Tales From the Nightside Read online

  I knew Aimee. I could find her.

  She deserves to die. She gave up her baby for the slaughter. Do it for me, my Harry. And we will be so happy together, afterwards . . .

  • • •

  I made my way back down into the club, looking for Aimee. Yes, I knew her. Professional good-time girl, living off Daddy’s money, go with anyone, do anything, in the pursuit of the next big thing, the next big thrill. I’d supplied her with various items from time to time. Never stung her so badly she noticed. She had no reason to be frightened of me. I found her outside the ladies’ toilet, chatting loudly with other bright, young, mindless things, who would laugh and chatter and enjoy her company right up to the point where her credit ran out. Aimee would always pick up the tab, as long as you could keep up with her. She smiled and waved at me as I moved in on her. She clearly hadn’t got the word on me yet. She was drunk. Her eyes were bright but vague, and her lipstick was smeared.

  “Harry, darling!” she squealed, throwing her arms around me and kissing the air somewhere near my cheek. “Have you brought me something new, something special? I’ve tried absolutely everything here, and I’m bored out of my mind. Harry always has the good stuff,” she confided to her circle, who stared silently at me with cold, jealous eyes. “What have you brought me this time, you lovely man?”

  “Not here,” I said. “This isn’t something I can give to anyone. It needs privacy. Come into the toilet, and I’ll show you what I have for you.”

  She giggled and tripped unsteadily into the toilet on her high stilettos. I followed her in and checked out the room, all tiles and subdued lighting. A couple were having noisy sex in one of the cubicles, and a woman had passed out cold on the floor with her dress still hiked up around her hips, but otherwise we had the place to ourselves. Aimee pawed at my chest with her soft little hands, pouting and making kittenish noises. I drew the slim silver blade I keep for backup, and stuck it between her ribs. She squeaked once in surprise, and grabbed me by the shoulders. I twisted the blade, and all the strength went out of her legs. I helped lower her to the floor and held her in my arms till she died. There was a lot of blood. I emptied the black centipede dust out onto the floor and used the vial to hold some of her blood. I laid Aimee out on the floor and crossed her hands respectfully over her breasts. I stood up and looked down at her.

  It helped that I’d never liked Aimee much.

  • • •

  There was blood on my clothes, but that was nothing new in Heaven’s Doorway. No-one even glanced at me. I went back up the stairs to the secret room on the next floor. My hands were shaking. I’d never had to kill anyone before. But it wasn’t as though I’d done it for myself. No. It was all for my angel. My lovely angel.

  Back in the room, she looked at the blood on my clothes and smiled, like a child anticipating a present.

  Did you kill her, Harry? Did you murder her for me?

  “Yes,” I said. My voice was dry and flat, even as my heart leapt in my chest from seeing her again. “I’m here, to set you free.”

  I uncorked the vial and spilled Aimee’s blood over the glowing red lines of the pentagram. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. I looked back at my lovely angel, confused, and she laughed at me. She dipped a finger into the blood, and sucked it off her finger like a child with a treat. And just like that, she wasn’t beautiful any more. It slipped away from her like the illusion it had always been, and now what crouched inside the pentagram didn’t even look human any more. It had a humanoid shape, with dark, membranous wings, but it reeked of otherness, like the huge spider you see scuttling across your bedroom floor. Flames leapt up in its eye-sockets, and its grinning mouth was full of needle teeth.

  I should have remembered; there’s more than one kind of angel.

  That’s right, Harry, it said, in a voice like spoiled meat, like the death of innocence or the torture of a loved one. I’m a fallen angel, and you’ve made a very bad mistake. They summoned me up from Hell and bound me with these wards, but do you really think mere mortals could hold me here, against Hell’s wishes? I’m here because I chose to be. Because it gives me so many opportunities to do what I do best, tempting fools like you and watching you fall. Aimee never had a baby or offered one up for sacrifice. You’ve murdered a relatively innocent young woman, Harry, and damned your soul to the Inferno, forever and ever and ever. It laughed at me. My work here is done. You can go now, Harry.

