Silas Robb: Of Saints and Sinners

Chapter 1-1-2

The foyer and stairs were in the same state of disrepair as the door; workable, but barely. When it was first built, the woodwork would have been beautiful. Much of it had been replaced with cold lifeless pieces of particle board and faux wood paneling. Silas shook his head. As much as humans loved to charge into the future, they ignored the past and the beauty there.

Silas skipped the elevator. He didn’t trust them and if there was a fairy in this building and it saw him coming the elevator would have been the perfect place to work its mischief. Of course that meant eight flights and that wasn’t much fun either.

Before he reached the fourth floor Silas could smell it. It was the meaty rotten stench of death, of carrion. As much as that reminded him of home, it was out of place here. The scent was faint and only his demonically enhanced olfactory sense allowed him to detect it.

At the top of the stairs he looked both ways, the hall was empty and quiet. Not even the sound of a TV. To his demonic ears, the only sound was coming from the street outside. According to the mailbox list at the door most of the fourth floor was deserted, at least most of the apartments didn’t have a name on them, but he hadn’t expected the whole building to be empty.

The apartment at the end was Willamet’s, but Silas went to the door across the hall from the stairs first. The door was unlocked and he pushed it open, ready to lunge forward if someone was inside and he had to shut them up quick. The apartment was empty.

Something was not right. He could feel it in his demon bones, magic lay thick about this place. He walked through the abandoned apartment.

It wasn’t completely empty; odds and ends lay strewn about. Some clothes and boxes were in the back rooms. Some boxes contained junk, but he thought humans would have felt they were important. He found pictures in one, old baby toys and clothes in another. Whoever had moved out had been in a hurry.

On impulse Silas reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a little vial. In it was a plant. He opened it and pulled out a little leaf. From his other pocket he pulled out a packet and shook out a small measure of blue powder. It was dried bluebell. He put both the leaf and dried flower in his mouth and chewed. If something supernatural had occurred here then the herbs he just chewed would interact with his human-demon physiology and he might catch a glimpse of what had happened.

It would also make him high as a kite.

He knew his target was in the other apartment and he should be there, the broken lock would go unnoticed for only so long. Maybe not though, there weren’t many tenants left to stumble upon it. He began to feel the slight tingling that meant the narcotic was going to work. It had a similar effect to dropping acid only instead of just hallucinations he would actually see the residue of supernatural events.

He walked around the apartment, stumbling occasionally. He was enjoying the euphoric effect of the leaf that activated the bluebell. Bluebell was common and by itself did nothing, but when combined with the leaf of the larthean plant, only found on the Plains of Tartarus or in a quaint little apothecary on the Upper East Side, it opened the mind to the mystical.

If he had come here to do battle with anything other than a relatively harmless fairy he wouldn’t have taken a chance on the intoxicating effect, but even high he should be able to deal with a fairy infestation.

He pictured himself in an Orkin man uniform wielding a spray can full of iron dust. He burst out laughing and it took him a moment to catch his breath. Oh yeah, the drug was working.

The visions began with tracers similar to LSD, but that is where the similarities stopped. They began to coalesce into faint shapes. He saw a little man running through the living room. The little man was chasing a mortal, an old guy, but the image was too faint to make out exactly how old. He appeared to be poking the old man with a little stick. The image faded as Silas stumbled to the bedroom door.

In the bedroom an image appeared of the same little creature, a brownie Silas realized, pushing books and paper off the bookshelf to rain down on the old man’s head. The old man took a swing at the brownie with his cane, but the fairy danced away.

Before he lost the effect of the leaf, Silas went out into the hallway and opened the door on the next apartment. Not yet approaching the one Mrs. Willamet lived in. As Silas had suspected this one was empty also, only there was more junk in it. The previous tenant hadn’t even bothered to pack half their stuff.

In this apartment he saw a flying creature, a pixie, he thought, swooping like an angry bird and pulling at the hair of an old lady who ran around the room, mouth open in a silent scream.

Silas staggered out into the hallway. The effects of the leaf were coursing through him and he thought he might have used too much.

“Nahhh,” he said and chuckled.

He pulled out his phone and speed dialed Mort.

“Yeah?” Mort asked when he picked up.

“See if you can pull a list on any submitted plans or notice of public use that involve this block or this building,” Silas said.

“You sound funny, you Okay?” Mort asked.

“Yep, just fine, never been better.”

“Jesus Christ Silas! Are you high? You haven’t been out of my sight for more than ten minutes. Couldn’t you have waited until you got home?”

“Sorry doctor’s orders,” Silas said and hung up on Mort’s outraged squawk.

