A Song of Shadows by John Connolly

Author:John Connolly [John Connolly]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2015-03-11T18:30:00+00:00

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The woman stank of cats and cookies, of piss and mothballs, but Cambion, whose sensory abilities his disease had long ruined, and who had grown used to the reek of his own decay, barely noticed it. It was enough that she cooked for him and helped him to get in and out of chairs, and beds, and baths. Edmund could do all that too, of course, but he lacked her delicacy. He was compassionate, but not gentle, and as Cambion entered the last stages of his life he appreciated tenderness, even that which was offered out of instinct, not inclination.

Cambion was once a torturer and killer, a sadist and despoiler of flesh, until Hansen’s Disease took hold of him, and he became known as Cambion the Leper, Cambion the Outcast. As the illness destroyed his body, rendering him unable to function in his preferred role, he became a middleman, a point of contact between the most vicious of clients and those men and women base enough to do their bidding. It had made Cambion wealthy, but now most of that money was gone. He had squandered it in his early years – for his tastes were no less depraved than those of whom he represented, and such vices are expensive to maintain – and then, following his diagnosis, doled it out as carefully as he could, in an effort to counter the disease. Cambion was a hunted man – one does not spend one’s life arranging torments and tortures without question and not build up an impressive roster of enemies – and so conventional medical intervention was not open to him: he would not have survived for an hour once news of his presence in a hospital became known. He was also cursed early in the leprosy’s progress by treatment with incorrect medicines, a consequence of his need to use backroom doctors. He spent years punishing the practitioner responsible by holding him captive and carving pieces from his body on a regular basis, but it provided small consolation.

Only a handful of Cambion’s old associates had remained willing to work with him, and see that he got his cut. The rest had abandoned him long ago, which was why Cambion, in turn, had fed their names to his hunters in the hope that, by betraying others, he might be allowed to die in peace. It had not worked; they still circled him. He was reduced to living in near squalor, tended by a woman who had once occupied his bed but was now little more than a walking corpse herself, but whose need for money was even greater than his own.

He rang the bell over his bed by tugging on a length of rope. The bedpan was out of reach, and he needed it. He could not feel the rope against his skin, for he no longer had sensation in his hands or feet. His muscles had grown weaker, even in the last few months, and the extent of his disfigurement caused him to shun all reflective surfaces.

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