Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

CHAPTER 14 in which needs must when the devil drives

Behind the carnival, the freaks gathered. Cabal had returned to the train for a chance to apply a hasty dressing to his wound and a quick change of clothes. He lifted the lid of the blanket box with the toe of his shoe, but Horst wasn’t at home. Typical, never around when he was needed. He dropped the lid with a bang and returned his attention to getting his thin black cravat just so. By the time he’d finished, they were waiting for him outside.

Cabal stood on the topmost step and addressed the search parties. “Good evening. We have two serious problems. Firstly, the carnival will cease to exist in a little over an hour’s time, and we are still one soul short of the target. Secondly, we have a man on the loose who knows far more about our business than is good for us and, therefore, him. This man will cause trouble if he isn’t located and dealt with as soon as possible. Mr. Bones?”

“Yo?” The thin man waved from the back of the group.

“Has Barrow managed to get out of the grounds?”

“No way, sah. We had a couple of peeks of him, but, soon as he sees us comin’, he’s out of there like a bat out of Hell.” He frowned. “Never did understand that expression. They don’t have bats in Hell.”

“Mr. Bones,” said Cabal, “a little focus, please?”

Bones focussed. “I got Joey on the main gate. Barrow ain’t going anywhere.”

“Good. Have you organised search teams?”

“Sure have, two of ’em. Dolby, Holby, and Colby from the Ferris wheel, because they know what he looks like — ”

“Hold on. Who’s running the wheel in that case?”

“Oh, a couple of Maleficarus’ old crew are handlin’ that.”

Cabal paused. He didn’t like leaving any of the former inmates of Brichester Asylum to their own convoluted devices unless absolutely necessary.

At the Ferris wheel, the two men watched it spin endlessly.

“You see?” said one. “It never ends. Wheels within wheels. Infinite angles.”

“Yes! Yes! Ouroboros incarnate! Swallowing his own tail!”

“Swallowtail?” said the first. “Where? Where?”

“Excuse me,” called a woman from the wheel. “Could you possibly let us off now? We’ve been going around for about half an hour and it’s getting a bit boring.”

The lunatics ignored her. “The circle is complete!”

“Card ten, the wheel of fortune!”

“Ten! Very, very significant!”

“Yes! No! Isn’t that twenty-three?”

Cabal shrugged inwardly. They’d be all right. “And the other team?”

“Some of the Things from the Ghost Train — we got Dennis and Denzil fillin’ in while they gone,” Bones added quickly, anticipating Cabal’s question.

“What we have here,” said the skeleton driver of the hastily retitled Parapsychological Perplex Experience, “is some sort of demarcation problem. Now, I wouldn’t dream of turning up on the footplate of your locomotive. You’re supposed to be behaving ghostily, in there.”

He pointed into the shadowed entrance of the ride. Dennis and Denzil, firmly wedged into the tiny train at the head of the ride, followed the gesture, their necks creaking like new shoes. They turned back to the Ghost Train’s driver and shook their heads, squik, squik, squik. There was the faintest sound of something rolling around inside of Denzil’s skull.

“All right,” said the driver, “you don’t want to do this in a civilised way, we’ll do it yours.” Denzil and Dennis looked at each other and nodded triumphantly. Squik, squik, squik.

“Konga?” called the driver at the top of the structure. The enormous gorilla automaton who sat on top of the ride and threatened passers-by with a papier-mâché boulder — at least, the passers-by hoped it was papier-mâché — leaned over the parapet and looked inquisitively at the driver. Upside down, it looked a lot more threatening for some reason. “I’m having a little trouble with these two,” finished the driver, waving a thumb at Dennis and Denzil. The giant gorilla slid a contemptuous glare at them, bared its impressive fangs, and made a basso profundo growl that shook their teeth in their dry sockets. What was left of Dennis’s and Denzil’s eyes widened with much cracking of varnish.

Those are th’ two parties, but we also got all these kine people an’ stuff who can jus’ stroll round the place, nonchalant like.”

Cabal looked at them and sighed. Most of them couldn’t stroll if they had a handbook on the subject, never mind doing it nonchalantly. He also noticed that his gaze kept sliding over one part of the group. With a deliberate effort he concentrated on the spot and finally noticed a small man who was so nondescript that even “nondescript” was slightly too exciting an adjective to describe him. “Who are you?” he asked. Everybody around the man tapped their chests in surprise, and it took a few moments of “No, not you, beside you, on the other side, no, your other side,” before the man realised he was the subject of attention. Interestingly, several others continued to look through the man in puzzlement as if he weren’t there.