He focused on Willamet’s door. It wavered a few times, then stood still. He stood leaning against the stair railing letting the drug burn itself off. It was fading. He should wait awhile, let the larthean leaf work its way out of his system.

“Hah, it’s only a fairy. Don’t need more than a fly swatter or a rolled up newspaper,” he slurred.

He walked to the door and knocked, maybe a little too loudly. He waited a moment and heard a shuffling on the other side. A moment later the door opened and a large woman looked around the door. She had to be more than three hundred pounds, wearing a stained housedress and a dark red bandana held her hair back.

“Yes?” she asked, her voice rough and wavering as though unused for a long time.

“Plumber,” Silas said.

“But I don’t need a…”

Silas didn’t wait for her to finish. He pushed open the door, using more strength than he intended. That was a lot of meat to push aside. The woman uttered a little screech as she fell back into the room. Inside the apartment the layout was the same as the others except nothing was packed. Apparently, the lady was not bothered by the pests. The apartment, however, was a mess. Clutter littered the tables and furniture, cigarette butts and old beer cans lay on the floor. The smell of rot was stronger here.

“You can’t just barge in like that. What kind of plumber are you?” The woman said.

Silas looked at the woman. He could see a blue aura faintly around the woman. She had some strong magic on her. Unfortunately the hallucinations remained, her red bandana was shinny as though wet. Even as he watched it appeared to melt and drip onto her forehead.

This was a bad trip.

“I’m not really a plumber, I am more of an Orkin man,” Silas said. “Where is your bathroom?”

“Orkin man?” she said, confused.

Silas sighed, she wasn’t of much use, it was as if she wasn’t all there. He was beginning to think he was going to have to kick down every door in the place.

“Second door on the right,” she said pointing off down the hall.

Silas turned to the hallway and bright blue light swam before his eyes. Briefly the whole apartment lit up like a blue flame. This was definitely the source of the infestation.

“Put the seat down,” the woman called from behind him as he approached the bathroom door.

The smell of rot grew stronger the closer he got, he opened the bathroom door and looked in. Nothing. The bathroom was empty. Silas stepped inside and looked around. Everything looked normal and shimmered with a faint blue aura, so faint that it was almost undetectable. The drug was wearing off. With his foot he flicked up the toilet seat. Still nothing.

Was it hiding from him? Did it know who he was? No, how could it? He shook his head trying to shake off the last of the fog. Based on the condition of the last apartments he thought the fairy should be in a full rampage trying to drive out the last tenant. It should have seen him as just another victim.

He looked under the sink and in the medicine cabinet. It occurred to him that not only were there no fairies, but he had not discovered the source of the smell. He went back into the hall and saw the woman not more than ten feet away, eyes wide as she looked at him. He turned his back on her and approached the door nearest the bathroom.

Here the smell got stronger and was mixed with the smell of feces and urine. It made Silas think of approaching an animal’s den. He kicked open the door this time, in case there was some creature in there waiting for him. The door ripped partially from its hinges and slammed up against the wall with a loud crack.

It was a slaughter house inside. Three bodies dangled from a makeshift rack secured to the ceiling. All three were naked with long cuts running the length of their bodies. Below each were bowls full of blood gathered from the victims, two young men and an old woman. There was movement from the bed behind the hanging corpses.

A large older woman lay naked on the bed, arms tied to the bed posts. Martha Willamet, Silas guessed, grimacing. Although he couldn’t be sure since the woman had been tied to the bed for a long time, she was covered with filth and sores. Her eyes rolled in her head and Silas was sure she had not been fed nor had anything to drink in a while.

So the large woman, now right behind him, had not been Martha. He looked to the bowls again and thought of the red bandana on the woman’s head and how it shined almost like it was moist. He now realized that the red drips on her forehead had not been a hallucination, it had been fresh blood.

“Red Cap,” Silas muttered, now he was sure he would kill Mort if he survived this.

Silas turned. The creature was now inches away from him. So close Silas could smell its foul breath. It had dropped all pretense of the disguise. The creature’s face had melted away, revealing the stretched grin and elongated nose common to the Red Cap species of Fey. Sharp teeth, slick with saliva and rotten meat sprouted from that grin. It was large, stretching the woman frame to its limit like some gigantic blob of silly putty. The bloody red cap for which it was famous sat on its head, fresh blood soaked its dirt matted hair wiggling with maggots. It had fed well and had grown powerful.

“Hi,” Silas said.

Before he could move or react, the creature grabbed him by his jacket lapels. In one smooth, powerful move Silas was thrown across the room. He grabbed the wooden frame of the window as the rest of his body slammed through, shattering glass, parts of the window frame, and the bricks surrounding it. The rubble plunged to the street below, but Silas held the remaining part of the window dangling forty five feet above the sidewalk.