one twisted voice Read online

  ‘Do you find me comely?’ Saoirse turned with a dancer’s grace, and again was before me without any sign of apparent volition. I’d have got an eyeful of her main assets if she hadn’t looped her knife hand over her breasts. Her other hand, and my Glock, was artistically placed over the juncture of her thighs.

  ‘”Comely” isn’t a word used very often these days,’ I said. ‘Just how old are you?’

  ‘As old as Lilith’s children,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘It’s surprising what the odd nip and tuck can do for you these days, isn’t it?’ Despite myself I could feel the ardour rising in me. Ardour’s another word you don’t hear much and has kind of fallen out of usage except in poorly written bonk buster novels or the latest Paul Broom chiller. I’d been taught a lot of old words since Broom had taken it upon himself to be my Professor X. I’d learned quite a few archaic names too, and understood that Lilith in some religious texts was recognised as the first woman, even before Eve. If Saoirse wasn’t exaggerating it meant she’d been around a loooong time.

  ‘That can’t possibly be your own hair colour?’ I sneaked a peek down and the hand clutching the gun couldn’t cover everything. ‘You dye down there too?’

  For the first time Saoirse frowned.

  Unlike highly emotional humans this woman did not radiate the auric colours that I was used to. All that outlined her form was a hazy grey smoke. But I didn’t need the firework displays that emanated from my usual quarries to tell me she was growing angry.

  ‘You do not appreciate this form?’ she said. ‘Perhaps you would prefer I was an incubus instead?’

  ‘Strictly heterosexual,’ I reassured her. ‘It’s just that I don’t fancy every strumpet that drops her knickers in front of me.’

  ‘Strumpet?’

  Another old word, but it was one she’d understand. Before leaving Broom’s place for Blackpool, my knowledgeable buddy had told me that the etymology of the name succubus came from the Late Latin succubare, or “to lie under”, later shortened to succuba and literally “strumpet”.

  ‘Old whore, if you’d prefer?’ I said.

  Saoirse made a sound that should never have come from her enchantress form. She bubbled out a growl like a drunken hobo clearing his throat after a night on methylated spirits.

  She raised Broom’s silver knife.

  Go on, Red. Cut his throat.

  “Shut it, Cash. Concentrate on what you’re good at.”

  Maybe you should let me take over, bro. I’ll show the hot little bitch a good time, all right.

  “Just get us the fuck out of these chains!”

  Saoirse said, ‘I can take your essence whether you wish to mate with me or not.’

  ‘Honestly, I’d rather you slit my throat. I hear that sexually penetrating a succubus is akin to entering a cavern of ice. Where’s the pleasure in that? And anyway, what’s this about you taking a man’s semen then passing it onto one of your incubus brothers so he can impregnate women with his demonic little offspring? What do you call them: Cambions aren’t they?’

  ‘You’ve researched well,’ Saoirse said, and my taunting had worked because she’d forgotten about sticking the blade in my neck and again moved away from me.

  ‘Everything I know you can find on Wikipedia,’ I told her. ‘Is that what you’re up to here? Breeding your own little crop of Cambions. Don’t bother, from the number of ugly inbred trolls I’ve seen out on the Golden Mile someone already beat you to it.’

  ‘You know little of my kind after all. And this know-it-all Wikipedia is as ill informed as the fools that write it. Too much faith has been placed in the Malleus Maleficarum as a source document, and your modern “Witches’ Hammer” – your Wikipedia – holds as many misinterpretations of the truth. My kind has no interest in your dishwater semen: it is your life essence that we desire. I’m coming now to set it free!’

  Suddenly Saoirse wasn’t the enchanting vision of beauty of before.

  Her looks fell from her in the shimmering river of mercury that had earlier shed her dress.

  Her fiery mane shrivelled into a keeled skull, her almost translucent skin metamorphosing into warty grey hide. Her breasts shrivelled like dried out teabags left on the side of a saucer at one of those backstreet cafes. Her pubis went bare, and her labia hung like soiled rags. Horrible enough before I looked up again at her face and saw that her green eyes had sunk back into the skull and were now snot-coloured currants deep beneath a thick brow, and her mouth…Oh, Jesus. Think anus, puckered, haemorrhoid-ridden, with needle teeth.

