DEAD END
DAW BooksJune 2019Selected by Jeremy Poynting
Case solved, thinks Miranda, a forensic scientist, when a serial killer is caught who has been preying on transients in the City, where only an elite have the right to live. Not so, says Chance, a god in human form, who can bend time and space, who suspects one of his own kind might be involved. In a novel that weaves together a dazzling mix of a Homeric world of gods and humans, non-binary Miltonic angels, Caribbean mythology and a police procedural, Barbadian author Karen Lord uses her skills as a storyteller to plunge the reader into a complex moral universe. — Jeremy Poynting
“Names are important,” said Chance.
“What?” Miranda asked, looking wistful and disoriented.
“Names are very important. I used to laugh at how humans use names, but I was very foolish. Humans can make the act of naming powerful, even dangerous.”
He tapped a page from her notes. “This woman – she had no name.”
“We called her the Mermaid. She was so comfortable in the water.”
“It would be a great help if I could find out her name.”
Miranda frowned. “It would help me as well, but she never told us, and we never found out. She was a transient, part of the City’s flourishing underground. No records, no relatives, no trace.”
Chance glanced down for a moment, looking at the end of the red brick path where she stood. Then he looked over his shoulder at the hedges, now closer than ever. Her journey out from the centre had brought her to the opposite side of the labyrinth.
She pursed her lips mutinously but soon wilted. “All right,” she said.
No sensation would accompany this maze. It was a purely mental journey, something Chance could observe without moving from his place. Miranda stepped forward. Her next inhalation was shaky and constricted. The hedges were tall and close, tall enough to dim the interior to twilight and close enough to trigger the slightly smothered breathing of imminent claustrophobia.
“All right,” she whispered, and went in.
It was the forensic lab; she recognised it easily. The chief pathologist stood with his back to her, dressed in the usual white coat with gloves, boots, skullcap, mask, and goggles.
He took up a bone-cutting saw and bent over the corpse on the stainless steel slab before him.
“I know this nightmare,” Miranda said. “It doesn’t signify anything more than first-year jitters in the criminology course.”
Just then, the corpse shuddered and shifted, unexpectedly unfurling a large fishy tail. “You can’t hurt me. I’m a mermaid,” she protested bitterly to the pathologist.
“Mermaids don’t drown,” he noted absently. “Please lie back. I have to prepare the site for grafting.”
“Chance!” Miranda yelled. “I don’t want to do this!”
“The legs are ready,” sang a new voice behind her.
Miranda whirled around. In real life, the pathologist’s assistant was a short, middle-aged, motherly woman. In the nightmare, the person standing in the doorway with two severed legs clasped in his arms was most definitely not her.
The saw whirred to life, and the corpse began to shriek. Miranda screwed her eyes shut, clapped her hands over her ears, and screamed louder. Something hit her in the face, scratched and scraped over her skin, fluttered and twisted in her hair like the wings and claws of a bat or a bird. She thrashed out in panic.
“Dead end,” Chance said.
The horrible noises stopped like a radio switching off. Miranda opened her eyes, panting, and saw that she’d been wrestling with a wall of twiggy foliage. She turned around.
“Dead end,” Chance repeated quietly, seeing that she had awakened fully. “Let's go outside. I have to think about this some more.”
He showed her the way out, an arch positioned right behind them over the traces of Miranda’s steps. Miranda stumbled out and immediately lay flat on the warm grass, her lips pressed tight, while Chance sat calmly nearby, rearranging the notes and spreading them out.
“The Mermaid, as you called her, was found without feet, victim of an untidy amputation that resulted in further complications and the loss of both legs above the knee.” He kept his tone carefully dispassionate as he listened to Miranda’s breathing become slower and more even. “A few days after your initial meetings with her, she was found in the hospital pool, drowned.”
“She should never have been left unsupervised,” said Miranda, dragging her hand over her eyes and forehead. “Look, Chance, I’m a bit confused. Why are you going through my notes again? We know who did it. He was tried and convicted, and he’ll suffer the penalty. If we’re supposed to ‘detain him on the path to immortality,’ please tell me what that entails, because if we can just twist time, go into the past, and get this bastard before he has a chance to hurt anyone, I’d like to do it now.” ◉
The character of Chance recalls the minor Greek deity Kairos, the youngest son of Zeus and god of luck and opportunity.
Lord has linked her genre-defying style of storytelling to her cultural heritage, commenting that: “We don’t hold too tightly to genre boundaries … In the end, we can always shelve it under ‘Caribbean’.”