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Museum director Philip Smythe marched down the hallway of the Oakfort historical museum, the hard heels of his shoes banging against the marble floor with every angry step. He was underslept, stressed out and even grumpier than normal. The museum was less than one hour away from launching their latest and most high-profile exhibition to date, and Smythe clearly smelled smoke coming from somewhere near exhibition hall B.

"This is a non-smoking museum for Chrissakes," he barked at the maintenance crew, and checked his watch. They had forty-nine short minutes to make the final preparations before the doors to "Treasures of the Ancients" flung open. A flock of starving journalists were already bleating outside with their cameras, their satellite uplinks and handwritten notepads, in case of a technical glitch. And for good reason too. This was no trivial exhibition. Smythe had spent a full year gathering ammunition for this one-off exhibit. The one chance to put his museum on the map.

"Priceless treasures, from ancient times to the renaissance. The most valuable historical artifacts, are all gathered here in Oakfort, for the first time in world history," he'd told the press while handing out free admission tickets. The last thing he needed now was a square jawed fire inspector being alerted to some fool blazing up, minutes before launch.

"Find that smoking fool," he grumbled at Jenny Hamilton, his blue-eyed assistant . "I want him caught, spayed and neutered."

We've got a problem" Jenny panted. "That smoke is not coming from any cigarette."

Philip Smythe froze midstep.

"You mean, somebody's toking up marijuana? I'll betcha it's one of the college educated artists."

"Nobody's smoking anything," Jenny replied. "The alarm system has caught on fire."

Heart pounding, Smythe followed Jenny to the alarm controller box that hung suspended below the ceiling in the main exhibition hall. Jenny was right. The alarm system was broken, or busted, or melted. Smythe didn't know about the inner wirings of the alarm system setup. Didn't care to know either. He paid people good money to know about electronics. But something was definitely wrong with the controller box. A thick trail of smoke evaporated from a melted black hole in the plastic cover. The ever vigilant eye of the LED was dead, too. An electrician in blue dungarees and hair in a ponytail balanced on a ladder. With a screwdriver clenched between his teeth, he looked like a pirate biting down on his scimitar before boarding a trade vessel.

"The... controller board is fried up good," he said.

"Power surge?"

The electrician scratched a three day stubble growth.

"If you ask me," he said. "I'd say the system has been taken out. Looks like a laser burn."

"The alarm system is out?" Smythe roared. "Not on MY watch."

With thirty five minuted to go, Philip Smythe wrapped his jacket around his hand and rammed his fist into a glass cabinet containing the Minoan Phsistos disc, a five thousand year old clay tablet, eight inches in diameter and adorned with hieroglyphs. The cabinet shattered, sending glass shards flying. But before he could even touch the artifact, the alarm system let out an ear piercing wail that made all talk impossible.

"The alarm system is working, OK!" he shouted at the electrician. "So much for your laser attacks. You can turn that damn thing off, now."

The electrician flipped a switch and the alarm went quiet.

"This alarm system has six separate boards," the electrician said. "Each monitors a single zone in the museum. The board controlling zone five is dead. This hall is zone three."

Twenty seconds later, and with thirty-three minutes left before launch, Smythe, Jenny and the electrician burst through the doors to exhibition Hall "E", where a large cardboard poster advertised

PREHISTORIC ARTIFACTS 40.000 - 1000 B.C.

The exhibition glass cabinet had been shattered to pieces. It looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the panels in a fit of rage and couldn't stop hitting. Shards of glass that glistened like diamonds in the sharp lights covered the floor, all the way from the cabinet to the entrance. Whoever had shattered the glass had done so with an ungodly force.

"OMYGOD!" Jenny cried silently, when she saw the carnage.

"Get someone to sweep this mess up, before the public arrives" Smythe ordered to anyone who would listen. He walked briskly to the broken cabinet, glass crackling and splintering under his shoes.