  I stood there, numb. Couldn’t think where to go, what to do. “Trying to help you was the only half-way-decent thing I’ve done in years,” I said finally. “I should have remembered; no good deed goes unpunished, in the Nightside.”

  Bye-bye, Harry. See you . . . eventually.

  I stumbled out of the room, followed by the fallen angel’s mocking laughter. I lurched through the packed club, blindly shoving people out of my way, ignoring their threats and curses. None of that mattered any more. Damned, for all time. I hadn’t tried to set the angel free because it was the right thing to do. I did it because I wanted her. Conned, like any other mark. I was tempted, and I fell, brought low by my own desires. You might say that’s the human condition—to be tempted by a pretty face. Or an apple.

  Some of these cons go way back.

  THE SPIRIT OF THE THING

  In the Nightside, that secret hidden heart of London, where it’s always the darkest part of the night and the dawn never comes, you can find some of the best and worst bars in the world. There are places that will serve you liquid moonlight in a tall glass, or angel’s tears, or a wine that was old when Rome was young. And then, there’s the Jolly Cripple. You get to one of the worst bars in the world by walking down the kind of alley you’d normally have the sense to stay out of. Tucked away behind more respectable establishments, light from the street doesn’t penetrate far. It’s always half-full of junk and garbage, and the only reason there aren’t any bodies to step over is because the rats have eaten them all. You have to watch out for rats in the Nightside; some people say they’re evolving. In fact, some people claim to have seen the damn things using knives and forks.

  I wouldn’t normally be seen dead in a dive like the Jolly Cripple, but I was working. At the time, I was between clients and in need of some fast walking-around money, so when the bar’s owner got word to me that there was quick and easy money to be made, I swallowed my pride. I’m John Taylor, private investigator. I have a gift for finding things and people. I always find the truth for my clients, even if it means having to walk into places where even angels would wince and turn their head aside.

  The Jolly Cripple was a drinker’s bar. Not a place for conversation or companionship. More the kind of place you go when the world has kicked you out, your credit’s no good, and your stomach can’t handle the good stuff any more, even if you could afford it. In the Jolly Cripple, the floor was sticky, the air was thick with half a dozen kinds of smoke, and the only thing you could be sure of was vomit in the corners and piss and blood in the toilets. The owner kept the lights down low, partly so you couldn’t see how bad the place really was but mostly because the patrons preferred it that way.

  The owner and bartender was one Maxie Eliopoulos. A sleazy soul in an unwashed body, dark and hairy, always smiling. Maxie wore a grimy T-shirt with the legend IT’S ALL GREEK TO ME, and showed off its various blood-stains like badges of honour. No-one ever gave Maxie any trouble in his bar. Or at least, not twice. He was short and squat, with broad shoulders and a square, brutal face under a shock of black hair. More dark hair covered his bare arms, hands, and knuckles. He never stopped smiling, but it never once reached his eyes. Maxie was always ready to sell you anything you could afford. Especially if it was bad for you.

  Some people said he only served people drink so he could watch them die by inches.

  Maxie hired me to find out who’d been diluting his drinks and driving his customers away. (The only thing that could.) Didn’t take me long to find out who. I sat down at the bar, raised my gift, and concentra
ted on the sample bottle of what should have been gin but was now so watered down you could have kept goldfish in it. My mind leapt up and out, following the connection between the water and its source, right back to where it came from. My Sight shot down through the bar-room floor, down and down, into the sewers below.

  Long, stone tunnels with curving walls, illuminated by phosphorescent moss and fungi, channelling thick, dark water with things floating in it. All kinds of things. In the Nightside’s sewers, even trained workers tread carefully, and often carry flame-throwers, just in case. I looked around me, my Sight searching for the presence I’d felt; and something looked back. Something knew I was there, even if only in spirit. The murky waters churned and heaved, then a great head rose out of the dark water, followed by a body. It only took me a moment to realise both head and body were made up of water, and nothing else.

  The face was broad and unlovely, the body obscenely female, like one of those ancient fertility-goddess statues. Thick rivulets of water ran down her face like slow tears, and ripples bulged constantly around her body. A water elemental. I’d heard the Nightside had been using them to clean up the sewers, taking in all the bad stuff and purifying it inside themselves. The Nightside always finds cheap and practical ways to solve its problems, even if they aren’t always very nice solutions.

