who Ale expects will come in this rain and the dark. If they come, it will be in the morning, and the little wimp magician will be done and gone well before then, and us too.”

  “There were those headlights!”

  “Yeah, but they stopped somewhere up there. Probably some miner’s shack there.”

  So, there was that. The little wimp magician must be Griffin. And it hit me they were probably right at that. He’d be done and gone well before Arty got here.

  Which left me.

  Well…it was raining just enough and they were far out from the cave enough that I might be able to squeeze behind and into the place. But not with my heels clacking on the rock.

  I removed the heels, leaving them without remorse by the side of the path, and walked on, in my silk stockings, which were going to have far worse than a run in them.

  Down the path, stopping every time I loosened some gravel or made something fall, and around the two goons peering blindly into the falling rain.

  And then I was in the shaft.

  I was blind as the devil’s toe, in a winding darkness. I put out my hand, to feel the wall, and walked following it a good hundred feet before I heard a bellow from up ahead. “No, by God, she’s not a real person. She’s a damned simulacrum and you’ll give her to me, you little shite.”

  Another voice answered, one with whining overtones.

  “I paid! I paid good money,” Ale bellowed. Hard to miss my brother’s dulcet tones. “And you’ll give her to me. Or you’ll stay in the antimagic cage till you die.”

  I walked along the wall, towards the voice. As the wall turned—the tunnel turned, I guess—a sort of grayish light filtered in. It let me see a rough-hewn tunnel, turning gently.

  I followed it as silently as I could.

  From the end of the hallway came Ale’s voice, and then another voice murmuring, pleading.

  As light became brighter, I knit myself with the wall and slid along it. My dress would be a loss too, and my fur already was.

  I couldn’t track every word that came from down the hallway, but I could hear the gist and it was this: Ale had paid Griffin to build a simulacrum of some woman, which Griffin had then refused to hand over. Griffin kept insisting his creation had a soul. I wasn’t sure what that meant, or how it would be possible. I also didn’t know why Ale wanted a simulacrum of a woman. It had been bothering me since Griffin’s place. Except perhaps he wanted to hide the fact he’d knocked one of his women around by having an unmarked duplicate show herself?

  I finally reached a point in the hallway from which I could see a round chamber cut into the rock. Down from that ther
e would be more galleries, but this chamber had a lantern hanging from a hook on the timbers bracing the roof, a table and two chairs.

  On one of the chairs sat Ale. He sat with the chair reversed, his chin resting on the back. There was an ashtray on the floor next to him. It was full.

  On the table, on a cage that looked made of wicker and looked exactly like something you’d keep a canary in, sat a man. I knew it was Griffin. I’d have known it was Griffin even if I hadn’t seen the summoning at his place. What surprised me was the sudden rush of need, the desperate need to free him, to let him work, to—

  I had my gun out from my garter before I realized it. I was always a half decent shot. And I didn’t know how one shattered a magic-dampening cage. I knew such implements existed because they were always a plot device in the pulps. But in the pulps, usually the hero broke them with his bare hands, or unlocked them or something.

  Well, breaking it with my bare hands was likely to chip my nail polish. And besides, I had the pistol out. I pointed it above Griffin’s head in the cage. And I shot.

  The sound was deafening in the mine and Ale got up, his hand going to his gun as he turned to where I stood.

  “Honey!” he said. Then stopped. His mouth quirked in an unpleasant smile. “Damn, that’s good,” he said, turning to look at Griffin.

  I looked too.

  For just a moment I thought that the cage hadn’t broken, that my shot had gone wide. Then I realized that the very top piece had fallen. The next minute there were a dozen of me all around saying, “What do you mean, Ale?”

  Ale looked around, he looked back at Griffin, but the cage was empty and the magician was gone.

  “You little shit,” Ale said. “I’ll shoot every one of you.”

  And then he started firing wildly.

  I don’t remember shooting him, but I remember his looking very surprised, then falling. I remember the running feet in the hallway, the shouts of “Honey,” in two voices I knew all too well.

  And then there were Arty’s strong arms around me, and I was leaning into him, and I felt cold, really cold.

  “Stay with me, Honey,” Arty said. “Stay with me.”

  But I faded into darkness.

  ✧ ✧ ✧

  I woke with all of them around me. My father, Arty and Griffin.

  Pater was saying, “So it’s not my daughter?”

  And Griffin was saying, in his whining, apologetic way, “Well, it is and it isn’t, Mr. D’Orio.”

  I flowed in and out of a dream hearing bits and pieces: simulacrum, ritual on my birthday. “Sometimes the soul gets captured is what it is. There’s no law about it, and that’s the truth, Mr. D’Orio, but I didn’t feel good giving her to him for who knew what purpose, while it was a living mind and soul in it.”

  I thought, “Me! They’re talking about me.”

  I shivered, ice cold, and slipped away into a dream where I was just a magical doll of sorts, and no one cared. I woke up again to, “She disappeared a year ago.” It was Pater, and his voice was sad, slow. “I thought she’d gone to California, to… I thought she’d gone. But I investigated, and no one could find a trace of her, and I said something to Ale, and I guess he got scared.”

  “Yeah,” Griffin said. “He just wanted her to be seen around. He wanted people to know Honey D’Orio was alive and well. That’s all I know. But it…she had the memories and the thoughts. And Jesus, as you see, she bleeds red.”

  I opened my eyes and there was a lot of red, over my clothes and over Arty’s hands, and over the hands of a man I recognized, through foggy vision, as our doctor.

  I fell into a dream again. I wasn’t real. I wasn’t even real. I was a thing. Which is why when Griffin was captured, my mind was the easiest to reach, to send an instruction to save him. He’d made me.

