The Devil's Detective (15 page)

It was night when he heard it; someone was crying.

Fool wasn't in bed, hadn't even made it back to his room. Rather, he was in the little kitchen waiting for the water sputtering from the tap to run clear rather than brown so that he could have a large drink. He had spent the time after his visit to the Man walking the streets of the Houska, simply looking. People and demons moved around him in thick, oily streams, the air dense with the smells of candle smoke and sweat, simmering with anticipation and fear. As he had left the Man, another human had been entering the Man's home, furtive and scurrying.
What secret had he been carrying?
Fool wondered. What knowledge had he been seeking, and what price would he pay? He imagined the Man's limbs stretching out through most of Hell, secrets and rumors and knowledge pulsing along the veins of him like sap, allowed to flower in some places and curdled to nothing in others, a network of information and exchange. And him, Fool, where was he in it all? A tiny morsel drifting along the Man's pathways, or something outside, an irritation to be tolerated until Rhakshasas's demands on him made the Man choose to remove him?
Little moving Fool
, Fool thought, seeing himself as a tiny thing being buffeted along streams not of his making, and made his way to the train. There was nothing more he could learn here.

Summer was the only other person in the offices. Fool went to her room, but even from outside he realized that the crying was not coming from there. He turned, going instead to the doorway of Gordie's room. The door was shut and he knocked upon it, gently at first and then harder when he received no answer. When he still heard nothing from beyond the door except crying, he opened it slowly, other
hand dropping to his gun; it was rare, but not unheard of, for ghosts or demons pretending to be ghosts to take up residency in the rooms of the recently dead and use whatever grief and upset they could generate to feed.

The door opened onto a room without light. Fool stepped back from the doorway and peered into the gloom, trying to make out something,
anything
, that would tell him what was in there. “Summer?” he asked, but still there was no reply but tears. A patch of the darkness shifted, something glinting as it moved, and then was gone. A long, low moan came from the darkness, feral and raw, and then a long, rough scratching. His hand tensed on the butt of the gun and then loosened, then tightened again, indecisive; there was little point in drawing it if it was a ghost, bullets would do nothing to it and would be no defense. If it was a demon, though, come to avenge the death of the thing in the bar, or simply to punish Fool for allowing himself to be noticed, for being a human who had the temerity to be something other than a victim, then he might have a moment in which he could defend himself. He stepped back from the doorway and said, trying to keep the catch and shake from his voice, “Show yourself.”

More scratching, another moan, and then a voice said, “I can't remember his face.”

It was Summer's, almost. Her voice was thick, slurred, and wet. Fool stepped into the room, lighting the lamp and letting its sallow glow curl around the corners of the space. Summer was sitting against the rear wall, knees drawn up to her belly, a pad on her knee. Her face was reddened and puffy, slick with tears and mucus, hair disheveled. She was running her hand back and forth across the paper, sketching furiously. As Fool watched, unsure of what to do, she tore the paper from the pad and crumpled it, casting it aside where it joined others scattered about her.

“His face,” said Summer, “I can't remember his face. What did he look like? What did my Gordie look like?”

Fool sat beside Summer against the wall. She had already started sketching on the blank paper, pencil lining in a face that might have been Gordie but might equally have been a stranger on the street or one of the bodies they sent to the Garden. After a moment, he reached
out and gently put his hand over Summer's, stopping her drawing. She looked at him, more tears flowing, and said, “Please.”

“He looked like Gordie. He looked like this room,” said Fool, gesturing about him. Unlike his own austere chamber, Gordie's was cluttered and cramped. The walls were covered in pieces of paper, each piece thick with notes and ideas and morsels of information, all in Gordie's tidy, efficient hand. Phrases and words leaped out at Fool like sparks jumping up from fires:
The Ronwe can speak, The Man builds, an island? Cattle? Food?
All Gordie's thoughts and knowledge and ideas laid out before them. Some of the pieces of paper were connected by pieces of string or cord, links between his suspicions or facts, links between this demon and that murder, this place and that rumor.

