Take No Prisoners (20 page)
Authors: John Grant
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Fantasy, #Short Stories (Single Author)
I shook my head again. "Tell me," I commanded.
She shrugged: clearly she was not much concerned by my roughness. "Any universe must have its Principles of Good and Evil," she said. "That's more than theology: it's a truth. If they're not there, they'll in due course be manufactured: they're required. It's as valid for the Dross as for anywhere else, which is why I came here, to seek out two individuals who could adopt those posts. But all I found" – and here she nodded her head forlornly – "was yourself, Piggy. The humans have been leached by the loss of The World, and the animals likewise. Only you, neither human nor animal, are still altogether here. You may not wish it, but you're the Dross's sole spirit, its genius.
Sole
. Are you sure you won't sit down beside me? We're friends again now, are we not?"
I glowered.
"Have it your own way." She intertwined her fingers and stretched her arms, looking at the backs of her knuckles. "It had been my desire that you might be divisible, so possibly giving to the Dross its twin but opposed Principles – yet you are far better integrated than your origin would suggest. And then I thought that at least you might be fitted to become the Dross's Soul of Good; the prospect of the Dross stumbling along for a while without an Evil Principle to hate dismayed me less than it should have, I confess. But, alas, you showed in our card game that you're unqualified for the task."
"I told you before," I said, "I'm just a humble beast. You cannot expect too much of me."
"Perhaps you are far more than I expected," she said quietly, and for once her catly eyes looked soft. "It depends on how you look at it. Whatever the case" – with a dismissive wave of a small hand – "it's the inescapable truth that you're incapable of carrying the burden of human pain that a Principle of Good must bear. Even a small fraction of it came closer to destroying you than you yet realize."
"I am glad I cannot stomach your twisted nightmares," I said.
"In a way, I'm glad, too – glad for you." Her eyes were saying otherwise. Softly she added: "But they weren't dreams."
"Then what of me?"
Another sorrowful smile. "It's obvious, surely? You must become the Dross's Principle of Evil, must you not?"
"But ..." My crudely molded hands were all that I could see. The sausage fingers flexed of their own accord. I had accepted my humbleness, my insignificance in the scheme of things, my baseness – yet until this moment I had never thought of myself as being particularly evil. Nor particularly good, come to that – neither. Now I saw myself as not even granted the virtue of insignificance: I was vile.
"You're not vile," she said, plucking the word from my thoughts. "Do not see yourself as so. And neither are you evil – rather, you're
too virtuous
, Piggy. A less meritable individual than yourself might have borne the burden of pain with insouciance, might have laughed their way through my simple trial. A Soul of Good must either be infinitely compassionate or completely heartless. You showed yourself to lack the degree of charity to have pity on the tormentors the cards brought to you; yet you were not heartless enough to contemplate dispassionately the sufferings of their victims. In all the universes, I know of no Principle of Good who has come to the post through compassion: all have hearts of stone, and would not survive otherwise. Piggy, stop weeping like this: is it not a fine thing to be, to be more virtuous than a god?"
It didn't seem to me so: was I not less, even, than a human?
"Come here." She said; this time it was no request. "Stop weeping." Likewise. "Sit down."
At last I looked up from my hands. Quite predictably – I say that with hindsight, of course – we were in a great dining-room, like one of those that had become so popular in the later days before The World deserted us, and even a little after, until they were dissolved by Drosshood. No, it was huger by far than any of those could have been: the furthest wall ahead of me was a hazy patch, almost too small to be seen; small clouds lurked in the moldings of the ceiling, far above. Waiters with horns and arrow-head tails and grins like that of the tavern's oaf sped up and down the length of the hall's single table, at whose head sat I. At the very most remote end from me, yet seemingly no more than touching distance away, sat the beautiful entity.
She smiled and raised an empty glass, then drank the air from it. At her signal, the other diners down the sides of the table straggled to their feet – white bibs and black lapels and stupid little ties and elaborated bodices and oh-what-a-plunging-cleavage-that-tart-has-dears and all – and raised glasses charged with something more spiritous than mere air. Red, but not like blood.
