Supernatural Noir

—

Introduction — Ellen Datlow

The Dingus — Gregory Frost

The Getaway — Paul G. Tremblay

Mortal Bait — Richard Bowes

Little Shit — Melanie Tem

Ditch Witch — Lucius Shepard

The Last Triangle — Jeffrey Ford

The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven — Laird Barron

The Romance — Elizabeth Bear

Dead Sister — Joe R. Lansdale

Comfortable in Her Skin — Lee Thomas

But for Scars — Tom Piccirilli

The Blisters on My Heart — Nate Southard

The Absent Eye — Brian Evenson

The Maltese Unicorn — Caitlín R. Kiernan

Dreamer of the Day — Nick Mamatas

In Paris, in the Mouth of Kronos — John Langan

Ellen Datlow

—

Noir is an attitude, a stance, a way of looking at the world. Paul Duncan, in his concise book
Noir Fiction
, defines it as a term “used to describe any work, usually involving crime—that is notably dark, brooding, cynical, complex, and pessimistic.”

Noir fiction has been popular since right after World War II and has maintained its popularity over the years. The world of noir is thick with criminality, rife with betrayal. But the main characters in noir are not necessarily detectives or criminals, hence the hard-living guy with a chip on his shoulder, a cold affect, and something painful (and tamped down) in his past, and the sexy dame with a middle name spelling “trouble” in capital letters.

The supernatural has taken a parallel path to the present but is an older form of literature, originally known as the gothic. There have been a lot of supernatural detective stories published, but relatively few supernatural noir stories. There
are
a few detectives of the supernatural in this anthology, but they’re not very traditional, and they don’t always succeed in their quest for the truth—for the facts—and those who do are sometimes very sorry.

The noir form of fiction and film has been one of my favorites my whole life, as has supernatural fiction. So it seemed perfectly appropriate for me to edit an anthology of stories combining two of the genres of literature I love.

I asked for smart, edgy, complex, harder-than-nails stories of the supernatural with at least a few of the trademarks of noir. Some of the stories within feature women as the main characters, and at least one oddity only becomes a tale of detection quite late in the game. But whatever changes the evolution of mores and sensibilities have wrought on traditional noir, I think you’ll recognize the characteristics of noir and be entertained by these sixteen writers’ interpretations of the genre.

Gregory Frost

—

All Meyers wanted to know was how Kid Willette, that he’d personally educated in the ring his last two years as a trainer, had ended up dead—and not just dead, but beaten, mangled, and dismembered dead. It didn’t make sense. It shouldn’t have been. Nobody could put a glove on Willette unless he wanted them to. Unless he’d been bought. That was the only time he’d ever gone down. Meyers knew that better than anybody.

So when he walked into the Sixth District station to find Detective Bulbitch, he just wanted a simple explanation: Kid had been doped; Kid had been drunk; Kid had been wounded. He thought he would hear an answer that would let him go home from his night shift in the taxi, hoist a farewell shot of bourbon in commemoration, and then go to sleep untroubled by impossibilities.

He found Bulbitch at his desk, sharpening a pencil with a pocketknife. The shavings were sprinkling down onto his belly. His pink skull, graced with all of seven remaining hairs, glistened as if the pencil was giving him a very hard time.

Meyers drew the folded
Inquirer
from his armpit, opened and tossed it in front of the detective. Bulbitch looked up. For an instant Meyers saw fear—the same fear he glimpsed in people all the time when they first got a look at him. Then Bulbitch’s face widened into amusement. “Well, if it ain’t my most favorite pugilist. How you been keepin’?” Meyers made a nod at the paper, where the front-page headline proclaimed, “Roadhouse Horror.” It was so big that even the national story following up on Truman’s kicking MacArthur out of command had been squeezed into a sidebar.

Bulbitch didn’t bother to look. “You still driving the cab?” he asked, and when Meyers persisted in saying nothing, he folded the knife and sat upright. He brushed the shavings like crumbs off his shirt and tie. “Yeah, all right,” he said. “Okay. I figured you’d hear about it. Expect the word’s out everywhere from Jack O’Brien’s to the Christian Street Y by now.”

And so the story unfolded.

Red’s Roadhouse out in Paoli was one of those two-story places slapped together with boards that had probably started life as a barn. The main hall had sawdust on the floor and a bar that was big enough for a catered wedding party to circle. On the second floor and in the back were the rented rooms, one of which they even had the chutzpah to call a “suite.” It was to this suite that Cody Aldred and his three enforcers had retreated for some R&R after a few weeks of breaking legs. The owner of the place, amazingly enough named Red, swore up and down that he didn’t know that Cody had brought in any working girls. How was he to know the women weren’t the men’s wives? It was a question that nobody answered as they were too busy laughing, seeing as how Red employed a half-dozen chippies of his own in the second-floor rooms.

So, a little past midnight the night before, in the main room, at least two dozen people had been lounging in various states of blur. Those who still remained in the aftermath—including ever-reliable Red—agreed that no one else had come in. Nobody at all had entered Cody’s suite.

