“See anything, Joe?” Murdock asked.
His eyes glowed with excitement. “It’s essence soup.”
Essences smeared into each other, reds and yellows dominating with streaks of blue and green. Here and there, the pale essence of the Dead twisted on cast-off garments and, yes, indications of body fluids. My head buzzed with the mess, the dark mass pulsing against my skull.
A wet, hollow sound filled the air with a rumble and a rush. I grabbed Murdock’s sleeve. “Better step back.”
We retreated a few feet into the tunnel as a gout of black-slimed water gushed out of the pipe. As if triggered by its companion, more water spewed from the opposite pipe. The pipe continued dropping a steady stream after the nearer one slackened. The catch basin sloshed as water fell and kicked up debris from the bottom. The water level rose and spilled into a culvert on one wall between the two pipes. The rancid smell of sewage and rotten garbage thickened. The stench had a texture to it that clung to the back of the throat and made it impossible not to gag.
In the midst of the swirls of essence, something pale floated, a void of essence. It rolled up and sank, then rose again. Wet hair spread across the surface, spreading the weight of the thing it was attached to. It bobbed, and dead white eyes stared up at us.
“Jesus,” Murdock muttered as he played the flashlight on the face.
“That is one big head,” Joe said.
The body found at the headworks was one of the Dead. This head, however, didn’t have the signature of one of the Dead. It rolled, its face rising out of the water.
“That’s not the head we were looking for,” Murdock said.
“I think we just found Zev’s friend Sekka,” I said.
8
As the cramped space around the catch basin became crowded with the arrival of the medical examiner and more MWRA workers, Murdock and I shuffled along a ledge to the opposite outlet pipe. The sewer workers fitted a temporary flexible pipe to the end of the outflows to bypass the basin, and pumps had been brought in to drain it. The medical examiner had the unpleasant task of fishing the giantess’s head out of the water.
Joe wandered around the edges of the space, swooping down whenever he saw something interesting. Interesting, in this case, was everything from a sodden stuffed bear to things that did not bear scrutiny.
“A headless body and bodiless head that don’t match,” Murdock said.
“I hate to say it, but if Zev’s attitude was any indication, there’s going to be more of this,” I said.
Murdock shook his head. “With multiple perpetrators.”
Joe wandered between us and flew up to face level. “Um . . . guys? If I, say, noticed a crack in a wall in a tunnel and a cold, creepy draft came out of it and it smelled like three-day-old lasagna, would you, um, want to know about that?”
Murdock and I exchanged glances. “You invited him,” I said.
“Show us the crack, Joe,” Murdock said.
Joe turned around and lowered his loincloth.
I tilted my head back with a grin. “You so walked into that.”
Murdock shook his head with a half smile. “I did, I did. Okay, what I meant was, where’s the crack in the tunnel, Joe?”
Joe’s eyes went wide. He turned around again, lowered his loincloth, and bent over. My laugh drew confused and annoyed stares from the MWRA workers. “Murdock, please don’t ask him what three-day-old lasagna smells like. I’ve had enough bad odors today,” I said.
Laughing wildly, Joe shot into the tunnel behind us.
Murdock reddened from laughing. “I can’t believe I fell for that. Twice.”
“Never accept glow bees from strange flits, my friend,” I said.
“So, you guys want to see what I found or not?” Joe called out.
He hovered next to the pipe, his wings lighting the space with a pink glow. Murdock cocked an eyebrow with me. “I’ve learned my lesson. You go first.”
I sidestepped along the pipe a few feet and looked where Joe pointed. Behind the pipe, bricks were knocked out from floor to ceiling, leaving a dark gap. I shined my light in but saw little beyond the opening. “He’s not joking, Murdock.”
Murdock slid next to me. We leaned on the cold cast-iron pipe and aimed our flashlights. The gap led to another tunnel, more rough-hewn, but clearly not natural. The Weird was built on landfill, so if a tunnel existed, someone had dug it. Faint hints of essence trails ran into it, the ambient remainders of body signatures. More than one person used the gap.
“He wasn’t lying about the smell,” said Murdock.
We both recognized it. Once you knew what it was, no one forgets the rancid smell of body decomposition. If we hadn’t been in the sewer, it would have been overpowering. Something was dead and rotting in there. “We’ve got another crime scene, Detective Murdock.”
Murdock glanced at me from under his brow. “Is that your way of saying I’m going first again?”
I stepped aside, then followed as Murdock ducked under the pipe and squeezed through the gap. The passageway was molded from the surrounding earth with supports made from random material—car bumpers, scaffolding, old timber, granite blocks—holding the opening stable. My body signature tingled against my skin. A few months earlier, troll essence had bonded to me, and it had never gone completely away. I’ve had a sensitivity to troll work ever since. “The earth and stone were shaped by a troll using essence, Murdock.”