“Oh,” said the man in a soft, unaccented voice, “you mean me.”

“Yes,” said Cabal, working hard to keep his line of sight locked to the man. “Who are you? I don’t remember seeing you before.”

“My name is Alfred Simpkins, sir. You were kind enough to take me in when my colleagues and I absconded from Laidstone Prison.”

“You’re one of the murderers?”

“Yes, sir.”

“One of the serial killers?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So …” Cabal looked at the pale little man with his hair combed across his bald patch, his little moustache, his little glasses, his cardigan and cheap suit with the patched elbows. “What’s your interest in this?”

“You’re looking for Detective Inspector Francis Barrow, retired, are you not? I saw him in the Hall of Murderers earlier this evening, snooping, skulking.” Some colour almost came into his cheeks. A couple of his neighbours finally spotted him and yelped with surprise.

Interesting, thought Cabal, he’s only easily visible when he shows emotion. Otherwise he’s too bland to notice. “He caught you, didn’t he?”

“Yes, sir. With your permission, I’d like to kill him.” He said it in the same way others might say, “I’d like an extra pint and a carton of yoghurt.”

“If you find him, you report it to one of the others. I want him alive.” Cabal’s thoughts were still on the last unsigned contract. “No personal vendettas — I’ve got a business to run.”

“Very good, sir,” said Alfred Simpkins in a tone devoid of anything.

Cabal cast his eye over the rest of the group before nodding with some little satisfaction. “Very good. You know who you’re looking for. Find him. Dismissed.” As they left, he sought out Bones. “Mr. Bones, have you seen my brother recently? In the last hour or so?”

“Afraid not, boss. I see him round, you want me to tell him you asked?”

“Yes, if you would. Thank you.”

Barrow hid behind the Waltzer and considered his next move. He’d already made one terrible tactical error by not getting the heck out of the carnival while he had a chance. He’d managed to convince himself that help could be found here, however, and that had been a big mistake. He hadn’t seen a single person whom he felt he could trust to behave sensibly, or who wouldn’t simply be put in too much risk. When he belatedly realised this, he’d headed for the exit, only to find an enormous character whose head seemed to be constructed from animated stone standing by the gate, watching those going home with a close attention. Barrow didn’t believe that he could hope to go up against the stone-headed man armed with anything less than an anti-tank rifle. A cursory examination of the fencing that surrounded the Cabal Bros. Carnival indicated that he wouldn’t be getting out that way, either: twelve feet high and topped with razor wire. He’d assumed that the inward bend at the top was a mistake, that they’d put up the fence the wrong way around. After all, putting it up that way would be far better at keeping people in than out. Now he wasn’t so sure it was a mistake at all. He was trapped, then. In that case, he had no choice but to stay hidden until daybreak. From what he’d seen on his previous early visit, most of the carnival’s denizens weren’t very keen on daylight. He’d watched a group of flickering dark things pass across the roofs and hoardings a few minutes earlier. Only the fact that he was out of the bright lights himself had made them visible; the townsfolk below had remained entirely unaware of the lightly tripping mob of nightmare that had passed only a few feet above their heads, shielded by the brilliant bulbs, neons, and fluorescents that made the darkness beyond so much deeper.

Barrow looked back on the unpleasant feeling of foreboding that had been with him much of the day, the feeling that he had glorified with the word “fear,” and smiled. No, that had just been the collywobbles. Now he was afraid. They were throwing everything into the search, and that meant things that had only ever been catalogued in chained books in cathedrals. Things that were a long way away from the human monsters he’d spent his working life hunting and bringing to justice. Thinking of that helped him; perhaps he could find some strength there by remembering the predators he’d pulled out of the crowd and thrown into gaol? He tried it.