  I take back what I said before, Cash said. I wouldn’t even touch her with yours, bro.

  Saoirse let out a keening hiss. Expelled urine and other foul liquids dripped down her upper thighs, but the sound had come from her awful mouth. Kind of a mating call, I guessed. Then she came for me.

  ‘Now would be a good time to do your thing, Cash!’

  In my urgency I’d shouted out loud.

  My odd words were enough to halt Saoirse in her tracks.

  Her arms hung by her sides, my weapons still clutched in mitts that were bony and ended in ragged claws. Maybe she still thought she could get me up by threat of a bullet or knife slash: such foreplay never did it for me. But now she paused to contemplate just whom the hell I was shouting at.

  From above filtered the clumping of footsteps. Saoirse had her lackeys on stand by; they were the same sons of bitches who’d grabbed me, kicked the shit out of me and then hung me here in the bitch’s cellar like a side of tenderized beef. They were an ugly bunch, and pitiless, so maybe there was something in the Cambion myth that Saoirse wasn’t letting on. Any second now and those brutes would come downstairs and hold me down while Saoirse had her wicked way with me.

  ‘Cash!’

  Allez, hop! cried my demented brother, like he was some old time circus performer. Let’s go, bro.

  For the last minute or so I’d been working my fingers and wrists, manipulating them without any conscious sense, really Cash working his wizardry through my hands without any assistance from me.

  The chains fell from my wrists just as Saoirse puckered up for a kiss. I struggled to free my arms from the clinging links, and Saoirse just put my energetic thrashings down to one playing hard to get. Her needle teeth nipped into my lips and she clamped on tight. A slick, wriggling tongue invaded my mouth and I coughed in revulsion. It was colder than three days old polar bear shit, and tasted just as bad.

  Earlier I’d imagined Saoirse’s long legs wrapped around my middle. Well, the dream became reality, and it was a nightmare. I felt the icy clamminess of her vagina as she tried to clamp on, her second puckered opening chewing its path up my left thigh towards my genitals. The only saving grace was that at least this one didn’t come with teeth. Let alone her trying to latch onto my penis, the invasion of my mouth was bad enough, and then the extraction of souls began.

  Fuckin’ hell, Carter, she’s starting with me!

  It wasn’t often my brother panicked. He was generally too sociopathic to care about anything, except when it was his own immortal soul. In all honesty I contemplated waiting for a while, allowing the soul-sucking demoness to gulp down Cash’s spirit – shit, I’d been looking for a way to expel his soul from mine for good, and now an unconventional opportunity had presented itself – but as much as I hated the murderous piece of shit, I hated Saoirse’s violation of my body more.

  I wrenched loose from the chains and gripped hold of her right hand. A trick I’d learned during a self-defence class stripped the knife from her grip. More likely it was desperation that made the technique work than any skill but the knife was now in my hand and I reversed it just as Saoirse realised she’d been fooled. She snapped her tongue from my mouth and reared back, and the curve of her fangs almost tore my lips off before she’d fully disengaged.

  I stood before her.

  She looked down at my empty hands.

  Then dawning realisation struck and she peered down at the on
ly boner she’d get from me: the erect handle of the silver knife jutted from between her shrivelled breasts.

  She was dead; she just didn’t know it yet.

  I reached out, braced my palm against the knife handle and gave her a shove.

  She fell flat on her back and didn’t move.

  Broom would be happy to hear that the supposed magical knife had worked better than even he’d imagined. He swore that the blade had been forged by some vizier of the Zoharistic Kabbalah persuasion and was based upon a much earlier design. The first knife was made for none other than the Archangel Samael after he had a bit of a fling with Lilith and realised that he’d made a major faux pas when she wouldn’t return to Adam in the Garden of Eden. Samael’s way of getting rid of the bunny boiling temptress was to have a knife forged by Tubal Cain, the first metal worker, that could do Lilith and her kind in for good. I didn’t have the heart to tell my friend that you couldn’t rely on EBay as a source for genuine angelic weapons, but now I wouldn’t have to.

  I left the knife jammed in the succubus’s breastbone. Maybe by extracting it she would rise up again like a vampire in a Hammer movie. I reached instead for the gun. It would be more effective than a blade against the group of Cambions now thumping down the stairs.

