I woke up like I was clawing my way out of my own grave. The sunlight falling across my face came through a shroud of fog, but even so it stung my eyes like sweat. The room looked familiar enough—my digs, plain as a brown paper bag. My unopened mail scattered across the table in the kitchen corner, my coat dangling like an executed man from the wooden hat rack by the door, with my fedora for his head. Same water-stained plaster ceiling I’d stared up at on a thousand nights, same window with its view of the building’s brick airshaft. The bed was mine, too, sheets tangled, the one pillow bunched off to the side. And I wasn’t the only one in that bed, now I had a look. Despite myself, I jerked away from the woman asleep beside me like she might be rabid.
Like she might bite, you could even say.
Squinting against the morning light, I slipped out of the creaking Murphy bed and backed away from the woman. She didn’t so much as stir. I didn’t think about the fact I was naked, didn’t ponder just then what’d happened to the clothes I’d had on beneath that coat and hat. I had more pressing concerns.
I stumbled my way into my tiny bathroom, feeling somehow more at home among all the broken tiles and mildew. I left the door open so I could keep a watch on my guest out of the corner of my eye. The bottom of the scuffed bathtub had a bit of water in it. Well, at least we’d cleaned up after … whatever.
I leaned over the yellowed sink and took a good long look at myself.
What a mess.
Scars, the old one around the left eye and a bunch of new ones around the nose, straggling across my right cheek. They ran down to lips that were still puffy-tender from their meeting with a fast-moving fist in the recent past. I saw a few newer additions around the throat, on the chest, the wrist, still just red-black scabs. That poor sap staring out of the glass at me was a sorry heap of bricks in need of a wrecking ball.
I sat down on the narrow lip of the claw-footed tub and wondered who that fella was and how he’d come to be such a walking disaster.
Memories drifted around my mind like old snapshots dropped in a pond. I saw a door with a frosted glass window, saw a woman I knew, but didn’t know. A red light pulsed on and off in my skull. I saw a girl slender as a new-born foal smiling sweet depravity at me. Darkness, and muzzle-flashes. A random procession of faces marched by and I put names to them without knowing exactly how I conjured it all up—Hally Thersis, Myles Ferryman, Jimmy the Doberman, Radamanthus. Somewhere in the gloom between the ruddy pulses, another face hovered, just out of sight, a face I needed to see to snap everything else back into place. A face that sank fear straight to the deepest places in me. My thoughts groped at it, then shrank back in terror, lunged and retreated again. I couldn’t. I couldn’t drag that image out of the shadows even to shake some sense into everything else. But I could put a name to it, oh yeah. It was Clymenus, better known as Mr. Menace, the man with a hundred eyes and a thousand ears.
I stood up and shook my head at that poor beaten-up bastard in the mirror. I could remember so many random names, why couldn’t I think of his? I ran two fingers down the side of my face, watched the sap in the mirror stroke the ugly half-moon curve of that old scar over his eye.
Frank. That was the dumb palooka’s name. Frank Orpheus. Licensed Private Detective. Office at the Cain Building, in midtown. Suite number 513.
The rest of it came fluttering back then, too, as that whirlpool in my brainpan died down and the photos settled where I could see them. Not quite all, but enough.
Almost enough.
I looked again at the long slender shape in my narrow bed, saw in the corner of my eye the fella in the mirror frowning at her. Just how had we ended up here, like this? How had I gotten so tangled up in this craziness? How had I so completely lost my grip on all the most basic rules of my profession, starting with the one about not letting your feelings get in the way of business? I poked around for traces of last night, but something had blown a big ragged hole in the middle of my recollections. I remembered tossing back high-quality hooch with the goon who’d done his best to make my face look like something Picasso might’ve painted, and I vaguely remembered the big dumb thug sliding down in his chair and flopping to the floor on his knees like he was shooting dice or maybe praying. But between that moment and the sunlight stinging me awake, someone had torn out all the pages.
I ran some water, scrubbed my face with my bare hands, raked my fingers through my hair, and walked back out into my living room-kitchen-bedroom. Slowly, I sat down on the bed and gave the soft figure there a nudge. When that didn’t get any response, I gave her another, and another, then a push, finally a shove. That did it. She rolled over and opened her eyes, blinked, shut them again, then opened them much more slowly. Her brow furrowed, then she looked me up and down and her eyes widened. It hadn’t even occurred to me to get dressed, but since she was every bit as naked under those sheets as I was on top of them, it didn’t seem worth making a fuss over now. I saw her hand wander up and down the contours of her shape, assessing her state of undress. She sighed. It was a very small, somehow unsettling sound.
“Morning,” I said.
She stared at me.
“Frank?”
“Yeah, and you’re Evelyn. Evelyn Night.”
“Of course.” She said it like the name was just another fact, like the price of lima beans in Peru, neither here nor there as far as she was concerned.
“You remember … anything?”
She went blank, might’ve been no more than a department store mannequin for all the life in her eyes. Then that plastic look crumbled, and she shook her head like she was answering no to a question, but not the one I’d just asked.
“Frank … oh, Frank … You were there, weren’t you?”
“Was I?”
