Just Another Judgement Day Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  ONE - Retro Voodoo and the Spirit of Dorian Gray

  TWO - At Home with John and Suzie

  THREE - Not Really Fitting In at All at the Adventurers Club

  FOUR - Justice, for All

  FIVE - Bad Boys and Wayward Girls

  SIX - The Only Thing Worse Than Asking Questions of God

  SEVEN - The Good Man

  EIGHT - There Is Always a Price to Be Paid

  NINE - Last Man Standing

  EPILOGUE

  Novels of the Nightside

  SOMETHING FROM THE NIGHTSIDE

  AGENTS OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS

  NIGHTINGALE’S LAMENT

  HEX AND THE CITY

  PATHS NOT TAKEN

  SHARPER THAN A SERPENT’S TOOTH

  HELL TO PAY

  THE UNNATURAL INQUIRER

  JUST ANOTHER JUDGEMENT DAY

  Secret History Novels

  THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN TORC

  DAEMONS ARE FOREVER

  Deathstalker Novels

  DEATHSTALKER

  DEATHSTALKER REBELLION

  DEATHSTALKER WAR

  DEATHSTALKER HONOR

  DEATHSTALKER DESTINY

  DEATHSTALKER LEGACY

  DEATHSTALKER RETURN

  DEATHSTALKER CODA

  Hawk and Fisher Novels

  SWORDS OF HAVEN

  GUARDS OF HAVEN

  Also by Simon R. Green

  BLUE MOON RISING

  BEYOND THE BLUE MOON

  DRINKING MIDNIGHT WINE

  Omnibus

  A WALK ON THE NIGHTSIDE

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2009 by Simon R. Green.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  eISBN : 978-1-440-66072-6

  1. Taylor, John (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—England—London—

  Fiction. 3. London (England)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6107.R44J87 2009

  823’92—dc22

  2008043274

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  In the Nightside, that sour secret hidden heart of London, it’s always three o’clock in the morning and the dawn never comes. Streets full of sin and cellars full of suffering, magic in the air and mystery around every corner; hot neon, hotter music, and the hottest scenes anywhere. Good and bad and everything in between. Dreams come true in the Nightside, especially the bad ones. Everything’s available, for the right price. So shop till you drop, dance till you bleed, and party like Judgement Day will never come.

  I’m John Taylor, private eye. I have a gift for finding things, and people. I won’t promise you justice, or revenge, or your heart’s desire. But I will find the truth for you, every damned bit of it.

  Welcome to the Nightside. Watch your back. Or someone will steal it.

  ONE

  Retro Voodoo and the Spirit of Dorian Gray

  You don’t go to Strangefellows for the good company. You don’t go to the oldest bar in the world for open-mike contests, trivia quizzes, or theme nights. And certainly not for happy hour. You don’t go there for the food, which is awful, or the atmosphere, which is worse. You go to Strangefellows to drink and brood and plan your revenges on an uncaring world. And you go there because no-one else will have you. The oldest bar in the world has few rules and fewer standards, except perhaps for Mind your own damned business.

  I was sitting in a booth at the back of the bar that particular night, with my business partner and love, Suzie Shooter. I was nursing a glass of wormwood brandy, and Suzie was drinking Bombay Gin straight from the bottle. We were winding down, after a case that hadn’t gone well for anyone. We didn’t talk. We don’t, much; we don’t feel the need. We’re easy in each other’s company.

  My long white trench coat was standing to attention beside our table. I’ve always believed in having a coat that can look after itself. People gave it plenty of room, especially after I happened to mention that I hadn’t fed it recently. The trench coat is my one real affectation; I think a private eye should look the part. And while people are distracted by the cliché, they tend not to notice me running rings around them. I’m tall, dark, and handsome enough from a distance, and no matter how bad things get, I never do divorce work.

  Suzie Shooter, also known as Shotgun Suzie, was wearing her usual black motorcycle leathers, complete with steel studs and chains and two bandoliers of bullets crossing over her impressive chest. She has long blonde hair, a striking face with a strong bone structure, and the coldest blue gaze you’ll ever see. My very own black leather Valkyrie. She’s a bounty hunter, in case you hadn’t guessed.

  We were young, we were in love, and we’d just killed a whole bunch of people. It happens.

