For a second time during that endless night, a tapping at the door dragged me out of the inviting darkness of sleep and into a far less inviting one. This rat-a-tat-tat came much more faint, slow and distant, like it was too tired to be urgent. After putting together where I was—asleep at my desk again—I realized the sound came from the outer door. Not bothering with the one shirt I had left in my cabinet, I wandered out past Cass’s desk and opened the glass door. If I’d been more in my right mind, I might have considered the possibility that it was my friend with the stone fists come to finish the job, but somehow the thought didn’t cross my mind. Or maybe I was past giving a damn.
Then I saw who was standing in the hallway outside my office and figured I must be dreaming again, because no one on earth could’ve looked so good to me.
Evelyn Night stared, then frowned, cocked her head and pondered me.
“Mister … Orpheus?”
I nodded and swung the door wide for her. “Just like it says on the glass,” I told her. “But after all we’ve been through, you should really call me Frank.”
That seemed to light something in her eyes.
“Frank,” she said, as if it had just come to her. “Oh, Frank.”
She fell against me and I held her, close and tight, kicking the door shut behind us. We kissed, and there was a bitter taste in it that I couldn’t quite ignore, much though I wanted to. Then I tore my lips from hers and spoke into the shadowy silk cascade of her hair, close to her ear. “I’m pretty glad to see you, too.”
“You—you’re hurt again,” she said, brushing my bandages with the tips of her fingers.
“Nothing to worry over,” I said. “The good news is it sounds like you knew these bandages were fresh—which means you remembered they weren’t there the last time you saw me. Which means you may remember more than you realize.”
She smiled that hopeful, broken smile again, so unlike the predatory grin I’d seen on Damia Nyx’s face.
“Yes, I think I do,” she said, and I thought I almost heard tears in that voice, even though I hadn’t seen any on her delicate pale cheeks.
“Now that we’re both clear on my name,” I said, softly, “you know yours yet?”
Whatever hint of joy had touched her eyes guttered out.
“I think … it’s lost, forever.”
“No. It’s not.”
She leaned back from me then, to study my face—searching it for lies, I guess. Or maybe just trying to put the pieces back together.
“Maybe you better sit down,” I said, and waved a hand at the sofa where I’d convalesced a few eternities ago.
She sat. I stood, still holding her hands, one in each of my own. Her fingers were ice.
“Your name is Evelyn Night. You live at twenty-two Elysian Avenue, uptown. Ring any bells?”
I had hoped for fireworks to go off in those haunted eyes, but the ghost-inhabited darkness lingered. My client simply stared away at nothing that was in the office with us, some middle distance between Now and Then.
“Like a dream,” she said, “one I remember dreaming … almost … but it feels like it could never really have been my life.”
“It was,” I said. “I suppose it still is.” Now I paused, trying to decide exactly how much I should drop on her all at once. My gut told me to go slow, especially with the really rough stuff. “I, ah, paid a visit to your home—I hope you don’t mind. Nice place. Very ritzy. Remember anything about it?” Like pictures in black frames, I thought, not wanting to have to say it.
She looked blank as a fresh sheet of paper, but nodded slightly. “I remember … empty rooms … lonely nights … I remember hurting, being … brokenhearted.” She shuddered then, and I thought she might even faint, but she kept herself upright and looked right into my eyes. “How could I forget? How could I ever forget something like that? My parents …”
I held her.
“I think maybe forgetting that is how this all started,” I said. I couldn’t help thinking of the darkness I’d put behind me a few hours ago, all tinted red and echoing with Damia Nyx’s glassy laughter. I’m not exactly the churchgoing type, but right then I had no doubt a person could lose his soul in the smoke and shadows of Mr. Menace’s depraved pleasure dens, all those places behind the doors with the red circles. Losing your name and memories there seemed easy enough.
“You want me to take you home?”
Evelyn shook her head. “I—no. I can’t face that yet. Not yet.”
“Well, there’s no hurry. The place will still be there when you’re ready.”
She nodded against my neck, didn’t say anything.
“Do you remember where you were tonight?”
“No,” she whispered, shaking her head so slightly I only half-saw it in the gloom. “I want to, I just … can’t.”
She swiped an errant lock of hair back from her brow. With her right hand, I saw.
“Well, let me tell you where I was,” I said, stepping away now. “I was with a young woman. Hot stuff—a real killer. Name of Damia Nyx. Mean anything to you?”
“Should it?”
“Oh, you and her go way back. At least that’s what Miss Nyx told me, not long before she tried to kill me.”
“Kill you?” Evelyn looked genuinely shocked, and maybe a shade guilty, as if it had been partly her fault.
“Tried to relieve me of my blood by ripping my throat out.”
“Blood …”
“Tried to do it with her bare teeth. Well, and a pretty ring of hers.”
“Oh, God,” Evelyn Night said, and crumpled in on herself like a house of cards collapsing.