“This is Gordie,” Fool said. “All this, all these things that he knew and learned and wanted to know, these things are him. He gathered so much together, knew so much more than I do. That was Gordie. I don't know who the Ronwe are, do you? Or the island? What island? We don't know, but Gordie did. This is Gordie, this is what he was and this is what he did. This is how to remember him.”

Summer took a deep, ragged breath and looked around the room. “Yes,” she said eventually. She began to sketch again, and this time the face that appeared under her pencil was Gordie, the real Gordie, the man who had been Fool's treasure trove of information and Summer's lover for these past months. Fool, watching, felt a sudden clenched ache inside himself, knowing that no one would ever sketch him in the passionate, desperate way Summer was sketching Gordie, and closed his eyes so he could not see.

In the darkness of his mind, Fool wondered. Gordie had died in the Orphanage, burned and savaged, and he could not help but wonder, was it a punishment for the things on the walls, for the things that Gordie had learned and tried to learn and known that he was not supposed to know?

Had Fool killed Gordie by asking him to know about Hell?

With a torn sigh, Summer stopped sketching and collapsed against Fool, weeping again. Fool put his arms around her and pulled her into a hug, the first time he had ever done so, and they sat for a long time in the absence of Gordie.

NAME OF DECEASED: Unknown

RESIDENCE OF DECEASED: Unknown–probable resident of a boardinghouse, see IDENTIFYING MARKS below

LOCATION OF DECEASED: Western Pipe Orphanage

DESCRIPTION OF DECEASED: Male, early twenties, blond hair. Average height. Average levels of undernourishment. Evidence of vitamin deficiency.

IDENTIFYING MARKS: None, although there are scars evident to the buttocks, legs, and shoulders consistent with victim having been a Genevieve.

INJURIES/CAUSE OF DEATH: Severe trauma to body and head; flesh has been torn from skull and one eye punctured. Penis has been removed—likely torn free rather than cut or bitten. Evidence of smaller wounds from postmortem predation, and of older wounds to the buttocks and thighs. Burns to skin. Cause of death: take your pick. Major organ trauma and blood loss are the technical reasons, but each of his injuries alone could well have killed him.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Fool, this one wouldn't talk much either. He's had his soul removed—there's nothing left in him at all. He's definitely another Genevieve, although he's not been doing it as long as the first victim. The damage to the buttocks and thighs isn't as well established and there's less older, healed trauma. He's looked after himself, as far as it went,
despite a lack of good food. I eventually had to ask questions of his flesh using the four chains, like last time. He told me it was a client but again not one met in the Houska, and also that he didn't have any suspicions about the client. Whatever hired him didn't look violent or disturbing, at any rate. The four chains are limited and can generate only yes-or-no responses, of course—although if you have enough bodies from the same event you can sometimes ask the questions of them in sequence and get fuller information. Still, it's enough for me to be confident this is the same murderer of the man recovered at Solomon Water.

The violence here is, if anything, worse than that first one, more sustained and wide-ranging. Tearing a penis off at its roots takes not just strength but will, determination, and isn't something that can be done that easily—muscle and tendon is stronger than you'd imagine. I think the scalp was peeled back by hand as well—there's damage to the flesh and bone of the skull that might correspond to fingers or claws. He was alive when all this was done to him, incidentally, and he must have been screaming and fighting. There's damage to his fingernails as though he was scratching against something, but there's no residue under the nails, which makes sense if the attacker is demonic—they're rarely soft enough to be harmed by human hands. This is something terrible doing these things, Fool, something very powerful indeed, and I'd imagine old and not keen on being investigated. Be careful.

Fool read Morgan's report, what there was of it, on the train out to the flatlands beyond the Houska. It was typed on paper that was thin and gray, the ink smearing as he held it, and it told him nothing that he hadn't expected. The report had been waiting for him when he awoke, cramped and cold and still sitting against the wall in Gordie's room after only a couple of hours' sleep. He had been alone when he awoke, surrounded by Gordie's memories and thoughts, and he had ached when he stood. Fool had crumpled the flimsy sheet into his pocket without looking at it and gone to rouse Summer, wanting to move, to focus, to keep investigating.

