Hell's Maw (14 page)

“Die now,” the woman breathed, leaning down to touch Ramos on the midpoint of his protective helmet, where the center of his forehead would be.

Ramos smiled at the prospect, sending the hidden signal—the one programmed into all living things—from his brain into his body, instructing it to give up the fight for survival, to die for his new mistress. As his breathing stopped and his heart ceased its beating, Ramos felt a wave of euphoria running through his slowing brain.

The woman strode onward through the tunnel, toward the exit where the two Pretors waited, accompanied by her two Terror Priests, who gave protection as she went
about her dark business. Her name was Ereshkigal and she was alive once more, walking the Earth for the first time in three millennia.

Poised outside in readiness, the two Pretors had no comprehension of what was about to hit them, of how they would beg with tears of joy for their lives to be ended for the woman with the feather train—until they saw the naked woman emerge and begin her dance of death.

There was something wrong about the woman, Pretor Corcel considered as he watched the would-be bomber through the one-way glass of the interview room. She had been cuffed to the table there like Grant had the night before, beneath the bright fluorescents that cast her skin in the pallid shade of sour milk.

It wasn't obvious, Corcel thought, but it was clear from her eyes. Not obvious, and perhaps more unsettling because of that. Her eyes were too small. The pupils and irises the color of chocolate were overwhelmed by their whites, like two birds' nests floating on a vast river of rapids.

She waited there, not complaining but just twitching now and then and scratching at herself as if there were bugs crawling beneath her skin. Her pale, pale skin.
That's the light,
Corcel tried to reassure himself.
No one looks good under fluorescent light.

He was right—no one did. But that wasn't it. There was something more to it, like looking at sickness, at death.

Emiliana Cáscara joined him outside the interview room carrying a thin manila file of paper. Her hair was as perfect as ever, her suit spotless—the opposite of the decaying woman waiting behind the glass.

“Find anything on her?” Corcel asked.

“No ID,” Cáscara lamented, “but she matches the description from a missing person report filed a little over a week ago.”

Corcel raised his eyebrows at that and Cáscara showed him the report she carried. It featured just a single sheet printout with a blurry photograph and a description.

“Bella Arran, café waitress. Lives on Camino Ancho, went missing eight days ago, approximately 11:30 p.m. on her way home from work,” Cáscara summarized.

Corcel peered at the picture, narrowing his eyes past the blur. “Could be her,” he agreed. “Let's see what the Americans make of it.”

A few moments later, Grant and Shizuka were allowed entry to join the two Pretors in the secure area beside the interview rooms.

“What do you have on her?” Grant asked.

“Possible missing persons,” Cáscara outlined, running through the information she had dug up.

“And you think this is her?” Shizuka queried.

Cáscara bit her lip. “You tell me. It's our starting point anyway.”

The four of them entered the interview room. As they did, Shizuka was struck by the smell on the air. She turned to Grant, halting in the doorway as the two Pretors continued on inside. “You smell that?” she asked quietly.

Grant shook his head briefly, just a fractional movement. He had had his nose broken so many times that his sense of smell was compromised. He could smell strong scents, but anything faint was lost to him.

Shizuka sniffed again, her nostrils twitching. “Like rotting meat,” she said quietly, “the way a smilax gets.”

Grant nodded an acknowledgment. The smilax was a type of carnivorous vine found in North America that let off a scent like rotting meat to attract its prey. “Strong?” he asked.

Shizuka shook her head. “No, but it's there. Something caught in the air-con, maybe.”

“Maybe,” Grant said, eyeing the AC grille high on the
wall. He wasn't so sure. His eyes couldn't help but be attracted to the pallid form of the woman who had set off the bomb in the baby carriage just a few hours before. There was something very off about her.

As the Pretors sat down, immediately the woman who may or may not be Bella Arran looked up with those disconcerting eyes of hers. Corcel took the lead, introducing the other people in the room. And then he asked her name.

The woman glared at him and spit on the desk she had been chained to.

