Ghosts of Karnak
Authors: George Mann
Also Available from Titan Books
THE GHOST
Ghosts of Manhattan
Ghosts of War
Ghosts of Empire
(October 2017)
NEWBURY & HOBBES
Newbury & Hobbes: The Affinity Bridge
Newbury & Hobbes: The Osiris Ritual
Newbury & Hobbes: The Immorality Engine
Newbury & Hobbes: The Executioner’s Heart
Newbury & Hobbes: The Revenant Express
Newbury & Hobbes: The Albion Initiative
(August 2017)
The Casebook of Newbury & Hobbes
SHERLOCK HOLMES
Sherlock Holmes: The Will of the Dead
Sherlock Holmes: The Spirit Box
Encounters of Sherlock Holmes
Further Encounters of Sherlock Holmes
Associates of Sherlock Holmes
Further Associates of Sherlock Holmes
(August 2017)
GHOSTS OF KARNAK
Print edition ISBN: 9781783294169
E-book edition ISBN: 9781783294176
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: May 2016
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
George Mann asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Copyright © 2016 George Mann
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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For Lyla Foy, whose
UMi
provided the fuel.
Her name was Autumn, and like the season that had invested her with both name and temperament, her appearance heralded the onset of a fall.
She’d been a pretty thing; all auburn curls and heels, her mouth a slash of wicked scarlet, her painted fingernails uniform and precise. She’d been twenty, twenty-two at most. She’d barely commenced her life, and now the city had taken it from her.
Donovan crushed the nib of his cigarette between his fingertips, grinding the ash and embers until it burned, until the butt disintegrated, and he allowed it to dribble away in the wind. How had a young woman like this ended up lying with her face in a puddle in an alleyway?
He dropped to his haunches, studying the shocked expression on her face; frozen, rigid, like an obscene photograph printed in a tabloid rag. She looked surprised. She hadn’t been expecting to die, then. Even after everything that had been done to her, she’d clung to the notion that she might somehow find a way out and live, that someone might rush to help her in her final moments, fend off her attackers and sweep her away to safety. And then the moment had come, and she’d been unprepared, terrified, alone. It was a hell of a way to die.
“Ritual, then?”
Donovan looked up to see Mullins standing a few feet from the body, rubbing his sweaty palms on the legs of his pants. His ample cheeks were flushed, and he kept glancing nervously at the corpse, as if he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to stare at it, or run a mile in the opposite direction.
Donovan sighed. “Well, given the fact they’ve carved bloody great icons into her flesh, it’s a safe assumption, Sergeant.”
“Yeah, well, I suppose it is,” said Mullins, redundantly. He ran a hand through his hair; a nervous gesture Donovan had seen a hundred times before.
“Listen, go take a look along the alleyway, see if you can’t find anything her attackers might have left behind; a knife, a cigarette butt, a footprint.” He knew the chances of turning up anything useful were minimal at best, but he couldn’t bear to watch the poor guy suffer any longer.
Mullins nodded gratefully and hurried away. Donovan wondered if the woman reminded him of someone. He’d seen that happen before; watched the most stoic of officers go to pieces over the sight of a dead girl in a familiar dress. Things like that, they brought it all home, made you think it could have been you. That it might have been your wife, or girlfriend, or sister lying there in the gutter, legs splayed apart, stockings torn, blood dribbling from the corner of her mouth. The thought made Donovan grateful he and Flora had never thought about having kids. He was certainly old enough to be this girl’s father.
He scratched at his new beard. It felt wiry and unfamiliar, and he was still unsure if he was going to keep it. Flora liked it, though; he could tell from the way he’d caught her looking at him in bed that morning, the little sideways glance when she thought he wasn’t paying attention. She’d practically sighed with relief when he’d stepped out of the bathroom, toweling himself down, with the thing still plastered over his face. Maybe he’d give it a few more days. Maybe the itching would stop.
He sighed, took another cigarette from the packet inside his jacket, and pulled the ignition tab. The light was fading now, the long, red fingers of the sunset clawing at the Manhattan skyline, as if trying desperately to cling on. Soon the police trucks would be here with the surgeon, and the stretcher, and the dancing lights, and this poor woman would lose any shred of dignity she had left.
Not that she had much.
Donovan took a long draw on his cigarette, and then gently, cupping the back of her head, rolled her over onto her back.
