The Devil's Detective by Unsworth Simon Kurt

Author:Unsworth, Simon Kurt [Unsworth, Simon Kurt]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780385539357
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-03T08:00:00+00:00

18

“What is this?”

The scream stopped suddenly, a new voice cutting through it. Something took hold of Fool’s shoulder and hauled him upward. He came upright, managing to get his legs under him and feeling the earth beneath his feet but then carrying on rising, finding himself lifted into the air. He tried to focus but his eyes were still loose in their sockets, feeling slack. He spun, blinked as his focus caught, and then was lost again before something large passed across his vision. It was holding him with a single long tentacle and it appeared and disappeared in his view, and he turned.

“An intruder,” said the little demon from the door. The sides of Fool’s face felt wet and he wondered whether his ears were bleeding but decided it was probably just tears and mud; now that the screaming had ended, the pain had also gone.

“Intruder?” said the second voice. Fool felt himself jerked farther up, the thing around his shoulder tightening. Something else slipped about his waist and another curled around his wrist. It dug in sharply and his hand opened, letting the gun fall for the second time. He had a brief view of it spiraling down, away from him, and then he was face-to-face with the demon holding him.

It looked like one of the smaller inhabitants of Solomon’s Water made large, a huge mass with no obvious limbs except for tentacles and something that might have been a set of wings but could equally easily have been fins. Its eyes were black and watery, the size of dinner plates, and its mouth was thick-lipped and full of needle teeth.

“Intruder,” said the thing as though tasting the word for the first time, and Fool knew that the only thing keeping him alive was that he had intrigued it, that it was wondering about him. The feeling wouldn’t last long, he didn’t think. He had to act now.

“My name is Thomas Fool,” he said, “and I’m an Information Man. I work for Hell. I have questions for you, for anyone here who can give me answers.”

He was briefly weightless, falling, and then shock leaped through Fool’s body; the thing had dropped him and only the mud, thick and slimy and accommodating, had prevented him from being injured. He lay on his back staring at the morning sky, seeing the gray clouds wheel above him, shot through with streaks of whiteness from the distant gleam of Heaven, and then he rolled, scrabbling for the gun. After a frantic moment he found it and pulled; it came free from the mud with a sucking noise. Around him the demons were gathering.

They did not attack, but simply formed a tight semicircle about him. The entrance to Crow Heights, now also his exit, was behind him and he tried to slither crabwise toward it. He had gone only a few feet when his back banged against something solid—the little demon’s box.

“So this is him.”

The voice came from somewhere in the crowd. Light

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