I wanted to hold back, to keep that last little bit of distance between us, not least because I still didn’t know how deep she was in this mess, or how much I could trust her. But I couldn’t simply stand there and stare. I dropped down beside her and put my arms around her again, felt her shake against me. If she was crying, it was in silence.
Then she said, “I think I remember now. Not everything … but enough. I remember what happened to me. I remember what he did to me.”
The way she said the word, I knew “he” meant the invisible boss, the phantom with a thousand ears. The man they called Mr. Menace.
“Tell me,” I said.
She told me.
It was Marcus Guilio—Junior Dapper—who introduced her to Radamanthus, and Mister Dapper himself who’d brought her into the Red Circle. It had all been fun at first—not innocent fun, but enough to take the edge off her grief, to push the pain away. There had been the gatherings at the club, and then other things, too, things she didn’t remember, or chose not to. I got the idea: games like the one I’d played with Damia Nyx, women and men all tangled up together in the dark, plenty of booze and bare skin and maybe some other, more exotic substances as well, say, the kind of thing that might have made it possible for a girl to shake off a couple of bullet wounds for a while. Only these games usually had more than two players at a time. It had quickly gotten so the perverse sport they engaged in at night seemed more real than Evelyn’s empty days in the lonely mansion on Elysian Avenue.
Then came the night Radamanthus decided she was ready to meet the big man. Aides Clymenus, known to those who knew him at all as Mr. Menace. Radamanthus played it up for a big deal, a great privilege. The other girls, the ones who hadn’t had the pleasure yet, made like they might die of envy. The ones who’d already met the man himself exchanged knowing looks and offered her the smiles of the damned, which she took for more jealousy. You’d have thought she was a good Catholic girl who’d been granted an audience with the Pope himself.
Radamanthus had a car waiting for her someplace past Club Erebus, through the rabbit warren on the other side of the door with the red circle. The fella behind the wheel was Myles Ferryman, the same tall, gaunt undertaker I’d seen with the Red Circle crowd the night I’d bribed my way into the club—and, no doubt, the figure I’d seen behind the wheel of Damia Nyx’s Dash Falcon. Seemed Ferryman was the only one Menace trusted to know all the ins and outs of the Tartarus Syndicate’s territory, all those empty tenements and notorious hotels and warehouses with no owners, all those rats’ nests of criminality and degeneracy on the bad side of the river.
Evelyn had no idea where Ferryman took her, doubted even Radamanthus knew for sure. Just someplace deep in that twisted labyrinth of streets, down a flight of mysterious stairs—not, I gathered, the ones I’d followed Damia Nyx down. After that it was all darkness, like a dream of drowning, lost in shadows and the haze of smoke and the wine they’d practically gulped down before they left the club. All the memories tangled up and got vague. There were people waiting down there in the dark—men, women, she couldn’t tell. They touched her, stroked and groped, did things with their mouths, their tongues and teeth. Somewhere in the middle of it all she lost her shoes and her high-class dress and anything she’d had on under it, and along with her clothes went all sense of place and time. In the utter black of those tunnels there had been only that fondling, only those obscene kisses. And then all that had faded and she was drained past the point of exhaustion, and alone.
So she’d thought, at first.
I watched her eyes as she told it, and it was like staring into a dried-up well—just like she’d described Mr. Menace. She wasn’t behind those eyes at all, not right then. She was adrift in that lost moment, or maybe someplace between Now and Then.
She didn’t hear the man in the dark with her, didn’t see anything, not at first. But she knew he was there, she said, because she felt him, the cold air that clung to him. Like he was some kind of ghost, I thought—some kind of boogeyman. Then she saw the black gleam of his eyes, and her heart froze. She heard him whisper terrible seductions to her that she couldn’t remember, and then she felt his icy embrace.
“He kissed me,” Evelyn Night murmured, staring at nothing. “That was all. But … it hurt … I remember it hurt, and I felt the life draining out of me … He was taking it, taking my life. He was murdering me. And I let him do it.”
I thought of Hally, the cuts with not enough blood, and of the black rings with the red bands and their wicked barbs, of Damia Nyx’s sanguine grin, and didn’t like where any of it was headed.…
Evelyn uttered a jagged laugh that turned into a kind of sob, then shook her head to chase the sound away.
“I could’ve fought. I could have gotten away from him … but … I …”
She dropped her head and I saw her gaze swim back into focus, back into the here and now.
“But you didn’t want to,” I finished for her, remembering the carnal gaze Damia Nyx had nearly beaten me with. How I’d almost wanted her to beat me.
“No,” Evelyn whispered. “I didn’t.”
I sat beside her, but at an angle so I could look her in the eyes. “What happened next?”
She was silent a long time, then shook her head. “I don’t remember. Only finding you, asking you to help me. Perhaps I only remember that because you told me about it.”
“Could be. Do you remember anything else about life before all this?”
“I’m not sure I ever was the person you talked about. Whoever she was … she died in the dark. I’m not her.”
