The Quorum (47 page)

She remembered other red nights, and the statuette, and the Thirteen. Little else made sense. Her brain pan wasn’t large enough for acute self-consciousness, but the fuzziness was clearing up. Her mind was still mostly mists, but a few pains and joys stood out as hard-edged tangibles.

Her talons twitched. She needed the red stuff. The killing frenzy rose in her. She pushed herself forward and caught the prevailing wind. Flapping occasionally against the complex cross-currents, she glided silently downwards.

She could feel the pull of the shaft from the statuette.

* * *

The alley was badly lit and unpopulated. Sally easily found the car. Like everyone remotely connected with crime, Derewicz evidently considered himself immune to it. The car was unlocked, and the keys were in the starter. Sally squeezed into the back, and crouched on the floor.

Derewicz came back, bruised and pissed off. He had lost his balaclava. He had a gun, which made things serious.

He saw her a moment after he had tossed his weapon into the front passenger seat. He grabbed for it, but she tipped the seat savagely forward. The gun fell into the clutter of old cigarette packets and porno magazines under the dashboard.

She grabbed his wrist and tugged hard. He was pulled off balance, and banged his head heavily on the metal jamb. He swore unimaginatively at her. She threw herself back and kicked the driving seat with both feet. He was scrunched against the steering wheel.

Derewicz pulled out, and angrily hammered the roof. Sally scrabbled for the gun, but couldn’t reach. She heard the click of a switchblade.

A gun and a knife. Evidently Karabatsos favoured belt and braces methods.

A murderous black duvet swooped out of the sky and fell on Derewicz. Sally saw him lifted out of her field of view. There was a sound like someone beating the dust out of a fleshy carpet; then the more identifiable noise of a man being turned inside-out.

Through the Panavision oblong of the widescreen, Sally could see that it was raining entrails and scraps of expensive tailoring. She clambered awkwardly into the front seat, and shut the door. She strapped on the seatbelt, picked up the gun, and felt stupidly safe.

When dropped from even a moderate height on asphalt, the human body resembles nothing so much as a dustbin liner filled with watermelons. Derewicz thumped into the ground. In order to get out of the parking space, Sally would have to drive over him. She knew it would hardly make a difference.

She drove at random, scarcely aware of the red-eyed stone thing in the back seat. She found a packet of camels in the glove compartment and gave up giving up smoking. She felt tight inside, as she always did after witnessing unspeakable horror.

She turned on the radio and found a hippie show. The Holy Modal Rounders sang, ‘It don’t take much to get you up there, but when you come down, you land on your fee-ee-ee-ee-eet!’

* * *

The licence was in Karabatsos’s name. His Swiss Cottage address was on the back of a crumpled envelope she found in the ashtray. So much for backbreaking detective work. She looked the street up in the car’s tatty A
to Z,
and whiled away the short drive by thinking up the right hardboiled questions to ask.

It was an unobtrusively expensive house, a lot like all the others in sight but with obscene stained glass panels on either side of the front door.

The key was on Derewicz’s ring, so she let herself in without making a fuss about it. The hallway was tastefully furnished with antiques in nice little niches. None of the pieces were as striking as Mother Hen.

Only one doorway off the hall showed a light. She opened it. The room was a study, and Karabatsos was in it.

He was stark naked, and lying in a circle of chalked symbols on the uncarpeted floor. His ribs looked like something from a Chinese takeaway, and his scrawny shanks were tattooed with a delicate tracery of ideographs.

As before, his stomach was the most notable thing about his person. It was purple with unhealthy yellow mottles, and rippled as it shifted on the countless cilia which affixed it to his abdomen. Vestigial hands clutched well-worn ridges under Karabatsos’s armpits. Beautiful, long-lashed eyes stared out of the mass, just below his sternum.

‘Miss Rhodes,’ he said, not turning his head to her, ‘you’ve not met my wife.’

He sat up carefully, cradling the flesh of his flesh, and pulled on a Sorcerer’s Apprentice dressing gown. His schlong hadn’t been anything to write home about.

‘Joanna is quite ardent, I’m afraid. I pledged to give her my body, but I never thought it would come to this. Soon, I fear, I shan’t have enough body left.’

‘Mother Hen...’ She held out the statue.

