The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told

“How come I’ve never seen your paper?”

“As I have said, you kept your most important eye deliberately closed.” LeBeau put his hand on top of the folder. “The paper has grown since the War. Before, we were a single sheet. During, we ran four. After, we grew to five, then ten, now eighteen. We need an English language edition. We will start with four pages on the expatriate community.”

“More meeting the boat,” Decker said. “More puff pieces.”

“No puff, as you say,” LeBeau said. “Warnings, perhaps. Stories that do not run in your Tribune or the Herald, things only hinted at in the fictions your friends write for the Transatlantic Review.”

“Who would read it?” Decker asked, surprising himself. Normally he would ask about pay before readership.

“People like my grandson,” LeBeau said.

“Where did he go?”

“He will take Etienne Netter and extinguish his darkness. Then he would help the police find justice.”

“He’ll kill him?”

“No,” LeBeau said. “But this Netter might wish he were dead when my grandson has finished with this. For Netter will realize what he has done and why, and with the revival of his soul, he will feel remorse so painful that death will be the only way out. Yet death will be impossible for decades. It is our smallest but best measure of revenge.”

Decker felt a chill run down his back. The conversations with LeBeau, as circular as they were, were beginning to make sense.

“We will pay triple what you earn at the Tribune for the first six months,” LeBeau said. “Raises every quarter thereafter if you continue to perform.”

“Perform?” Decker asked.

“You must follow the darkness,” LeBeau said. “See where it will lead.”

“And if I don’t?”

LeBeau smiled. “I shall buy you your next drink. You will become one of the-what do they call it?-casualties of the licentiousness of Paris. There will be no novel, no more hack work as you call it, no more typing. Only drinks, until one day not even the drinks will work. You will go to a sanatorium, and they will try to help you, but you will be one of the hopeless ones, the ones who has rotted his mind and his body, but has not managed to destroy the vision that has haunted you since you touched that kitten decades ago.”

It no longer surprised Decker that LeBeau knew so much about him. Nor did LeBeau’s description of his future surprise him. Decker had seen it already, as his father drank more and more, until finally his grandfather drove his father away to “a hospital” where they would “help” him. No one had ever seen him again.

His mother would not speak of him. She had lived too close to his darkness. She feared it for her son.

But running from it hadn’t worked. He had simply become a drunk in Paris instead of in Milwaukee. Even if he had no magic vision, he had a future like the one LeBeau had described.

And the writing had taken away the urge to drink.

Even if the things he wrote had chilled him deeper than anything else.

“I never met her, did I?” Decker asked the old man. “Sophie. I never did meet her.”

LeBeau looked at him. “You met her. Her spirit, after she had died. She wished she had been with you instead of this Etienne. She used your similarities to pull you in. She wanted him stopped. She did not want him to harm anyone else.”

It sounded good. Decker wasn’t sure he believed it, but he wanted to. Just like he wanted to believe that Noir existed, that he would be paid three times his Tribune salary, that his Corpse Vision actually had a purpose.

“I suppose I can’t tell anyone what I’m doing,” he said.

LeBeau shrugged. “You can tell,” he said. “They will not believe. Or worse, they will not care, any more than you care for them.”

LeBeau glanced at Hemingway, still scribbling in his notebook. Decker looked too. Hemingway raised his head. For one moment, their eyes met. But Hemingway’s were glazed, and Decker realized that Hemingway had not seen him, so lost was he in the world he was creating.

They were all creating their worlds. The expatriate reporters with their chummy newspapers in English, hiding in a French city that did not care about their small world. The novelists, sitting in Parisian cafes, writing about their families back home.

And the old man, with his darkness and nightmares looming backwards.

Decker already existed in darkness. He could no longer push it away. He might as well shine a light on it and see what he found underneath.

“I’ll take four times the salary,” he said, “and a raise every two months.”

The old man smiled. “It is, as you say, a deal.”

He extended his hand. Decker took it. It was dry and warm. They shook, and Decker felt remarkably calm.

Calmer than he had felt in months.

Maybe than he had felt in years.

He did not know how long Noir would be in his future. But he did know that his tenure there would be better than anything he had done in the past.

Anything he had seen in the past.

He opened his most important eye, and finally, went to work.

The Unicorn Hunt by Michelle West

Hunting the Unicorn in the big city isn’t exactly a simple proposition. Unicorns being what they are, sleek bastards, they’re steeped in old lore, as if lore were magic.

Some of the lore is true, mind you; there’s always a bit of truth in any old legend, if you know how to sift through the words. Words often get in the way. Maggie’s my sometime partner, when it comes to things that exist outside of whatever passes for normal. She’s got half a family-which is to say, herself and the kids-and a full-time job, besides. But she’s got a bit of a temper, and a memory that just won’t quit. She takes the whole business personally.

Me? I never did.

I was raised by my grandmother, a tough old woman with a mouth like a soldier’s, and a pretty strong right hand to boot. She had some standards, expected good grades, and carried a weary disdain about life that pretty much seeped into everything I ever tried to do. It wasn’t so much that she laughed at me-although I might have mentioned she was a touch harsh-as that she saw through me.

It was hard to dream much, in my grandmother’s house. And make no mistake, it was her damn house. Small, squat building, red brick painted in a drab grey, porch up the backside of the house and round the side to the front. Garden for days, and in a city house, that says something. She didn’t much believe in grass; it was a waste of water and sun, in her opinion. No, she grew useful things. Herbs, spices, fruits, vegetables. No flowers for her either, although I sort of liked them when I was younger. Flowers in her garden always withered and died, and I learned not to plant ’em.

You get odd communities in the city. My grandmother was at the centre of ours. When she wasn’t drinking, she was often on that porch, and she had words of wisdom for any poor sucker who happened to stop within earshot of her chair. She had a cane that she used like a gavel-she sure as hell didn’t need it for walking-and a voice that could make thunder seem sort of pleasant.

But I learned to love her. It was an uphill battle, for the early years of my childhood, and much of the affection I feel for her is hindsight and odd memory. She told me things I hated, when I was young, and watching them prove true was both a liberation and a bitter reminder that that old woman knew things.

She didn’t believe in magic.