They were cheering. Half a million cheers or more. They were gulping their liquor back. Half a million of them – it was almost as deafening as the cheering had been.
"Drink, Piggy!" called the being.
"Yes – drink!" came the bawl from
omnes
. "Drink! Hail to you, our Gloried Soul of Evil!" All that sort of human guff.
"I
would
drink up if I were you, dear Piggy," whispered the being in my ear, even though she was kilometers distant. "You'll find it'll help. These formal affairs are such a bore. And, as an immortal – oh, did I forget to mention that? – you have an eternity of them facing you."
Like my tankard in the tavern, so my glass here.
And some time later I awoke and found me there on a cold hill side.
Hung over.
~
Who knows who she – who it – was? That she was not of the Dross was obvious, and much that she said persuaded me she was not of The World, either. And who gave her the
permission
to visit this curse upon me? Or was she herself the highest authority?
Not here. Not any longer. There is but one Highest Authority in the Dross, is there not? Even
I
dare not deny myself in that.
Yet ... yet, while I have lost that ridiculous humbleness I once felt towards humans – or, more precisely, towards the human soul and all the marvels I attributed to it – still I do not know but that I wouldn't go down on my knees before her, if that were what she desired me to do. Like I once might have before my maker, as his dutiful, adoring, infinitely inferior beast.
Despite the fact that, as the Dross's appointed Soul of Evil, I'm no longer a beast.
I am
Beast
.
I've cheated the system, of course, as I think I was intended to do. The Dross could do worse than having me – rather than anyone else – as its Principle of Evil and so, however I'm tempted to find a final relief from the loneliness and the pain, I take very great care of my life. To judge by the mess that the humans are making of the simple task of creating a Principle of Good for themselves, they'd make a real shambles of replacing me as their Soul of Evil – a loud
ugh!
to the thought! I've walled myself away here in Starveling, which I've transformed through brutal measures into a remote and impregnable castle, and the guards who shield me die in imaginative torment should I indicate to their officers even the vaguest, most unjustified scintilla of suspicion that one of them might not have my personal welfare as his highest priority. After all, while their pain may not be fully pain, as mine is, I know that they do not like to die.
Imagine how much worse it might be if I were to be replaced by someone without compassion. Cruel enough for a world that its Principle of
Good
should be like that.
There are compensations to this miserable existence. I have all that I could ever want by way of fleshly pleasures, and I find some joy in the exercise of my tyranny. If only rarely, sometimes I can distinguish that transcendent music which the more artistically minded of the dying make a part of their screams. And I gain some satisfaction from knowing that, in a backhanded fashion, I am indeed serving the Cause of Good.
But all of these are trivial rewards, save one, already adverted to and here easily enough delineated.
There was a time when I was ashamed of myself – ashamed of being Beast.
I feel nothing of that now.
By contrast, I am
proud
to be Beast. Indeed, let me shout it so that the rafters of Starveling ring:
I am proud to be Beast!
(Starveling: a castle built of winds and rains ...)
I am glorious in my own wildness, in my savagery, in my brutality, in the power of my
self
.
I am a fitting pivot around which all of this battered world, the Dross, the scraps that The World sniffingly discarded as too poor and inconsequential for its infernally fastidious consideration ... I am the pivot around which all of the Dross must perforce turn.
I am not only the Soul of Evil, I am this
world's
soul.
I am the driving force that keeps the Dross alive.
I am Beast.
Let me bellow it again, in a voice so drink-thicked and rejoicedly guttural that it is impossible for anyone save myself to understand my power-hallowed words:
I
A M
B E A S T !
~
But ...
I am unhappy as the echoes fade.
Drunk, I guess.
Time for bed.
For a moment the empty bottle is invisible, and then I hear it shatter on the flagstones below.
A Case of Four Fingers
They'd engraved the tombstone of Pretty Polly McTavish with the parrot's tragic last words: "Hello Sailaaargh."