She scrambled up into a sitting position, forgetting any modesty she might have left and kicking the sheets away, pulling her knees up to her chest and touching my shoulder with one soft cool hand.
“I … I can’t see everything, but … some of it … I can remember some of it because you were there. I don’t know why that is, but it’s true. I can remember some of it because you were with me. I … we …”
She broke off, closing her eyes and turning her face away from me. I slipped closer to her and curled an arm around her long, tapering back, ran my fingers through that forge-fire hair of hers.
“What?” I said.
“You were … you were supposed to be …”
“What?”
“… my first.”
“First what?” I asked, but I knew, and understood she didn’t mean it the way girls usually do when they gab with their gal pals about their firsts. “You mean I was supposed to finish up like Guilio, or Hally Thersis?”
I felt the far-off stir of memories, of carved thorns and polished nails, and teeth.
“It was what they wanted … Mister Radamanthus … and …”
She couldn’t bring herself to say that other name, and she didn’t need to. I knew it well enough and I didn’t much feel like hearing it just then. But what she’d said made it a bit clearer why Jimmy the Doberman hadn’t killed me that night in my office. I’d thought they meant to scare me off, but maybe this Mr. Menace had me figured better than I’d realized. Maybe they knew exactly how to keep me on the hook, to make sure I’d stick to the case no matter what. Getting rid of some troublesome photos was just the gravy.
“Yeah, okay,” I said, pulling her tight to me, enjoying the sensation of her soft warmth alongside me more than I had any right to. “Maybe that was how things were set up, but somehow it didn’t end that way. I’ve still got a pulse and from what I can tell, so do you.”
“I guess we should count our blessings.”
Her voice sounded more damned than blessed, but I nodded.
“Yeah, and we should do something else, too. We should figure out a way to end all of this, for both of us. We should figure out how we can wake up from this nightmare, once and for all.”
“We can’t. I can’t.”
“Like hell.”
“How?”
She slumped against me, breathing very deep and slow.
“I’m not sure yet, because I’m only just figuring out what we’re dealing with. But I think I’m starting to see all the stuff I couldn’t at first, all the stuff that made your case such a puzzler. When it was just a case.”
She looked at me, but the surprise in her eyes faded almost instantly. She knew that she was a lot more to me now than a name and case number at the top of a file. More than a one-night stand, too.
“He’s some kind of … monster, isn’t he?” I continued, each word as heavy as if it were cast in lead. “The man running the show. Mister Menace.” I saw her flinch at the name. “And I think he can take your life away in pieces and only give you back the ones he wants you to have. That was okay for your friend Miss Nyx, because she wanted to be what he wanted to turn her into. So she gave in to him and when he’d torn out anything decent and innocent in her, she still had her name and everything else that made her look like good ol’ Damia Nyx, uptown society girl.
“But you … Maybe you wandered in on your own, even asked to be let into the party. Only then you realized you didn’t want what Radamanthus and his boss were selling, and you didn’t go in smiling like little Miss Nyx did. And when they tried to take all the good out of you, you held onto it. You hid it somewhere, and after you got away from them, it came back to you, but full of holes. You were a person again, unlike the rest of that strange flock, but you’d lost your history, your home, your family—even your name. But you knew enough to go looking for it. So you came to me.”
I wasn’t sure where the thoughts all came from; I had a feeling they were percolating up from whatever part of my mind remembered all the details about last night, the stuff the rest of my brain had wiped clean. All I knew for sure was that as I said all these crazy things, they made perfect sense to me. It was the raving of a madman, and I knew beyond any doubt it was true.
Evelyn just slouched there against me, cool and light as a feather pillow.
“I can feel him,” she said, her voice so quiet it might have come from across the sea. “I can feel him pulling on my soul, trying to … to tear the rest of it out of me. I … Frank, I can’t keep hold of it much longer. Pretty soon … he’ll win. And I’ll be just like Damia.”
“No. We won’t let it get that far. We’ll stop it first.”
She held me in her haunted gaze a moment, then sank back onto the bed, not even troubling to cover up those splendid, naked curves of hers.
“I need to sleep.”
I shook my head, despite the damn near overwhelming desire I had to settle there beside her. “We need to think. Sleep can wait.”
“I’m so tired, Frank. Let’s just sleep a while.”
With every word she spoke, I found it harder to keep my eyes open, and my whole body felt like a sack someone had filled with wet concrete. The thought of sliding back under the sheets with her and letting the thick gray fatigue in my skull have me sounded like the closest a guy like me might get to heaven. But I shook it off, got up to put on some strong coffee.
“We can’t waste time,” I said, rattling pans, filling my tall black coffee pot with water and lighting the stove to start it boiling, making noise to keep us both alert. “Gotta think, if we’re gonna walk away from this.”
“I can’t Frank, it’s too late for me.” I heard her words slur toward a doze. “You can … you should … Let me go, Frank. Walk away and let me go.”
I ignored the pot and dropped back onto the bed, swept her up in my arms.
“Enough of that talk. We get out of this together, or not at all.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I said it. It’s how things are now, like it or not.”
