The sudden, horrifying death of a former mentor and colleague throws Slime Splayed back together with his ex-partner to stalk a killer known only as the Night Scout, but as one crime leads to another, he finds himself tangled in a web of intrigue, friendship, love, betrayal, and murder in – Silence Broken.
Silence Broken
I
The snow made slush out of the victim’s cranial fluid before I arrived on the scene. The jellydancer’s thin, graceful legs were becoming as pale as the frost that slowly settled a gentle, frozen blanket over them. As usual, a motley crowd had gathered around. I pushed my way through the gawkers, gapers, and chatterers to the center. A couple of bulls tried to stop me but I flashed my buzzer at them and they let me pass. The festering eyes of Detective Infector Gloomp steamed as I approached.
“If it isn’t Slime Splayed,” Gloomp said. “Didn’t think I’d be cursed to see your bony ass out on a night like this.”
“Spare the unpleasantries, infector,” I said as I offered him a nip from my flask. “Tell me what you know so far.”
The infector gladly helped himself to the O positive from my flask. “Looks like murder. The brain sack has been ruptured. Poor ball of mucus probably didn’t even know what happened.”
“Any witnesses?”
Gloomp shivered his proboscis, “several, but they are not talking.”
“Tight lips eh?”
“No lips.” Gloomp nodded to the stand of other jellies lurking in the nearby alcove. I took a long, appreciative look at them, their membrains glowing with nervous luminescence. Gloomp gave me a nudge. “You really like those kind don’t you?”
I shrugged it off, “Guess I’m a sucker for the tall, brainy types.”
“Eh, not my style,” the Infector grunted. “All legs and no body; not much for conversation either. The spindly things couldn’t even lift a finger to help one of their own. They just stood there and watched it… ooze to death.”
“You’re hiding something from me, Gloomp,” I said. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Why don’t you start, Slime? You tell me how you got wind of this case. Who’s your client?”
“Smiley,” I lied. I knew Gloomp would take the bait. Smiley taught us everything we knew. He was a clever, old troll who never wanted to be giant. These days he just hung around the suburbs.
“Smiley’s dead, Slime. His house caught on fire.”
“I know,” I answered, “But it didn’t just catch on fire, it blew up. I didn’t learn that from you though did I? Why not?”
“Why not? What the heaven, Splayed! We used to be partners. Then you left for the private sector. What has that done for you? Nothing!”
“That fire was arson, Gloomp! Stuff like that has been happening in Sweden for a long time, and you still didn’t think to tell me.”
“Yeah, but that’s Sweden, who cares?”
“Gloomp!”
The Detective Infector pointed a tentacle at me. “That’s enough out of you! You want me to help you, then you have to help me. Just like the old days. You may be smart, Slime, but you know that when we used to work together we were giant! You don’t help keep the silence any more, so what’s in it for you? The action?” He pointed to the stand of dancers, “The jellies? Who’s your client, Slime?”
Gloomp had me by the polyps this time. “Let’s just say it’s a family affair.” Gloomp didn’t give an inch, and he still held my flask. “All right, Smiley’s knees.”
“Smiley didn’t have…! Oh, Slime! What have you got yourself into?”
“Yeah I know.” I explained, “They claim to be Smiley’s knees, and if you think about it, it stands to reason that they may have been separated for a long time.” Infector Gloomp still wasn’t happy with my answer. “Look, I’m sorry we drifted apart. That’s my fault. However, you knew that sooner or later I’d find out about Smiley, and once I did I’d catch up to you. You didn’t tell me, so that makes it your fault we are having this discussion. So who’s really to blame? We can’t be the Slimy Gloomp Giant like in the old days, but okay, we can work together. So, do you have anything else to share with me? Besides your left arm?”