Smith, the insurance man who collected on a few too many policies for comfort. Yes, he could still remember the look on Smith’s face when the verdict came in, like a spoilt child who’d been found out. Jones, the doctor who started to play God with his patients’ lives and disposed of the ones he disapproved of. That had been difficult — Jones had been “assisting” the enquiry as an expert witness, and it was the alteration of a piece of evidence that had made Barrow look more closely at his involvement. Ye gods, the trouble he’d had convincing his superiors to probe Jones’s background more thoroughly. Brown, the hatter with the very private collection of busts he used to model his wares. If there had ever been a man to revel in his own insanity, it had been Brown. He’d actually become a hatter purely because of the association with madness. When he’d been sentenced, he’d asked to see his captor in private. There, as the Black Maria waited to take him away, he’d leaned close to Barrow and, laughing quietly to himself, whispered, “I’m not really mad. Only pretending, only pretending!” He was led away making shushing noises at Barrow — it was to be their private little joke.

And Simpkins, the man who killed because he could. They’d arrested him on fifteen charges, and he’d quietly suggested in the interview room that there were thirty-two missing persons that they might like to add to the tally. Barrow could still remember Simpkins in the dock while the charges were read, never showing a flicker of emotion but seeming polite, if a little bored. “Do you plead guilty or not guilty?”

Simpkins had pushed his glasses back up his nose, smiled slightly to show that he just wanted to help, and said, “Oh, guilty. Obviously.”

In his interviews, he would only talk to Barrow, and ignored questions from anybody else even if Barrow was present. “Why is it so important that you speak only to me?” Barrow had asked finally. “It’s very inconvenient.”

“Because you can see me, Detective Inspector Barrow. Other people start to lose interest after a while. You, delightfully, always see me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ve gone through life as a piece of marginalia, faintly written in soft pencil. Passed by, overlooked, ignored. It has been of great personal distress to me, I cannot begin to tell you how painful. Since childhood, I was always the last to be chosen — if, indeed, they remembered to choose me at all. Always considered the wallflower, though I stood full-front and cried, ‘Me! Me! Me!’ Never loved, never despised, never anything to stir the emotions at all. Alfred Simpkins, the invisible man. After a while, it quite began to aggravate me. That’s when I started making people take some notice of me.”

“You started killing them.”

“Yes, I did. Even that was a disappointment. I’d hoped for some sort of great emotion from those whose lives I took. After all, being murdered for no other reason than because a pallid little man — I am under no illusions as to how you perceive me — wants to prove a point, you would think it would make people angry at the very least. It would seem unfair, would it not? But all I ever got was faint expressions of surprise. You know, I don’t believe they noticed I had murdered them. I really don’t. They just seemed faintly put out, as if it were a bit of bad luck, an act of God. ‘Oh, my carotid artery has been severed with an open razor. I knew I should have cut down on greasy foods.’ ‘Botheration, I’m being belaboured with a fourteenth-century battleaxe. What are the odds, eh?’ I was standing there in front of them with a sub-machine gun or backing over them with a rotary cultivator or whatever and shouting, ‘I am Alfred Simpkins! I am killing you! Will you please take a little bit of bloody notice, please?’ But they never did. So I kept going. Hope springs eternal, after all.”

“You knew you’d be caught, surely?”

“Well, one would think so, wouldn’t one? Do you know, I’ve sat in my living room covered head to toe in blood, cradling the murder weapon in my hands — already labelled ‘Exhibit 1’ — and been interviewed by your colleagues. Had I seen my next-door neighbour recently? Indeed, I had. A little under three hours previously, when I’d bludgeoned her to death with this very knobkerrie, officer. Well, sir, we have other enquiries to make. Good day. They hadn’t noticed. Nobody notices me. Except you, Detective Inspector Barrow. You notice me. The first time you saw me, you knew I’d done it. Do you want to know what I would like to do more than anything, Detective Inspector Barrow?”

“No.”

“I’d like to kill you.” Barrow had looked at Simpkins hard. “No animosity. Simply because you would notice yourself being murdered. That would be my little bit of affirmation of my existence. Then I would never have to kill again.”

Barrow had denied Simpkins’s request and not been diplomatic about it. Simpkins was sent down to Laidstone for so many life terms that, even with good behaviour, he was unlikely to be out before the next ice age. Simpkins’s attitude towards him had changed then; it had become personal.

Barrow paused, curious, and wondered why he was thinking about Simpkins just now, of all times. Perhaps it had been that little man he’d seen walk by in the crowd. He’d been the absolute living spit; the resemblance had just started all these thoughts rolling around his head. All of which was very nostalgic in a forensic sort of way, but it wasn’t getting him any closer to finding somewhere safe and stopping Cabal. “Stopping Cabal” seemed very simple when it was only two words. The implications were horrifying in their complexity, however. Stop him how? Stop him from doing what? Stop him when? First things first, he thought, and broke cover.

