"Don't," it begged when he pointed the gun at its head. "Not the face."
"Give me one good reason why not."
"You'll need the bullets," came the reply.
Harry had expected bargains and threats. This answer silenced him. "There's something going to get loose tonight, D'Amour," Cha'Chat said. The blood that was pooling around it had begun to thicken and grow milky, like melted wax. "Something wilder that me."
"Name it," said Harry.
The demon grinned. "Who knows?" it said. "It's a strange season, isn't it? Long nights. Clear skies. Things get born on nights like this, don't you find?"
"Where?" said Harry, pressing the gun to Cha'Chat's nose.
"You're a bully, D'Amour," it said reprovingly. "You know that?"
"Tell me..."
The thing's eyes grew darker; its face seemed to blur.
"South of here, I'd say..." it replied. "A hotel..." The tone of its voice was changing subtly; the features losing their solidity. Harry's trigger finger itched to give the damned thing a wound that would keep it from a mirror for life, but it was still talking, and he couldn't afford to interrupt its flow. "...on Forty-fourth," it said. "Between Sixth...Sixth and Broadway." The voice was indisputably feminine now. "Blue blinds," it murmured. "I can see blue blinds..."
As it spoke the last vestiges of its true features fled, and suddenly it was Norma who was bleeding on the sidewalk at Harry's feet.
"You wouldn't shoot an old lady, would you?" she piped up.
The trick lasted seconds only, but Harry's hesitation was all that Cha'Chat needed to fold itself between one plane and the next, and flit. He'd lost the creature, for the second time in a month.
And to add discomfort to distress, it had begun to snow.
The small hotel that Cha'Chat had described had seen better years; even the light that burned in the lobby seemed to tremble on the brink of expiring. There was nobody at the desk. Harry was about to start up the stairs when a young man whose pate was shaved as bald as an egg, but for a single kiss curl that was oiled to his scalp, stepped out of the gloom and took hold of his arm.
"There's nobody here," he informed Harry.
In better days Harry might have cracked the egg open with his bare fists, and enjoyed doing so. Tonight he guessed he would come off the worse. So he simply said, "Well, I'll find another hotel then, eh?"
Kiss Curl seemed placated; the grip relaxed. In the next instant Harry's hand found his gun, and the gun found Kiss Curl's chin. An expression of bewilderment crossed the boy's face as he fell back against the wall, spitting blood.
As Harry started up the stairs, he heard the youth yell, "Darrieux!" from below.
Neither the shout nor the sound of the struggle had roused any response from the rooms. The place was empty. It had been elected, Harry began to comprehend, for some purpose other than hostelry.
As he started along the landing a woman's cry, begun but never finished, came to meet him. He stopped dead. Kiss Curl was coming up the stairs behind him two or three at a time; ahead, someone was dying. This couldn't end well, Harry suspected.
Then the door at the end of the corridor opened, and suspicion became plain fact. A man in a gray suit was standing on the threshold, skinning off a pair of bloodied surgical gloves. Harry knew him vaguely; indeed had begun to sense a terrible pattern in all of this from the moment he'd heard Kiss Curl call his employer's name. This was Darrieux Marchetti; also called the Cankerist; one of the whispered order of theological assassins whose directives came from Rome, or Hell, or both.
"D'Amour," he said.
Harry had to fight the urge to be flattered that he had been remembered.
"What happened here?" he demanded to know, taking a step toward the open door.
"Private business," the Cankerist insisted. "Please, no closer."
Candles burned in the little room, and by their generous light, Harry could see the bodies laid out on the bare bed. The woman from the house on Ridge Street, and her child. Both had been dispatched with Roman efficiency.
"She protested," said Marchetti, not overly concerned that Harry was viewing the results of his handiwork. "All I needed was the child."
"What was it?" Harry demanded. "A demon?"
Marchetti shrugged. "We'll never know," he said. "But at this time of year there's usually something that tries to get in under the wire. We like to be safe rather than sorry. Besides, there are those-I number myself amongst them-that believe there is such a thing as a surfeit of Messiahs-"
"Messiahs?" said Harry. He looked again at the tiny body.
"There was power there, I suspect," said Marchetti. "But it could have gone either way. Be thankful, D'Amour. Your world isn't ready for revelation." He looked past Harry to the youth, who was at the top of the stairs. "Patrice. Be an angel, will you, bring the car over? I'm late for Mass."
He threw the gloves back onto the bed.
"You're not above the law," said Harry.
"Oh please," the Cankerist protested. "let's have no nonsense. It's too late at night."
Harry felt a sharp pain at the base of his skull, and a trace of heat where blood was running.
"Patrice thinks you should go home, D'Amour. And so do I."
The knife point was pressed a little deeper.
"Yes?" said Marchetti.
"Yes," said Harry.
"He was here," said Norma, when Harry called back at the house.
"Who?"
"Eddie Axel; of Axel's Superette. He came through, clear as daylight."
"Dead?"
"Of course dead. He killed himself in his cell. Asked me if I'd seen his soul."
"And what did you say?"
"I'm a telephonist, Harry; I just make the connections. I don't pretend to understand the metaphysics." She picked up the bottle of brandy Harry had set on the table beside her chair. "How sweet of you," she said. "Sit down. Drink."
"Another time, Norma. When I'm not so tired." He went to the door. "By the way, " he said. "You were right. There was something on Ridge Street..."
"Where is it now?"
"Gone...home."
"And Cha'Chat?"
"Still out there somewhere. In a foul temper..."
"Manhattan's seen worse, Harry."
It was little consolation, but Harry muttered his agreement as he closed the door.
The snow was coming on more heavily all the time.
He stood on the step and watched the way the flakes spiraled in the lamplight. No two, he had read somewhere, were ever alike. When such variety was available to the humble snowflake, could he be surprised that events had such unpredictable faces?
Each moment was its own master, he mused, as he put his head between the blizzard's teeth, and he would have to take whatever comfort he could find in the knowledge that between this chilly hour and dawn there were innumerable such moments-blind maybe, and wild and hungry-but all at least eager to be born.
"Harry is an interesting combination. He springs out of the film noir detective tradition, but he also has his feet and hands deep in horror territory. Like me, he feels the tension between the ordinary world and the supernatural world."-Clive Barker