It was a touching gesture, and I don't think there was anyone among the small huddle of mourners at the pet cemetery who didn't have a tear in their eye as the Reverend Jeremy Harcourt-Fruitcake plummily read out the last rites. Pretty Polly had sacrificed her life so that Miss Grimthorpe, the so-called Pantry Detective, could solve her forty-seventh and best-selling case to date, the grisly
Who Slew the Cockatoos?
The grim service over, I headed off alone down Curling Lane to my home and workplace at the edge of the village.
Birds sang.
Bees buzzed.
Trees rustled.
Clouds did whatever it is that clouds do.
It was Indian Summer, always a busy time in the village.
Always a busy time for me.
Today I was going to have to process Pretty Polly McTavish and, if memory served aright, half a dozen other carcasses. Human ones.
But first I needed a cup of tea.
Strong tea.
Later I sat on my porch, savoring the Broken Orange Pekoe, looking at the sky, wondering if it was time yet for me to start searching, just out of interest you understand, through the Sits Vac columns in the newspaper. Ten years – ten years I'd been doing this job, and that's a long time out of anyone's life. Especially since, if you looked at it another way, I'd been doing the job for something like a century. And despite the fact that even a long time doesn't take much of a chunk out of eternity.
But the century felt like an eternity in itself, is what I'm getting at.
The village always looked good in Indian Summer, which lasts about half the year in these parts. Christmas takes up a good part of the rest. Halloween lasts a week and a half.
Maybe I'd better explain.
Maybe I'd better not.
Not yet.
I drained the last of the tea and flicked the cup so that the damp leaves at the bottom flew to land among the oleanders. God alone knows how they flourish so well, all year round, since I hate gardening. It's the digging. Makes me feel creepy.
Superstitious.
But that's the way I am.
The cup washed and put away in the cupboard, I sauntered from the house across to my workshed. It was tatty, corrugated-iron-roofed, wooden-walled, brown and greasy, just like it had been yesterday. Along one side of it were the heavy green plastic hoppers where the remains of the deceased were regularly dumped by the Authorities. One hopper per corpse. In Indian Summer it can get so busy that I need a dozen hoppers, but today, according to my accounts book – more accurate than my memory – there were only eight corpses to deal with. Still quite a number, but not as bad as it sometimes is.
Hopper number one. Accounts book and pencil out of pocket. Tick off Pretty Polly McTavish in the RECEIVED column. The brute had dispatched her with a baseball bat, so she wasn't a pretty sight. She'd require stitching before she was ready to be seen out and about again.
Hopper number two. The first body of a set of five, I knew. This one and the other four had been exotic dancers, all stripped naked except for skimpy red underwear, all slashed and mutilated in inventive ways. Dave Knuckle had been in town for the Case of the Parboiled Detective, soon to be published as
Smack My Butt, Babe
. Which of the mangled bimbos had been actual victims and which were merely his discarded girlfriends was always a tough one. Best left to the Authorities.
Hopper number seven.
Tick
went the pencil. The by-product of an ongoing case for Sir John. An Ashmolean subcurator smothered by having a rolled-up paperback copy of
Piers Plowman
rammed down his throat. The acne scars were as livid as vintage port.
Hopper number eight.
Empty.
I coughed into it to listen to the little echoes confirm the evidence of my eyes. I stared at my accounts book in histrionic disbelief – these things should be done properly or not at all. In my own neat, crabbed writing the entry was there, just as I'd written it down the night before when the Clerk of the Authorities had dictated it to me over the telephone.
"One corpse, male, with severed hand. Identity: Gerald G. Dukes, a.k.a. The Even Mightier Spongini. Profession: Stage magician. Age: 28."
There followed a few further personal attributes. The Clerk would have been bound to mention it had invisibility been one of them.
No, the hopper was definitely empty.
There'd never been an error before – not in the whole long ten-years-that-was-really-a-century-that-felt-like-eternity. Never
could
be.
But I ran to the house and the telephone to call the Clerk anyway.
Just in case.