Walking like a man who has every right to be going into the back of a sideshow, he went into the back of a sideshow. I just need a dark corner, he thought, somewhere I can … He paused, inhaled through his nose. What was that smell? An odd, synthetic sour odour. He had a rapacious memory, in that once a sensation had been experienced it was held for good, and so he knew he’d smelled something similar before. Unfortunately, his rapacious memory hung on to the details, too, refusing to pass them on to the cognitive centres, and so he couldn’t quite recall where. He twitched a curtain gently to one side and peered through the gap. What he saw rooted him to the spot. He was on the wrong side of the velvet rope that separated the visitors from an exhibit, if that was the right word. Actually, on this occasion, it was definitely the right word. Most definitely. Exhibitionism was the whole point here.

On the far side of the rope, Barrow could make out the shadowy forms of the paying customers. They clung to the area of low light — dim, flickering electrical faux candles showing only form but no detail — loath to be seen and identified. This was a place that many wanted to visit but nobody wanted to be caught in. The reason for the guilty interest lay languorous and lithe upon a chaise-longue, regarding the gawking and sweating mass with an insouciance that slid easily beyond human limits. Since his conversations with the brothers Cabal this evening, it was as if the scales had fallen from Barrow’s eyes. For example, he knew without hesitation — as surely as Horst had known about Cleopatra earlier the same evening — that, whatever else Layla the Latex Lady was, she wasn’t a lady. She wasn’t even human.

There was something in the way that she moved, slowly and deliberately and without apparent recourse to such human fripperies as joints, that was reptilian yet still warmly mammalian enough to provoke a low hum of sighs and wetting of lips from her admiring audience — the white noise of desire. Her skin was dark, dark grey, smooth and gently reflective like that of a young seal fresh from the sea, and as she moved it made a gently organic noise, surface whispering over surface. Barrow inhaled again. That was the sour smell, rubber, and the slightly sweeter smell was talcum powder. She must get through pounds of the stuff every day, he thought. The smooth skin ran over every square inch of her body except her neck and head, which rose from the encompassing sheath like the painted portion of a gunmetal statue. As he watched her, he realised, without any particular sense of surprise, that there was no clear interface between the rubber and flesh: one simply seemed to merge into the other. The only details upon her body were the high heels that seemed to grow organically from her feet, as if part of her biology — as, indeed, they were. No other detail was sharply delineated, not even her fingernails.

Barrow was sorry for that. More detail would have allowed him to close down the whole carnival on public-morality grounds. No such luck; Cabal wouldn’t make a mistake like that. Still, he found himself wondering what kind of details they might have been. Her body was like something that Vargas might have dreamt on a particularly humid night. He clenched his eyes shut and told himself that there were people out there, and possibly in here, who would cheerfully see him dead, and a little bit of focus would be gratefully received.

Layla watched the audience with amused arrogance. A typical crowd: mainly men, with a few women, some of the latter asking themselves confused questions. She breathed in and tasted their pheromones, borne by the faint breezes that moved sluggishly through the sideshow. Their scent was fainter than usual, the wind was from the north, but she detected something else, and it was delicious. She found the chemical traces in the air and assiduously picked them out with the tip of her darting tongue, to muttered approval from her admirers, then drew them along the roof of her palate as a connoisseur takes time with a fine wine. Fear. Somebody there was in fear of his or her life, and the taste of it was exquisite. She closed her eyes and allowed the flavour to separate into its components: male; middle-aged; occasional pipe smoker; behind her. She knew all about the search tonight, and now knew exactly where Frank Barrow was. She also knew that she had less than an hour’s existence left. Really, she should alert Johannes Cabal; that was the right thing to do. On the other hand, she had sprung from Satan’s very own personal blood, and this meant that the right thing to do wasn’t always the thing that was done. Let Cabal rage. She was going to have some fun.

Barrow watched as Layla gestured to the bodyguard who stood to one side and whispered in his ear. “Right, show’s over,” he was bellowing at the audience even as he straightened up. “Ain’tcha got homes t’ go to?” His manner implied that if anybody didn’t, then he knew a nice hospital that they could spend the next few weeks in as an alternative. With a collective sigh and many wistful glances, they filed out, followed by the bodyguard.

