The Devil's Detective (11 page)

In the house's darkness, something glowed momentarily, the light showing them a long hallway studded with doorways on either side, and then it dimmed again. Fool moved inside, looking around as Gordie and Summer followed. As his eyes adjusted to the lower light, he saw that the nearest opening was only a step away. Through it he saw a grimy room with tangled piles of sheets and old mattresses scattered across the floor. Most of the mattresses were stained, dark blooms covering their surfaces as though shadows had become liquid and then dried. The smell of burning hair and meat and sweat crept around them, and still the shrieks came from all about them and from somewhere ahead of them, deep in the Orphanage's terrible womb.

Apart from the mattresses and sheets, the first room was empty. The room opposite it contained more mattresses and sheets along with piles of discarded towels, brittle with age and dried fluids. Sickly moss, ashy in the half-light, had furred the floor around the piles, and Fool thought that he saw the moss pulse slightly as though drawing in breath when he came close to it. Gordie started to shift the mattresses, lifting and then letting them drop, and for a moment Fool wondered why before realizing he was looking for clues. The
Guide
stressed things like “finding the information contained at the scene of the crime” and “the reading of the environment,” and Gordie had taken it all to heart. Fool had tried to tell him that the book was old, ancient, making reference to rules and ideas of policing that Fool had never even heard of, but Gordie had simply replied, “But it must matter, or they wouldn't have given us them, surely?” How could you argue with that? And even if you could, why would you? Was this desperate optimism any worse than the helpless rage Fool himself had felt standing in the street over the headless corpse? He supposed not.
Poor fool
, he thought, not sure whether he meant Gordie or himself, and then something shrieked and scuttled in though the doorway.

It was aflame, low to the floor and casting off thick smoke and flickering light in oily wreaths as it went. It darted past them, crashing into the mattress that Gordie was holding, knocking it from his grip and disappearing under it as it fell. Gordie staggered, unbalanced by the collision, and Summer cried out his name. The air filled with the stench
of burning meat and material as flames licked out from the underside of the mattress, more black smoke pouring out with the smell, making the air acrid and sharp. Whatever was under the mattress, it thrashed against the weight, shrieking again, the sound shuddering the hanging smoke and echoing around the room. There was an answering shriek from somewhere else in the house and the mattress shifted, bucked up, and released a drift of jittering sparks before falling back to cover the thing.

“It's a child,” Summer cried, crouching. More flames capered across the mattress's surface, stopping and sizzling at the edges of the old stains. Summer tried to lift it, but the flames caught at her fingers and she dropped it. “Gordie, please,” she called as the thing screeched again. Fool heard pain and longing in the cry, and anger and something more, unknowable and fragile. Gordie went to Summer, throwing a helpless look at Fool, and pushed at the mattress with her, throwing it back from the burning creature that was turning in frenzied circles under it.

“It's a child,” Summer said again, but it wasn't.

It had some human flesh, that was true, but the thing on the floor was mostly demon. As well as the two human legs and arms, there were four more legs sprouting from its sides, insectile and black. Things that might have been wings had erupted from its back, but they looked wretched and stubby. Charred black lumps that might have been the remains of feathers emerged from the wings, and flesh hung from them in tatters. When it turned to them, its eyes were huge and black, taking up half of its face, and its mouth was a torn circle from which spittle and fire fell in equal measure.

And it burned.

The flames came from its mouth and from its ears, bled from around its eyes and from its anus, spilling down its legs and to the floor, where they spread in a viscous circle. It saw Summer and opened its mouth even wider, crying out through the fires, raising itself onto its human knees, and holding out its arms. It was tiny, Fool saw, only two feet long at the most, and its belly was rounded and pudgy, bouncing as it moved. It was almost completely covered by the fire now, the whole of it emerging and vanishing behind flickering blue and orange flames and the smoke that they threw off. The insectile legs hadn't grown naturally
but had punched their way out of the flesh of its sides, leaving weeping, crusted scabs at their exit points. Claws were extending at the end of the legs, snapping, and tiny human hands were opening wide.

