ice cream or something? I’d love an ice cream.”
Again, no response. Lynch’s eyes were closed.
“Paul?”
Kenny reached out and nudged his one solid lead. Nudged him again. Then he saw the blood that drenched Lynch’s shirt, and he grabbed him and shook him. Lynch’s head rolled back, revealing a throat with a long, smooth slit, like a red eye opening.
The door to his right opened, and two people entered. The man was tall and thin, dressed in a dark blue suit of impeccable tailoring. He wore a hat like a 1940s private eye. He sat on the other side of the table and took the hat off. He had dark hair and high cheekbones. His eyes seemed to have trouble focusing. His skin looked waxy. He wore gloves.
His companion stood against the wall behind him. She was tall and pretty and dark-haired, but she couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. She was dressed in black trousers and a tight black jacket, zipped halfway up, made of some material Kenny didn’t recognise. She didn’t look at him.
“Hi.” The man’s smile was bright. He had good teeth.
“Hi,” Kenny said.
The girl said nothing.
The man had a smooth voice, like velvet. “I’m Detective Inspector Me. Unusual name, I know. My family were incredibly narcissistic. I’m lucky I escaped with any degree of humility at all, to be honest, but then I’ve always managed to exceed expectations. You are Kenny Dunne, are you not?”
“I am.”
“Just a few questions for you, Mr Dunne. Or Kenny. Can I call you Kenny? I feel we’ve become friends these past few seconds. Can I call you Kenny?”
“Sure,” Kenny said, slightly baffled.
“Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s important you feel comfortable around me, Kenny. It’s important we build up a level of trust. That way I’ll catch you completely unprepared when I suddenly accuse you of murder.”
Kenny’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”
“Oh dear,” said Inspector Me. “That wasn’t supposed to happen for another few minutes.”
“I didn’t kill Paul Lynch!”
“Could we go back to the nice feeling of trust we were building up?”
“Listen, I had arranged to meet him, I was going to interview him, but when I got there he was already dead.”
“You’d be surprised how often we hear the ‘he was already dead’ defence in our line of work. Or maybe you wouldn’t, I don’t know. The point is, Kenny, it’s not looking good for you. Maybe if you tell us everything you know, we can persuade our colleagues to go easy on you.”
Kenny stared at the man, then looked over at the girl. “Who are you?”
She returned his look, raised an eyebrow, but didn’t answer.
“She’s here on work experience,” said Inspector Me. “Don’t you worry about her, Kenny. You just worry about yourself. What was your relationship with the corpse?”
“Uh,” Kenny said, “I’m a journalist. He’s someone I’d interviewed a few times.”
“About what?”
“It’s … nothing. He is, or he was, a conspiracy nut, kind of.”
“Conspiracies? You mean like government cover-ups, that sort of thing?”
“No, not really. He was more …” Kenny sighed. “Listen, it’s a long story.”
“I don’t have anywhere else to be,” said Inspector Me, and glanced back at the girl. “Do you?”
“Yes, actually,” she said. “I have a christening to get to.”
“Oh,” said Me. “Of course.” He turned back to Kenny. “So maybe if you talk really fast, you can explain it to us.”
Kenny took a moment, deciding on the best way to avoid sounding like a lunatic. “Right,” he said. “For the past few years, I’ve been investigating some oddball stories. Nothing big, nothing major, but stories that get ignored because when you hear them, they sound insane. No newspaper is going to take this stuff seriously, so I can really only devote a small amount of time to them.
“It started when I did a piece on urban legends. You have all your usual stuff, modern myths and burgeoning folklore, some funny, some horrible, some creepy, everything you’d expect to hear. But I started hearing new ones.”
“Like what?”
“Just rumours, snippets of stories. Someone saw a gunfight where people threw fire. Someone saw a man leap over a building, or a woman just disappear.”
Inspector Me tilted his head. “So the modern urban legend is about superheroes?”
“That’s what I was thinking, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve been hearing whispers about an entire subculture where this stuff goes on. Lynch said it’s everywhere, if you know what to look for.”
“I see. And did Lynch claim to be such a superhero?”
“Lynch? No. God, no. I mean, he wasn’t well, obviously. He had visions, he said. That’s what he called them, visions. He’d had them since he was a teenager. They scared the hell out of him. He was sent to psychiatrist after psychiatrist, given pill after pill, but nothing worked. He’d describe these visions to me and they seemed so vivid, so real. He couldn’t hold down a job, couldn’t maintain a relationship … He ended up homeless, drinking too much, muttering away to himself in doorways.”
“And this,” Inspector Me said, “was your source?”
“I know he sounds unreliable.”
“Just a touch.”
“But I stuck at it, listened to what he was saying. Eventually, I learned how to separate the ramblings from the … well, the facts, I suppose.”
“What kinds of things did he see?” asked the girl.
Kenny frowned. He didn’t really understand what gave a student on work experience the right to question him, but Inspector Me didn’t object, so Kenny reluctantly answered. “He saw the apocalypse,” he said. “He saw a few of them, to be honest. The first one concerned these Dark Gods, the Faceless Ones, whatever he called them. Someone banished them eons ago, nobody knows who, and they’ve been trying to get back ever since. When he was seventeen, Lynch had a vision in which they returned. He saw millions dead. Cities levelled. He saw the world break apart. He kept having these visions, and every time it would be some new aspect, some new viewpoint from which to watch the world end. He was convinced we were all going to die one night, a little under three years ago. He said these things, these god-creatures, would emerge through a glowing yellow door between realities. Of course no one would listen to him. And then the night came when the world was going to end … and it didn’t. And the visions stopped.”
“I love stories with a happy ending,” Inspector Me said.
“It wasn’t over, not for Lynch. More visions came to him. He predicted the Insanity Virus, you know.”
“The