The main door closed with a final click. Barrow didn’t know whether this was a good thing or not. Layla, on the other hand, seemed to know very well. She rolled onto her back and straightened one leg and ankle, admiring the way the light reflected along her thigh, shin, and foot in a single, unbroken bar. She slowly turned her head until she was looking directly at Barrow.

“Hello, Francis,” she said.

Barrow decided it was a bad thing after all. He stepped back from the curtain and opened the rear door of his covert entry. Barely a few inches wide, the door was abruptly slammed shut from the other side, and he heard the lock turn. He rattled the door and heard a laugh. Then he heard the bodyguard say, “Have a nice time, Mr. Barrow,” and walk away, laughing the whole while.

Barrow was one of those people blessed with a mind that works faster under stress. It was working very rapidly now, looking for some sort of handle on Layla’s likely personality, her possible behaviour. In his uniformed days, he’d been involved in a raid on — delightful old-fashioned phrase — a house of ill-repute. The girls — no matter what their age, they were always “girls” — had shown a certain ennui at the raid and sat around on the stairs smoking and chatting amiably with the young and easily embarrassed coppers. Barrow had been struck by their marked lack of obvious sexuality; despite various stages of undress, leather hip boots, and bullwhips, despite the girls in school uniforms, nurse uniforms, and, confusingly, police uniforms, the house still gave the impression of just being a place of work. They rented out their time and their bodies and their theatrical skills, but that was all. He’d got talking to a tall brunette who wore a long peignoir over some article of clothing that creaked threateningly when she moved. She’d asked him for a light, and while they waited for developments in the raid, which seemed to have stalled for some reason, they talked about this and that. Feeling fired by a faint moral indignation, as he was, after all, a policeman and still believed that his job was to act as society’s conscience, he asked her why she did what she did. She had seemed nonplussed. “Why do I do this generally? For the money, of course. Why do I do this specifically?” At this point, she’d opened the gown, and before he averted his eyes, he caught a glimpse of something Byzantine wrought in leather. “Because I don’t have to touch the gentlemen hardly at all. They do it all themselves, on the other side of the room, while I tell them how bad they’ve been. The hours are good, the money is excellent, and, apart from the sheer tedium of it, it’s the best job I’ve ever had.” At that point the chief constable of the district had turned up in his pyjamas with a raincoat thrown over the top and demanded to know why the raid had been planned without him being told. The operation was stepped down in some haste, and they were all sent home. Interestingly, the tall brunette with the creaking lingerie seemed to know the chief constable by his first name, although she also called him “Patricia” at one point.

Barrow somehow doubted that a filter tip and a friendly chat were going to endear Layla to him. He had to get out of here before she found him. He looked along the narrow corridor formed between the heavy curtains and the walls of the temporary building. Hoping that the front door hadn’t been as securely locked as the rear, he set off at a dogtrot. He couldn’t hear anything from the main body of the building and imagined her stepping directly into his path. What would he do then? He’d never hit a woman — well, just the once, but she’d been bearing down on him with a chainsaw — and, despite his reservations about Layla’s status as a human, didn’t want to start now. He made the end of the corridor and broke cover without hesitation, reaching the door in a few steps. He tugged at the safety bar. On the other side, a padlock and chain rattled mockingly. He felt a shadow on his back and spun around.

He was alone. There was no sign of Layla. He didn’t delude himself; there was no possiblity that she’d gone, she was probably on the other side of the curtains herself, now looking for him. Fine, that gave him a few moments alone in the main part of the room. Overhead, he noticed something in the gloom that might be a painted-out skylight. It wasn’t much, but he was running out of ideas as he stepped over the silk rope and looked a little closer. It was a skylight, but he doubted he could reach it even if he stood on the chaise-longue. Still, he wasn’t doing anything else. He pulled the low couch a couple of feet to one side, until it was directly below the blacked-out skylight, climbed onto it, and reached up. He was nowhere near. He tried jumping, but that didn’t seem to get him any nearer at all. He paused; something had bumped against the curtain. He crouched, concertina-ing himself as small as he could get. He made himself aware of the muscles in his legs, imagined them pulling hard to catapult him up, imagined his hands reaching the catch, knocking it open. Then another jump to get his hands on the ledge, pulling himself up, pushing the skylight open with his shoulders as he climbed. He knew it would have been an impressive feat when he was twenty and wished he could be less rational about the danger he was in. He needed the homicidal strength of a man in mortal fear and fury, the strength of ten he’d seen enough times to know that it existed. He looked up, willed the skylight to be nearer, and jumped.