Movement behind Fool, catching at the corner of his eye. He turned to find that more of the children had arrived in the doorway, all different but somehow similar, tiny and pink and charred and warping and burning. One clambered up the doorframe, its hooked hands digging into the wood and plaster and leaving scorch marks behind. How many of them were in the hallway? Fool couldn't tell. He drew his gun, turning back to the one in the room. As he turned it scuttled forward, darting at Summer. Gordie shouted something unintelligible and fired his weapon, and a chunk of floor exploded in front of the child, sending splintered wood leaping into the air and making the thing veer sideways. It circled them so that it was between them and the door, regarding them warily, the flames dripping from its mouth and onto its chest. The ones behind it continued gathering in the doorway, the hall now lit by the unsteady, rippling illumination of their burning.

“Where's the fucking body?” asked Fool.

“Somewhere close to the door,” answered Gordie without looking around. “In one of the front rooms, the tube said.” He shook his gun. “It's already full, I can fire again,” he said.

“Good, you might have to,” said Fool. “How did the killer get in here and get out again? How many of these things are there?”

It was impossible to see the floor of the hallway now, so thick were the shifting, darting bodies. The base of the doorframe had started to smolder, gray smoke rising to join the oily black expulsions from the creatures, old burns sparking back to life in orange, glowing patches. Mouths opened, claws clicked and extended, wings broken and fully flexed. Fool raised his gun and saw Gordie do the same.

“They're demons,” said Fool. “They're newborn but they aren't stupid. If they understand we can hurt them more than they hurt already, they'll let us past.”

“How?” asked Gordie.

“No,” said Summer, her voice low, understanding. Fool fired.

Three in one day
, he thought as the nearest thing broke apart into a splash of flesh and a bright burst of flame that collapsed in on itself
almost as quickly as it had expanded.
Very noticeable Fool
, and then Gordie fired and Summer screamed.

It was a worse noise than anything the demons were making, a rising howl that seemed to tear at her throat as it emerged. She pushed past Fool and Gordie but already the things had scattered, leaving the hallway empty apart from the smoke of their passing and the remains of the one Fool had killed. As the three of them emerged, the one that Gordie had shot was trying to crawl away, its broken legs twisted behind it. Even as it bled, more flames burst to life in among the exposed and torn meat of its belly. Fool stepped forward and raised his gun, but Summer pushed past him again and shot it, sobbing as she did so. “They're children,” she managed to say, and then she fell to her knees in the growing pool of blood and intestines that it had left behind.

“Summer,” Gordie said, “you have to keep moving. They'll come back.” She raised her face to him and nodded, tears trickling across her cheeks and dripping from her chin.

“Just children,” she said again, holding her arms out to Gordie. He helped her up and they hugged, unself-consciously. He whispered something in her ear and she nodded, tilting her face back and kissing him on the mouth.

“I'm sorry,” Fool heard Gordie say and then the screaming started again, not Summer but the orphans, their voices twisted and brittle and furious. Already, the uneven glow had started to gather beyond the hallway's farthest doors as they massed.

The body was in the next room. It was splayed on the mattress in the corner, lying on its back, naked and exposed. It was covered in bites, small and shallow, that made Fool think of the marks left by the tinier inhabitants of Solomon Water; the orphans had been at the corpse, but they had not done much damage. The skin around the bites was reddened and raw, but the worst of the damage was around the face and genitals. Its penis was torn away at the root, the pubic hair now soaked with blood from the wrenched and ripped skin, the flaccid tube lying draped over the left thigh. Larger tears, these more destructive, were scattered around the belly and across its chest, exposing muscle under ruptured skin.

His face was gone.

“Find something to wrap it in and let's go,” said Fool. Strips of skin peeled back from the skull and had been left to hang like hanks of unbrushed hair at the side of the head. One eye was a ruined mess but the other peered at Fool with a wide, owlish glare. What had done this? What demon tore off the faces of the things it fed upon, bit and ripped at them? And did so in the Orphanage, where the offspring of demons and humans might amass and attack at any second? Was it so desperate to loosen the soul from the flesh to eat it that it would treat the man like this, would tear him to a mangled, shredded mass? Just what were they hunting?

