A few did get up to leave, heading for the rear door the moment I entered. But I’d already sent Molly around the back, and the fleeing immortals stopped dead in their tracks as they found Molly lounging threateningly at the rear door. The immortals retired sullenly to their seats, and Molly came forward into the café to smile at me. Everywhere, cold eyes moved quickly from me to Molly and back again, but still no one had anything to say. They hadn’t lived for so very long without learning to keep their mouths shut until they knew what was happening.
I studied the various faces unhurriedly from behind my featureless silver mask (there’s something about the lack of eyeholes that really freaks people out), and finally settled on the few major players present. The only ones who might admit to knowing Mr. Stab, and where he might currently be found. They weren’t exactly top drawer, any of them. An elf lord in delicate filigreed brass armour, chased and etched with protective spells in old elvish. A monk in a tattered red robe, with a face so lined it was almost impossible to make out his features, marked as significant only by the Sumerian amulet around his neck. A couple of Baron Frankenstein’s more successful creations, dressed in black leather from head to toe, to hide their many scars. And a painfully thin presence in a grubby T-shirt and faded jeans who I only knew by reputation, the Hungry Heart. He had a plate full of steaming raw meat set out before him, and he was cramming it down as fast as he could shove it into his mouth. Blood dripped down his working chin, unnoticed.
Proof, if proof be needed, that immortality isn’t everything.
The elf lord looked vaguely familiar, so I started with him. He sneered openly as I strolled over to his table, disdain written all over his arrogant, high-boned features. He made no move to get up or reach for a weapon, but even sitting still with both empty hands resting on the tabletop, he was still the most dangerous thing in the café, and both of us knew it.
“I know you,” I said. “Where do I know you from, elf lord?”
“I was there,” he said in his sweet, sick, magical voice. “Leading the attack on you, in our ambush on the motorway. After your own family betrayed you to us. We came at you on our dragon mounts, singing our battle songs, with our brave new weapons. We had you outnumbered, we had our arrows of strange matter, and still you triumphed. Elf lords and ladies of ancient lineage, friends and family I had known for centuries, all fell beneath the thunder of your terrible gun. I am the only survivor of that day, but rest assured, foul and cursed Drood…the Unseeli Court does not forgive or forget.”
“Good,” I said. “Neither do I.”
“We shall be at your throat all the days of your life!”
“Of course you will,” I said. “You’re an elf.”
And then I turned my back on him, and ignored him. Knowing that would piss him off the most. There was no point in questioning an elf. He’d cut his own tongue out before taking the risk he might say anything that would help me. I looked thoughtfully at the monk in the scarlet robe, and he straightened self-consciously under my silver gaze.
“Know, O mortal,” he said, in a surprisingly rich, deep, and commanding voice, “that I am Melmoth the Wanderer, that original lost soul upon whom the legend is based. Long have I wandered, across all the world, through lands and peoples whose very names are now forgotten.”
And then he stopped, because everyone else in the café was laughing at him. I couldn’t really blame them. I’d already met a dozen Melmoths in my time, all claiming to be the original, along with as many Draculas, Fausts, and Count St. Germaines. Even immortals have their wannabes. I leaned in close for a better look at the Sumerian amulet, and the monk flinched back in his chair. Up close, the thing was clearly a fake, and I turned my back on the monk too, and looked at the Frankenstein monsters.
They were both tall and on the large size, but they could still have just about passed as human, as long as they kept well wrapped up. Here at the Café Night, among their own kind, they didn’t bother, and their black leather motorcycle jackets hung brazenly open, revealing long Y-shaped autopsy scars on their torsos. One had started out as male, and one as female, but such subtle distinctions had not survived their surgical rebirth. They were monsters, with nothing human in their faces or thoughts. Their faces were gray, their lips black, their eyes yellow as urine, the eyelids drooping slackly away from dry eyeballs. Long rows of stitches showed on their foreheads, where the baron had sawed open their skulls before dropping new brains in. Unlike everyone else in the café, these two weren’t scared of me, or even impressed. They had left such emotions behind them, in the grave. Their thoughts and their hearts were cold, and they didn’t care about anything I might threaten to do to them, because the worst possible thing had already been done to them. No point in asking them anything.
That just left the Hungry Heart, sitting alone at his table, set well aside from everyone else, because some things are just too disturbing, even for an immortal. A man so thin he was hardly there, but driven by a terrible energy. He looked up at Molly and me as we approached his table, but kept on stuffing his face with the raw meat, chewing desperately, even pushing pieces back into his mouth with his long, bony fingers. He managed a sort of smile, and blood trickled down his chin.
I knew his story. Everyone did. It’s one of the great cautionary tales of our time, the gist of which is: never piss off a voodoo priest with a mean sense of humour. The Hungry Heart lives forever in the grip of an unrelenting hunger, never satisfied, and he can only survive by eating his own body weight in flesh every twenty-four hours. He has to dope himself heavily just to get a few hours of sleep, every now and again. So, never sleep with a voodoo priest’s daughter, never get her pregnant and then abandon her, and never do a runner afterwards, thinking fleeing halfway across the world will put you out of the voodoo priest’s reach.
Good thing he wasn’t a vegetarian, I suppose. That would have been really terrible.
No one knows how old the Hungry Heart is. Or how long the poor bastard might live. Depends on his strength of will, I suppose. He finished the last scrap of raw meat on his plate, licked his bloody fingers, looked sadly at the empty plate, and only then looked at me and Molly.
“Any meat will do,” he said, in a surprisingly soft and ordinary voice. “As long as it’s raw. Human flesh is the best. It’s like a drug…Got a real kick to it. Wonder how much of a jolt I’d get…from eating a Drood?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Tinned meat isn’t on the menu today.”
“What do you want here?” said the Hungry Heart, all the tiredness of the world in his voice. “No one here wants any trouble. We all have enough of our own. All we want is to nurse our wounds in private, among our own kind.”
“Just looking for a little information,” Molly said breezily. “We’re trying to locate Mr. Stab, and we’ve been given to understand that he frequents this place.”
“Now that really is an insult,” said the elf lord, rising gracefully to his feet, a slender, shimmering dagger in his hand. “As if even we would tolerate such an abomination as Mr. Stab in our select little circle. We do have our standards.”
“Yes,” said the monk, rising to his feet, pulling back the sleeves of his crimson robe to reveal arms corded with muscle. “You come in here and insult us to our faces? Associate us with the likes of Mr. Stab? There’s a limit to the abuse even we will take.”
The Frankenstein monsters were on their feet too, looking even larger and more imposing. And the Hungry Heart sighed, pushed his empty plate to one side, and rose to his feet.
“I’m hungry,” he said. “Anyone here got a can opener?”
“I might have,” said the monk. He produced a short knife from under his robe. “This is the blade that cut Judas Iscariot down from the tree where he hanged himself, in Haceldama, the Field of Blood. Legend has it this blade can cut through anything. Maybe even Drood armour.”