As his body straightened, the chaise-longue rocked treacherously under the impulse. Barrow forgot all about attaining the skylight and started concentrating on staying upright. The clash in priorities resulted in a low jump that knocked the chaise onto its side. He came down, lost his footing, and fell awkwardly. As he hit the floor parallel to the couch, it added insult to injury by rocking back onto its feet with a solid thump.

Barrow lay winded for a moment before pulling himself into a sitting position and leaning against the chaise. This wasn’t going well. He looked up and realised it wasn’t even going that well.

“Why, Francis, you’ve had a little accident. Let me” — she released the curtain and it fell to behind her as she took a step towards him — “kiss it…” Another step. Perhaps it was the angle, a skewed perspective, but she seemed to cover more ground with each step than was humanly possible. “… Better.” She was standing over him. He looked up at her as she brought the full power of her presence to bear upon him, and strange things started to happen in his brain. Parts of the reptilian brain that encompasses the head of the brain stem began to fire in odd patterns. Barrow almost gagged on a rising tide of thick, cloying lust coloured with the sort of pack behaviour that makes “I was only obeying orders” a favoured defence for war criminals the world over. Unreasoning desire and unquestioning obeisance: a winning combination for the more upper-class predator.

Layla had been born perhaps fifty weeks before and would never see her first birthday. It didn’t matter; she’d seen more in those brief months than most saw in a lifetime. Horst Cabal had found the parts that made her up pre-packaged in a catering-size coffee tin labelled Layla in one of the cars. He had taken the tin to Johannes and shown it to him.

“Have you seen this?” he’d said, emptying the contents onto Cabal’s desktop. Cabal had looked at the mess for some moments before asking, “Well? What is it?”

“Layla the Latex Lady, I would guess from the label and contents. Remember that board I showed you? She must have been one of the very few members of this carnival that they sorted out before the plug was pulled.”

“So — less work for you. Why should I be concerned?”

“Why? Just look at this stuff, Johannes. I’m having second thoughts about animating her.” Cabal had looked quizzically at his brother before taking a pencil and sorting through the mess. There was no rag and no bone. There were several rubber items in place of a rag, most recognisable, some less so. Cabal had located a small sheet of latex, perhaps two dozen erasers, a few objects that he was glad hadn’t been used previously, and a couple of others that had made him think some designers must have a difficult time explaining in polite company exactly what it is that they design. For hair, there was a long, loose ponytail gathered into a knot at one end. He’d held it up to the light and marvelled at the multitude of different colours. There didn’t seem to be an analogue for bone until Horst had pointed out a large tube of silicone gel. “Oh my,” Johannes Cabal had said, otherwise lost for words just for once.

Then there had been the clippings. Held together with a treasury tag was a motley collection of old and yellowing advertisements for corsets, high heels, stockings. Farther in had been pages snipped from the lingerie sections of more modern home-shopping catalogues, photographs of public-toilet walls covered in childish drawings and closely written fantasy, mimeographs of anonymous letters, detailed and disturbing. Cabal had coughed and put the items back in the tin. “People like that sort of thing, you said so yourself.”

“That’s before I saw all this stuff. I have my doubts.”

“We don’t have time for doubts,” Johannes Cabal had said, cast the tin’s contents on the floor, and invoked her then and there.

Cabal had discovered early on that Layla was the carnival’s star performer in most senses and deployed her frequently to great effect. He didn’t like being anywhere near her, though. She appealed to him in a certain way, and Cabal didn’t like being influenced at such a base level.

For Layla was the very epitome, the very physical embodiment, of guilty eroticism: the spirit of the peep show, the sly glance up the library stepladder, the thumbed postcards, the denied impulse, the addictively tawdry, the illicitly thrilling. Fortunes had been built upon it in dilution. Concentrated in one form, lines drawn by a thousand million fevered imaginations and topped with a face that was all things to most men and a fair proportion of women, the effect was nothing short of devastating. Men came to her, and afterwards they found that they had been lessened. Less dignity. Less self-respect. The complex roadmap of the average intelligence was reduced to a one-way highway with no off-ramps and no U-turns in her presence. Everything became dangerously simple.