“Nice,” Grant muttered, from his position standing beside the door with Shizuka. Waiting there, the two of them looked a little like bouncers.

Corcel looked at the spittle on the desk for a few seconds. It had flecks of gray in it, like ash from a cigarette. “
That
won't get us anywhere,” he told the woman in Spanish. “You're here until I say you leave, so the sooner you answer our questions, the sooner we can be done with all of this.”

The woman's pinprick eyes flickered from Corcel to Cáscara on the chairs, and then over to Grant and Shizuka by the door behind the Pretors. Slowly, her expression changed into a sneer of superiority.

Cáscara picked up the questioning. “You can speak, correct?” she asked.

The woman glared at her, saying nothing.

“She shouted something when she came through the doors,” Grant remarked helpfully. “‘Corpses for my mistress.'”

“You can speak?” Cáscara asked again, more insistent this time.

“Yes,” the woman replied tonelessly as if this was the first time she was being asked.

“Please give us your name,” Corcel asked gently.

The woman continued to glare at him, her mouth sealed tightly.

“A woman went missing a little over a week ago,” Cáscara began after thirty seconds had passed. “Stop me if this begins to sound familiar. She was a waitress at a café on fiftieth called Oscuro. The woman's name was Bella Arran. Do you want me to stop yet, or should I continue?”

The woman watched Cáscara with pinprick eyes, her expression unreadable.

“Are you Bella?” Corcel asked. “We suspect that you are and that perhaps you are in trouble.”

“Trouble which we may be able to help you with if you will speak to us,” Cáscara added gently.

The woman's eerie gaze switched back to Corcel, watching him with that piercing stare. “You believe that I am her,” she said at last, “the woman, Bella Arran?

“Bella Arran is dead. But what came afterward, that is me. I see now how life was wasted, its purpose rudimentary, banal and pointless. My mistress showed me the true worth of the soul, and I followed her down into the darkness of the womb's embrace. I remembered as I went into that darkness how life had begun and how its promise had been squandered, over and over, year after year. How what I had been was as nothing to what I could have been, to what I still can be. And she showed me how all I needed to do was give myself to her and die and then I could be happy.”

“And are you?” Cáscara asked. “Happy?”

“I feel happiness now the like of which I could never describe,” the woman who had been Bella Arran said, her voice wistful. She closed her eyes as she spoke these words, pale eyelids dropping down before her unsettling gaze like a store's shutters. The lids were too pale and too thin—they looked as though they had been poorly cut from tracing paper.

“I embrace the light behind the darkness that waits at the grave,” Arran said, “for only with light can the darkness ever be seen. I am future, while your past is already racing away.”

“She says she's dead,” Grant translated into English for Shizuka as he listened to the Commtact's translation.

Shizuka looked at him with concern, saying nothing.

“You've spoken of your ‘mistress,'” Corcel said. “Who is she?”

“The great lady under the earth,” the dead woman replied, her eyes remaining hidden behind those awful tracing-paper lids. “Your judge in the world that is coming. You are corpses-in-waiting, flowers to be plucked by my mistress, Ereshkigal.”

As she spoke the name Ereshkigal, something seemed to change in the woman's physical makeup. Before the startled eyes of the two Pretors, Grant and Shizuka, the woman's previously pallid flesh began to glow in patches, like paper catching light. A moment later and without warning, her whole head was engulfed in a plume of black smoke through which only the licking flames could be seen. The flames and something else—the bright teeth of her widening smile. Her exposed skin billowed smoke, filling the air above her like ink dropped in water.

Closest to the fire extinguisher located at the far side of the door, Grant grabbed it, hefting it up in both hands and clamping down the firing nozzle even as the two Pretors leaped out of the way of the expanding cloud of smoke and flame. A jet of white foam emerged from the fire extinguisher, spraying across the room as Grant targeted the burning woman.

“My mistress shall come for you soon enough,” Bella Arran stated quietly from behind the curtain of smoke, her voice unhurried, its tone eerily normal.