I stared into her face. I couldn’t believe that this beautiful, haunted and frail woman in my office was completely ensnared in Menace’s poisonous web. This shaken girl was still more Evelyn Night than Damia Nyx, no matter what her memories seemed to tell her.
“Maybe you can be that woman again,” I said, slowly. “Maybe Evelyn Night’s not really dead. Not yet.”
“I don’t believe that.”
She said it, but I’d swear I caught a glimmer of hope in her dark eyes.
“Who came to see me all these nights?” I pressed. “Not whoever Mister Menace and his goons set loose, the woman who disappears every night. She wouldn’t give a damn, and she sure as hell wouldn’t pay some poor dumb gumshoe to chase down her old name. So it must’ve been that other woman, the one who knew she had a real life and wanted it back.”
“Then why can’t I remember her?” she asked, tears shining on her cheeks. “Why does it all feel like a made-up story someone told me ages ago?”
I sighed, wanting the bottle again, or at least a nice piano aria. Anything to clear my thoughts.
“Well, one thing’s sure, we’ve got to get you out of this tangled web you’re in. Then maybe that old life will come back to you. I’d bet money on it.”
“I don’t even know what I’m involved in,” Evelyn said. “It’s all like a dream I can never remember when I wake up. Except that I can never really wake up, either—not to that life you talked about. Only to this … whatever this is. This purgatory.”
I had no response for that. What could I say, when I more than half agreed with her?
Then she stood up and pulled some cash out of a pocket, dropped it on Cass’s desk and headed for the exit.
“Thank you, Mister Orpheus,” she said, opening the door.
I stepped to the door and shut it again.
“Now hold on there, sister,” I said. “You’re not walkin’ out on me as easy as that. I’ve taken a fair amount of hurt for you—we’re in this together now.” I hoped my tone came across more kind than tough, even if it wasn’t my usual mode.
She answered with a broken smile.
“You’ve done all you can for me. Thank you. But … Frank, you should get out while you can. And you still can.”
Like she’d heard Cass saying it.
I shook my head. “That’s not how it is anymore. I’m full-in and I’m gonna be full-in until the end.”
And didn’t that turn out to be right? If I’d known how right, maybe I would’ve let her walk on out that door. But I didn’t, and she didn’t.
Instead, my client, Miss Gray or Miss Night or whatever I was supposed to call her, looked at me a moment. Then she took a step away from the door and stared out the window, into the night. “So,” she said, not smiling. “What do we do next?”
“First, you sit back down and let me talk. Fair?”
She nodded. “Fair,” she said, and glided back into the room, but didn’t resume her place on the outer office sofa.
“It seems to me we gotta find out just exactly what you’re in. I’ve gotten a glimpse, but only enough to make me ask a lot of questions. I can’t get in there on my own, not with Menace’s goons everywhere and that she-devil Damia Nyx prowling around.” I took a breath before I continued; I knew neither of us would like what I had to say next. “You, on the other hand, can come and go from that world as you please.”
She laughed again, still bitter and hurt, but with the faintest hint of warmth now. “How?”
I slipped an arm around her waist, tugged her close, then reached into her jacket pocket. I’d felt the small hard shape when I slipped my arm around her. I pulled the thing out and opened my hand to reveal the black ring with the fluid red band around it and the half-hidden barb, the twin of the one that’d drawn wet red lines all along my gut and shoulder and wrist.
“I think this is the key,” I told her. Then I glanced up and got a good look at her face.
Her skin had gone as white and hard and brittle as chalk, her lips thin, drawn back into something like a snarl or a grimace. Her eyes burned with—what? Loathing, I thought. Or fear.
“Put it away,” she whispered.
I dropped the ring back into the pocket I’d pulled it out of.
“I’m sorry,” she said, sidling away from me. “I … don’t want to look at that thing.”
“So you know what it is.”
“No, and I don’t want to. It’s something awful. That’s what I know.”
“Then I’ll get rid of it,” I said, reaching again, “maybe that—”
“No!” she snapped, clutching the ring through a handful of her jacket, holding it to her heart like a precious keepsake. “I can’t. I should—I want to, oh God. But I can’t.”
“I figured. I don’t know how, but I figured.” I took a breath, and the stormy tension in the air dissipated a bit. “So okay, we’ll just have to figure out how to use it to get what we want.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
I thought of the sting of my wounds. “I know it. Still …”
“This is crazy.”
“Probably.”
She shook her head, managed something resembling a smile—but it was a broken thing, more pain than relief. All the same, it was the most life I’d seen in her yet, the brightest glimmer of hope. I wanted to leap to it—yeah, just like a moth to a flame.
Miss Night stared out the office window, out across the jagged skyline of the city where the dawn had begun to touch the clouds, turning them from the black of sackcloth to the gray of ashes. Not much warmth or light to be found out there, either, but I suppose it was better than nothing.
“I’m tired,” she said softly. “So tired.”
“Yeah,” I said, and put an arm around her again. “Let’s get out of here.”