‘Pretty, isn’t she?’ He didn’t seem all that interested. ‘I must say I’m surprised to see you. In her last killing frenzy, back in ’68. she didn’t stop until Henry Fleetwood put the retarding spell on her. He was the First Among Thirteen then, not that there were thirteen of us left. After the mess was cleared up there were only five: myself, Henry, my wife, Mr Derewicz and the odious Silliphant. My wife having long since disqualified herself from consideration as a human being, I suppose I am the only one. That rather devalues my position as the First, but never mind...’ ‘You’re forgetting me, aren’t you?’

Karabatsos decanted something red, and sipped it.

‘No, my dear, of course not. You aren’t easy to forget, believe me. It’s just that you don’t count. You’ve held on to the statuette long enough to catch whatever it is that upsets Mythwrhn so much. We never did quite work it out, but Fleetwood got the incantations down pat. You might have the temporary use of your limbs, Miss Rhodes, but you are as dead as Julius Caesar, Jacob Marley and silent pictures.’

‘...and you?’

‘Ah, I was careful. I am thrice protected. There was not a little pain involved, but the Mythwrhn cannot so much as touch me. It’s not really magic, just transcendental arithmetic. It’s quite fascinating once you get through the brand of patronising mumbo-jumbo the late Joel Silliphant was so keen on. Of course, you don’t have time to make a thorough study of the subject...’

He poured a little liqueur into a slurping orifice between his wife’s eyes.

‘There there, Joanna. We’ll be finished soon. Miss Rhodes, if you wouldn’t mind leaving. My wife has had a tiring day.’

‘Why me, conjure man?’ She asked. ‘How did I come into your game?’

‘You have such a nice advertisement in the Thomson Local Directory. Now, I would appreciate not having to watch the Mythwrhn play with you...’

A rush of air blew the door behind Sally open. Mother Hen crowded into the hall.

‘Oh well, I suppose my stomach can stand it. Try not to scream too much. The neighbours are liable to complain.’

Mother Hen brushed walls with her wings, uncomfortable without a sky above her. She brushed a heavy bronze mask to the floor, and closed her talons about the heavy metal, crushing it like a coke can. Her wound bled a little.

She drew her wings in and crouched as she came into the study. Once in the spacious room, she stretched. Sally saw the shifting, multi-coloured highlights in her superficially black feathers. Her flat stomach gleamed with honeyed perspiration. She was terribly beautiful.

‘She doesn’t want to kill you,’ said Karabatsos. ‘She wants to kill me. But, just now, she can’t. We all have to obey laws. Obviously, my tattoos were worth the momentary discomfort. She has a very presentable bum, don’t you think?’

Sally backed away. Mother Hen towered over Karabatsos, clacking her beak with rage. She turned her head on a swan neck and looked at Sally with kindly eyes.

Sally realised that she had left Derewicz’s gun in the car, but assumed that it wouldn’t have made much difference.

Karabatsos tried to look nonchalant, but his hands were quivering in voluminous sleeves. Mrs Karabatsos was chirruping something.

Mother Hen draped her wings around Karabatsos and hugged him. She dipped her head to his stomach, and gripped the squealing jelly with her razor-edged beak. Blue mucus sloshed loudly on herringbone tiles.

Karabatsos screamed like a man being partially castrated with a pair of boltcutters. He realised too late how close he was to his wife, and that he should have protected her too.

Mother Hen shook her head, and Karabatsos flew into a wallsized bookcase. Delicately, she dropped the wriggling wife. The thing that had loved Nigel Karabatsos rolled like an upended louse. Its tubes waved feebly as it shrivelled and died.

Karabatsos leaked into a pile of broken-backed books. From nipples to pubes, he was an open wound. The neatly punctured bowels flopped loosely between his legs. He gulped deep breaths, but his lungs were as functional as a pair of ruptured balloons.

He had nothing courteous or acidic or witty or waspish to say as his contents spilled.

Sally looked at the feathered murderess, and could find no disgust for such a magnificent creature. The assassin tucked her head under her wing, and scratched feebly at her sundered breast. Sally knew what she had to do.

She took the statuette, and got a firm grip on the golden arrow. The shaft came free as smoothly as the sword-in-the-stone for the once and future king. Sally easily snapped the impertinent needle in two.

Unbloodied, Mother Hen stretched her wings and shattered the French windows. A light rain blew in from the walled garden. Her wound irised shut, leaving a negligible scar. She was no longer bound. She sang gently.

