The Devil's Detective by Simon Kurt Unsworth Page A

firm, Gordie’s merely conversational, and Fool didn’t argue. Whatever protection he may have offered them once was gone now, he suddenly understood, shredded by the interest being shown in him. They were his colleagues, the closest things to friends he had in Hell except, perhaps, he realized with a sad little jolt, Elderflower or the Man, things he wasn’t even sure were human.
    They came to the doorway and the shrieks and cries were almost unbearable, not just loud but agonized and piercing. Fool, who had heard screams of most timbres during his years in Hell, had heard nothing like them before; the Orphanages were not a place he had ever had call to visit previously. The cries were continuous, tremulous, and they tugged at him even as they made his flesh crawl. Gordie felt it as well, it was obvious; he was frowning, his forehead low above his eyes, as though he were in pain, but it was Summer whom Fool was most worried about. She was already sweating, and the look on her face was as alien as anything Fool had seen on Elderflower’s features. There was longing there, as though she were attracted to this tumultuous noise, wanting to open her arms to it, as well as a determination not to let it catch her.
It has barbs, this sound
, Fool thought,
ones that are already sinking deep into Summer.
    The house, or something in it, shrieked again and Summer moaned slightly, closing her eyes. Gordie put a hand on her shoulder but she shook it off sharply. As though Gordie’s tiny gesture of sympathy had galvanized her, she opened her eyes and said, “Are we going?”
    As they walked swiftly to the door Gordie said, “I’ve thought of something else, about the Man. Something I heard once.”
    â€œLater,” said Fool. The Man was a problem for later, and whatever Gordie had remembered could wait.
    â€œIt’s a strange thing, about how he grows. About what he eats,” said Gordie.
    â€œTell me after we’ve done this,” said Fool. They were at the doorway now, surrounded by wafts of heat and the smell of burning hair. Thethree stopped, and then, looking at each other briefly, they all stepped forward.
    In the house’s darkness, something glowed momentarily, the light showing them a long hallway studded with doorways on either side, and then it dimmed again. Fool moved inside, looking around as Gordie and Summer followed. As his eyes adjusted to the lower light, he saw that the nearest opening was only a step away. Through it he saw a grimy room with tangled piles of sheets and old mattresses scattered across the floor. Most of the mattresses were stained, dark blooms covering their surfaces as though shadows had become liquid and then dried. The smell of burning hair and meat and sweat crept around them, and still the shrieks came from all about them and from somewhere ahead of them, deep in the Orphanage’s terrible womb.
    Apart from the mattresses and sheets, the first room was empty. The room opposite it contained more mattresses and sheets along with piles of discarded towels, brittle with age and dried fluids. Sickly moss, ashy in the half-light, had furred the floor around the piles, and Fool thought that he saw the moss pulse slightly as though drawing in breath when he came close to it. Gordie started to shift the mattresses, lifting and then letting them drop, and for a moment Fool wondered why before realizing he was looking for clues. The
Guide
stressed things like “finding the information contained at the scene of the crime” and “the reading of the environment,” and Gordie had taken it all to heart. Fool had tried to tell him that the book was old, ancient, making reference to rules and ideas of policing that Fool had never even heard of, but Gordie had simply replied, “But it must matter, or they wouldn’t have given us them, surely?” How could you argue with that? And even if you could, why would you? Was this desperate