The golden mask of King Tut had been knocked off it's support, as had the death mask of King Agamemnon. The two masks were facing each other, as if eyeing each other up. Or maybe they were both staring at the one vacant space left between them. Hours ago that same space had been signed to an entirely different artifact, but in its place, someone had left a single, red bead. It was the size of a peppercorn, but pointed at the one end. It could have been a fragment of a larger piece of jewelry, or maybe the burning red eye of a statuette. But there it was now, alone and resting on an empty stand previously meant for a small ivory figurine

Philip Smythe slumped onto a wooden chair. His hands trembled as he shook a Marlboro from its pack and struck a match on the naked butt of a Greek alabaster cherub.

"I thought you said, this was a no smoking museum," noted the electrician.

"I don't give a shit!" Smythe shouted. "It's my damn museum and it's my reputation at stake. I'll damn well smoke wherever I damn well please."

"The thief took only a single item: the Löwenmensch statue," Jenny observed. "Why would anyone want to steal something that simple, but leave the golden masks behind? King Tut alone is worth millions"

Smythe shrugged. "A collector, no doubt. The Löwenmensch is carved from ivory, but with no inlaid jewels or gold, the street value would be next to nothing."

Jenny studied the broken glass of the cabinet. She pried something off, that had stuck to the broken pane with a pair of stainless steel tweezers and held it to her magnifying glass.

"You... probably shouldn't tamper with that," Smythe said. "That's police evidence."

"That's fur," Jenny said."We're talking about a burglar who has super hairy arms and superhuman strength, and who wields an industrial strength laser."

Smythe stubbed out his cigarette on the marble floor and swept the ashes away with the toe of his shoe.

"I'll need superhuman strength to face the journalists." He rose from the chair and marched towards the entrance the the waiting guests.

"Get someone to move King Tut, Agamemnon and the Phaistos to Hall B," he shouted as he walked. "Close hall E for the public. Man the souvenir shop. We're opening in

Three

Two

One...

---

Chapter 1.

SIX RED TEARS

Catalina Gomez was making the bed in room 203 when she felt something cold brushing against the small of her back, like the touch of a butterfly with frozen feet.

"One minute, Señor!" She turned around, but when she didn't see anyone standing there, she shrugged it off. Must have been a muscle-twitch. Catalina stretched and massaged a sore back muscle with her thumb. With only the manager and herself to run Hotel Nahual -and the handsome Miguel in the garden, they were all overworked and muscles were always sore. Oh, how she wished Fernando would hire extra hands to help around the hotel, but business was slow outside the tourist season. In a month or so, summer would attract surfers and scuba divers to San Blas and its colorful coral-reefs.

Catalina made a mental note to put in a vase of fresh flowers from the garden. Hotel Nahual had been in business for more than a hundred years and it was custom to welcome new arrivals with a fresh bouquet from the hotel garden.

Not my lilies! Complained Miguel every time Catalina picked his prize flowers, but she loved the antique white lilies, and she loved Miguel. The flowers went well with the dark wooden interior of the rooms, and they brought a welcoming vanilla fragrance to the place; fresh but not overpowering, unlike honeysuckle. Besides, the lilies were innocent in their whiteness.

Like me, thought Catalina. She was twenty one and attractive. A Latina beauty with an almost heart-shaped face and sparkling brown eyes. Catalina sighed, "and a great ass". She had heard that remark so many times from drunk sales-representatives, it had almost grown second nature to introducing herself with a "Hello, I'm Catalina. I'll be your room maid and yes, I have a great ass."

"Just smile and ignore them," said Miguel. But it was easy for him. It wasn't him every desperate sales representative or lonely tourist took for an object to stare at, like some complimentary room service: a chocolate heart on the pillow and a great ass to gawk at.

Two sales representatives stayed with them right now, but they didn't seem too bad. Mr Phelps in 104 was some kind of shoes representative. He'd given her a generous tip before calling his mother to say he'd arrived. His type never caused any problems. The other guy even brought a niño with him. Again, no sign of trouble with this one either.

Catalina noticed a smear of dust on the window and went over it with her towel. When it didn't come off, she reached for the spray can of detergent. In the garden below, Miguel was busy mowing the lawn, but not too busy to smile back at her.

"I love you!" she mimed through the closed window. Someday soon, they would get married and maybe start their own place.

