Hammers on Bone (Persons Non Grata, #1)

by Cassandra Khaw

To all the monsters hiding in this world, I hope the children will skin you alive. To the children in the world, let no one say you can’t make your monsters bleed.

“I want you to kill my stepdad.” I kick my feet off my desk and lean forward, rucking my brow. “Say that again, kid?” Usually, it’s dames trussed up in whalebone and lace that come slinking through my door. Or, as is more often the case these days, femmes fatales in Jimmy Choos and Armani knockoffs. The pipsqueak in my office is new, and I’m not sure I like his brand of new. He’s young, maybe a rawboned eleven, but he has the stare of someone three times his age and something twice as dangerous. Not here to sell cookies, that much is obvious. I saw him take a firm, hard look at the door, take in the sign I’d chiseled on the frosted glass: JOHN PERSONS, P.I. “I said”—he plants his piggy bank on my desk like a statement of intent—“I want you to kill my stepdad.” “And why’s that?” “Because he’s a monster.” You learn things in this line of work. Like how to read heartbeats. Any gumshoe can tell when a darb’s lying, but it takes a special class of sharper to differentiate between two truths. Whatever the reality is, this kid believes the spiel he’s selling, marrow and soul. In his eyes, his secondary sad sack of an old man’s a right monster.

Right on cue, a whisper crackles in the back of my skull, like a radio transmission from the dead, shaky and persistent: wait wait wait. The kid doesn’t even flinch. “You kill when you have to.” I knot my arms over my chest. “When I have to. Not when a gink with a bag full of change tells me to. Big difference.” A muscle in his cheek jumps. Brat doesn’t like it when someone tells him no. But to his credit, he doesn’t break form. He sucks in a breath, nice and slow, before exhaling. Class act, this one. If I ever meet his folks, I’m going to have to tip a trilby to them.

Please. I sigh, feel the air worm out of my lungs. I could do with a cigarette right now, but it’d be impolite, not to mention stupid, to leave a client hanging about this dive. No telling if he’s going to stay put, or if he’s going to paw through places he don’t belong. And I couldn’t afford that. So, I shake out a few folders instead, rearrange a stack of papers. Just to give my hands something to do. “Tell your mom to call child services. The bulls will have your old man dancing on air in no time.” “I can’t.” He shakes his head, curt-like. “He did something to my mommy. And he’ll do something to the police, too. I know it. Please. You’re the only one who can help.” “What makes you say that?” “Because you’re a monster too.” Well. This got interesting. I crook a finger at him, beckon the midget closer. He doesn’t hesitate, scoots right up to the edge of the desk and tilts his head forward like I’m some favorite uncle about to ruffle his hair. I take a whiff. Drink his scent like a mouthful of red. —black and animal bile, copper and cold springwater, herbs and life of every dimension, almost enough to hide the stink of cut-open entrails, of muscles split and tethered to unimaginable dreams, a composition of offal and spoor and predator breath— “This is some bad shit you’ve gotten mixed up with there.” “I know.” He fixes his eyes to mine. You could carve Harlem sunsets with that look he’s wearing. “Will you take the job?” Wehavetowehavetowehaveto. Persistent as bear traps, ...

Croydon’s a funny place these days. I remember when it was harder, when it was chiselers and punks, knife-toting teenagers and families too poor to make it anywhere else in grand old London, when this body was just acres of hurt and heroin, waiting to stop breathing. Now Croydon’s split down the middle, middle-class living digging its tentacles into the veins of the borough, spawning suits and skyscrapers and fast food joints every which way. In a few years, it’ll just be another haunt for the butter-and-egg men. No room for the damned. Home, sighs my ghost. “No,” I correct him, adjusting the folds of my collar with a careful little motion. “Not anymore.”

I don’t let her finish. Instead, I wedge a foot through the gap and shoulder the door open, knocking the latch free. The broad scuttles back, alarmed. I can see the cogs in her head wheeling as I swagger in: what’s this shamus doing dripping rain in her foyer? As she slots together an objection, I slice in between. “So, what’s the deal here, sister? You making the runt work sweatshops or something?” “Excuse me?” She’s staring. They always do. These days, it’s all bae and fleek, bootylicious selfies and cultural appropriation done on brand. That puts me in a weird linguistic space, with my chosen vocabulary. I mean, I could embrace the present, but I feel a responsibility to my meat’s absentee landlord.

