Fantasmagoria (6 page)

Behind the macabre pile, a heavy wall rose to a porticoed ceiling covered in a mural triumphantly proclaiming the achievements of the Master Race. Broad, buxom women raised fists and held banners as they stood on the corpses of the weak, the mechanoid, the aminal. In the background, a congress of white-haired, black-eyed Furies ripped their enemies to pieces, which were scattered before them.

The rest of the room was filled with the dismemberings of a rusted race. Arms, legs, torsos, hands, and some parts with no human analog had all been removed and stacked in piles, like with like.

Five arched steel doors covered the back wall. Ovens. That’s where everything organic went.

“Shit,” he cursed. It was eerie, an eternal tomb.

The sounds of his struggles broke the silence, and an elderly woman walked into Gilbert’s field of vision. He hated that the visor obscured so much. He sensed others were nearby, in the shadows. Men, perhaps.

“You’ve made a nice living for yourself.” The woman tossed a file of papers and photographs on the table. It was stamped with a black hand. “More to the point, you’ve been smart about it.”

“Where am I?”

The old woman sat down. She was thin and wrinkled but well kept and neatly dressed. Her faded hair rose in a bun, and she wore an off-white leather patch over her left eye crested in a multi-hued pearl. “Did you know that ‘hoosegow’ means prison? Calling it Hoosegow Prison is redundant.” Her voice was lean and cracked with age.

“I thought it was somebody’s name.”

“Most people do.”

“Is that where we are?”

“Built over two hundred years ago by the First Army of the Master Race, it became the seat of their genocide. After they were defeated, it served as the city’s municipal prison. Then it was a sanitarium. Finally, like everything else, it got old and was abandoned.”

“I see.” Gilbert didn’t know what else to say.

“I’m also old, Mr. Tubers, which means I have an unhealthy fascination with the past.”

“It looks like a dungeon.” The aqueduct had been under the main facility. Gilbert expected this was deeper still. There was enough concrete overhead to bury him safely, if that was the endgame. He tugged on the handcuffs.

“It is. This is where the Amazons tortured and dismembered most of the mechanoid race, not to mention countless other undesirables.”

Gilbert looked at the blood-splattered table. “Looks still in use.”

“My employer purchased the abandoned lot from the city after discovering this chamber. We’re almost seventy feet underground.”

“Are you going to torture me?”

The woman smiled. “All right, Mr. Tubers. Let’s get down to cases. Your contract has been purchased from the Black Hand.”

“I don’t have a contract.”

“But you have a debt.”

“My father had a debt.”

“Which fell to you.”

“It’s bullshit.”

The woman sat back. “But we haven’t been introduced. I’m Marcelline.”

Gilbert didn’t speak. She already knew his name.

“Whether you think you owed anything to the Hand or not is irrelevant. We work for the same person now.”

“And that is?”

“Not as important as your work as a political assassin.” Marcelline sifted through the photographs in the file, throwing them down one after the other. “Futuria. Atlantis. Japanamania.” She raised an eyebrow. “The Hand keeps excellent records. You’re quite the world traveler. Looks like you’ve even been inside the Aminal Kingdom. Most people are lucky to travel a hundred miles, and here you’ve been all over the world.”

“I’ve been fortunate.”

Marcelline closed the file. “Never more than twice a year and never in Freecity. That’s smart. Foreign sanctions keep you under the radar.”

“All the work here is for the criminal syndicates anyway.”

“All business handled through the Black Hand. And all monies as well, I assume.”

“It’s not as lucrative as you might think.”

Marcelline nodded. “Murder is a volume business, I’m afraid.”

“So I’ve discovered.”

“But,” she folded her hands, “you’ve eked out a living. You keep your expenses and your profile down while you work on your . . . collections.”

She stressed the ‘s.’ Plural. Gilbert swallowed. She knew. If it bothered her, she didn’t show it. That’s why they sedated him, he thought, so they had time to go through his apartment. Gilbert realized he had no idea how long he’d been out. Judging by the pain in his head and stomach, it might have been days. He tried not to think about how much he wanted to vomit.

“You have a dark secret.”

“I don’t see where that’s any of your business.”

“Believe it or not, I admire you, Mr. Tubers. You’ve had something horrible happen to you. Most people would have given up years ago, but you turned it to your advantage. That takes hard work, guts. So let’s be forthright with each other. You’re in a pickle. Your unique talents have caught the interest of someone very powerful. And whether you believe yet or not, what you wanted, dreamed about, hoped for when you woke this morning has all gone away.” She fluttered a hand into the air. “This is the day from which you will mark the rest of your life. However long that is.”

Gilbert looked at the blood stains.

Marcelline saw it and leaned forward. “I appreciate that a man in your position isn’t afraid of death. Unlike most people, you’re faced with your mortality every day. I think you’re more afraid of what I think of you than you are of dying. Like most little boys of unusual intelligence, you were not socialized well, and so you struggle with people. That’s why it was so easy for you to cut them from your life. And the rest.”

She reminded Gilbert of the harlequin razorback. It was among the most intelligent of fairies. Its body was covered in dots of adaptive pigmentation that it could change individually from white to red to black. It was flightless but notoriously elusive. It blended into the leaf litter where it stalked insects. And a harlequin never showed its true colors.

“Your collections, both of them, along with all of your notes and research and equipment, your clothes and toys and the pictures of your father, have all been removed from your apartment.”