Things were getting dangerously simple for Barrow right now. He looked raptly up at her. How had he ever thought that her skin was featureless when, wherever his eyes fell, detail bloomed: anatomical, perfect, titillating, and quite mesmerising? The higher centres of Barrow’s mind, his Ego and Super-Ego, were aware that all was not well and were hammering on the bridge door of his mind. Unfortunately, the beastly Mr. Id wasn’t receiving visitors today, so Barrow just sat there and trembled and sweated and breathed shallowly. “There, there,” said Layla, taking control as always.

She slowly knelt astride him and took his head in her hands. He had the faint sensation of her nails dimpling the skin at the back of his skull. How could she have nails? Her hands were coated in latex, weren’t they?

Barrow’s Super-Ego was standing on his Ego’s shoulders and bellowing through the air vent to the bridge, “We are in big trouble unless you do something, you hairy oaf! Fight or flight! Fight or flight!” Id wasn’t listening, naturally. He just sat in the captain’s chair with an unseemly tent in his jockey shorts and looked foolishly deep into Layla’s eyes, perfect pools of enchanting quicksand from which few escaped.

Barrow didn’t, couldn’t move as her lips parted and she bent forward to kiss him. Even when her mouth deformed elastically but oh so artistically, he just sat there and waited for whatever she had in mind. Even when her lips settled across the bridge of his nose and the base of his chin, encompassing everything in between, he only distantly wondered where you learn tricks like that. They stayed like that for a few moments as he breathed her breath and remembered having a tooth out under gas when he was seven. Her tongue played across his lips and playfully tickled his nostrils.

Then, with a powerful spasm that ran from her throat to her abdomen, she sucked the air out of his lungs. She was tired of fulfilling human fantasies, she just wanted to kill somebody for a change.

Barrow’s brain snapped into working order, albeit a little late in the day to do any good. He grabbed her hair and pulled back frantically, beat at her head with his balled fists, tried to break her grip somehow. All in vain; she was strong as sin, very literally. As he struggled and fought, she didn’t move a muscle, just looked into his eyes with a cool alien satisfaction as she waited for the life to leave him. He could feel himself growing weaker as his lungs tried to drag some little vitality from the thin dregs of air that were left to them. The room was becoming less distinct as tunnel vision constrained his sight closer and closer to a full blackout, unconsciousness, and death. His fists struck feebly and erratically against her. It felt like punching a tyre and the thought made him want to laugh but he couldn’t and he wondered if that was to be his last thought and hoped not because he wanted his last thought to be of Leonie and who was going to look after her when he was gone although obviously she was an adult woman and isn’t it dark? an adult woman and could and could and could and cadwallader Memphis divot spigot olly olly oxinfree …

Barrow’s brain regretfully closed down all verbal functions and awaited the moment when it would have to close down everything else.

… and you only appreciate fresh air when you’ve been cooped up indoors in a tyre factory all day although there’s a still a faint smell and what are you staring at?

Barrow’s vision blurred and cleared. He was still staring at Layla’s face and she was still looking at him, but the orientation had changed, and Layla’s eyes looked vaguely disappointed somehow. Suddenly he remembered that she was trying to kill him and he ought to get back to fighting her. He punched out at her body, but his hand met no resistance. He tried slapping at her face and, unexpectedly, she let him go, just like that. His faint but appreciative surprise increased by several magnitudes as he watched her head bounce away from him and come to rest some feet away. He cried out and pushed himself away from it until he came up against the chaise-longue. He looked around frantically, trying to reorientate himself, panting. He was still in the sideshow, still on the floor. Layla’s head lay some feet away, grimacing slowly, while to the other side her decapitated body was still on its knees, writhing. Behind it, a nondescript little man with what looked like a breadknife in one hand scrubbed ineffectually at the great quantity of colourless clear slime that had covered much of the front of his jacket.

“Oh dear,” said the man conversationally when he noticed Barrow looking at him. “I don’t think this is going to come out.”

“Hello, Mr. Simpkins,” said Barrow hoarsely.

“Hello, ex-Detective Inspector Barrow,” said the man, and continued scrubbing at the stain. “You know, you get used to bloodstains, but this is a new one on me.” He indicated Layla’s disparate parts. “I didn’t actually intend to behead the young lady, incidentally, just cut her throat. But there was nothing to her at all. Once the blade had cut the — well, I hesitate to call it skin — it just kept going. Like slicing German sausage. And — pop! — off comes her head. Which would have been gratifying in a professional sense, but then all this dreadful goo came spraying out. Geysers of blood I’m used to — you just brace yourself for it as a necessary unpleasantness, like going to the dentist. But this?” He nodded gravely as if communicating a great discovery. “I doubt it’s natural.”

