SS Corpse Vision (v5.0) Read online

  Decker didn’t ask where they came from. He didn’t remark on their silent entrance. Instead, he handed the folder to the old man.

  The old man untied the folder, opened it, and scanned the pages, handing them one by one to his grandson.

  Decker read upside down, embarrassed by the words, their lack of cohesion, their meandering viewpoint. When the grandson saw the name Etienne Netter, he stood.

  “My thanks,” he said and bowed to Decker. Then he walked away, leaving the pages beside Decker’s plate.

  Decker did not touch them. The old man picked them up and put them back in the folder, which he tied shut, making a careful bow.

  “It is more than I could have hoped for,” he said. “You have saved lives.”

  Decker shook his head. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “This man, this Netter, he is a new breed. You have heard of Jack the Red, no? Saucy Jack?”

  “The Ripper,” Decker said. “Decades ago. In London.”

  “The first of his kind, we think,” the old man said. “If there had been one such as you, perhaps he would have been stopped.”

  “He was stopped,” Decker said. “He only killed five.”

  “That we know of,” the old man said.

  He set the papers under his own plate, then extended his hand. “I am Pierre LeBeau. I run Noir, the central newspaper in the City of Dark.”

  Decker couldn’t take the misstatements any more. “City of Light,” he said. “We call Paris the City of Light.”

  LeBeau nodded. “Light has its opposite. You have seen the dark. You write of it. You know what is coming.”

  “Only because you tell me that it is,” Decker said. He sipped his coffee, pleased that his hand remained steady. “How come I’ve never seen your paper?”

  “As I have said, you kept your most important eye deliberately closed.” LeBeau put his hand on top of the folder. “The paper has grown since the War. Before, we were a single sheet. During, we ran four. After, we grew to five, then ten, now eighteen. We need an English language edition. We will start with four pages on the expatriate community.”

  “More meeting the boat,” Decker said. “More puff pieces.”

  “No puff, as you say,” LeBeau said. “Warnings, perhaps. Stories that do not run in your Tribune or the Herald, things only hinted at in the fictions your friends write for the transatlantic review.”

  “Who would read it?” Decker asked, surprising himself. Normally he would ask about pay before readership.

  “People like my grandson,” LeBeau said.

  “Where did he go?”

  “He will take Etienne Netter and extinguish his darkness. Then he would help the police find justice.”

  “He’ll kill him?”

  “No,” LeBeau said. “But this Netter might wish he were dead when my grandson has finished with this. For Netter will realize what he has done and why, and with the revival of his soul, he will feel remorse so painful that death will be the only way out. Yet death will be impossible for decades. It is our smallest but best measure of revenge.”

  Decker felt a chill run down his back. The conversations with LeBeau, as circular as they were, were beginning to make sense.

  “We will pay triple what you earn at the Tribune for the first six months,” LeBeau said. “Raises every quarter thereafter if you continue to perform.”

  “Perform?” Decker asked.

  “You must follow the darkness,” LeBeau said. “See where it will lead.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  LeBeau smiled. “I shall buy you your next drink. You will become one of the—what do they call it?—casualties of the licentiousness of Paris. There will be no novel, no more hack work as you call it, no more typing. Only drinks, until one day not even the drinks will work. You will go to a sanatorium, and they will try to help you, but you will be one of the hopeless ones, the ones who has rotted his mind and his body, but has not managed to destroy the vision that has haunted you since you touched that kitten decades ago.”

  It no longer surprised Decker that LeBeau knew so much about him. Nor did LeBeau’s description of his future surprise him. Decker had seen it already, as his father drank more and more, until finally his grandfather drove his father away to “a hospital” where they would “help” him. No one had ever seen him again.

  His mother would not speak of him. She had lived too close to his darkness. She feared it for her son.

  But running from it hadn’t worked. He had simply become a drunk in Paris instead of in Milwaukee. Even if he had no magic vision, he had a future like the one LeBeau had described.

  And the writing had taken away the urge to drink.

  Even if the things he wrote had chilled him deeper than anything else.

  “I never met her, did I?” Decker asked the old man. “Sophie. I never did meet her.”

  LeBeau looked at him. “You met her. Her spirit, after she had died. She wished she had been with you instead of this Etienne. She used your similarities to pull you in. She wanted him stopped. She did not want him to harm anyone else.”

  It sounded good. Decker wasn’t sure he believed it, but he wanted to. Just like he wanted to believe that Noir existed, that he would be paid three times his Tribune salary, that his Corpse Vision actually had a purpose.

  “I suppose I can’t tell anyone what I’m doing,” he said.

  LeBeau shrugged. “You can tell,” he said. “They will not believe. Or worse, they will not care, any more than you care for them.”

  LeBeau glanced at Hemingway, still scribbling in his notebook. Decker looked too. Hemingway raised his head. For one moment, their eyes met. But Hemingway’s were glazed, and Decker realized that Hemingway had not seen him, so lost was he in the world he was creating.

  They were all creating their worlds. The expatriate reporters with their chummy newspapers in English, hiding in a French city that did not care about their small world. The novelists, sitting in Parisian cafes, writing about their families back home.

  And the old man, with his darkness and nightmares looming backwards.

  Decker already existed in darkness. He could no longer push it away. He might as well shine a light on it and see what he found underneath.

  “I’ll take four times the salary,” he said, “and a raise every two months.”

  The old man smiled. “It is, as you say, a deal.”

  He extended his hand. Decker took it. It was dry and warm. They shook, and Decker felt remarkably calm.

  Calmer than he had felt in months.

  Maybe than he had felt in years.

  He did not know how long Noir would be in his future. But he did know that his tenure there would be better than anything he had done in the past.

  Anything he had seen in the past.

  He opened his most important eye, and finally, went to work.

  “Corpse Vision,” was first published in Jim Baen’s Universe, December 2009.