  Naked, my mushy lips a match for my mushed up face, I greeted the fuckers as they stomped down and stood in a semi-circle behind their late mistress. Blazing auric colours sparked all around them. They were pissed. But then so was I.

  ‘Cash,’ I said. ‘Time for your special skills again.’

  With pleasure, bro.

  My gun hand came up. Truthfully, Cash, my murderous brother wasn’t the only one in control of my fingers this time.

  Author’s note:

  This story was specially written for and appeared as an editor’s Halloween special at the webzine “Thrillers, Killers ‘N’ Chillers”.

  BOOZE AND OOZE

  ONE

  ‘What ya havin’, Roman?’

  Duffy was at his usual place behind his bar, when he’d have been better off stood in a cornfield with a broom shank up his ass scaring away crows. His small black eyes twinkled like a vein of untapped coal. They were the same colour as his ‘Just For Men’-dyed quiff; so spidery it sat on his forehead like a dead tarantula. His acne scarred face dimpled around his supposed earnest smile.

  ‘Like you need to ask?’

  ‘Double Dark Valentine?’

  ‘Yeah, with a DV chaser.’

  ‘Rough night?’

  ‘The one behind me or the one ahead?’

  ‘Take your pick.’

  He had that right. Last night I’d spent too many hours at his bar. This morning when I woke up I was lying flat on my back, butt naked, my mouth open and tasting like a hobo had squatted in it through the early hours. Also tasted like said hobo hadn’t moved out when he took a dump as part of his morning constitutional.

  ‘Who’d I leave with last night?’ I asked.

  ‘You don’t remember? Shit, Roman, you staggered outta here with a hottie on each arm. The Kawczynski Twins!’

  ‘The Kawczynskis? Crap, not those two Latvian midgets from Fat Man Moog’s House of the Bizzarro?’

  ‘What you got against the vertically challenged?’ Duffy straightened his back, but his sparse pompadour still sat an inch or so below my eye-line. I sat on a bar stool so he didn’t feel so short. Duffy sloshed amber liquid into a glass. It was a similar shade to the sclera of my eyes when I’d looked in the bathroom mirror this morning.

  ‘I just don’t like to be short changed, man,’ I said.

  ‘That’s why you took both of them back to your dive. So you got the best buck for your bucks.’

  I held my head in my palms, groaned.

  Duffy grinned. When he does that he looks even more like a demented scarecrow. I didn’t look up: I knew he was hitting me with a wide mouthed grin as I got a waft of hot halitosis. Too much sugar in that boy’s diet.

  He leaned over the bar and nudged me with my glass of Dark Valentine.

  ‘Here, get that down you. There’s another right on its way.’

  ‘The Kawczynski Twins…crap!’ My head felt so heavy it was a struggle to hold it up. I propped an elbow on the bar, wedged my stubbled chin in my palm, took the double shot of DV in the other.

  I heard Duffy chuckling. Not a nice sound at the best of times.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Had you going there, didn’t I? Wasn’t the Kawczynskis. It was the Kaczinzkis. Without the double-ya and with an extra zee.’

  I shook my head, then downed my drink J R Ewing quick-style. I’d no idea what he was going on about.

  ‘Gimme that other drink, Duffy. I need it.’ He sloshed another measure into the glass I held out to him. ‘Make it a double.’

  ‘Take it easy on that stuff,’ he said, ‘don’t forget about tonight.’

  ‘There’s no full moon…’

  ‘No. That’s not what I meant. You’re working, or did you forget?’

  I raised both eyebrows, but couldn’t pull off an innocent look for love nor money. ‘Duffy I’ve no recollection of taking home the…uh…the Cack-stinky Twins, let alone taking a job.’

  ‘Cack-stinky? Shit, Roman, don’t you ever listen to what I say?’

  ‘Forget about ‘em for a minute,’ I said. I had. ‘What’s this work I agreed to?’

  ‘Good job I’m around to look after your well-being, isn’t it, Roman Dalton?’

  Duffy shoved over a slip of paper. Without waiting he turned away, picked up a white stiletto-heeled shoe off the bar top. He studied it as keenly as he usually did the tit-bits of knowledge he gleaned from the stack of National Geographic magazines he kept under the bar counter next to his twin-gauge. He lifted it to his nose, his face crinkling as he took a sniff.

