Doyle After Death by John Shirley Read Free Book Online Page B

kidding. That’s the only time I use the word dead . It’s happy hour. That five bought you two drinks—­”
    â€œGive him another on me, hoss!” Bertram called. “Put it on my tab!”
    â€œI’ll make it a double, then.” And he poured me another drink. “Just remember, Fogg, you got to earn any more money, besides what you came with. And that’s a fact.”
    I nodded. “Okay. You said I could make myself useful in town . . . that include earning some Fi ’s?”
    â€œYeah. Here comes the guy you ask for a job . . .”
    I turned and saw a large man rippling by the window—­it was the sort of window glass that’s warped to look antique. He came banging in the front door. It was Doyle. “Major—­there’s been another murder.”
    The major nodded. “I’ll get my coat, Mr. Doyle, and close up.”
    I looked back and forth between them. “Murder? Here?”
    Doyle looked me up and down. “Perhaps you’d like to come along . . . Bertram says you were . . . a detective? I could use the help.”
    T here were three of us—­myself, Major Brummigen, and Doyle, following the Lamplighter up a dark, steep path through a forest. Four men in all.
    Sure, we were still men, and still human. Anyway, that’s how it felt.
    The Lamplighter appeared to be an old man: a bright-­eyed, hook-­nosed old man with a short, pointy gray beard and shoulder-­length curly white hair, holding his lantern high, so our party was accompanied by a wobbly pool of light. His long purple robe never seemed to get soiled, though it sometimes trailed in the muddy water trickling down the cracks in the rocky path—­and the cuffs of my trousers did get soiled. None of us were breathing hard, climbing the stony path, since none of us were breathing. Not the way you think of breathing. It took some real effort, some burning of personal energy, to get up that hill though.
    As we climbed, the night came on, as it does everywhere . . . as it does except where it’s always night. (Where it’s always night, as I learned later, is a series of low rolling hills about forty miles to the northeast of here.)
    The starless, moonless night sky spread like a tsunami of India ink that never quite fell; it seemed poised above the dripping willows overhanging the path. I thought of the phrase The Great Darkness that some ­people used for death. It seems to me I’d come through a great darkness to get to the Purple Sea.
    The woods smelled pleasantly of leaf decay and living soil. The Lamplighter’s arm, lifting the guiding lantern, never faltered. The occasional foxfire glimmer, blue and red, picked out a few details in the forest, where fragments of lost spirits guttered.
    The stars? They were absent without leave. Without my leave anyway. The moon? A no-­show. We never see stars, here; we never see a moon, never at all. I miss them.
    It was wet and misty out there, the rain just having quit. But it wasn’t cold.
    â€œWe’re almost at the crime scene, Nick,” the major rumbled beside me. He had a Chicago accent. “With luck the remains are still at Gretchen’s Overlook.”
    The major’s cadences were very American; just as much as Mr. Doyle’s were British. But was Major Brummigen still an American, considering where we were? Was I still American? Was Doyle still British? Did I give a damn?
    Dressed in a caped mac over an Edwardian hunting outfit, Mr. Doyle tromped heavily in knee-­high riding boots, intermittently muttering to himself.
    When we got to the hilltop we paused for a moment, and looked back down into the valley to take in the small settlement of Garden Rest, a gemlike crescent nestling between the hills. The lights from the little town’s cottage windows and the grid of streetlamps looked back from the thick darkness. Sourced neither in