Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

Now I could feel that particular defence crumbling and water leaking through more holes than I had fingers to plug them with.

I nursed the whisky for half an hour, then ordered another and brooded on that. And I was about to order a third when a glass appeared in front of me. It was black sambuca, and it had been served in that showy way that normally annoys the hell out of me—set on fire, with a coffee bean floating on the top—but when the woman eased herself in on the stool next to mine and leaned forward to blow out the flames, I forgot all about that.

The phrase “drop-dead gorgeous” is overused, in my opinion. Did you ever seriously look at a woman and think that your heart would stop? That the sheer intensity of her beauty threatened to burn a hole through your skull so that your brains would bleed out?

I was looking at her now.

She was tall and statuesque, where normally I go for petite and cute, but you could tell at one glance that she was the sort of woman that categories would crash and founder on. Her hair was a coal black waterfall, and her eyes were of a matching color, so intensely dark that they seemed to be all pupil. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, then her soul had an event horizon. She would have looked good with a Lady d’Arbanville snow-white pallor—good but Gothic. She was every shade in white’s spectrum, which I’d never appreciated before. Her skin was the palest ivory, her lips a darker and richer color, like churned cream. The black shirt she wore seemed to be made of many layers of some almost-sheer material, so that as she moved, it offered microsecond glimpses of the flesh beneath. By contrast, her black leather trousers showed nothing but surface contours and talked to me entirely in terms of textures. A silver chain, entirely plain, decorated her left ankle, which was crossed over her right. Black stilettos sheathed her feet.

But it was her smell that was having the strongest effect on me. For a moment, when she first sat down, it had hit me as a hot wave of rankness like the stink of a henhouse after a fox has been busy in there. Then a second later I realized I was wrong, because the smell had opened up into a thousand shades of meaning: subtle harmonies of musk and cinnamon and dew-wet summer air overlaid on sweet rose; heavy, seductive lily; and undisguised human sweat. There was even a hint of chocolate in there, and those hot, sticky boiled sweets called aniseed twists. The total effect was indescribable—the smell of a woman in heat lying in a pleasure garden that you had visited as a child.

Then those astonishing eyes blinked, slowly and languorously, and I realized that my appraisal had taken several seconds—seconds in which I had just been staring at her with my mouth slightly open.

“You had a certain look about you,” she said, as if to explain the free drink and her presence. Her voice was a deep and husky contralto; the equivalent in sound of her face. “Like a man who was reliving the past—and not really getting a lot out of it.”

I managed a shrug and then raised the sambuca in a salute. “You’re good,” I admitted, and took a long sip. The rim of the glass was still hot, and it burned into my lower lip. Good. That gave me some point of contact with reality.

“Good?” she repeated, seeming to give that a moment’s thought. “No, I’m not. Not really. You can take that as a warning.”

She’d brought her own drink over with her, too—something in a tall glass and bright red that could have been a Bloody Mary or plain tomato juice. She clinked glasses with me now and drank off half of it in one gulp.

“Given how short life is likely to be,” she said, setting the glass down and favoring me with another high-octane stare, “and how full of pain and loss and uncertainty, it’s my opinion that a man should live for the moment.”

If this was a chat-up line, it was a new one on me. I took another mouthful of her smell; I was disconcerted to find that I had an erection.

I groped for a bantering tone. “Yeah, well, normally I do. Most of the moments I’ve had today haven’t been up to all that much.”

She smiled. “But now I’m here.”

Her name was Juliet. More than that she wasn’t interested in telling me, except that it came out that she wasn’t from London. I could have told that from her accent; or rather—as with Lucasz Damjohn—her lack of one. She spoke with a kind of diamond-edged clarity, as though she was setting syllables down next to one another in line with a pattern she’d already memorized. It might have made her sound like a Eurovision Song Contest presenter, but when did Eurovision ever make you stand inside your pants?

She wasn’t interested in finding out about me, either, which was great. The less I talked shop right then, the more I liked it. Whatever the hell we did talk about, I don’t remember it now. All I remember was the absolute certainty that we were going to walk out of that bar and find somewhere where we could fuck like demented rabbits.

In the meantime, another glass of black booze arrived, and then another, and another. I drank them all without tasting them. Everything seemed to be black when you looked at it properly; Juliet’s eyes were black kaleidoscopes that stole the world away from you and then gave it back again translated into subtle, midnight shades.

We tumbled out of the bar into the black night, lit by the thinnest sliver of moon, and then into a black cab that drove away without needing to be told where we were going. Or maybe I did mention a destination, some part of my brain still trying to deal with the mundane realities while I groped at Juliet’s shadowy curves and she fended me off without effort.

“Not here, lover,” she whispered. “Take me somewhere no one can see.”

Then the cab was receding into the distance, and we were standing on the pavement outside Pen’s house. The windows all black except for one; Pen was in the basement, and I remembered vaguely that I hadn’t seen her for two days. It didn’t seem important right then; nothing was important except getting into my room with Juliet and locking the door. Once that was done, the whole damn world could end, and I wouldn’t care.

I couldn’t get the key into the lock. Juliet spoke a word, and the door sprang open of its own accord. What a useful trick! She was leading me by the hand up the stairs, and there was a bubble of perfect silence around us, so that when I spoke her name in a drunken slur, I couldn’t even hear it myself. She looked around at me and smiled, a smile full of almost unbearable promise.

My own door opened just as easily as the street door. She drew me inside and closed it behind us. “Oh Jesus, you’re so—” I blurted, but she shushed me with a finger on my lips. This wasn’t the sort of occasion where you had to flatter and cozen your partner with clumsy words that didn’t even fit. Her blouse fell away without her touching it; so did her trousers and her shoes. Her flesh was uniformly pale, a dazzling contrast to her dark hair and eyes. Even her nipples, and the area around them, were all as pure and perfectly white as if they were carved from bone. Naked except for the slender chain tinkling out its seductive, silvery tune on her ankle, she pressed me to her, and her lips sought mine, one strong hand on the back of my neck, holding me in place.

“Now,” she growled. “Give it to me. All of it.”

She was tearing at my clothes with her other hand, and it didn’t surprise or alarm me that her long nails shredded cloth like paper, making deep lacerations in my flesh along the way. She fumbled briefly between my thighs, until with her help, I tore free of what was left of my trousers and pants. Our mouths fused, then our groins. We merged at last, Juliet holding the contact as she drew the breath from my lungs into hers, and heat expanded from my heart and crotch to fill the world.