In that moment something brushed against her again. This time it was a gentle touch, like that of a cat rubbing against her leg, but Whiskers was never this cold. So cold. She looked down, expecting to find Fernando's grey tabby begging for scraps, but the sight that met her, made her cry out in horror. The face looking up was not that of any earth creature, but a hideous distorted head, almost flat and hairless, and with eyes black and unblinking. The head connected to a long, boneless tentacle that poked out of a strange dark cloud floating in mid-air. Its skin was moist and grey like an overgrown intestine. But intestines don't writhe on the ground and reach out for you. Catalina screamed and tried to kick the creature away, but it wrapped itself around her legs and around her midriff in seconds, taking her into a cold, wet embrace.

The creature opened its mouth, revealing thin rows of tiny, but razor sharp teeth. A forked tongue, bluish grey like a throbbing vein darted forth and licked at her face and a smell of rotting carcass seeped from the creature's mouth. Catalina retched from the stench as she struggled to keep her foothold. But the creature slithered and tugged at her, dragging her towards the dark cloud that remained suspended five feet above the carpet, between the freshly made twin bed and the window.

She heard Miguel screaming her name over and over from the other side of the window, until the world faded into darkness and with it, Miguel's desperate cries.

---

Chief inspector Amari Quinn of the Oakfort police pushed a crude handmade drawing across the desk.

"Does this look familiar to you?"

He showed me a pencil sketch drawn by an amateur. The lines were shaky and the artist pressed down too hard on the pen. The grooves were etched so deep into the paper you could trace the lines with your fingertips and physically feel the drawing, as if the image had been stamped in braille.

But did the image ever look familiar to me? Oh man!

The flat, white head with expressionless eyes mounted on an endless body was forever etched into my memory. To most people, a living intestine, thick as a log and snaking its way through space, French-kissing its victims happens only in direct-to-DVD grade Z movies. But inspector Quinn and I are not most people, and I'd already met this creature before. Thankfully it happened in one of my hallucinations only, but it still fills me with dread. Months ago I had a living vision of being stuck in a place my brain calls the abyss: another world that sometimes spills into our own. It's a place of endless darkness with no fixed dimensions, and populated by insane, writhing creatures that defy Earthly description. One creature, like the one in the drawing almost collided with me as it came screaming through the void, narrowly missing me by inches before making a leap into another dimension. It was like watching a whale diving into the depths and vanishing, leaving behind only a ripple in time-space and a gut-wrenching stench of rotting intestines.

At the time I thought the experience was for real. But my brain acts up now and then, and I can never be sure what's for real and what is caused by neurotransmitters gone into hyperdrive. In case we haven't met before, You'll need to understand that I have trouble telling reality from nightmares. It makes life difficult, and lonely at times. But my condition also makes me sensitive to little details other people miss: like a faint smear on a cup, a misplaced newspaper, or a lingering sensation in the air. All this makes me a better detective than most amateur sleuths, and this has gained me the friendship of the Oakfort police, as well as a nice monetary income on the side.

Strangely enough, Inspector Quinn is convinced there's nothing wrong with me. To him, the abyss is for real, and I have the ability to change into a demon-like form when I'm in danger [1]. Then again, he also believes himself to be a werewolf, and gladly drives for hours to the Farvale District every weekend. Here he roams the forests all night, howling and doing - whatever his kind does up there.

While I studied the pencil drawing, Quinn made two espressos on the expensive_GAZZIA Brewmaster_ he bought for the police station.

"The artist was freaking out when he did this," I noted, which was the understatement of the decade. When I met the same creature, I froze in panic. The mouth of the creatue was nothing but a lipless crack into flesh, white like yesterday's cod. With two fangs protruding from the upper jaw, this creature was one mile-long feeding machine with a mouth and a gut. If it had an asshole, you would need to look for it a few miles down the void.

"Panicky," Quinn corrected. "The hotel manager emailed me this sketch. He called twice on my mobile, five times to the office and he left twelve messages on my answering machine at home."

"Why would some Mexican hotel owner have your private home-number? San Blas is not your district. Heck, it isn't even in our country."

Quinn stabbed the drawing with the tip of his pen.

"Fernando is an old friend of mine. I've got to help him out."

I nodded. "I've seen something like this before. It was a bad hallucination."

"Hallucinations don't grab people and drag them into the abyss."

"So, how did Fernando come face-to-intestine with the thing?" I asked.