Murdock’s flashlight beam was lost in the distance. “We didn’t fare so well last time we encountered a troll. Maybe we should call the Guild.”
I rubbed my hand along the wall, dirt and stone particles clinging to my body essence as the troll residue attracted it. “It’s old work. I think the troll who made it is long gone. The only fresh body signatures I’m getting are dwarves and solitaries.”
He leaned his chin into his shoulder and called it in on the radio. “Let’s check it out,” he said.
“Now?”
His face was shadowed when he looked over his shoulder. “I’ve got a gun and a body shield.”
Murdock’s body shield existed in my mind as a curiosity and a failure. On an earlier case we worked together, he had become caught in the backlash from a major spell. When he recovered, he could create a body shield stronger than most fey body shields. No other abilities had manifested, though, and he remained human to my senses. The shield’s existence fascinated me because I had never seen something like that happen to a human. It also made me feel that my own lack of ability had prevented me from protecting him, and I wondered what the change in him boded for the future. “This is the part of the movie where I think, ‘Why the hell are they going in there?’ ” I said.
He walked up the tunnel. “And this is the part where I say, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ ”
Joe flew between us. “And this is the part where I wonder if there will be cookies and whiskey when we’re done.”
Where the sewer had the chill of winter, the air in the tunnel had the tang of steam heat, the faint odor of wet metal and rust. The temperature shifted, warmer and damp, but not hot. A hundred feet in, the troll-worked walls gave way to a wide concrete space with bricked-over archways along one side. The stench of death grew, as did what appeared at first to be homeless squats —piles of clothes, shoes, glasses, pocketbooks. Someone had gathered the items like to like. We passed a mound of cell phones, then a stack of briefcases, and piles and piles of magazines.
At the end of the concrete passage, we found the first skull. Joe spotted it, his keen eyesight picking out the yellowed bone amid a stack of hats. “Murdock, there’s an awful lot of stuff down here. We should call for backup,” I said.
Murdock squatted in front of the skull as if he were going to question it. He shined his light in the direction we had been walking. “I think I see stairs. This looks like a sealed-off basement.”
“We’re in the Weird, Murdock. Basements are either abandoned or you wish they were.”
We went to the foot of the stairs. Rusted metal steps led up to more darkness, concrete-skimmed walls crackling off to show the brick beneath, paper trash covered in sooty dust lining the sides of the treads. “Up or back?” I asked.
Murdock stared into the darkness of the stairs. “Back. We need to have this whole place secured.”
“I found a body!” Joe shouted.
We swung our lights toward him. Halfway back in the basement, Joe’s essence illuminated a pile of clothes against the brick wall. As we retraced our steps, my sensing ability picked out a null spot below him, an essenceless void. Our lights exposed a small woman propped against the wall, ashen-faced, her dark hair long and greasy. Her skin pulled tightly over her bone structure, as though she had no fat, her prominent face bones in stark relief to the wells of her closed eyes and open mouth. She didn’t look like she had been dead long.
“There’s a head in her lap. I think it’s the one you’re looking for,” Joe said.
As he lowered for a closer look, something stirred around the null zone of the body, a purple-black essence forming in my sensing ability where none had been a moment before. The strange haze coalesced into thick ropes undulating in the air a foot or so above the body. “Careful, Joe. Something’s there,” I called out.
As he reached for the sword that he kept hidden against his side, an essence strand shot at him, and the woman’s eyes flew open, revealing deep black pits with no whites. She hissed with a thick rasp.
Joe yelped and popped out of sight.
Murdock’s body shield flared in dense crimson around us as he pulled his gun. The woman flattened herself against the wall, pressing her head sideways and staring at us with her eerie dark eyes. “What the hell is that?” Murdock said.
“Holy shit, get out of here, Joe,” I said. He popped out.
Thick purple strands of essence burst out of the
“Shoot it!” I shouted.
Murdock moved in a daze, his arms flailing. He dropped his flashlight. The gun went off, the shot ricocheting into the darkness. A strand of purple essence dove at me, spearing my chest with cold, sharp pain. The dark mass in my head flared, and I screamed.
The dark mass moved inside my head, plunging downward with a hot, burning surge. A spike of black light ripped from my chest and coiled around the purple essence, leaping along the strand and wrapping around the
Gagging, I fell to my knees. Both flashlights lay on the floor, illuminating dust in the air. A growled panting came from the darkness. I shuffled on my knees and retrieved a flashlight, playing the
