Camera Obscura (7 page)

  "Tell me about that body, Viktor. You
have
seen such a thing before, haven't you? I know you have. You want to tell me about it, don't you? You don't want me to get
hurt
, do you, Viktor? You don't–"

  "Please," he said, and she knew he was hers. "Show me," she said.

  He took her to the far side of the cavern. Past the cages again, and turning her eyes away from the figures inside. Viktor's experiments, following from the works of–

  No. She walked past and they came to a large metal door set into the rock. The under-morgue proper. When she put her hand to the door the metal was cold to the touch. Viktor played with a pad by the door and it opened with a faint hiss. Tendrils of fog ebbed out, as if reaching for them.

  "Follow me."

  She did. They went inside. Ice-cold, steel walls, icicles hanging

like nooses from the ceiling. Inside: rows of metal cabinets pulled open, holding corpses in various stages of decomposition on their trays. Men, one woman, two children. The children looked almost identical, a boy and a girl with chinawhite skin turning grey.

  Viktor looked expectant. Waiting for her to make a connection… It took her a moment but the colour began to dominate her view and she said, "Grey."

  He said, "Yes."

  She came closer, examined the hand of the boy. The grey had spread down his arm, in patches, looking oily, looking… she wasn't sure. She reached to touch it and Viktor's hand held her back. "Don't," he said.

  He went to a table laden with instruments and returned with a prod. When he pressed the little trigger a burst of blue electricity sparked at the end.

  "Watch," he said. There was something almost fond in his voice when he said, "Watch the grey cells."

  She watched.

  He put the end of the stick to the boy's dead hand and pressed the trigger.

  She watched. The electricity singed the skin. She watched the grey shapes on the boy's white skin.

  Nothing at first.

  Then…

  The grey spots, she realised, were slowly moving.

 
 

 
 

How to describe it? The grey moved along the boy's frozen corpse as if it were alive. It looked snake-like. It looked reptilian. It looked like mercury and it looked like shadows. That was it, she thought. Like grey shadows, growing on the boy's dead skin, animating it. Shadows bellowing across naked arms and chest, along closed eyes and china face. She said, "What is it?" and her voice was very small in that cold, hushed place.

  Viktor said, "We don't know."

  She said, "Where does it come from?" and he said, "That, Milady, is what the Council hopes you could tell us."

  She stared – and now the boy's left hand was twitching, the fingers closing, slowly, slowly, into a fist, and she took a step back when – there! – his eyes sprang open and the corpse stared at her, cold-blue eyes not seeing, dead eyes animated by a grey shadow that should not have existed, a wrong thing, unnatural and yet–

  "Stop it," she said.

  But Viktor was no longer applying the electricity.

  "The effect lasts for some time independently of the trigger," he said. "The cold slows it down. The main reason we're keeping them in here. You did well, by the way, disposing of the corpse. It would have been… inconvenient if the deceased began to walk down Rue Morgue post-mortem."

  She almost laughed. She felt a little hysterical. In one moment the investigation went from something understood – something within her remit, within the world as it was, as it should be – into something else entirely, something alien and unknown. "When did it start?" she said.

  The little scientist beside her shrugged. "Who knows?" he said. "We began grabbing them as soon as the reports started filtering in. I have no doubt we missed a few."

  "How long?"

  "Two years," he said. "Possibly three."

  "
Years
?" she said. She had to get some fresh air. The boy was moving now, his entire body shaking, the head moving in a silent
no
. "Open the door," she said.

  Viktor, too, seemed happier once they were outside, the door safely closed behind them.

  "Is it–" she said, and hesitated.

  "Infectious?"

  She nodded. Viktor said, "Not so far, but…"

  "But what?"

  "It seems to be spreading."

