Lost Souls.txt ???????? [╞ ╒JD1╒JD2 mBIN кк╤└ [back]
by
Clive Barker
Everything the blind woman had told Harry she'd seen was undeniably real.
Whatever inner eye Norma Paine possessed-that extraordinary skill that
allowed her to scan the island of Manhattan from the Broadway Bridge to
Battery Park and yet not move an inch from her tiny room on
Seventy-fifth-that eye was as sharp as any knife juggler's. Here was the
derelict house on Ridge Street, with the smoke stains besmirching the
brick. Here was the dead dog that she'd described, lying on the sidewalk
as though asleep, but that it lacked half its head. Here too, if Norma
was to be believed, was the demon that Harry had come in search of: the
shy and sublimely malignant Cha'Chat.
The house was not, Harry thought, a likely place for a desperado of
Cha'Chat's elevation to be in residence. Though the infernal brethren
could be a loutish lot, to be certain, it was Christian propaganda which
sold them as dwellers in excrement and ice. The escaped demon was more
likely to be downing fly eggs and vodka at the Waldorf-Astoria than
concealing itself amongst such wretchedness.
But Harry had gone to the blind clairvoyant in desperation, having failed
to locate Cha'Chat by any means conventionally available to a private eye
such as himself. He was, he had admitted to her, responsible for the fact
that the demon was loose at all. It seemed he'd never learned, in his all
too frequent encounters with the Gulf and its progeny, that Hell
possessed a genius for deceit. Why else had he believed in the child that
had tottered into view just as he'd leveled his gun at Cha'Chat?-a child,
of course, which had evaporated into a cloud of tainted air as soon as
the diversion was redundant and the demon had made its escape.
Now, after almost three weeks of vain pursuit, it was almost Christmas in
New York; season of goodwill and suicide. Streets thronged; the air like
salt in wounds; Mammon in glory. A more perfect playground for Cha'Chat's
despite could scarcely be imagined. Harry had to find the demon quickly,
before it did serious damage; find it and return it to the pit from which
it had come. In extremis he would even use the binding syllables which
the late Father Hesse had vouchsafed to him once, accompanying them with
such dire warnings that Harry had never even written them down. Whatever
it took. Just as long as Cha'Chat didn't see Christmas Day this side of
the Schism.
It seemed to be colder inside the house on Ridge Street than out. Harry
could feel the chill creep through both pairs of socks and start to numb
his feet. He was making his way along the second landing when he heard
the sigh. He turned, fully expecting to see Cha'Chat standing there, its
eye cluster looking a dozen ways at once, its cropped fur rippling. But
no. Instead a young woman stood at the end of the corridor. Her
undernourished features suggested Puerto Rican extraction, but that-and