“You there?” he whispered into the mouth of the alleyway. “If you’re watching from the shadows, you can damn well get down here and help.”
He waited a moment for a reply, but there was nothing. No subtle shifting of the light, no red glow of night-vision lenses, no quiet, measured observations. He wasn’t there.
Donovan balanced his cigarette on his bottom lip, and leaned over, studying the woman’s face. There was a mark on her forehead, carved into the flesh with the tip of a knife. The blood had run, mingling with the water to form glossy streaks, but the symbol was just about visible. It appeared to be a circle or disk, resting inside a pair of horns.
There were other marks, too—one just below the soft cup of her throat, above the curve of her breasts, depicting what looked like a small bird with a long beak, and another on her forearm, a neatly carved succession of nested shapes—a circle inside a square, inside a triangle, inside a larger circle.
Donovan chewed the end of his cigarette. She’d been alive when they’d cut her. He knew that much about corpses. He could tell from the way the blood had swelled to the surface, how the skin had puckered. She’d probably screamed, too. The pain would have been excruciating. He’d have Mullins check that out as well, talk to anyone in the nearby apartments in case they’d heard anything. Trouble was, they probably heard women screaming out here every night. It was that kind of neighborhood.
Mullins had already taken her purse; Donovan would take a proper look at that back at the station. He checked her hands, though. There were rings still on her fingers. Impressive rings, too, with big rocks. She’d been going up in the world, keeping company with someone who could afford expensive presents. The rings meant something else, too—this wasn’t just a robbery, with someone trying to cover his tracks or get a cheap thrill from carving her up. Whoever had done this had left her purse, and three rings totaling in the hundreds of dollars. Whoever was responsible—whichever sick bastard Donovan was going to have to find—had targeted this woman for a reason. The symbols were a message. Donovan’s first job was to discover for whom.
He saw the lights before he heard the shrill cry of the sirens, and stood, pluming smoke from his nostrils. Two police trucks and a surgeon, just as he’d anticipated. He’d been playing this game for too long.
“Mullins?” he said, cupping his hand around his mouth and calling down the alleyway. “You found anything?”
“No, sir,” came the muffled response. “Nothing worth mentioning.”
“All right, then get out here and brief the others. I want her bringing straight to the morgue, and I want Dr. Vettel’s eyes on her. No one else. Only Vettel. She’s not going to like it, but when she’s done working up a lather on the holotube, tell her that I owe her one.” He flicked ash from the end of his cigarette, watching as Mullins emerged from the other end of the alleyway, wearing a sullen expression. “You got that?”
“I’ve got it,” he said.
Donovan nodded. Uniformed men were jumping out of the trucks, spilling out into the road in a veritable tide of blue.
Shame they couldn’t have been here when she needed them
, he thought. He knew he wasn’t being fair, that he was grouchy and tired and needed a drink, but then what had happened to the woman wasn’t fair, either.
He rubbed his palm over his face. There’d been too many girls recently. Maybe it was starting to get to him.
Mullins was already talking to Parkhurst, one of the uniformed boys, issuing instructions about getting the body brought back to the morgue. Donovan decided not to bother him. He’d see him back at the station.
Turning up the collar of his coat, he walked past the parked police trucks, their lights still flashing wildly, and cut down a side street, emerging onto Fourth Avenue. Cars sailed by on the wet road as if skating on mirrors, their tires stirring up puddles close to the sidewalk. Steam curled from a nearby standing pipe, and overhead, the silvery shaft of a searchlight from a police blimp danced across the rooftops, making ghostly shapes amongst the stark silhouettes of water towers and billboards.
Donovan flicked the butt of his cigarette into the gutter, where it fizzed for a moment in a puddle before going out. He figured that was some kind of metaphor for his day.
He took a deep breath, then set out for the station.
If the splintered ribs weren’t enough, now he was bleeding from a gash above his left eye, and he had an awful, dawning notion that his lung was about to collapse.
The Ghost tried to roll onto his side, but even that set off a series of blooming explosions in his head; tiny bursts of fairy lights, dancing before his eyes.
He sucked at the air, and then wished he hadn’t. His chest burned. Not just the usual, taken-one-too-many-punches sort of pain, either—this was
excruciating
. The sort of pain that made you think twice about trying to breathe again. He decided that might be his best course of action—to feign death and hope the thing that had done this to him would lose interest in the fight.
His cheek was pressed against the wet concrete. He twisted his head.