CHAPTER ONE

Slaves of the Silver Key

 

The blonde leveled the still-smoking revolver at the man sprawled at her feet. “Of course I love you,” she said.

Everything about Julia Halloran seemed to proclaim those words a lie. Her voice was cold and even, her piercing blue-gray eyes unmisted by tears. Her hand stayed steady as she trained the .38 at what remained of the dying man’s head. The first shot had been a little high. A small chunk of his skull was gone, but his features were intact. She took careful aim, intent on correcting that mistake.

Julia paused then, her mask of resolve slipping just enough to reveal her pain. She choked back a sob and searched her husband’s eyes one last time for some hint of understanding. She could finish it without going mad if Sean recognized that she really was acting out of love.

Julia didn’t find what she was looking for in his eyes. Head haloed by a spreading crimson pool, Sean Halloran stared up at the apartment’s water-stained ceiling. His expression betrayed no misery, no surprise, only a profound weariness. Slowly his gaze moved to his wife. Her love had been the lifeblood of his dreams, at least the ones he’d not bartered away or allowed to wither. Now those last surviving hopes abandoned him.

With their passing, Sean Halloran’s eyes became fixed, as inexpressive as stone.

Not so his mouth, which was already quirked up at one end in an exaggerated, unnatural smirk. That smirk grew. It pushed up into his cheek, lips stretching until they fissured at a dozen bloodless faults. His jaw shifted as the gash of his mouth crept higher. The sound of bones cracking drowned out his bubbling, labored breaths.

The sight robbed Julia of her resolve. Her arms dropped to her sides, the gun dangling from numb fingers. “God help us,” she whispered. “Too late.”

“Yes, Julia Halloran,” said a sepulchral voice. “He belongs to Hell now.”

A figure wrapped in a ragged black cloak slipped through the open window leading to the fire escape. He adjusted the aim of his twin pistols as he emerged from the darkness and crossed the room, one gun fixed on the dying man, the other on the would-be murderer. His movements were effortless and menacing, a drop of poison gliding along a dagger’s edge.

For an instant Julia mistook the weird figure for Death itself. The threadbare cloak fluttered behind him like wings as he approached. Beneath the brim of his black fedora, his gaunt face was cadaverous, with blue-white flesh pulled tight over jutting bones. An awful, inhuman light—a crimson promise of justice, swift and merciless—flickered in the voids of his eyes.

He loomed over Sean Halloran for a moment and studied the dying man’s growing hideousness. The whites of Sean’s eyes had darkened to the purple and yellow of old bruises. The darkness devoured the brown of his irises. It crept hungrily across his face and body, staining his skin. Wherever the purple discoloration appeared, the flesh spasmed. Sean’s mouth was shuddering, too. It had shifted so much that it ran in a nearly vertical line, from his chin to the side of his nose. The inhuman maw gabbled and chuckled in a language heard only in the nightmares of the hopelessly mad.

The cloaked stranger nodded slowly, as if he understood every word.

There was no hesitation as he squeezed the trigger. Three bullets obliterated Sean Halloran’s head and silenced the eerie gibbering. The body trembled, tried to rise. Arms dark and bloated to near bursting struggled to push the torso from the floor. Finally, it collapsed and lay still.

All during the execution, the stranger kept his second automatic trained on the woman. The muzzle was poised a handbreadth from her face. “Your gun,” he said without looking at her. “Drop it.”

The .38 slipped from her fingers and thudded to the floor.

“The police will be here soon to investigate the gunshots,” he said. “I need some information from you before they arrive.”

“I know who you are now. I didn’t at first, but now I know. You’re that vigilante—the one the papers call the Corpse. The Tribune said you’d left town and you weren’t coming back.”

“They were wrong.”

“Yes, Sean said so, too. He said you’d be back.” She coughed a hollow, bitter laugh. “He was afraid of you.”

“With good reason.” Holstering his guns, the Corpse crouched to examine the body.

“Sean told me you killed Goose Vanderbilt.”

“Vanderbilt was a criminal, a murderer, like Sean,” he said as he studied the dead man’s fingers. They were patterned with small blotches even darker than his skin’s purple cast. “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from me.”