“What now, Mr. Simpkins?” asked Barrow. Simpkins cocked his head quizzically. “You said you were going to kill me one day. Is that today?”

“Oh, that old thing,” said Simpkins dismissively. “I’ve saved your life today, ex-Detective Inspector Barrow. In some cultures, that means your life belongs to me. Why should I kill you now? Why take what’s already mine?”

“A nice thought, Mr. Simpkins, but relevant only if you subscribe to one of those cultural views. I’m not sure you do.”

Simpkins laughed, a suppressed sniffing noise. “You’re quite right, of course. Always the detective? No, I was still intending to kill you, but, you know, I don’t think I shall now.” He held out his hand with two fingers extended in a “V”-for-victory salute. “Two reasons. Firstly, having saved your life for admittedly selfish grounds — I was determined that if anybody was going to kill you, it was going to be me — it seems almost churlish to then go ahead and take it. But secondly, and for me far more pressingly, you remembered me. I don’t know if you recall, but as soon as you could talk you said, ‘Hello, Mr. Simpkins,’ which was touchingly polite in this day and age. Very civil. You remembered me, and I have no doubt you will always remember my little part in your rescue here.”

“You can rest assured on that count,” said Barrow. Rescued from a synthetic succubus by one of the world’s most notorious serial killers — no, he wasn’t likely to forget that in a hurry.

“You’re precisely the sort of person — indeed, the only example to date of the sort of person — that I want to preserve. I would as soon kill myself as kill you. I’m not the suicidal sort, by the by.”

“You were hiding in the Hall of Murderers, weren’t you?”

“Yes, that was me. With the card pinned to my jacket calling me Albert Simmonds, among many other inaccuracies.”

“So Cabal’s sheltering the Laidstone escapees, is he?”

“Oh gosh, yes. We outnumber the waxworks.”

“Why?”

“Why, for the price of our souls. I’m an atheist, so it was no great loss to me.” He looked at Layla’s corpse, which was slowly deflating and puddling into oddly regular forms. “At least, I was an atheist. Besides, we were all Hell-bound long before we signed his forms, so it’s still six of one and a half-dozen of the other.”

“Forms?” asked Barrow. “He had forms?”

“Oh, yes. I read mine before I signed. The others didn’t, a mixture of illiteracy and relief to be out in the open, I think. Rather nicely drafted, although peppered with archaic terms. Still legally binding, though. The bearer has all rights to the signatory’s soul on the occasion of his or her death. Probably quite standard if you happen to be working for Satan, I would think.”

“Look, Mr. Simpkins …”

“You even remember to pronounce the ‘p’! Bless you, ex-Detective Inspector Barrow!”

“I need to find those forms and destroy them. Will you help me?”

“Me? Oh, I’m sorry, I’m no action man.”

“But, and I hope you’ll forgive me for bringing this up, you can go unnoticed where I would be spotted.”

Simpkins shook his head with clear regret. “Not here, I’m afraid. That’s how I first gathered that there was something amiss in this carnival. Lots of the staff notice me, although, if this young lady is anything to go by, they notice me precisely because they’re not people at all. In fact, the less like people they appear, the more likely they are to spot me. No, I’m afraid I can’t offer any direct help. If you would value my opinion, though, you might do a lot worse than examine the desk of Mr. Johannes Cabal. It’s in the office car of the train.” He looked at the knife. “I don’t suppose I’ll be needing this anymore.” He dropped it to the floor and watched it clatter into silence. He smiled. “That was easier than giving up smoking. Good evening, ex-Detective Inspector Barrow.”

“Good evening, Mr. Simpkins,” said Barrow, and watched him leave via the rear door. He gave him two minutes and then followed, stepping over an odd collection of rubber knick-knacks and yellowed magazine clippings, and picking up the discarded breadknife en route. The rear door had been unlocked with the key. Nearby was a bone wrapped in rag and hair and liberally smeared with fat and beefcake. Barrow guessed that Simpkins had caught the sideshow bodyguard unawares. This was an odd place, but he was finally beginning to understand its rules. He checked his watch. Twenty past eleven. He set off for the train.