  It took a week to be on my feet. They found her meanwhile. They found me, I should say, in one of the deep dark tunnels at the back of the mine. She’d been shot, wearing an evening dress and dancing shoes. Ale shot her in the parking lot of the Magic Cat. And he hid her in the mine, whose name, fading on a board by the entrance, was “Honey Fall.”

  Pater didn’t have the body transferred to the family crypt, though he had a priest come and bless that forgotten tunnel of that lost mine.

  He was changed, Pater was. Arty had gotten him when he’d realized what was going on. He figured only my father could stop Ale. I’d managed that well enough, but I couldn’t make Pater as he’d been. He’d lost interest in the business. He’d lost interest in everything except visiting me every day of my prolonged convalescence.

  It was December before I was back on my feet. Apparently, a body and a soul is a body and a soul, even if a body started out as a simulacrum. It takes the same time to heal. It works the same way, as both Griffin and the doctor explained.

  “That’s why Mother Turner wanted you to eat,” Griffin had said. “Simulacrums that are just simulacrums—just dolls made of magic—can’t. She sensed you weren’t that. You moved like the original, and you had thoughts of your own, even under compulsion. She wanted to make sure.”

  That had been months ago, and I’d been spending time in my—in my original’s—apartment, in bed and sitting by the window, while a professional nurse looked after me. Arty had returned to California. He said he was building a studio and couldn’t leave it for that long. I’d had two postcards, one showing sunny Los Angeles, another an orange grove. He’d only written “Wish you were here” on the back both times.

  I’d seen pictures of him in the magazines, with this platinum blond actress who was the big star of his new movie.

  Then it was a week to Christmas. Snow covered Denver in sparkling jewels. The house and gardens had been lit.

  “I want you to come with me to the station,” Pater said, coming into my room, where I sat on a chair, rereading the glossy magazine with a picture of Arty and the blonde.

  “Darling,” I said. “It is very sweet of you, but I’m no longer five. I’ve seen the Christmas lights downtown many times before. It doesn’t excite me.”

  “Minx,” Pater said but said it approvingly. “I want to take you to the station. There’s a young man coming to town to ask you a very important question.”

  I dropped the magazine. Tears sprang to my eyes unbidden. “Arty? Daddy, I can’t.”

  “Why can’t you? Seems to me you should have married him when he first asked, and told me to go to the devil. Well, there is no dynasty here. I’m letting everything go, winding down all my affairs. You two go out, and I’ll come and join you when I can. It’s time I lived in the sun.”

  “But, Daddy, you forgot. I’m not the real Honey. I’m a body built who knows how, and a captured soul. What if it all stops working tomorrow and I die?”

  Pater patted my hand. “Then, my dear, you’re exactly like the rest of the human race. You might as well make the most of it.”

  So I did.

  Three Kates

  A STORY OF THE GENIUS WARS

  Mike Massa

  “Germany calling,” the nasal, upper-crust English voice emerged scratchily from the speaker set into the ceiling of the poorly lit pub. “Germany calling.”

  Erich Hendriksen moodily pulled at his warm pint and leaned back in his chair, listening as the propaganda broadcast began.

  Lord Haw-Haw could be counted upon to lie but news cloaked in propaganda was better than nothing, and nothing was all that the Allied censors were offering at the moment. None of the customers sheltering from the intermittent rain objected to the radio selection, each quietly, expectantly awaiting darkness and the possible return of German bombers.

  The drinkers ignored his black cassock and white collar, and Hendriksen ignored them in turn. If any thought it strange that the broad-shouldered priest sought out a murky bar for a beer, they kept it to themselves. His damp coat hung from his chairback, the mud blotches along the hem drying in the pub’s warmth.

  “Tonight the German High Command will ag
ain send their irresistible fleet of aircraft to destroy the criminal English war effort. Many civilians are therefore put at risk due to the intransigence of the English Parliament…”

  Risk.

  Hendriksen knew something about that. His short-fused mission was redolent with the stuff.

  And now the familiar risks of failure and capture were newly supplemented by being killed by his own side’s bombers.

  Haw-Haw’s droning voice grated on Hendriksen’s nerves. The Abwehr controller in Berlin required him to monitor the nightly broadcasts for the codes inserted into the news program. Each launched successive phases of his mission. That meant that he had to endure Haw-Haw’s poorly affected, offensively incorrect upper-class English accent. The sheer absence of professionalism helped the hate come more easily.

  That and the instinctive disdain of the field operative on the sharp end, reflecting on the secure, easy life of a rear echelon propagandist.

  With an effort, Hendriksen relaxed his white-knuckled grip on his drink before his scarred, powerful hands broke the glass and made a scene.

  The pub door banged open, admitting the chill November wind. The latest customer slipped between the blackout curtains which had been in place throughout England since that idiot Goering convinced the general staff that he could bomb the British to the negotiating table. The curtains dragged at a thin, tan coat, revealing a pale flash of thigh.

  The newcomer was female, and strikingly so.

  She stepped quickly to the bar, her windblown auburn hair obscuring most of her face, permitting only a brief glimpse of carmine lips. The aproned barkeep stepped forward, squinting suspiciously. The new guest leaned across the bar, murmuring quietly to the proprietor as every male customer surreptitiously noted the perfect line of her seamed stockings.

  The barkeep nodded towards the shadow where Hendriksen sat.

  The agent watched, his trained eyes dark as she turned towards his table, affording him the first look at her youthful face and wide eyes. She was shockingly young and her tentative steps suggested unease, perhaps at being inside a drinking hall. Tapping heels carried her all the way to his table.