~
And now maybe I better
had
explain. About the village of Cadaver-in-the-Offing, and about the way things are around here, and perhaps a bit about myself as well – even though I don't like the, you know, limelight.
Nestled among the rolling hills of Barsetshire, one of the lesser known Home Counties, Cadaver-in-the-Offing is a sleepy little place – two shops and a pub and a scattering of houses, not to mention the church and the vicarage – but behind this veneer of tranquillity lurk seething passions and unfettered violence. More passions, more violence than in the rest of the country put together.
Because Cadaver-in-the-Offing is the place where detective stories happen.
The village has a population of about two hundred, if you look at it one way, and about two hundred million, if you look at it another. There have to be enough people so that the lesser characters in detective stories – the victims, the witnesses, the murderers, the romantic leads, the local color – are always different. But economies can be made, and usually are, by recycling those characters.
Endlessly.
Who can honestly recall the countless lusty young men who've accompanied Dr. Gideon Fell or Sir Henry Merrivale, and who've waltzed off with the pretty, young but feistily independent ingenue at the end of the case? Who can recall those ingenues either, come to that? The victims in Perry Mason's cases form a long train of utter anonymity, as do the various gorgeously pneumatic soubrettes who clutter up the proceedings. Who
didn't
commit the murder or solve the case in
The Nine Tailors
or
The Sign of Four
or
Inspector Queen's Own Case
or
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
or ...
I could go on.
Once upon a time all these forgettable individuals actually had an independent existence, even if you couldn't tell them apart from each other any more than I'd been able to distinguish Dave Knuckle's discards in my hoppers.
It was wasteful.
Decades ago the Authorities, during one of their periodic spurts of cost-cutting, realized this. Down-sizing was the zeal of the day. Why expend effort hiring individuals for the bit parts, why have to put out the cash for the undertaker's bills when people could be found on the unemployment queues who'd be only too eager to accept zero wages in exchange for board, lodging ... and immortality? Oh, sure, they'd have to accept being murdered every once in a while, but they wouldn't be dead long before being revived, given a different name, maybe a fresh wig, a new home to live in, a new role and probably a new spouse or lover.
Acting in conjunction with the Anti Blood Sports League, the Authorities founded Cadaver-in-the-Offing.
And hired me.
Yes, I suppose you're probably still wondering about me. Frankly, the less said about me the better. I had my own reasons for coming to work in Cadaver-in-the-Offing, but presumably the law-enforcement agencies of various obscure Middle European countries have forgotten all about me by now – which was one of the reasons why I was contemplating resigning my post, that day in the midst of the overlong Indian Summer.
Or maybe they haven't. That's one of the reasons I won't resign quite yet.
The other? All will become clear, Tonstant Weader.
So let's just say no more than that it's my job to take the ... the
secondary products
of the detectives' industry and ... and
mend
them.
That's all you need to know.
Other than that, let my past be an obscurity and my present something only dimly perceived; let me be a faceless and nameless cipher.
~
"Hello, Victor," said the Clerk wearily when finally he answered the telephone. He packed decades' worth of disdain into those two words: just because Cadaver-in-the-Offing couldn't continue to function without my services – or those of another like me – doesn't mean that people are courteous to me. Oh, no: far from it. Most of them avoid me like the plague, and, whenever they're forced to deal with me, look at me like they've just trodden in something the cat's done.
Tell you the truth, I prefer it that way.
I explained my problem. For once I knew that I had his attention. I could hear the click of his keyboard in the background as he checked up on what I'd been telling him.
"Yes," he said at last. "I have the entry here on screen in front of me ... Dukes ... Even Mightier ... inscrutable ... magician. Hum. Ho. He is –
was
– part of a case for Inspector Romford."
"The one with the pipe, the puppies, the paunch and the passion for peppermints?"
"The very same. Big in the library market. Would be even bigger if it weren't for the difficulties he had kicking his crack habit. Hm ... he was supposed to have solved this case by now – it's just a short story. It was one of his stage rivals did it – The Mighty Thrombosis – on account of the wife, Zelda. The Mighty Thrombosis's wife, that is. Usually the wife in a Romford case."