  ‘Kinky,’ I said.

  He blinked, unashamed. Someone must have been dancing on the bar last night. I was only glad it wasn’t a Doc Marten boot he’d found. Surreptitiously I checked and was glad to note I’d remembered to put both my boots on this morning before staggering here. In the next instant, Duffy turned fluidly and hurled the shoe at the Wurlitzer jukebox. My head had been doing such a stutter-skip-jump since sitting down I hadn’t noticed that Clarence ‘The Frogman’ Henry had kept on repeating “I don’t know why I love you”. The shoe did its work, and the record clicked on. “But I do…woo…ooh…ooh”.

  The Frogman’s warbling sounded too much like the echo I often heard inside my head, so I palmed my hands flat over my ears, staring desolately into my empty glass. I’d be damned if I could recall draining it. A second or so later I shifted my gaze to the stained piece of paper.

  It had been torn from a lined notebook. The perforations at the side told me. That’s what made me such a good private eye: even hung over I was still the astute type. Yeah, right.

  There were some spider tracks on the paper, but I couldn’t focus on them. I lifted the slip, held it at arm’s length. A cell phone number and a name. ‘Who the hell’s Bishop?’ I wondered aloud.

  ‘He would be the albino dude you were huddled up with in the snug last night.’

  ‘Albino? Like with white skin and all?’

  ‘Bunny eyes. The business.’

  ‘How the fuck could I forget about talking to an albino?’

  Duffy drew my gaze to the waste bin under the row of bottles at the back. There were three empty Dark Valentine bottles poking out the top. God knows how many were buried beneath them. ‘I didn’t drink them all…’

  Duffy stooped to the bin, pulled out two ‘Babycham’ bottles and showed me the evidence: imported stuff, retro as all hell. ‘The Twins had these,’ he said.

  ‘Crap.’

  I thought about my booze consumption. I often did.

  ‘Gimme another, will you?’

  Give Duffy his due; he’s a damned fine barman. He sloshed, and I sipped this time.

  ‘Albino,’ I repeated.

  Something was coming back
to me.

  Red eyes.

  Nah, that was just my reflection in the DV.

  ‘Got any change for the payphone,’ I asked.

  ‘Where’s your cell?’

  ‘Probably the same place I left my po-lice detective badge,’ I said. ‘These days I don’t have much use for either.’

  Duffy fished in his pocket and then scattered some dimes on the counter. He nodded over at the alley that led to the washrooms, where the payphone was pinned to the wall as a reminder of yesteryear. ‘Knock yourself out, Roman.’

  I stood up off the bar stool and staggered towards the phone.

  The Frogman changed tunes.

  ‘”You always hurt the one you love”,’ he crooned.

  Not true. I’d hurt plenty I despised too.

  I wondered whom it was that Bunny-eyed Bishop wanted me to hurt.

  TWO

  Troy Bishop was the real deal. An honest to God albino; but then he was also something else.

  He was so pale he had that ethereal glow to his skin and the pink cast of his eyes looked like bloody holes in his skull face. Think a demonic snowman from a B-movie horror flick and you get the idea. When he opened his mouth his teeth were yellow and tusky, his tongue a grey slug that worked at his palate making his speech more slurred than mine.

  After I’d phoned him, found out who he was and where to find him, I’d bummed a lift to his place in the back of Duffy’s reclaimed taxi. Duffy was a good barman, but a crappy chauffer. Twice he ran red lights and once almost knocked an Orthodox Jew from his pedal cycle. Thankfully both swerved at the opportune moment. Duffy lost a wheel trim but miraculously the Jewish guy hung onto his wide-brimmed hat.

  ‘Jesus,’ I’d said. ‘You going Nazi on me?’

  ‘I’ve got a bar to run,’ he reminded me. ‘Haven’t time for carting your drunken ass all over The City.’

  He dropped me at the curb of a townhouse in a bad part of town. Then he tore off, leaving tire rubber on the cracked asphalt.

  I lifted a hand in thanks but he was already gone. I coughed at the exhaust fumes that hung in the air like a monochrome spectre.