 

Moving grey shapes. It was as if, having viewed the corpse (and now she realised, too, that she had come in close contact with the dead man in the Rue Morgue, skin-to-skin, and did the subtle grey shapes leap from one to the other? Were they even now working their way into the fabric of her being, into her cells and bone-marrow, into her bloodstream and brain?) she was now seeing the world in a skewed fashion, the night world of black shades transformed into a half-light place, inhabited by moving grey shapes… She blinked but they would not go away, houses and windows and lamps at strange angles, footsteps in dust and clouds flying low.

  Like the shadows of another world, she thought, and the night felt colder, clammier somehow.

  She had left the catacombs on the left bank of the Seine, exiting through an Employees Only door of a hotel on Rue de la Bûcherie. She felt a sense of urgency now, a need to find the missing women, to begin to answer the questions that were growing, sprouting like grey-capped mushrooms all over her post-mortem investigation.

  Who were the black-clad assailants in Montmartre? Who had killed the man called Yong Li? Were they the same people? It seemed unlikely – unless they already had the object in their possession and wanted to discourage her from pursuing them. She had asked the Council and Hoffman had said, "Imperial assassins."

  But which empire? Was the lizard queen behind the murder? Yet all the threads were leading East, away from these cold European lands…

  Her carriage was waiting for her. A black unmarked vehicle, its mute driver ready with the horses. She could have had a baruchlandau, a horseless carriage, to take her through the narrow streets of Paris. She preferred the horses. Like canaries down in a mine, the horses could warn her of danger before it was there.

  "Pigalle," she told the driver. He nodded, without expression. A large man, with stitch marks on his forehead, around his skull. One arm was shorter than the other. One of Viktor's creatures, who only came out at night. The man was dressed in a black cloak and a low-hung hat. Just another shadow in this city of shadows, unremarkable, invisible to all but the few like itself. She settled back in the carriage and felt the streets pass without looking at them, listening to the city as it entered the deep-end of night.

 

She had questioned Viktor but he could tell her nothing more – couldn't, or wouldn't, but either way the result was the same. He'd shown her the cultures growing in his test tubes, grey swirls sprouting, forming shapes almost like an alphabet, carrying a meaning hovering just beyond her reach. And that was it.

  One last exchange: "Who was the agent in charge?"

  Viktor: "I'm not sure I'm at liberty to–"

  Grabbing him by the neck, her fingers closing on his throat – "Just a little squeeze, Viktor, and who'd put
you
together again?"

  "Tômas! It was Tômas!"

  
Him
? That mask-wearing murderer, that phantasm, shapeshifting like a thing from a British Penny Dreadful, changing his clothes, his hair, the colour of his eyes – at will, it seemed – second only to Holmes of Baker Street in his capacity as master of disguise – but without the Great Detective's honesty, his morals, a blank slate, Tômas, a creature of the gutters, a killer and one who enjoyed the killing, and yet–

  A valued agent of the Council, who knew well the value of such men.

  "A body-snatcher?" she said. "A suitable job for him."

  "No doubt," Viktor agreed, croaking the words. "Well, I won't keep you."

  She released his throat, left him to massage it. She saw the look in his eyes, knew its meaning.
What makes you any different?

  I don't enjoy the killing, she wanted to say, but didn't. Perhaps, she thought, she feared it wasn't true.

 
 

 
 

She let go of Tômas – for now. She would find him, later, and she would extract the truth from him, however much he threatened or fought. She had dealt with worse than him, before. And she let go of Viktor, too – cooperative Viktor who was still lying to her, still keeping her from the truth – she knew him, could read it in his shifty little eyes. He was only telling her what the Council wanted her to know, no more, no less. She was the Council's creature – well then, she would follow the scent blindly, and do as she was told – for now, for now…

  They were, all of them, the Council's creatures: serving the greater good, whatever that was, per the calculations and machinations of these strange, artificial beings. Viktor in his lab, Fanto – Tômas with his robberies and secret murders and body-snatching – even Q, gentle Q who lived underground and kept his misshapen eyes on things – the Council's eyes, leased, borrowed, sold.

  She settled back and the coach rattled on. To Pigalle, the one place guaranteed to be lit up this time of night. She had already passed through it once tonight. But then it had been too early.