Sally was wrapped up in Mother Hen’s feathery embrace. She closed her eyes and felt the great heart beating close by her ear. Her body thrilled as she was swept off her feet.

‘Up, up, and away,’ she whispered.

S
ally Rhodes let Wringhim pick her up in the Dealer’s Room, and willingly accompanied him back to the house in Lodovico Street. He matched perfectly the description the Australian’s people had given her, down to the sharkskin suit, watery eyes and William Powell moustache. She spotted him straight off, flicking through a stack of
Spicy Mystery Stories
magazines at one of the stalls. She had done enough research in the past week to pass herself off as one of these bizarros, and engaged him in conversation. He was only too keen to brag. She had the impression he hadn’t ever talked with a real, live girl before. That gave her an advantage. He was too pleased with her interest in him to question it. She dropped a few names, and he stooped for them.

‘Dennis Etchison? Now, there’s a thing. I have every story he ever wrote, in the magazines they originally appeared in. Men’s magazines, mostly, if you get my drift...’

Sally smiled. ‘That must give you an unbeatable pick-up line.’ He didn’t get it. ‘You know, “come up and see my Etchisons”?’

He still didn’t get it. She decided to abandon irony as a tool in this case.

Wringhim started to tell her about the three issues of
Vault of the Strangler
missing from his collection. He seemed to take their absence personally. His eyes glowed like neons, and his voice took on the exact lascivious tone of the husband in
Gaslight
talking about the hidden rubies. He recited the names of obscure pulp writers in an unholy litany, ‘Seabury Quinn, Arthur Leo Zagat, Justin Case, Otis Adelbert Kline, Robert Blake...’ His long fingers played over the yellowed edges of the stack of pulp magazines in front of him, curving into claws as he flicked an issue open to scan a contents list. He all but slobbered over a faded cover picture of a voluptuous girl, clad in two cobwebs, being consumed whole by a hungry plant. Unmarried, the file had said, no personal ties. It was easy to see how he had sublimated his procreative urges.

Later, in Lodovico Street, Wringhim produced a huge keyring and dealt with the triple locks on the door of the Collection Suite. She expected a dusty morgue with piles of ancient, rotting books, and skeletons of long-missing persons scattered on stone floors. She got a striplit, modern library, with free-standing shelves of bright-spined paperbacks arranged alphabetically by author, while the more dour hardbacks were behind glass against the walls. Many of the spines had embossed skulls, ghosts, severed hands, full moons behind clouds, bats. Titles were written in dripping blood, or green slime, or monkish gothic script.

‘I have every book Arkham House ever put out, all personally signed to me by the authors.’

She thought that wasn’t possible, but merely nodded, trying to look interested.

‘And here, Miss Rhodes, I have a complete set of Ramsey Campbell’s works.’

‘The books look a bit... well, scruffy,’ she said.

‘Yes. I’ve coated them with dirt from the gutters of the streets in Liverpool where Campbell was living when he wrote the books. It’s personalised touches like that that make any given item unique. You notice the red smudges on the binding of that American
Incarnate?’

Indeed, she had. ‘Yes, is that...?’

‘Strawberry jam. Smeared by Tamsin Campbell, the author’s own daughter. That would nearly triple the worth of the volume, of course. As I was saying, the personalised touches always add to the value.’

‘Hmmn, interesting,’ she murmured. The profile the Australian had put together didn’t quite convey how many cowboys short of a posse Wringhim was. He had no record, but that didn’t make him clean. He had independent means, which covered a multiplicity of indulgences. She was beginning to get a feeling about this lead. Not a nice feeling, but a useful one. Perhaps she would be able to report back to the Australian tomorrow after all.

‘What’s through here?’ she asked, indicating another multiple-locked door.

‘Ah, that’s the centrepiece of my collection. That’s where I keep my Barkers.’

‘Clive Barkers?’

‘Of course. He’s the most collectible of the moderns, you know. There are so many special editions, so many variants...’

‘And your collection is complete?’

He smiled, and she noticed his ratty little foreteeth poking out from under his double-slash of a moustache. ‘But of course, Miss Rhodes. You must come and see.’

More keys ground, and the door was unsealed. The windowless room beyond lit up automatically, like a fridge. The light was ghostly, slightly glimmering.