  “Who disturbs me?” said the sewer elemental, in a thick, glutinous voice.

  “John Taylor,” I said. Back in the bar, my lips were moving, but my words could only be heard down in the sewer. “You’ve been interfering with one of the bars above. Using your power to infuse the bottles with your water. You know you’re not supposed to get involved with the world above.”

  “I am old,” said the elemental of the sewers. “So old, even I don’t remember how old I am. I was worshipped, once. But the world changed, and I could not, so even the once worshipped and adored must work for a living. I have fallen very far from what I was; but then, that’s the Nightside for you. Now I deal in shit and piss and other things and make them pure again. Because someone has to. It’s a living. But, fallen as I am . . . No-one insults me, defies me, cheats me! I serve all the bars in this area, and the owners and I have come to an understanding . . . all but Maxie Eliopoulos! He refuses my reasonable demands!”

  “Oh hell,” I said. “It’s a labour dispute. What are you asking for? Better working conditions?”

  “I want him to clean up his act,” said the elemental of the sewers. “And if he won’t, I’ll do it for him. I can do a lot worse to him than dilute his filthy drinks . . .”

  “That is between you and him,” I said firmly. “I don’t do arbitration.” And then I got the hell out of there.

  Back in the bar and in my body, I confronted Maxie. “You didn’t tell me this was a dispute between contractors, Maxie.”

  He laughed and slapped one great palm hard against his grimy bar top. “I knew it! I knew it was that water bitch, down in her sewers! I needed you to confirm it, Taylor.”

  “So why’s she mad at you? Apart from the fact that you’re a loathsome, disgusting individual.”

  He laughed again and poured me a drink of what passed for the good stuff in his bar. “She wants me to serve better booze, says the impurities in the stuff I sell is polluting her system and leaving a nasty taste in her mouth. I could leave a nasty taste in her mouth, heh heh heh . . . She pressured all the other bars, and they gave in, but not me. Not me! No-one tells Maxie Eliopoulos what to do in his own bar! Silly cow . . . Cheap and nasty is what my customers want, so cheap and nasty is what they get.”

  “So . . . for a while there, your patrons were drinking booze mixed with sewer water,” I said. “I’m surprised so many stayed.”

  “I’m surprised so many of them noticed,” said Maxie. “Good thing I never drink the tap-water . . . All right, Taylor, you’ve confirmed what I needed to know. I’ll take it from here. I can handle her. Thinks I can’t get to her, down in the sewers, but I’ll show that bitch. No-one messes with me and gets away with it. Now, here’s what we agreed on.”

  He pushed a thin stack of grubby bank-notes across the bar, and I counted them quickly before making them disappear about my person. You don’t want to attract attention in a bar like the Jolly Cripple. Maxie grinned at me in what he thought was an ingratiating way.

  “No need to rush away, Taylor. Have another drink. Drinks are on the house for you; make yourself at home.”

  I should have left. I should have known better . . . but it was one of the few places my creditors wouldn’t look for me, and besides . . . the drinks were on the house.

  I sat at a table in the corner, working my way through a bottle of the kind of tequila that doesn’t have a worm in it because the tequila’s strong enough to dissolve the worm. A woman in a long white dress walked up to my table. I didn’t pay her much attention at first, except to wonder what someone so normal-looking was doing in a dive like this . . . and then she walked right through the table next to me, and the people sitting around it. She drifted through them as though they weren’t even there, and each of them in turn shuddered briefly and paid closer attention to their drinks. Their attitude said it all; they’d seen the woman in white before, and they didn’t want to know. She stopped before me, looking at me with cool, quiet, desperate eyes.

  “You have to help me. I’ve been murdered. I need you to find out who killed me.”

  That’s what comes from hanging around in strange bars. I gestured for her to sit down opposite me, and she did so perfectly easily. She still remembered what it felt like to have a body, which meant she hadn’t been dead long. I looked her over carefully. I couldn’t see any obvious death wounds, not even a ligature round her neck. Most murdered ghosts appear the way they were when they died. The trauma overrides everything else.