Gloomp scowled as he sucked on his teeth and then spat out a few. “What’s this silent world coming to? There was the arson in the suburbs that killed Smiley, the break in at the old school with a ritual sacrifice of its guard spiderdog, a string of burglaries in the forbidden stacks, and I don’t even want to think about what happened in the nursery. Strange things are happening Splayed, and I think they are all connected. I hate to say it, but this looks like…”
“Don’t tell me you are starting to believe in this ‘Night Scout’ character too,” I interrupted.
Infector Gloomp glared at me with all 41 eyes. “I work with the facts, Slime. Ghosts, trolls, undead mutations; real life. Those fantasy stories the old bats are telling, about an immune human with magic powers and who can walk among us like a shadow, are not part of my job. I was going to say it looks like the start of another Danish invasion.” Gloomp hissed and licked one of his ears. “‘Night Scout’ indeed! do me a squishy favor will ya? Take a proper look at this poor ghoul and tell me what you can actually see.” He dug one of his eyes out of its socket and briefly examined it. “I keep growing these things and this is all they are really good for,” he growled as he popped the eye into his mouth.
I shook my new third head. “You’re not going to like this. There are bruises on the jellydancer’s knees, as though it was struck by a large, heavy, moving object. Also here in the snow, leading up to and heading away from the victim, are two long tracks.”
Gloomp looked and nearly choked on retina. “Aw, hells below! You’re right. I’ve never seen tracks like that before.”
“No one has,” I told him. “At least, not for over seventy years. this jellydancer looks like it got hit by a truck.”
“A truck?” A horrified look fell over Detective Infector Gloomp's crusty features. He took another long drink from my blood flask. “Cuthulu help us all!”
II
It was the next day when a couple of bulls came to my place and dragged me out of my little nest. Gloomp had ordered it and they were not being the least bit friendly. I met Gloomp in his office. He was twitching all over. Something happened to turn his normally rock solid jaw into jelly. “Arright Slime you gotta come straight with me this time. You said that a truck killed the Jellydancer.”
“It looked like a truck did it,” I said. “It may have been something else just as big. I don't know for certain.”
“I got some news for ya buddy. It weren’t no truck.”
He was hiding something from me. “You’ve got a witness then?”
“Had a witness. Floffy.”
“Floffy? Didn’t he retire? Last I heard he went fishing.”
Infector Gloomp propped a couple of tentacles on his desk. “Floffy couldn’t handle retirement, so he took up a watcher position down by the old railway. Good troll, old Floffy; always knew how to keep feelers out for signs of trouble. Well, I sent one of my boys to check out where those tracks lead, you know what he found?”
“Let me guess, Floffy,” I said as I pulled out my flask and held it out to him.
“Don’t get ahead of me Slime. Arright, you already have two more than me but that’s not the issue here.” Gloomp took the flask, gave it shake, and shot me a questioning look. I pointed knowingly at his desk. He nodded as he remembered why it was empty and pulled out a bottle from his desk. After filling my flask and handing It back to me, Gloomp took a long pull from the bottle and continued, “Yeah my boy found Floffy, but not before finding a whole bunch more Jellydancers. The very ones from the scene earlier. It looked like a turf battle between the Splamps and the Splomps again but for the charred corpses.”
“Charred?” I asked as I took a drink form my flask.
“Yeah that’s right, this was a full on flame war! Well, from the looks of things, this flame war happened in Floffly’s neighborhood. It was enough to bring him out of the water to deal with it, if you can imagine that. Floffy wasn’t there any more though. Found him farther down the road Slime, like he had been dragged there. He was torn up really bad, and someone had been cutting on him. They left him there all tangled up among some tree trunks. Now, you think about that for a moment Slime. Who do you know might get a bunch of jellys and Floffly so screwed up? Huh? Floffy told us before he died, you want to know what he said? Go on take a guess.”
“I’m not going to play your game.” I told Gloomp. “You’re the one who dragged me in here today. Either you’re going to tell me or you’re not.”
“Spooks.”
The word gave me chills. “Spooks? From the government house?”
“You tell me, Slime. You’ve had dealings with spooks before.”