“Uh-huh.” I rap ash from my cigarette and grin like the devil come to dine on Georgia. “Mind if I look around?” “I really don’t think—” You gotta love the redcoats. Americans, they’re quick to tell you to make with the feet. But the Brits? It just ain’t in them to be rude. I take one last, long drag before I stub out my smoke in the aging carpet and start deeper into the house, the bird’s complaints trailing behind like a slither of organs. The stink grows stronger: less human, more maritime malfeasance. A reek of salt and hard use, of drowned things rotten with new life. An old smell, a childhood smell. I walk my fingertips across the moldering wallpaper, black-blotched like some abused housewife. Under my touch, visions bloom. Ah.

She flinches like I’d clip a dame of her size, mouth slumping under its own weight. “He’s out. He’s working at the brickworks.” I glide my tongue along the back of my teeth, counting each stump before I start again. “Where?” Silence. A lick of chapped, bloodless lips. “Sister, here’s some free advice. Whatever mess you’re in, you should clean it up and get out.” “Excuse me? I—” I cock a bored stare. “You got a mug like a boxer. You want the same for your boys?” Her fingers twitch to her face. I’m lying, of course. The thing wearing her sweetheart was careful. If there are teeth marks, they’re secreted beneath secondhand hems, pressed into spaces sacred to lovers. But guilt is a funny kind of magic. I watch in silence as she gropes the cut of her jaw, the line of her nose, features spasming with every circuit, every new or imagined fault. By the time we make eye contact again, her gaze is frayed, wild with visions of things that don’t exist. I tilt my head.

The skirt punches a bony finger at the window, straight at the factory at the end of the road. It’s an ugly thing. Most places in London, the businesses will try to blend in with the neighborhood, mix a little effort into the mortar, so to speak. But this was the brickworks, the smoke-clogged uterus of the English capital. It was never meant to be beautiful. And frankly, it ain’t. The building in the distance, with its boneyard of chimneys, its cellblock windows, is like the corpse of a god that’s been left to rot, picked-over ribs swarming with overall-wearing insects.

Fifteen feet, ten feet. Five. I almost lose my cool when I break into the man’s personal space. It was here, was in him, is still in him. Its scent clots hot in his every exhalation: febrile, fecund, dried plasma and mold.

“What kind of information?” he asks as he hooks an ankle over a knee. Under the bobbing orange light, his neck looks scabrous, scaled, the flesh a pebbled gray where it should have been pink. “I’m looking for a guy. McKinsey.” The name flares in memory, the syllables disgorged by a kid too young for his eyes. “His fiancée said he works for you. Got some questions for him.” “McKinsey? I know him. Good guy.” A prickle of defensiveness, a calcification of his lidded stare. “Works hard, drinks hard. A little too hard, sometimes. Maybe. But then again, which of us don’t? Either way, good man. What’s your beef with him?” “Mm.” I breathe in, press the smoke against the roof of my mouth. “No beef. I’m looking to clarify a few things.” “What things?” His throat flutters, expands. “Things.” In his agitation, his skin splits, spreads to frame a moist blue eye, cataracted and lethargically sullen. The foreman doesn’t notice and I do my best to call no attention to it. “What. Things,” he gurgles, fists clenched, cheeks palpitating. Another eye opens in his neck, bigger than the first, more alert. It bulges against its restraints, ticking madly as more follow in a fusillade of wet noises. “Things,” I repeat impatiently. I’m too old to be intimidated, but not old enough to be inoculated against a sense of righteous offense. The thing in his neck is a blasphemy, a mutagenic outrage of flesh, an insult to man and beast and all of us that came crawling out of the ocean before. As I breathe ...

I leave the address to my office, scribbled on a blue square of cardboard. The foreman says nothing, just keeps his stare pointed forward, face mangled by hate, some of it his, some of it borrowed. I start toward the door, then hesitate at the threshold. Under my rage and my disgust, there’s an urge to put this horror right. No one deserves this slow dissolution of muscle and self. I’ve seen his affliction. I know where it’s going. I know how it ends.

