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LOST SOULS Clive Barker Everything the blind woman had told Harry shed seen was undeniably real. Whatever inner eye Norma Paine possessed-that extraordinary skill that allowed her to scan the island of Manhattan from the Broadway Bridge to Battery Park and yet not move an inch from her tiny room on Seventy-fifth-that eye was as sharp as any knife jugglers. Here was the derelict house on Ridge Street, with the smoke stains besmirching the brick. Here was the dead dog that shed described, lying on the sidewalk as though asleep, but that it lacked half its head. Here too, if Norma was to be believed, was the demon that Harry had come in search of: the shy and sublimely malignant ChaChat. The house was not, Harry thought, a likely place for a desperado of ChaChats elevation to be in residence. Though the infernal brethren could be a loutish lot, to be certain, it was Christian propaganda which sold them as dwellers in excrement and ice. The escaped demon was more likely to be downing fly eggs and vodka at the Waldorf-Astoria than concealing itself amongst such wretchedness. But Harry had gone to the blind clairvoyant in desperation, having failed to locate ChaChat by any means conventionally available to a private eye such as himself. He was, he had admitted to her, responsible for the fact that the demon was loose at all. It seemed hed never learned, in his all too frequent encounters with the Gulf and its progeny, that Hell possessed a genius for deceit. Why else had he believed in the child that had tottered into view just as hed leveled his gun at ChaChat?-a child, of course, which had evaporated into a cloud of tainted air as soon as the diversion was redundant and the demon had made its escape. Now, after almost three weeks of vain pursuit, it was almost Christmas in New York; season of goodwill and suicide. Streets thronged; the air li