“I don’t like it,” she murmured. Her eyelids kept fluttering shut then bursting open, then fluttering shut all over again. “I let you go last night. I don’t remember much of what happened, but I remember that. He couldn’t make me kill you. Please … I saved your life, don’t throw it away for me.”
“I said, we’ll both walk away from this.”
She sighed, leaning against me, heavy with exhaustion now. “How?” she muttered.
“We have to face him,” I said, slumped against her as she slouched against me. “Face him and … finish him. Cut off the head of the Tartarus Syndicate, however we can.”
“No,” Evelyn whispered, and I heard an edge of near-terror in her voice I’d never heard before. “No …”
I pried an eye open, hardly aware I’d let them close, and looked down at her, asleep in my arms. So beautiful.
From somewhere a thousand miles away came the rich fragrance of coffee brewing. I figured I’d better go take it off the stove in a minute.
Shifting to get up, I rolled over beside beautiful Evelyn and didn’t quite make it off the bed.
The air stank of burnt metal and incinerated coffee.
I opened one eye.
Twilight. Damn.
And … something else.
The bed beside me was empty.
I sat up and stared around my crackerbox apartment. I was alone.
Only I wasn’t. I felt her there, somehow, as if I could tell just by the feel of the scorched air that she was still in the place.
Then I saw her, standing at the window, dressed and tidied, staring out at the gathering night. How I’d missed her the first time I couldn’t guess; it was like I’d looked right through her. Like she’d been made of glass.
“Hey,” I said, getting up now, switching off the burner under the boiled-dry coffee pot. “Hey.”
She didn’t turn. I stepped up next to her, studied her phantom reflection in the window. I hated that look in her eyes—it was the same one I’d seen before, at the hotel, in the office. The look of someone desperate to be someplace else. The look of a hop head half out of her skull for a fix.
I put an arm around her neck, tried to draw her to me but she wouldn’t budge. She just stood there, watching dusk deepen to night behind the jagged concrete and steel skyline of the city.
“I … need to go …”
“Not yet.”
“Yes. Before something else happens to you.”
“Crazy talk. I’m fine.” I tried to ignore the itch around my eye and the aches in my face so that I could maybe believe it. “You’re staying here with me until we can figure out our next step.”
“No. I … I can’t stop myself … I hear his voice in my head, right now. I hear him whispering for me to … to give up, stop pretending … stop pretending I don’t belong to him. And I can’t … I can’t keep saying no.
“And if … when I finally give in … Frank, he wants me to kill for him. He wants me to kill you.”
“You had the chance. You didn’t do it.”
“But … I had to fight so hard … I can’t fight it for another night. I need to leave here, now, before I break down. I should never have come to you at all.”
“Listen, if you go out into that city, what do you think will happen? Maybe you won’t kill me, but it’ll be someone else, some poor sap who’ll fall hard for those red lips of yours, and then two people will die. That poor sucker, and you. The part of you that monster on the West Side couldn’t get to. Radamanthus’s boss is trying to take everything from you, everything that matters. I’m not about to let him get away with it now.”
Now at last she turned to face me, her eyes full of darkness. She shook her head, slowly. “It’s too late.”
“No.”
I wrapped her up tight in my arms and kissed her, kissed her deep and for a long, long time.
I guess it was that kiss that finished me, completely and for good—and Evelyn Night, and other, innocent people. That kiss that never seemed to end, that spiraled on and on into the black. We toppled into bed and my hands were all over, frantic to uncover her skin again. We rolled and thrashed and moaned in a kind of insane chorus that made me think distantly of that endless music in Club Erebus. And then I got to thinking that we were at Erebus, our naked bodies tangled together in a booth while the music thumped and groaned, and maybe we kept the beat to it or it kept the beat to us; the rhythm was the same in any case. Cocktail waitresses and cigarette girls drifted past, giving us politely uninterested gazes, pink ribbon smiles, as if our contortions were nothing all that interesting. Customers in pressed suits and fancy dresses gawked at our performance, grinning, appraising us like showdogs, but we kept pushing and relaxing, flailing and flexing. Polite applause broke out and I wanted to snarl at all those freakshow escapees to get their filthy eyes off us, what the hell were they doing in my place anyway? Only then we weren’t in my place, or at the club either. We were back in that sweat-stinking tunnel, twisting on the floor while other couples or trios or groups did the same and more, and I couldn’t hear either of us anymore, but I could still feel her, and all those eyes on us, and that brutal hunger twisting in my gut. Even this bestial abuse of our flesh couldn’t soothe that hunger, and I thought I felt teeth tearing flesh and couldn’t tell whose teeth or whose flesh and didn’t give a damn anymore. Someone else had joined the fun now, a blonde girl, writhing and squirming with us like an angry white snake. It wasn’t enough. I wanted the taste of blood, of stolen vitality, and I knew it clung to my skin, maybe my own maybe not.
But suddenly in the depths of all that, I couldn’t. Something deep in the pit of me forced me back, screamed sanity at me. My bones hummed with pent-up, ravening hunger, but I held it off. Still not sure where I was, only half sure who I was, I pushed myself away and into a darkness that obliterated everything for a long time.