  Strangefellows was full that night... the night he came to the Nightside. We thought it was just another night, and the joint was jumping. Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” was pumping out of hidden speakers, and thirteen members of the Tribe of Gay Barbarians were line-dancing to it, complete with sheathed broadswords, fringed leather chaps, and tall ostrich-feather head-dresses. Two wizened Asian conjurers in long, sweeping robes had set their tiny pet dragons to fighting, and already a crowd had gathered to place bets. (Though I had heard rumours that only the dragons were real; the conjurers were merely illusions generated by the tiny dragons so they could get around in public without being bothered.) Half a dozen female ghouls, out on a hen night, were getting happily loud and rowdy over a bottle of Mother’s Ruination and demanding another bucket of lady-fingers. It probably helps to be a ghoul if you’re going to eat the bar snacks at Strangefellows. And a young man was weeping into his beer because he’d given his heart to his one true love, and she’d put it in
a bottle and sold it to a sorcerer in return for a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes.

  In a more private part of the bar, a small gathering of soft ghosts were flickering in and out around a table that wasn’t always there. Soft ghosts—the hazy images of men and women who’d travelled too far from their home worlds and lost their way. Now they drifted through the dimensions, from world to world and reality to reality, trying desperately to find their way home, fading a little more with every failure. A lot of them find their way to Strangefellows, and stop off for a brief rest. Alex Morrisey keeps the memories of old wines stored in Klein bottles, just for them. Though what they pay him with is beyond me. The soft ghosts clustered together, whispering the names of lands and heroes and histories that no-one else had ever heard of and comforting each other as best they could.

  Alex Morrisey is the owner and main bartender of Strangefellows, last of a long line of miserable bastards. He always wears black, right down to designer shades and a snazzy black beret pushed well back on his head to hide his spreading bald spot, because, he says, anything else would be hypocritical. Alex wakes up every evening pissed off at the entire world, and his mood only gets worse as the night wears on. He has a gift for short-changing people, doesn’t wash the glasses nearly often enough, and mixes the worst martinis in the world. Wise men avoid his special offers.

  Strangefellows attracts a varied crowd, even for the Nightside, and Alex has to be able to cater to all kinds of trade, with everything from Shoggoth’s Old and Very Peculiar, Angel’s Urine (not a trade name, unfortunately), and Delerium Treebeard (taste that chlorophyll!). Alex will never say where he obtained some of the rarer items on his shelves, but I knew for a fact he had contacts in other dimensions and realities, including a whole bunch of disreputable alchemists, tomb-robbers, and Time-travellers.

  I poured myself another glass of the wormwood brandy, and Suzie tossed aside her empty gin bottle and reached for another. Both our hands were steady, despite everything we’d been through earlier. A Springheel Jack meme had entered the Nightside through a Timeslip, sneaking in from an alternate Victorian England. The meme had spread unnaturally quickly, infecting and transforming the minds of everyone it came into contact with. Soon there were hundreds of Springheel Jacks, raging through the streets, cutting a bloody path through unsuspecting revellers. Every bounty hunter in the Nightside got the call, and I went along with Suzie, to keep her company.

  We killed the Jacks as fast as they manifested, but the meme spread faster than we could stamp it out. Bounty hunters filled the Nightside streets with the sound of gunfire, and bodies piled up while blood ran thickly in the gutters. We couldn’t save any of them. The meme had completely overwritten their personalities. In the end I had to use my gift to find the source of the infection, the Timeslip itself. I put in a call to the Temporal Engineers, they shut it down, and that was finally that. Except for all the bodies lying in the streets. The ones the Springheel Jacks killed, and the ones we killed. Sometimes you can’t save everyone. Sometimes all you can do . . . is kill a whole bunch of people.

  Business as usual, in the Nightside.

  There was a sudden drop in the noise level as someone new entered the bar. People actually stopped what they were doing to follow the progress of the new arrival as he strode majestically through the packed bar. In a place noted for its eccentrics, extreme characters, and downright lunatics, he still stood out.

  A tall and slender figure, with a gleaming black face and an air of aristocratic disdain, he wore a bright yellow frock coat over a powder-blue jerkin and green-and-white-striped trousers. Calfskin boots and white satin gloves completed the ensemble. He didn’t look like he belonged in Strangefellows, but then, I would have been hard-pressed to name anywhere he might have looked at home. He stalked arrogantly through the speechless crowd, and they let him pass untouched, awed by the presence of so much fashion in one person. He was too weird even for us; an exotic butterfly in a dark place. And, of course, he was heading straight for my table.

  He swayed to a halt right before me, looked down his nose at me, ignored Suzie completely, which is never wise, and struck a dramatic pose.