Her expression alters. She recognizes the description. There’s no mistaking it. Not in the flash in her big, brown eyes, or the way the muscles in her neck gather and tense, her jaw closing with an audible clack. When she finally speaks, it’s with intense suspicion. “Yeah. I know him.” “What can you tell me about him?” “Nothing. He’s bad business. That’s all you need to know.” “Does he come in here regularly? Does he have friends? A favorite order—” “I don’t want to talk about him.” She breathes out, and I catch it then: the ghost of its scent, winnowed down into something fleeting, barely there, but still unmistakable, camphor and burnt pine wood, leavened with dried gore. I make a leap. “Did he hurt you?” And land on the money. Sasha’s eyes grow round, glacial. “I think we’re done talking, monsieur.” “He did, didn’t he?” “I don’t—” I snake a hand out and trap her wrist. —a simian jaw, cheeks too wide and face too ugly, a lizard stare, heavy, hanging with sins. He won’t let her go, holds her elbow with a dog’s death grip on its favorite bone. “What are you doing?” Her blood thumps against my skin, hummingbird shivers. She pushes him. He slaps her. Her head ricochets backward. Impact. A crack of pain blurs her vision to red. She looks up as he wrenches her forward. Up into eyes—there are so many of them, like constellations, like unclean galaxies—and more eyes, a nightmare of sclera and blue.

“Get out of my head.” The images break against Sasha’s voice, the sound filled with an indisputable authority. Her memories contract to a pinpoint smear of light. I’m flung out even as she pitches back in her seat, half-rearing, a snake enraged, chair screeching. Sasha’s eyes flare wide. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” “Someone who wants to help.” “I didn’t ask for your help.” “You want him to do that again? To someone else?” Sasha shudders like a frog someone had rigged up to electrodes, limbs spasming without direction. “Don’t.” “Don’t what?” “Don’t fucking presume anything about me. You—” She swings her head, left, right, left, an animal prepared to charge. “God. You think you’re better than him? Than them? Just because you’re trying to help?” “I’m not just trying to help. I told you. I’m on a—” “Case.” She finishes for me. In her anger, her t’s disintegrate, her sentences accelerate, frenzied, halfway to local creole. “And that makes it better? Because you’re doing it for money?” “I—” “You want something, bruv? You ask. You ask me like I’m a person. When I say no, you fuck off. What you do to someone’s head and what you do to their meat, it isn’t much different, you hear? You don’t take what you’re not given. Get me?” “Yes.” Her rebuke knocks the wind from me. I remember when somebody else said that to me. You don’t take what you’re not given. I had laughed, then. But I’d asked. And he laid open every room of his mind, every chamber of his being, and it was better...

You know how they say you never forget how to ride a bike? Magic’s like that. Deeper, even. The knowledge of it inks itself on the inside of your bones, as does the practice, the methodology of execution. You can’t unlearn it any more than you can unlearn the symbiosis of ventricle and aorta. I stroke the razor across my arm. Three deep welts: one for every god devoured, every world forgotten. Blood wells, bruise-green, runnelling off my skin and onto the city map, branching into a thousand smaller tributaries, a million cilia to puncture the strands of hair I’d pinched from Sasha and the foreman. I breathe. In my head, a ghost squirms and shivers. A hissing noise froths and builds, builds and froths. The follicles thrash like something alive, even as the blood continues to creep, mapping itself to the blueprint of the city, hue altering, shading to orange. “Oh, kid. What did you get yourself into?” There were entire streets outlined in ochre, neighborhoods throbbing lymph-yellow. I fumble for the cigar in my drawer and ignite the bulbous tip with a flick of my fingers. As a rule, I don’t like spending power, but the body, the body wouldn’t let me rest until I did something. Anything, rattled the man that once lived in this skull, rags and bones and memory, but somehow still stubborn as capitalism. So, I did my voodoo and he kept his part of the bargain, settling to uneasy dreams once more, even as the flesh frayed and stuttered. That’s the other problem with power. It lik...

Please, sighs my specter again. Damn thing is never happy. I get as far as finishing the cigar before I’m calling on the old ways again, the power coming eager and exultant, a pup on its first hunt. And this time, it sings, pure as silver, as it travels my veins. Like it already knows there won’t be a focus, won’t be a totem, no physical thing to constrain its joyous kinesis. “I’ll decide once I know what we’re facing,” I tell the emptiness. The ghost shudders in acknowledgment. The world skews, splits into fractals of possibility, an endless concerto of maybes and may-have-beens, every possible variation of the future laid out like a feast. I find the thread I’m looking for, and my vision detonates.