"He was outside," Replied Quinn, "unloading tins of tomatoes when he heard the maid screaming. When he reached room 203, that... thing... was wrapping itself around the chamber maid."

"I see creatures like that," I acknowledged. "Did he hallucinate, or did it really suck her into the void?"

"Thankfully, Fernando did the only thing he could think of: he threw the maid's vacuum cleaner into the rift."

The idea of an middle aged hotel manager attacking a monster with a household appliance struck me as equally insane and funny, and I burst out laughing. "Fighting creatures from the abyss with a Hoover, now that's a new one."

"Apparently he hit something, and the creature let go of Ms Gomez."

"So, there's no dead body and no Hoover either?"

Quinn held up his hands. "It gets even better. The girl doesn't even remember a thing."

"So all you have is one panicky hotel manager with a talent for drawing monsters, but no victim and no witness? Doesn't seem like much of a case."

The situation was confusing; if my friend was concerned about people losing their vacuum cleaners to the abyss, he was even crazier than me. Quinn frowned and his voice grew deadly serious.

"I'm not worried about what goes into the abyss.

It's what comes out of there that scares me shitless."

It began to dawn upon me why my friend had asked me to come down to the station, and I didn't like the idea. Not at all.

"San Blas is out of my jurisdiction," said Quinn. "I'd travel down to Mexico myself and calm the old man, but I'm tied up with a gang shootout from last night."

He reached into his desk drawer and took out a small pouch that contained six red gems, each the size of a peppercorn. He pinched a gem between his thumb and index finger and held it to the desk lamp. The light shone through the crystal illuminating the reports on his desk in a deep shade of red.

"Rubies?"

"Genuine. But are they really worth a killing? I've got five dead gang-members on the slab downstairs."

The rubies were all of the same size and cut: round in one end and pointed in the other, like six red tears.

"It's an unusual cut for jewelery. What's the street value?" I wondered.

Quinn shook his head. "Fifty bucks, maybe one hundred; rubies don't carry much street value. Diamonds yes, but never semi-precious stones like emeralds, sapphires

• or rubies." He scratched his red beard and stared at the handful of stones.

"Why couldn't they just duke it out over drugs? My sense of smell is a hundred times better than that of a human. I can smell the grade of cocaine in somebody's pocket from across the street, I can tell the amount of money in a gym-bag by scent alone, but THIS!"

Quinn held the tiny pouch to his nose. "I smell gunpowder and blood, but no trace of drugs." He dropped the pouch back on the desk. "These rocks are as cold as their owners."

He reached me the pouch. "Maybe you can sense something?"

Thanks to my condition, I can often sense what happened in a place, or feel the history of an object. But it normally requires me to provoke an episode through heavy drinking. I shrugged and rolled a ruby between my fingers.

"Smooth," I noted.

"It's outstanding craftsmanship. But they're so small."

"Maybe they were part of a watch movement?"

I tried to get a vibe on the rock, but I was growing queasy and a visual disturbance intruded into the corner of my eye. The sun cast moving shadows where there shouldn't be any, it grew increasiinngly difficult to remain focused, and I had a creeping sensation of someone waiting for me on the other side of the office door. Someone who meant evil.

"I'm not feeling well," I said. "I've been having small episodes since the Gill case[2] and I'm seeing things right now."

"You need a vacation," said Quinn.

I stiffened in my chair. "You're sending me to San Blas, aren't you?"

"Please, Daniel. Help Fernando before the poor man has a proper melt-down."

"I'm no cop," I objected. "I can't go snooping around, doing police business."

"Just go as yourself, said Quinn. "You're a musician; you can stay at the hotel and play. It'll give you the perfect cover - and maybe... just maybe, roll in some generous tips."

I sighed; I could use the dough.

"Alright, I'll pack my guitar."

Quinn patted my shoulder.

"Listen," he said. "The flight is already booked, and Fernando will put you in his best room for free. Just go and calm the old man down. Stay for the week and slurp Mojitos by the pool. What's the worst thing that could happen?"

"This!" I pointed at the creature on the drawing.

"This is the worst thing that could happen."

---

[1] In: Havana or Hell

[2] In: Fallen Angels