  “I am Percy D’Arcy!” he said. “The Percy D’Arcy!” He looked at me as though that was supposed to mean something.

  “Good for you,” I said generously. “It’s not everyone who could bear up under a name like that, but you it suits. Now what do you want, Percy? I have some important drinking and brooding to be getting on with.”

  “But...I’m Percy D’Arcy! Really! You must have seen me in the glossies, and on the news shows. It isn’t a fabulous occasion unless I’m there to grace it with my presence!”

  “You’re not a celebrity, are you?” I said cautiously. “Only I should point out Suzie has a tendency to shoot celebrities on general principles. She says they have a tendency to get too loud.”

  Percy actually curled his lip, and made a real production out of it, too. “Please! A celebrity? Me? I . . . am a personality! Famous just for being me! I’m not some mere actor, or singer. I’m not functional; I’m decorative! I am a dashing man about town, a wastrel and a drone and proud of it. I add charm and glamour to any scene simply by being there!”

  “You’re getting loud, Percy,” I said warningly. “What do you do, exactly?”

  “Do? I’m rich, dear fellow, I don’t have to do anything. I have made myself into a living work of art. It is enough that I exist, that people may adore me.”

  Suzie made a low, growling noise. We both looked at her nervously.

  “Your existence as a work of art could come to an abrupt end any moment now,” I said. “If you don’t leave off fancying yourself long enough to explain what it is you want with me.”

  Percy D’Arcy pouted, in a wounded sort of way, and pulled over a chair so he could sit down facing me. He gave the seat a good polish with a monogrammed silk handkerchief first, though. He shot Suzie an uncertain glance, then concentrated on me. I didn’t blame him. Suzie gets mean when she’s on her second bottle.

  “I have need of your services, Mr. Taylor,” Percy said stiffly, as though such directness was below him. “I am told you find things. Secrets, hidden truths, and the like.”

  “Those are the kinds of things that usually need finding, yes,” I said. “What do you want me to find, Percy?”

  “It’s not that simple.” He looked round the bar, looking at everything except me while he gathered his courage. Then he turned back, took a deep breath, and made the plunge. It was a marvellous performance; you’d have paid good money to see it in the theatre. Percy fixed me with what he thought was a commanding gaze and leaned forward confidentially.

  “Usually my whole existence is very simple, and I like it that way. I show up at all the right places and at all the right parties, mingle with my friends and my peers, dazzle everyone with my latest fashions and devastating bon mots, and thus ensure that the occasion will be covered by all the right media. I do so love to party, and make the scene, and generally brighten up this dull old world with my presence. There’s a whole crowd of us, you see; known each other since we were so high, you know how it is . . . There isn’t a club in the Nightside that doesn’t benefit regularly from the sheer spectacle of our presence . . . But now it’s all changed, Mr. Taylor! And it’s not fair! How can I be expected to compete for my moment in the spotlight when all my friends are cheating? Cheating!”

  “How are they cheating?” I said, honestly baffled.

  Percy leaned in very close, his voice a hoarse whisper. “They’re staying young and beautiful, while I’m not. I’m aging, and they’re not. I mean; look at me. I’ve got a wrinkle!”

  I couldn’t actually see it, but I took his word for it. “How long has this been going on?” I said.

  “Months! Almost a year now. Though I’ve had my suspicions . . . Look, I know these people. Have known them all my life. I know their faces like I know my own, down to the smallest detail. I can always tell when someone’s had a li
ttle work done, around the eyes or under the chin . . . but this is different. They look younger, untouched by time or the stresses of our particular life-style.

  “It started last autumn, when some of them began patronising this new health club, the Guaranteed New You Parlour. Very expensive, very elite. Now all my friends go there, and every time they appear in public, they’re the absolute peak, the very flower of beauty. Not a detail that isn’t perfect, no matter how dissolute their private lives may be. I mean, people like us, Mr. Taylor, we live . . . extreme lives. We experience . . . everything. It’s expected of us, so the rest of you can live the wild life vicariously, through us. Drink, drugs, debauchery, every night and twice on Saturday. It all gets just a bit tiring, actually. But anyway, as a result, we’ve all been in and out of those very discreet clinics that provide treatments for the kind of diseases you only get by being very social, or help in getting over the kind of good cheer that comes in bottles and powders and needles. We all need a little help to be beautiful all the time. A little something to help us soldier on to the next party. We all need damage repair, on a regular basis.