Summer was gone.

It wasn't that she had vanished, but that the things that had made her Summer had seemingly disappeared; her body was there, she moved around, but when she spoke, her voice was flat and uninflected and she neither questioned nor made suggestions when Fool told her about the Man's information and that he might have given them a way to identify one of the dead Genevieves. Her eyes, rimmed with scarlet puffiness, looked downward most of the time, coming up only once, when Fool mentioned Gordie. She made no reference to the previous night. It was as though the losing of his face and finding it again had made his death more real for her, and that in dying Gordie had taken with him the part of Summer that she had let him have, the part that made her something other than mere animated flesh.
Perhaps he did
, thought Fool. He had never given even the smallest part of himself to someone else and had no idea what it might feel like, what it might be like if they went away and took that gifted part with them. He had no idea what to say to her, so he said nothing. After he read the report, he handed it to her. She read it and handed it back silently.

The train was nearly empty. It was early in the afternoon, and most people either slept or were at their Bureaucracy-appointed tasks. In the distance, the smokestacks belched their greasy breath into the sky; the noise of the factories reached them through the open window of the train like the rumble of approaching thunder.

They moved slowly through the Houska. It seemed smaller during the day, its walls and streets more claustrophobic without the glamour of darkness and the lights that breathed from each doorway when the heats of sex and drink and violence rose each night. Some of the bars were open but they appeared quiet. There were few demons visible.

The train rolled on, its rhythm lolling Fool into an uneasy doze. How long since he had slept well? A month? A year? Never? He felt as though he was always lagging behind, always one or two or three steps behind where he ought to be, missing things, too tired to see straight or clearly. Rests were always taken between other things, squeezed in like this, wedged in between this meeting or that body, and even when he made it to his bed, the time available to him was too little. He thought again of the two dead men, of flesh torn beyond recognition, of another soul set loose, of Gordie aflame, and of Summer, and he thought that there
were different types of death and that they were all as terrible as each other.

Gordie had once told Fool that Hell had been a place of rigid hierarchies somewhere back in its history, that each area corresponded to the punishments meted out for a particular sort of sin, and that explained why it still had distinct geographies. The Houska, where the rakes and addicts had been punished, was now for nightlife, for the bars and prostitution. Crow Heights' walled solidity had always been for the residences of the ancient and powerful, the humans living cramped together in Eve's Harbor (which was nowhere near water and which the demons called Cattletown and which had once been the place of rack and confinement), the demons in the sprawling expanses of North and South Hope (actually one huge, curving area surrounding most of the Houska and abutting Eve's Harbor, and which the humans called simply Pipe). Intertwined with these inhabited areas were Hell's other spaces: the Bureaucracy, which described both the area itself and the function attended to in the offices and halls that it consisted of; the industrial estates that sat permanently under vast clouds of spewing gray and black smoke; the Flame Garden where the dead went; and the farmlands. Each area had its functions and its inhabitants, and there was little mixing between them except in the Houska and in places that were sometimes called the Sisters. The boardinghouses were in one of the Sisters, a blurred edge between the Houska and North Hope filled with numerous squat buildings constructed of old, black wood.

Fool had never been to the boardinghouses before, had never needed to. He hadn't even known where they were until that day, when he had had to look them up in a thin book called
The Places of Hell: An Information.
Until a day ago, he would simply have asked Gordie, who seemed to know things like that, to have it all in his head or on his walls.

As they climbed down from the train, the boardinghouses all looked the same; long rows of one- or two-story buildings with no windows, made of heavy wooden planks with doorways carved roughly into the front walls, but as they approached, Fool saw that there were differences. One or two had porches, long walkways in the front of the building with railings and chairs scattered about them, and others had extra doorways or small huts leaning against their front or side walls. Unlike the Houska,
there were signs of life here; humans walked down the streets and demons watched them proprietorially from doorways as they walked. Some of the boardinghouses had names scratched into the wood above their entrances; most simply had numbers.