Even though the Clerk couldn't see me I held up a hand to stem the flow of words. "That's all as might be," I said, "but the fact of the matter is that I'm still a body short of my quota."
"Don't suppose you've got even the, harrumph, severed hand?"
"Not so much as a bleeding fingernail. I told you, I checked the hopper proper."
"Well, it's not my responsibility – I don't deal with the detailed stuff, as you know."
"I know."
In other words, the Clerk thought this was likely to be a knotty problem, and the quicker he got his rear covered the better.
"Delegate, boy, delegate," he said. "That's my motto. Eh?"
"I know."
He was going to dump me in it and leave me to sink or swim.
"Tell you one thing, though," he added, then paused. "This indeed sounds like" – and I could almost hear the drums roll – "A Case For Inspector Romford!"
The phone went dead.
~
Quite how Inspector Romford's inability to solve A Case For Inspector Romford could be A Case For Inspector Romford was a logical tangle that part of me was trying to unravel as I ambled up Curving Lane towards the center, if the village could be said to have such a thing, of Cadaver-in-the-Offing. It was about lunchtime, and so Romford would certainly be in the Heart & Sickle, drinking brown ale and keeping an ear open for clues. It's an old technique and can be effective. The sole disadvantage is that the brown ale tends to mean the clues, though gathered, go astray again.
I found him at a table in the corner, nursing a pint. Beside it was a whisky chaser. I raised my eyebrows.
"Needed a drop of the hard stuff," he said, seeing the direction of my gaze. "Don't mind telling you, whossname, that I'm bamboozled."
With the accent on the middle syllable,
I thought, but I said nothing.
"Right there in front of my eyes it was done," he continued, "bold as brass and twice as natural. I thought I had it all sewn up within minutes, but it wasn't to be. Mark my words, there's more to this case than meets the hand."
I must have looked puzzled, because he added, leaning forwards confidentially towards me, "I would have said 'eye' but the hand's quicker, see?"
I said I saw.
"Bleeding conjurers, prestidigitators, stage magicians, illusionists, call them what you will," he mumbled through the froth on the top of his beer.
Pulling the wooden chair scrapingly back over the slate floor of the Heart & Sickle's snug, I asked him what he meant.
And he explained.
~
The previous night had seen a grand gala at St Boniface's Church Hall, beside Dead Man's Crossroads in the middle of Cadaver-in-the-Offing. The
Barchester Bugle
had been full of it for weeks. It was a rare honor for a conjurer so internationally prominent as The Mighty Thrombosis to treat a place as small as Cadaver-in-the-Offing to one of his performances, but his mother came from hereabouts and he wanted to try out a few new tricks in front of an unimportant audience, so to here he'd come.
ONE NIGHT ONLY
An Informal Evening with
THE MIGHTY THROMBOSIS
the advertisements and handbills had said. And under that there was further news:
ably supported by
Helsinki's Most Dazzling Acrobatic Troupe
The Family Brød
"The Seven Deadly Finns"
Mrs. Romford had booked tickets at once for herself and the Inspector, telling him that he'd just have to juggle his duty hours to accommodate her wishes. He'd made a song and dance about the difficulties of disrupting his schedule, but in fact he'd been glad enough to go: ever since he'd first dropped a hidden pack of cards as a child he'd been fascinated by the whole charisma of stage magic – the greasepaint, the ethereally beautiful assistants, the mystery, the spectacle, and the whole participatory
game
whereby the audience
knew
it was being hoodwinked yet believed in magic all the same. And at least it wasn't Shakespeare; Mrs. Romford had gone off Shakespeare in a big way ever since a certain distressing occurrence during a performance of
Julius Caesar
.
So when his day's labors were over he changed into his second-best tweed suit, checked his mobile phone was working in case of emergencies ("There'd better
be
no emergencies," he'd growled at fresh-faced Sergeant Mutton), made sure he'd got plenty of tobacco and peppermints in his pocket for the walk home, and set off with his wife for the Church Hall.