“That’s why you had to come back. We’ve all done something wrong. Everyone in Chicago.” Julia looked down at her hand, still aching a little from the pistol’s recoil. “A lot of it’s as bad as the things that Sean and those friends of his had gotten into. Whatever rotten business it was that damned my poor, sad darling.”

The crimefighter reached into Sean’s shirt for the thin chain circling his neck. He knew the chain would be there and what he’d find attached to it: an elaborately wrought silver key. Unlike the others he’d seen, though, this one was spotted with black paste. He yanked it free. “Where did this come from?”

“The key? I don’t know, but he’s had it a few weeks.” Julia moved dazedly to a cabinet and took a box down from a shelf. “I first noticed it the day he smashed this.”

She removed the handkerchief that covered the lidless box like she was pulling back a winding sheet. Inside lay the ruins of a homemade crystal radio set, the coil wrapped around an empty Albers Flapjack Flour package. “Sean wanted to be an announcer. He built this so he could listen to the Cubs games through an earpiece and call them for me. The day he broke it they were playing the Robins at Wrigley.” She set the box beside her husband’s body. “He was never good enough to play, but he could have been a great announcer. It’s all he ever really wanted. Any trouble he got himself into—before whatever that bastard Vanderbilt got him mixed up in—was from big ideas to get money for voice lessons or a suit for interviews. But then he just gave up. Smashed the radio and wouldn’t talk about it again.”

“The rest of it started then, too,” the Corpse said. “The smile.”

Julia nodded. The crooked smile was a constant after that, a badge Sean had shared with Vanderbilt and the other men who came to collect him for their late-night jobs. She’d come to loathe that expression, and to fear it. She hadn’t been to church since leaving Ireland, but she recognized the touch of the Devil readily enough.

Out in the hallway the sound of small footfalls ended in pounding and a shout: “Ma,” a child bleated, “let me in quick! The bulls are all over the street!”

A door creaked open to admit the boy. Before it slammed shut again, the noise from within the apartment grew momentarily louder. “Is everybody happy?” Ted Lewis asked from a scratched and skipping phonograph record. “Happy—happy—happy…?”

The question cut through Julia’s shock. She gazed at the dead body with suddenly clear eyes, which then drifted up to take in the room. She was startled, as if she were seeing her squalid surroundings for the first time. “Sweet Jesus, but it’s hot in here,” she said. “And that awful smell.”

The stench was the usual tenement funk and the less specific miasma of disease, decay, and death that lingered in such places. Though the Hallorans’ room was cleaner than most in the building, the smell there was no less oppressive. It had long ago permeated the floorboards and plaster. The tenants could no more escape it than they could silence the persistent drone of drunken shouts and curses, the bawl of hungry children, the harsh liquid hack of the sick, and the sobs of desperation that thrummed through the pipes and bled from every crack and corner joint.

Wordlessly the Corpse watched the tears begin to well in Julia’s eyes and roll down her cheeks. The tears weren’t so much the mark of her sadness flowing out as the despair flooding in. Whatever defenses she’d erected against the misery of her life were disintegrating.

The key cupped in the Corpse’s gloved hand glowed with a sickly blue radiance. He’d seen this before, with the keys he’d taken from Vanderbilt and three of Halloran’s other associates. It was feeding off her sorrow somehow. He slipped the key into the pocket of his bullet-torn coat and withdrew a silver tube. He emptied its contents onto the dead body at the center of the room. There was thunder now in the hall, the heavy-footed charge of policemen in the stairwell.

Julia followed the Corpse over to the open window. “Find the monster that did this to him,” she said.

He could see that she was already lost to whatever strangeness had sunk its claws into the city. “I promise you justice,” he replied. That promise sounded very much like the threat it really was.

When the police broke down the door to the apartment, they found only the remains of Sean Halloran, upon which writhed a few dozen yellow-white maggots—the calling card of the Corpse. The vigilante and the widow were gone. The Corpse was, at that moment, dropping down into the alley from the bottom rung of the building’s fire escape. He paused for only a moment before he stepped over Julia Halloran’s body, a still, broken heap after her silent leap into oblivion. Then he turned his back on her shattered form and headed toward the low-rent theater district on South State, the locus of true magic in Chicago.