Read Online Camera Obscura by Lavie Tidhar - Free Book Online

Let go of Grimm. Let go of it all, the half-light, half-life of the catacombs, their smell clinging to her leather coat. Her ribs ached and her face felt swollen. She opened the window of the carriage, let the comforting smells of the upper city in, the smoke and manure and the curses and songs, the lights in the distance, growing closer – Pigalle, the place of merriment and drunkenness, of dancing and whoring and knifing, of carousing and robbing and killing.
      Her kind of place.
      And now there was a sound penetrating the night like a knife – a woman's scream, high-pitched, terrified – terminating so suddenly that the silence ached, and she was out of the carriage and running before the mute driver could bring it to a halt. Running, towards the dark mouth of an alleyway, Peacemaker out of its holster, running and knowing all the while that it was too late.
      She burst into the alley and saw a shape on the ground, a dark pool around it, and a shape standing above, turning to look toward her and she ran–
      A grey misshapen face, moonlit despite the darkness – a skull as white as moon rock, eyes in which the tendrils of galaxies swirled – the mouth open in a silent hungry grin–
      Man, beast, spirit, ghost – the knife a solid real object, too late – it slashed the woman lying on the ground. She fired, the gun making a loud noise in that small confine. Stars above, half-hidden by the city's perennial smoke. Stars looking down. The crazed grinning face turning to her, a crack in that elongated skull – the mouth opening, snapping at her, snap , snap! and she fired again.
      The figure on the ground moved, groaned. The creature took another hit from her gun and only grinned harder. Then – shouts behind her, the whistles of gendarmes. The creature waved a paw – a hand? – a sickle moon – goodbye, goodbye, and–
      Jumping – floating? – a shapeless grey cloud scaling the wall of the alley. A hiss in the night, a wordless promise, we'll meet again, my lovely.
       Soon , she answered him, firing all the while at the retreating grey shape, knowing it was useless. Soon, I hope.
      And it was gone. The night was ordinary once again. A woman lay by the alley's brick wall, amidst the rubbish of the adjacent restaurant – mussel shells, discarded, rotting meat, an empty turtle shell crawling with fat black flies, pools of rancid oil staining the ground like blood.
      Place Pigalle. A shout and feet running behind her, stopping abruptly. Violent sounds – it took her a moment to realise it was someone being noisily sick.
      Other, unhurried footsteps coming. She crouched down by the woman. Elderly, her dress revealing wrinkled skin, coarse-painted face, the sagging breasts rising and falling still, though almost imperceptively, with the body's last intake and outtake of air.
      Slashed. "Tell me," she said, whispering to the woman. Watching tendrils of grey crawling over her wrists. The woman's eyes looking into hers, black eyes, as dark as a starless, moonless night.
      "Door," the woman said. The single word a whispered puff of air. "Door. K… key."
      She said, "Where?"
      The woman, dying: "Every… where."
      The eyes, closed now. The heart, the engine of the body quit. Remembering Viktor's lectures. Blood circulation stopping, brain functions terminating one by one. A silent machine, beginning to decay, impossible to fix. Nothing more nor less than death. She thought of doors, and keys.
      Behind her, footsteps stopped. A hand on her shoulder – gentle. A familiar voice: "We'll find who did this."
      Not looking up at him. "You won't."
      "Milady…" the title whispered, an exasperated sound. And something else… but what?
      "Why do you always have to turn up like this?"
      An English expression came to her mind and she began to laugh. "Like a bad penny," she said. "A bad penny–" laughing, the laugh becoming sobs. The Gascon's hands on her shoulders,