Something just didn’t seem right about this turn of events. “Not for a long time, but what were you saying before? About it not being a truck.”
“Got a tip from someone with eyes over at the government house. Said they saw a vehicle over there; big one with crawler treads. A whole bunch of spooks went in and out of it just before it got moving, heading our way. It was a tank.”
“Sounds to me like you’ve got this all worked out. So what is it you want from me?”
Gloomp stretched up and set his tentacles back on the floor. “This client of yours Slime, this knees of Smiley’s. Are they a spook?”
“They can’t be.”
“You sure about that?”
I shook a head. “They just seem to solid.”
“Well, I’ll be the judge of that. Bring em in, I need to have chat.”
“You know I can’t do that Gloomp.”
“Stop thinking with your proboscis, Splayed. You’ll bring them in, or heads are going to roll. Hades knows you have a couple to spare.”
III
I searched the corpse of the trollifcer I found. It was hastily buried, partially with dirt and partially with snow. Had I arrived only an hour later I would have missed it entirely as another heavier storm was already covering the tracks of the spooktank. Fortunately for me, whoever killed this bull was in such a hurry that they did not take their psEYEic. For a moment I was happy to know that this new way of recording incidents was going to shed some real light on this case. I carefully removed the trollifcer’s eye and removed one of my own to load it up to my waiting socket, and saw his last moments.
“Hey.”
I had no idea what this bull was talking to. As far as I could tell he was interrogating a tree. Then the thin, white trunk moved, turning full about, and it had eyes.
“Mrr?”
No tree ever made a sound like that.
“Is that your vehicle sir?” The view shifted to the right and a jagged pincer gestured straight out at a large metal crate with feline features and long bands of heavy treads. Damn it all, Infector Gloonk was right. A tank! My mind began to race with the possibility of another invasion. This quiet, skinny, pale subject standing before me in the memory trashed the notion by just being there. That was clearly not a Dane.
“Mrr?” Again with that noise. Was it trying to speak?
“Sir, that vehicle is illegally parked. Furthermore this entire area is closed to all camping due to an oncoming storm. If you or anyone associated with yourself are associated with it, I must ask that you relocate to a safe area, preferably within the city limits.”
“Mrr.”
“Sir, do you understand what I am saying to you?”
Those frosty eyes narrowed only a little bit. I could swear I saw the flash of metal before the subject lunged forward. I felt the sting of pain in my thorax from the psEYEic re-view. Cold. I had to focus quickly or I might believe that I was the one being attacked. In a panic, I reached up to pull it from my socket and disconnect. I saw the world spin and tilt with hardly a sound. Stern, straight lips came into view, a crunching sound, and silence.
I lay on the snow, trying to breathe, but mostly I coughed in hard bursts that scraped my throats like swilling cell after cell of old, cheap battery acid. The psEYEic lay crushed in my claws; my first piece of hard evidence ruined by my sudden loss of professionalism. That thing was no spook. Some may be thin, wispy, and white like this, even as quick and quiet, but this was too well fleshed out. Just before the flash I saw what gave it away, a five-fingered hand. This was a man.
Men, tanks, my mind rushed to the easy conclusion, invasion. I knew deep down in my polyps it was not right for there was just one more thing I saw before this poor bull, stuck down just for doing his duty, saw just before the end. That man's eyes glowed. The flash was not just from a bit of metal piercing its middle; the light it reflected came from him, like… magic, damn it!
There was no way I could prove this to Gloonk. He was a good friend but he would never believe this story, no matter how chummy we may have been. Only two paths lay before me now. As I stood up I put the psEYEic to my lips and took a long deep suck of the retina.
I could go back to Gloonk and tell the truth. The suspect or suspects skipped town. He would probably be glad to let it become someone else's problem. I did not have to tell him about seeing the man get all glowy with what at the moment I could only describe as magic. Gloonk hated talk about that stuff anyway.