And yet, in something like five minutes, according to everyone in the place, Cody and all three of his boys had been butchered. Torn to pieces. The three chippies were unharmed, and not one of them could explain what had happened.

There’d been noise, something that howled like a gale and rattled the brass knob and shook the door on its hinges. The screams, someone said, were the screams of men being slid quick into hell. Only when it was over—and silent—did Red work up the gumption to go look. He didn’t even reach the door before the three chippies in there started their own caterwauling. Red paused with his hand on the knob, and that was when he noticed that the sawdust under his feet was turning wine dark, the stain spreading outward. The shrieking went on and on, but Red backed all the way to the bar, where he grabbed some change and hurried to the pay phone on the outside wall. Nobody else went for the door in his absence, although maybe one or two sidled on out of the roadhouse.

“Tough guy, old Red,” said Bulbitch. “Uses himself a little baseball bat with a rebar center when somebody acts up in his establishment. But even he wasn’t gonna open that door. And, Meyers, you ought to leave it closed, too.”

Meyers kept his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He rocked like a punching bag, his mind sifting the details. Bulbitch grabbed a pack of Camels off his desk, jerked one cigarette out, and put his lips around it to draw it from the pack.

“So,” Meyers finally, casually said, “Kid was with Cynthia, huh.”

“Yeah.” Bulbitch’s fingers had just scissored on the cigarette, but stopped. He scowled with the realization that he’d been played, and he stared up at Meyers without lifting his head. “And you have now got all the information you’re getting, Mr. Meyers.” He rose up, his head even with Meyers’s neck. “You listen to me now. Leave it. This isn’t Montgomery versus Mouzon at Shibe Park. Ain’t any rules here. This is somebody did something so awful we’re gonna have to invent a new word to call it. And anyway, Kid Willette
ruined
you in the fight biz, so what in hell is it you think you owe his ghost?”

Meyers pulled the newspaper to himself. The picture on the front page was of a pile of trash beside what might have been a body under a sheet. “Nothing,” he said. “Not a goddamned thing. I was just curious, was all.” He took the paper and left.

——

The following night, whenever he had a fare that dropped anywhere close to Third and Race Streets, Meyers trolled over to the DR Bridge and drove the Crawl. He had no idea where Cynthia lived, but he knew where she worked when she hadn’t been hired for a night and hauled out to Paoli.

The third time through the Crawl that night, one of the working girls hailed him and told him to take her to Spruce and Twenty-Second. On the way he asked if she’d happened to see Cynthia.

She told him, “Not tonight, I ain’t, on account of her pimp dragged her over to South and Second till things settle down. And you didn’t hear that from me.”

After dropping her off, Meyers cut over to South and then drove straight down toward the Delaware; about the time he crossed Broad he remembered to turn off his light.

He parked the cab and got out, then strolled north along Second. This was the turf of old money, and a hooker had to blend a bit. He knew he might not find her—she might have scored a john already. But he got lucky.

Cynthia had a little dog on a string, a Pekinese, and she was walking it up and down the sidewalk between South and Lombard. Her platinum hair all but glowed under the streetlights. Meyers wondered what she did with the dog.

As he came nearer, she paused and made a show of taking out a cigarette. He shook his head in the darkness as he drew up. “You know, I still don’t smoke,” he told her.

Her pose relaxed, and she stared hard at him. “Oh,
you
. I mighta known.” She pulled out a lighter and torched her own smoke. Her hand might have been shaking. “You looking for a tumble tonight, Pants-on-Fire?”

“Not really.” He held out his hand as if inviting her to dance. Between two fingers was a folded ten-dollar bill. “I need to talk to you, Cyn.”

“You think so?” Her jaw clicked, and she shifted it from side to side. Cynthia had suffered at the hands of a boyfriend, a psychopathic fighter, back in the days Meyers had been training Willette. The boyfriend had dislocated her jaw, and whoever had fixed it hadn’t set it right, with the result that it clicked sometimes when she spoke. If it hurt, she never said. Meyers had been on hand the night the boyfriend had tried to murder his opponent in the ring, and the opponent’s trainer had taken a three-legged stool to him. One leg had driven right into his brain, almost immediately making the world a significantly better place. Somehow, Cynthia had ended up going home with Meyers that night. She’d stayed till morning. Mostly, they’d gotten drunk while she tried to figure out why she was crying her eyes out over “a rotten dead bastard,” and Meyers had insisted on paying her like any john. It was some strange matter of protocol and respect that made sense only to him. In the end, as a compromise, she’d charged him for an hour of her time. He still didn’t know what to call what had happened between them.

He said, “You gotta talk to me a little bit. You were with Kid.”

She flicked the cigarette away and lit another. “I didn’t think this was no social call.”

“Who did it, Cyn?”