  “What makes you think you were murdered?” I said bluntly.

  “Because there’s a hole in my memory,” she said. “I don’t remember coming here, don’t remember dying here; but now I’m a ghost, and I can’t leave this bar. Something prevents me. Something must be put right; I can feel it. Help me, please. Don’t leave me like this.”

  I always was a sucker for a sob story. Comes with the job, and the territory. She had no way of paying me, and I normally avoid charity work . . . But I’d just been paid, and I had nothing else to do, so I nodded briefly and considered the problem. It’s a wonder there aren’t more ghosts in the Nightside, when you think about it. We’ve got every other kind of supernatural phenomenon you can think of, and there’s never any shortage of the suddenly deceased. Anyone with the Sight can see ghosts, from stone tape recordings, where moments from the Past imprint themselves on their surroundings, endlessly repeating, like insects trapped in amber . . . to lost souls, damned to wander the world through tragic misdeeds or unfinished business.

  There are very few hauntings in the Nightside, as such. The atmosphere here is so saturated with magic and super-science and general weird business that they swamp and drown out all the lesser signals. Though there are always a few stubborn souls, who won’t be told. Like Long John Baldwin, who drank himself to death in my usual bar, Strangefellows. Dropped stone-dead while raising one last glass of Valhalla Venom to his lips, and hit the floor with the smile still on his face. The bar’s owner, Alex Morrisey, had the body removed, but even before the funeral was over, Long John was back in his familiar place at the bar, calling for a fresh bottle. Half a dozen unsuccessful exorcisms later, Alex gave up and hired Long John as his replacement bartender and security guard. Long John drinks the memories of old booze from empty bottles and enjoys the company of his fellow drinkers, as he always did. (They’re a hardened bunch, in Strangefellows.) And, as Alex says, a ghost is more intelligent than a watch-dog or a security system, and a lot cheaper to run.

  I could feel a subtle tension on the air, a wrongness, as though there was a reason why the ghost shouldn’t be there. She was an unusually strong manifestation—no transparency, no fraying around the
edges. That usually meant a strong character when she was alive. She didn’t flinch as I looked her over thoughtfully. She was a tall, slender brunette, with neatly styled hair and under-stated make-up, in a long white dress of such ostentatious simplicity that it had to have cost a bundle.

  “Do you know your name?” I said finally.

  “Holly De Lint.”

  “And what’s a nice girl like you doing in a dive like this?”

  “I don’t know. Normally, I wouldn’t be seen dead in a place like this.”

  We both smiled slightly. “Could someone have brought you here, Holly? Could that person have . . .”

  “Murdered me? Perhaps. But who would I know in a place like this?”

  She had a point. A woman like her didn’t belong here. So I left her sitting at my table and made my rounds of the bar, politely interrogating the regulars. Most of them didn’t feel like talking, but I’m John Taylor. I have a reputation. Not a very nice one, but it means people will talk to me when they wouldn’t talk to anyone else. They didn’t know Holly. They didn’t know anything. They hadn’t seen anything because they didn’t come to a bar like this to take an interest in other people’s problems. And they genuinely might not have noticed a ghost. One of the side effects of too much booze is that it shuts down the Sight, though you can still end up seeing things that aren’t there.

  I went back to Holly, still sitting patiently at the table. I sat down opposite her, and used my gift to find out what had happened in her recent past. Faint pastel images of Holly appeared all around the bar, blinking on and off, from where she’d tried to talk to people, or begged for help, or tried to leave and been thrown back. I concentrated, sorting through the various images until I found the memory of the last thing she’d done while still alive. I got up from the table and followed the last trace of the living Holly all the way to the back of the bar, to the toilets. She went into the ladies’, and I went in after her. Luckily, there was no-one else there, then or now, so I could watch uninterrupted as Holly De Lint opened a cubicle, sat down, then washed down a big handful of pills with most of a bottle of whiskey. She went about it quite methodically, with no tears or hysterics, her face cold and even indifferent though her eyes still seemed terribly sad. She killed herself, with pills and booze. The last image showed her slumping slowly sideways, the bottle slipping from her numbed fingers, as the last of the light went out of her eyes.