ss - Lost Souls.txt

Lost Souls.txt????????[JD1JD2mBIN                                   [back]
                                     by
                                Clive Barker

 Everything the blind woman had told Harry she'd seen was undeniably real.
 Whatever inner eye Norma Paine possessed-that extraordinary skill that
 allowed her to scan the island of Manhattan from the Broadway Bridge to
 Battery Park and yet not move an inch from her tiny room on
 Seventy-fifth-that eye was as sharp as any knife juggler's. Here was the
 derelict house on Ridge Street, with the smoke stains besmirching the
 brick. Here was the dead dog that she'd described, lying on the sidewalk
 as though asleep, but that it lacked half its head. Here too, if Norma
 was to be believed, was the demon that Harry had come in search of: the
 shy and sublimely malignant Cha'Chat.

 The house was not, Harry thought, a likely place for a desperado of
 Cha'Chat's elevation to be in residence. Though the infernal brethren
 could be a loutish lot, to be certain, it was Christian propaganda which
 sold them as dwellers in excrement and ice. The escaped demon was more
 likely to be downing fly eggs and vodka at the Waldorf-Astoria than
 concealing itself amongst such wretchedness.

 But Harry had gone to the blind clairvoyant in desperation, having failed
 to locate Cha'Chat by any means conventionally available to a private eye
 such as himself. He was, he had admitted to her, responsible for the fact
 that the demon was loose at all. It seemed he'd never learned, in his all
 too frequent encounters with the Gulf and its progeny, that Hell
 possessed a genius for deceit. Why else had he believed in the child that
 had tottered into view just as he'd leveled his gun at Cha'Chat?-a child,
 of course, which had evaporated into a cloud of tainted air as soon as
 the diversion was redundant and the demon had made its escape.

 Now, after almost three weeks of vain pursuit, it was almost Christmas in
 New York; season of goodwill and suicide. Streets thronged; the air like
 salt in wounds; Mammon in glory. A more perfect playground for Cha'Chat's
 despite could scarcely be imagined. Harry had to find the demon quickly,
 before it did serious damage; find it and return it to the pit from which
 it had come. In extremis he would even use the binding syllables which
 the late Father Hesse had vouchsafed to him once, accompanying them with
 such dire warnings that Harry had never even written them down. Whatever
 it took. Just as long as Cha'Chat didn't see Christmas Day this side of
 the Schism.

 It seemed to be colder inside the house on Ridge Street than out. Harry
 could feel the chill creep through both pairs of socks and start to numb
 his feet. He was making his way along the second landing when he heard
 the sigh. He turned, fully expecting to see Cha'Chat standing there, its
 eye cluster looking a dozen ways at once, its cropped fur rippling. But
 no. Instead a young woman stood at the end of the corridor. Her
 undernourished features suggested Puerto Rican extraction, but that-and
 the fact that she was heavily pregnant-was all Harry had time to grasp
 before she hurried away down the stairs.

 Listening to the girl descend, Harry knew that Norma had been wrong. If
 Cha'Chat had been here, such a perfect victim would not have been allowed
 to escape with her eyes in her head. The demon wasn't here.

 Which left the rest of Manhattan to search.

 The night before, something very peculiar had happened to Eddie Axel. It
 had begun with his staggering out of his favorite bar, which was six
 blocks from the grocery store he owned on Third Avenue. He was drunk, and
 happy; and with reason. Today he had reached the age of fifty-five. He
 had married three times in those years; he had sired four legitimate
 children and a handful of bastards; and-perhaps most significantly-he'd
 made Axel's Superette a highly lucrative business. All was well with the
 world.

 But Jesus, it was chilly! No chance, on a night threatening a second Ice
 Age, of finding a cab. He would have to walk home.

 He'd got maybe half a block, however, when-miracle of miracles-a cab did
 indeed cruise by. He'd flagged it down, eased himself in, and the weird
 times had begun.

 For one, the driver knew his name.

 "Home, Mr. Axel?" he'd said. Eddie hadn't questioned the godsend. Merely
 mumbled, "Yes," and assumed this was a birthday treat, courtesy of
 someone back at the bar. Perhaps his eyes had flickered closed; perhaps
 he'd even slept. Whatever, the next thing he knew the cab was driving at
 some speed through streets he didn't recognize. He stirred himself from
 his doze. This was the Village,surely; an area Eddie kept clear of. His
 neighborhood was the high Nineties, close to the store. Not for him the
 decadence of the Village, where a shop sign offered "Ear piercing. With
 or without pain" and young men with suspicious hips lingered in doorways.