Then, receding into the distance, the tracks from the tank pointed out the second path. I could still follow it before the snow covered the evidence, if only just to satisfy my own curiosity about the goings on of the last few days. To prove to myself that there was no such thing as a Night Scout. I flicked the spent psEYEic to the ground. I always hated the short shortsightedness of dichotomies. Only two choices, black or white, good or bad, healthy or diseased. This is the reason why I grew a third head.
IV
The mess that was the watchtroll turned my stomachs. Mouth and belly slit open, bits of old papers everywhere, I could hardly fathom what kind of tortures this killer put him through just for some old info. I needed a stiff one right now. I went down to the cooler of the hospital in hopes to find something that had not spoiled too much under the strain of time, or too little for that matter. Even though the cooler was a long way past it's usefulness, if it was still sealed well enough it might have something worth a taste. Someone was waiting for me there. I heard their footsteps as they came near and took a seat.
“I don’t have time for this,” I said as I opened a promising door. Its soft seals tore as it opened and I saw a tempting label on the shelf inside reading, ‘MacIntyre.’ I pulled the shelf out and a not too fresh, and not too spoiled corpse was displayed on it before me. “I’m on a case.”
Smiley's knees just crossed casually and gave a little flip of the foot as if to say, ‘So what?’ Damn if I was not such a sucker for a nice pair of legs. I guess I should not have been surprised when they caught up with me. Being all legs they really could run like hell. “I haven't forgotten, but this case, well, you're already too involved.”
The legs uncrossed and spread apart slowly, dragging both feet and making little crossing arcs on the scummy floor. I let myself have a good look before I let her know I meant business. “I like what you've done with your gangrene, it goes well with your heels.”
They jumped up, both feet stomping the ground in anger and made for a quick march at me. I stopped them with one tentacle stretched out. “Enough of that! I know you're hot for news, but this is about more than Smiley. It's gotten bigger than Copenhagen, and to be honest, I don't know if I can trust you.”
They ground one toe against the ground. “Don't try to act coy with me now. I don't think the two of you were really joined at the hip. You're not really Smiley's knees are you?” They didn't answer but I didn't expect one. “I didn't think so. I have seen your kind before. Smiley mentored me, and now I am a leg man just as much as he was. He flashed his big toothy grin at you, and you lost your head. Then he stole your heart; left you just another of the quiet walking wounded.”
They took a step and a half back, still angry. “Don't worry, I know you didn't kill him. You would have liked to, but no. Tell me does the name ‘Night Scout’ mean anything to you?” A shift of weight told me ‘no.’ Then they sauntered over to the slab and propped themselves up rubbing the ankles together to try and weaken me with the tease, hoping I'd let a bit of info slip.
“Not a chance!” I told them. “I am not letting you get into this, no matter if you really cared about Smiley or not. This lead is too dangerous and I can't have the likes of you following me, you stand out too much.” Smiley's knees gave the corpse on the slab one good, hard kick that snapped off its leg and sent it flying at me, name tag and all. Fortunately they didn't have a throwing arm to speak of and it was easy for me to catch the flying limb. “Take it easy there twinkle toes. This is a hundred year old Scott, it's the good stuff.” I took a good pull on the Scott between my teeth and let myself savor the aged, smokiness. “Mighty fine if you have the belly for it.”
They jumped down off the slab and tried to give me another toe to my pseudopod.
“You may want to go join the Jellydancers, they have some openings in their kick line thanks to all this mess! Whatever is going on, Smiley was just the start of it. Whoever is doing this is looking for information. I know because everywhere they have been the old archives have been raided and someone has turned up dead. The latest was the guard troll here. They must have found something important here because the guard tried to eat it just to keep it away from them. This killer chased him down and cut him open to get at it. Does that scare you enough to stay out of it now?”
They just quietly turned one heel, all the fight gone for now. “Do me a favor, march those legs back home and wait for me to solve this. If you keep following me you're going to lose your ass, and no one will be able to put you back together after that. Now if you will excuse me, I need to see a horse, about a man.”