As the flame-retarding chemicals struck the woman,
her eerie voice chided them from behind the curtain of black smoke. “You cannot avoid her steps. And when she comes, her love will be all that you shall know.”

Shizuka pulled at the door handle but the room had locked automatically when it had closed, sealing in the prisoner and interviewer as a safety feature in case the prisoner somehow overpowered the Pretor. A request was needed to open the door, which was monitored at all times.

Corcel was at Shizuka's side in a moment, hammering against the reinforced glass panel in the door to call the attention of his fellow Pretors outside.

“Let us out,” he shouted. “Quickly—there's a fire in here.”

With Pretor Cáscara behind him, Grant continued dousing the burning woman with the extinguisher, the sound of its loud jet muffling her chanting voice so that he only heard fragments of her words. “You are corpses-in-waiting, every one of you,” she said. “Each of you shall know bliss and shall embrace that bliss with absolute love and absolute joy. You shall embrace the grave willingly and only then will you know the loving touch of Ereshkigal.”

The room was filling with the thick, noxious black smoke that was billowing from the burning body. It reeked of burning fat, hissing and cracking as the skin blistered and the flesh beneath it cooked.

A moment later, the door to the interview room opened with a click as the magnetic seal was unlocked from without.

“Go! Go!” Pretor Corcel shouted, ushering Shizuka outside past the shocked faces of three Pretors waiting by the door.

“Liana?” Corcel encouraged as he stood in the doorway, holding the door open with his back. His partner backed away from the burning figure at the desk, trotting
out through the open door as one of the uniformed Pretors entered with another fire extinguisher.

“Grant?” Corcel called.

Grant continued to douse the burning body for a few more seconds, but the flames were out now and it was just smoke billowing in thick, inky clouds from the body. The voice had stopped chanting, the white teeth still visible, locked in a rictus grin amid the blurred blackness of the head. “She's out,” he said.

“Come on,” Corcel encouraged. “Don't breathe any more of this ash.”

Grant nodded, striding across the room and placing the spent fire extinguisher on one of the chairs that the two Pretors had been using. “Thanks, man,” Grant said, coughing to clear his dry throat as he exited the room past Corcel.

Corcel waited a moment longer in the doorway as more Pretors were hurrying along the corridor outside to assist. The Pretors carried firefighting equipment and wore breath masks and oxygen packs.

Bella Arran's body had slumped back after the fire, her head fallen back as far as it could go, exposing her charcoal-black throat so that it was almost in line with the ceiling. Her clothes had burned away along with her skin so that she was just a mangled mire of bones and burned flesh now. Dark smoke rose from the corpse, leaving the stench of burning meat on the air.

Corcel turned away, letting the cleanup squad do their job.

“Well, that was downright creepy,” Grant stated grimly. He was standing by the window in a communal room in the Hall of Justice, taking the disposable cup of coffee that Pretor Corcel had just poured him.

The room was small with green-painted walls that reminded Grant of pond weed and an arrangement of low, comfortable seating that had seen better days. A coffee table dominated the center of the room, and Pretor Cáscara had taken a seat opposite Shizuka while Corcel worked the percolator in the corner. The room was two stories up with a barred window overlooking the rear of the building. The window looked down on a service road that ended in an underpass leading into the multistory parking garage at the side of the building and featured a locked area where trash cans were stored for pickup.

The smell of smoke hung heavily on everyone's clothes.

“She had nothing on her to trigger that,” Corcel confirmed. “We checked her pockets before she was put in the interrogation room. She was clean.”

“Have you ever heard of spontaneous human combustion?” Cáscara asked the room.

Shizuka was sitting opposite her, erect on one of the sagging seats, her body poised, alert. “Mr. Krook in
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens dies in such a way, if I recall correctly.”

Cáscara nodded. “It is a documented phenomenon,
although of questionable veracity. According to the reports, a human body combusts without any external source of ignition—no wick, no fuel.”

Grant turned from the window. “And you think that's what our suspect, Bella Arran, just did?”