 "This isn't the right direction," he said, rapping on the Perspex between
 him and the driver. There was no word of apology or explanation
 forthcoming, however, until the cab made a turn toward the river, drawing
 up in a street of warehouses, and the ride was over.

 "This is your stop," said the chauffeur. Eddie didn't need a more
 explicit invitation to disembark.

 As he hauled himself out the cabbie pointed to the murk of an empty lot
 between two benighted warehouses. "She's been waiting for you," he said,
 and drove away. Eddie was left alone on the sidewalk.

 Common sense counseled a swift retreat, but what now caught his eye glued
 him to the spot. There she stood-the woman of whom the cabbie had
 spoken-and she was the most obese creature Eddie had ever set his sight
 upon. She had more chins than fingers, and her fat, which threatened at
 every place to spill from the light summer dress she wore, gleamed with
 either oil or sweat.

 "Eddie," she said. Everybody seemed to know his name tonight. As she
 moved toward him, tides moved in the fat of her torso and along her
 limbs.

 "Who are you?" Eddie was about to inquire, but the words died when he
 realized the obesity's feet weren't touching the ground. She was
 floating.

 Had Eddie been sober he might well have taken his cue then and fled, but
 the drink in his system mellowed his trepidation. He stayed put.

 "Eddie," she said. "Dear Eddie. I have some good news and some bad news.
 Which would you like first?"

 Eddie pondered this one for a moment. "The good," he concluded.

 "You're going to die tomorrow," came the reply, accompanied by the
 tiniest of smiles.

 "That's good?" he said.

 "Paradise awaits your immortal soul..." she murmured. "Isn't that a joy?"

 "So what's the bad news?"

 She plunged her stubby-fingered hand into the crevasse between her
 gleaming tits. There came a little squeal of complaint, and she drew
 something out of hiding. It was a cross between a runty gecko and a sick
 rat, possessing the least fetching qualities of both. Its pitiful limbs
 pedaled at the air as she held it up for Eddie's perusal. "This," she
 said, "is your immortal soul."

 She was right, thought Eddie: the news was not good.

 "Yes," she said. "It's a pathetic sight, isn't it?" The soul drooled and
 squirmed as she went on. "It's undernourished. It's weak to the point of
 expiring altogether. And why?" She didn't give Eddie a chance to reply.
 "A paucity of good works..."

 Eddie's teeth had begun to chatter. "What am I supposed to do about it?"
 he asked.

 "You've got a little breath left. You must compensate for a lifetime of
 rampant profiteering-"

 "I don't follow."

 "Tomorrow, turn Axel's Superette into a Temple of Charity, and you may
 yet put some meat on your soul's bones."

 She had begun to ascend, Eddie noticed. In the darkness above her, there
 was sad, sad music, which now wrapped her up in minor chords until she
 was entirely eclipsed.

 The girl had gone by the time Harry reached the street. So had the dead
 dog. At a loss for options, he trudged back to Norma Paine's apartment,
 more for the company than the satisfaction of telling her she had been
 wrong.

 "I'm never wrong," she told him over the din of the five televisions and
 as many radios that she played perpetually. The cacophony was, she
 claimed, the only sure way to keep those of the spirit world from
 incessantly intruding upon her privacy: the babble distressed them. "I
 saw power in that house on Ridge Street," she told Harry, "sure as shit."

 Harry was about to argue when an image on one of the screens caught his
 eye. An outside news broadcast pictured a reporter standing on a sidewalk
 across the street from a store ("Axel's Superette," the sign read) from
 which bodies were being removed.

 "What is it?" Norma demanded.

 "Looks like a bomb went off," Harry replied, trying to trace the
 reporter's voice through the din of the various stations.

 "Turn up the sound," said Norma. "I like a disaster."

 It was not a bomb that had wrought such destruction, it emerged, but a
 riot. In the middle of the morning a fight had begun in the packed
 grocery store; nobody quite knew why. It had rapidly escalated into a
 bloodbath. A conservative estimate put the death toll at thirty, with
 twice as many injured. The report, with its talk of a spontaneous
 eruption of violence, gave fuel to a terrible suspicion in Harry.

 "Cha'Chat..." he murmured.

 Despite the noise in the little room, Norma heard him speak. "What makes
 you so sure?" she said.

 Harry didn't reply. He was listening to the reporter's recapitulation of
 the events, hoping to catch the location of Axel's Superette. And there
 it was. Third Avenue, between Ninety-fourth and Ninety-fifth.

 "Keep smiling," he said to Norma, and left her to her brandy and the dead
 gossiping in the bathroom.

 Linda had gone back to the house on Ridg...