“Jesus, Meyers.” She drew herself up, and for a moment he felt like she was bigger than he was. “Do you know, I got bounced to three different cells in three different station houses last night? Wasn’t allowed to sleep and damn near not to take a piss, and they just asked and asked and asked, but they got nothing for their trouble. Ten-dollar bill buys you the same as they got, but it’s your money, honey.” She snatched it from between his fingers.

“Well, at least tell me the way it happened. I know you liked Willette.”

She took a deep drag. The dog pulled her a couple of feet along the sidewalk so that he could sniff around a skinny tree. “Yeah, he was nice, for a handsome boy with a wad of bills and no sense.” The dog whimpered then, and she said, “Come on, Johnny, I gotta walk.”

They strolled side by side, like two old friends in no hurry to get anywhere. “What happened is, I don’t know what happened. They was three back rooms made up that suite—suite, like they’s a big luxury hotel and not a hole you could raise pigs in. I was, you know, doing Kid. And then all of a sudden, somebody’s screaming, and I mean screaming like their legs was being sawed off. It was Cody. Kid pushed me off him, snapped up his braces and charged right outten that room. No shirt, and he was stuffin’ himself back in his trousers with one hand and picking up his gun with the other.”

“He had a gun?”

“They all had guns, honey. Anyway, he charged out of that room like a bull, and the screaming, it stopped just for a second. Couple of doors slammed. And then it was back, but it was some other voice, and some shots, and then even more screaming. Kid that time. You got no idea how awful it was. I crawled under the bed with the cockroaches and the condoms and the mouse shit, and I stayed there.

“And then it just stopped, ya know? Everything went quiet. Some time passed. I got up and put on Kid’s jacket and snuck out to see. I woulda bolted, but Dottie come out of the next room. She’d been with both of Cody’s other guys, and I don’t know whose turn it was, so don’t ask. You probably know Dottie. She stayed home tonight like I shoulda.”

“What about the third girl?”

“Her.” She shook her head at some memory. “Cody had her with him already. She just got off the boat. Acted like she only spoke enough English to order a sandwich maybe.”

“Off the boat from where?”

“Estonia—is that a place?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then.”

The dog wrapped himself around a light pole. Meyers asked, “What are you not saying here, Cyn?”

She pulled the dog backwards to untangle him. “Dunno what. You’d seen her, you’d understand. Big, shiny eyes. Crazy eyes. Course, we all had
’
em right about then, didn’t we?” She met his gaze as if his calm perplexity could answer for everything. “Cody said her name was Yuliya, like Julia but with a
Y
. He was gonna hand her over to Mr. Drozdov later.”

“Cody pimping for the boss?”

She shrugged. “Hey, it’s a business, isn’t it? You get paid and go where you go, same as a cabbie.” He ignored that. “And maybe with Drozdov’s reputation, ya gotta go all the way to Estonia to find somebody who don’t know any better.”

He chewed on that. “So she was with Cody the whole time?”

“Me and Dottie found her sprawled in a chair, covered in blood. Didn’t have a stitch on.”

“Then
she
saw what happened.”

Cynthia waved one hand around in a little circle. “What she told the cops was, the two of them was playing, you know, the way Cody liked it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He’d tied her to the chair. I been with him once or twice. It’s like he’s tryin’ it out
’
cause the boss does it. Only nobody’s afraid of being tied up by
Cody
, ya know?”

Meyers knew. Drozdov had dipped into the fight game awhile, hadn’t he, and more people seemed to get hurt on those occasions. Somehow Drozdov and the mob accommodated each other, kept to their respective territories. He must have had connections they appreciated. There were stories about how Drozdov liked to inflict pain, in particular how he liked to play with a boys’ wood-burning set. He’d been arrested two years back after a couple of mutilated hookers had been fished out of the Delaware. They’d been tortured, burned and scarred with an iron of some kind, and somebody had fingered Drozdov, or maybe the cops had just heard the same stories as everybody else. Either nothing could be proven or he’d bought the right people to make the charges go away. Hookers and hired muscle—nobody cared about either one.

Meyers shook himself back to the present. “Okay, so Cody tied up this dame.”

“Said he blindfolded her and the second she tugged it off, she was hit in the face with blood like out of a fire hose—and that’s how it looked, all right. Feet was still tied to the chair. We seen her and we ran into the room before we knew what was . . . what all the lumps on the floor was.” Her chin trembled and she clamped her lips together and shot him an accusatory glance. After a minute she went on. “Dottie started screaming, and then this doll comes around, and she starts screaming, too.”

“You were in shock, all three of you.”

“Sure.” In the streetlight glow he watched her revisit the moment, watched her face pulled by awful currents of memory. “There was four bodies in there, John. The stink. And you couldn’t look anywhere at all. You just . . .”

He tried but could not fathom how it had happened. How could nobody have witnessed Kid Willette’s demise?

“I’m cold,” Cynthia said abruptly. “I think I’m sick, you know? Probably oughta go home, like Dottie. Stay in bed.”

“I’ll give you a lift,” he said. “On the house.”