  At that moment she missed Grimm. He was back in the

under-morgue, and she had not even seen him – not stopped to check on him, that metallic, insect-like creature, another denizen of Paris' secret world. Yet faithful. Faithful and–

  No. Let go of Grimm. Let go of it all, the half-light, half-life of the catacombs, their smell clinging to her leather coat. Her ribs ached and her face felt swollen. She opened the window of the carriage, let the comforting smells of the upper city in, the smoke and manure and the curses and songs, the lights in the distance, growing closer – Pigalle, the place of merriment and drunkenness, of dancing and whoring and knifing, of carousing and robbing and killing.

  Her kind of place.

  And now there was a sound penetrating the night like a knife – a woman's scream, high-pitched, terrified – terminating so suddenly that the silence ached, and she was out of the carriage and running before the mute driver could bring it to a halt. Running, towards the dark mouth of an alleyway, Peacemaker out of its holster, running and knowing all the while that it was too late.

  She burst into the alley and saw a shape on the ground, a dark pool around it, and a shape standing above, turning to look toward her and she ran–

  A grey misshapen face, moonlit despite the darkness – a skull as white as moon rock, eyes in which the tendrils of galaxies swirled – the mouth open in a silent hungry grin–

  Man, beast, spirit, ghost – the knife a solid real object, too late – it slashed the woman lying on the ground. She fired, the gun making a loud noise in that small confine. Stars above, half-hidden by the city's perennial smoke. Stars looking down. The crazed grinning face turning to her, a crack in that elongated skull – the mouth opening,
snapping
at her,
snap
,
snap!
and she fired again.

  The figure on the ground moved, groaned. The creature took another hit from her gun and only grinned harder. Then – shouts behind her, the whistles of gendarmes. The creature waved a paw – a hand? – a sickle moon – goodbye, goodbye, and–

  Jumping – floating? – a shapeless grey cloud scaling the wall of the alley. A hiss in the night, a wordless promise,
we'll meet
again, my lovely.

  
Soon
, she answered him, firing all the while at the retreating grey shape, knowing it was useless.
Soon, I hope.

  And it was gone. The night was ordinary once again. A woman lay by the alley's brick wall, amidst the rubbish of the adjacent restaurant – mussel shells, discarded, rotting meat, an empty turtle shell crawling with fat black flies, pools of rancid oil staining the ground like blood.

  Place Pigalle. A shout and feet running behind her, stopping abruptly. Violent sounds – it took her a moment to realise it was someone being noisily sick.

  Other, unhurried footsteps coming. She crouched down by the woman. Elderly, her dress revealing wrinkled skin, coarse-painted face, the sagging breasts rising and falling still, though almost imperceptively, with the body's last intake and outtake of air.

  Slashed. "Tell me," she said, whispering to the woman. Watching tendrils of grey crawling over her wrists. The woman's eyes looking into hers, black eyes, as dark as a starless, moonless night.

  "Door," the woman said. The single word a whispered puff of air. "Door. K… key."

  She said, "Where?"

  The woman, dying: "Every… where."

  The eyes, closed now. The heart, the engine of the body quit. Remembering Viktor's lectures. Blood circulation stopping, brain functions terminating one by one. A silent machine, beginning to decay, impossible to fix. Nothing more nor less than death. She thought of doors, and keys.

  Behind her, footsteps stopped. A hand on her shoulder – gentle. A familiar voice: "We'll find who did this."

  Not looking up at him. "You won't."

  "Milady…" the title whispered, an exasperated sound. And something else… but what?

  "Why do you always have to turn up like this?"

  An English expression came to her mind and she began to laugh. "Like a bad penny," she said. "A bad penny–" laughing, the laugh becoming sobs. The Gascon's hands on her shoulders, drawing her up: "Hush, we'll find her killer, we'll find–"

  Lady de Winter, calming slowly against his shoulder. Whispering: "You'll find shit."