“Fool, help, please,” said Gordie miserably. He was trying to lift a sheet from a pile on the other side of the room and the gray moss was rippling across its surface, pulsating, slithering toward his hands. He shook the sheet but the moss clung tight, moving like a pool of slow-flowing oil. Fool went to Gordie and gripped the other side of the sheet and they shook it as hard as they could, but still the moss clung.

“Don't call Summer,” whispered Gordie as they shook. “This moss, I think it's feeding on what's left after they're born, and I don't know if …” He trailed off as they whipped the sheet again. Most of the moss dropped off, hitting the floor with a damp sound and immediately starting to ooze down between the floorboards. One last flick removed the remnants from the material, along with a drift of flakes from older stains whose surfaces cracked in spiderweb patterns.

The two of them rolled the body in the sheet as quickly as they could. Fool was acutely aware of the increasing ferocity of the screams filling the room, and the undercurrent notes of scurrying and chittering. The orphans were coming back, closing in on the room. Already, wisps of black smoke were coiling around the doorway, lit from within by a pulsing heartbeat of flame. He fired another shot out into the hallway, blowing a hole in the plasterboard opposite the doorway and creating a cloud of hanging white dust. Something darted past, shifting the dust, making it swirl.

“Where's Summer?” said Gordie.

“I don't know,” said Fool, dragging the body toward the door. The weight pulled against him and his grip on the sheet slipped. “Help me, Gordie. Quickly.”

“Where's she gone?” said Gordie and grabbed the sheet. The two of them hauled the wrapped corpse to the door. In the leaping, sinuous light, moving shadows danced across the floor and up the walls, filling the hallway. The screams' volume was a physical thing that beat at Fool's ears. He made out little and could not see the entrance to the Orphanage, so thick was the gathering smoke, but he could feel the violence, the predatory stances, the impending attack.

Summer was standing in the middle of the hallway.

She was wreathed in tendrils of smoke, her gun hanging loosely at her side, and she was speaking. “Please,” Summer said, “I know you hurt, but a part of you is human. We only want to help this man, to find out what happened to him. Won't you tell us, please? You must have seen. And if you can't, please can you let us pass? Please?”

Amazingly, the orphans stopped moving for a moment. Fool sensed rather than saw them regarding Summer with blank-eyed malice. “Summer,” he called quietly, dropping the sheet and taking a step into the hallway.

“Summer,” shouted Gordie, his voice wavering, “come here. Run!”

Summer ignored them, crouching and holding her hand out to the nearest orphan, a ragged thing with a human face melting into a body that appeared to consist of a black, pulsating carapace covered in countless limbs and a bristling, whipping tail. It retreated from her hand, hissing and shrieking, spitting fire to the floor, where it sputtered and went out. Summer held out her gun and let the orphan see it before dropping it to the floor. “You're human, just a baby,” she said, “and I know you hurt, and you're angry, but hurting us won't help.” Behind Fool, Gordie moaned, a low wail that sang under the cries of the orphans. And then a movement shivered around the hallway like a whirlwind collapsing in on itself and the orphans surged toward Summer.

She got off one shot, scooping up her weapon and aiming at the thing that, moments before, she had been holding her hand out to. Fool saw it spin back into the crowd, the flame of its death spraying wide above its companions. Summer threw herself backward, but she was too slow and the closest orphans leaped upon her.

Flames snaked across the thin material of her uniform as Summer screamed. Something on a thread that was burning dropped down on her from the ceiling, long legs opening to clamp around her head, and she screamed again, the cry muffled by the orphan that even now was wrapping silver threads about her. As Gordie started toward her, the threads began to blacken, their outer layer drying and crackling, flaking away, and by the time he reached her, the first flames had appeared along their cabled length. He tore at the strands, crying out as the flames snatched at his fingers, Summer screaming and pushing up at the orphan on her head as more crawled up her body. Fool fired, shooting the nearest scuttling creature, and joined Gordie in pulling the creatures from Summer. He pulled his cuff down over his hand to protect it from the twisting skeins of flames, knocking orphans to the floor and kicking at them. Most were light and hadn't gripped onto Summer strongly, but there were so many that their tide was inexorable and began to swamp them.