Gilbert felt his skin flush. She didn’t appear to be lying. He took a deep breath and tried to keep his heart rate down. His stomach boiled.

“Our employer now has everything of value to you that exists in the world.” She let that sink in. “You’re smart, and a survivor. Do as you’re told, and you’ll get it all back.”

Gilbert doubted that. “When?”

“Soon. But try to run, talk to anyone, or make things difficult, and you’ll find out that, as bad as things may seem, your life can get much, much worse.”

Gilbert looked at the piles of death, and beyond that, the mural on the wall. Proud Amazons hung over Marcelline’s inquisitive eye. Her head was framed in the slaughter of innocents. He nodded in understanding. “But can you untie me now? I’m going to throw up.”

“Fine.” Marcelline stood. “Then I’ll introduce you to someone you’re going to kill.”

(SEVEN) A Cackle of Murderlings

Erasmus stuck Zen-ji at the top of the grand staircase for good reason. A ten-foot samurai in full armor, meditating cross-legged on a large dais: that sent a clear message—that, and the man-sized sword that lay in front of him.

Jack had never seen Zen-ji speak, and in all his comings and goings through the years, Jack never saw him turn his head, or cough, or go to the bathroom. But Jack had seen him move, three times in fact.

The first had been for Johnny Two-Brain, so named because of some fantastically poor decisions he’d made with his penis, the last of which was to screw Jenny Diamond, whom Erasmus was sweet on. Not that anyone knew. Zen-ji separated the two brains, along with the right and left halves of Johnny’s body, in what had to be the fastest surgical transection in history.

Jack and Johnny had come up together, back in the cowboy days when Freecity was a lot smaller and the Empire a lot further away and everything was up for grabs. They weren’t friends, but they were friendly. Still, all Jack could think about as he watched the two halves of Johnny’s surprised face fall in opposite directions to the floor was how sharp that massive sword must be, and how strong its wielder, to make a cut like that.

Jack technically didn’t see Zen-ji’s second move. The lights were out. But he saw Mortimer Pendergast sitting in a high-backed chair in the boss’s office, smiling at Erasmus. Morty ran the Dark Red, Erasmus’s secret of secrets: an underage brothel, mostly teenage boys from the streets or local orphanages that Pimpernel patronized through his various philanthropic organizations.

The boss had caught Morty fronting on the side, but Morty wasn’t pimping. He was extorting. He had been blackmailing a famous artist who frequented the club. Morty had pictures of her in bed with two and three teenage boys at a time. She was famous and married and in good with the Imperial crowd. She was only too happy to produce high quality forgeries of some of the lost greats. Her crown jewel was a replica of Waldorff’s Seventh View of the Falls from the Great Sewer, which Morty sold to an aminal collector for a few hundred thousand.

Morty claimed he had inherited the art collection from his great uncle, who had been a rogue cartographer and frontier trader back before the Empire shut the border. But Erasmus was the king of liars, and he wasn’t having any of it. He pretended to laugh at Morty’s ingenuity, and Morty knew it. He must have had a hunch what was coming because, even as he laughed at the absurdity of it all, the carpet under his seat grew dark with his own urine.

The two were yukking it up good when Erasmus switched out the lights. Jack heard the sound of movement through air and the crack of wood. When the lights came back on, it looked like someone had shoved a log through Morty’s chest. There was a foot-wide hole in the back of the big chair. Zen-ji had focused on the man’s heartbeat in the dark and had speared him clean through, furniture and all.

The third move came on a rare occasion when the samurai’s dais was inside Erasmus’s office. The boss had wanted to get a picture of the Doutee Gang—Chester and his cousins—who’d come over from the other side. They’d been running some two-bit protection gigs out in the hills surrounding the city. Stupid hicks milking poor dairy farmers. Erasmus had them line up in front of an old beast of a camera, tripod-mounted like a machine gun. Of course Erasmus fucked with them first, moving them around, changing their order, asking one person to sit, one to stand, and finally all to stand in a row, some on boxes to even their heights “for the picture.” And all the while their faces were beaming, drinks in hand. “Fancy liquor,” they said. They probably drank moonshine.

It was a test. Erasmus wanted to challenge the samurai, to see if Zen-ji was faster than the camera. And it was a daredevil’s gambit. Five heads in one blow. One of them rolled near Jack’s feet. “Fancy-drinks” Chester was so tense for the picture, his body stood headless for two minutes, clutching that highball like it was the last he’d ever have. Jack stood in the corner as the rest of the crew bet on how long it would take to fall.

That was the last time anyone came over from the other side. After that, everyone knew. You either worked for Erasmus Pimpernel, or he’d fucking kill you.

Erasmus couldn’t wait for the film to be developed. It was all he talked about for days. Jack never asked which was faster, shutter or samurai. Jack may have been the most prolific of Erasmus’s Murderlings, but Zen-ji was the most efficient. Three moves. Seven kills.

Jack stood in front of the giant with his hands in his coat pockets. It was impossible to tell if Zen-ji’s eyes were open under the large, curved helm. It shrouded all his features. Not that it mattered. A trained Japanaman could spear your heart just by fixing on the sound of it beating. Jack had seen it.

Not that Jack had a heart to spear, but there was plenty clicking in his chest.

The guys at The Dive said the same as LaMana—Jack was still alive because Pimpernel couldn’t convince anyone to take the hit. But Jack knew better. He was looking right at him. Erasmus was patient when he wanted to be. He had his own reasons for leaving Jack alive.

“Jack!”