The Bride Wore Black Leather n-12 Read online

  “Oh bloody hell, it’s you again. No need to announce yourself, John Taylor. Everyone here knows you, whether they want to or not. What do you want? I was having a really nice dream about wood nymphs, and it wasn’t only my sap that was rising.”

  “Open up,” I said ruthlessly. “I’ve got a lot to do today, and arguing with snotty simulacra is not on my list.”

  “You can’t come in unless you know the password,” said the door, cunningly. “What’s today’s password?”

  “There is no password! There’s never been a password, and you know it! Now tell Cathy I’m here, or I’ll rub your surface down with a wire brush!”

  The face in the door pouted. “Go on. Abuse me! It’s what I’m here for. No-one ever wants to chat, or pass the time. I miss being a tree. I’d throw my nuts at you if I only knew where they were. I’m supposed to be a security measure, you know. Hah! Hah, I say! Half the people who come here try to stuff letters in my mouth.”

  “Get a move on,” I said, unfeelingly. “I’ve got a lot to get through before my wedding tomorrow.”

  “Ooh! Ooh! A wedding!” said the face excitedly, rising and falling in the wood. “I love weddings! Can I come? Please say I can come! I’ll be very quiet and not get in the way. You could lean me against a wall at the back of the church. I promise I’ll be very good and not bother anyone.”

  “We’ll see,” I said, wondering how I got into these kinds of conversations. “Now tell Cathy I’m here and want in.”

  “Oh Cathy!” said the face. “The big boss is here again! Are you ready to receive him, or do you need time to get all those naked people out of the office first?”

  The reply must have been of an affirmative nature because the face disappeared back into the solid wood, and the door swung open before me. I strode quickly through, before it could change what passed for its mind. The building’s lobby stretched away before me: expensively comfortable, brightly lit, but not overpoweringly so, and so deeply carpeted it felt like walking on water. Which was probably the effect they were hoping for. The usual Pre-Raphaelite prints on the walls. That John Waterhouse does get about. Doesn’t anyone like Turner any more? The tastefully uniformed security man sitting behind his high-security reception desk took one look at me, blanched, and looked very much as though he wanted to sink down underneath his desk and not be noticed. But he gathered all his courage and made himself sit upright and nod to me respectfully. I ignored him, heading for the elevators at the far end of the lobby. There was a time I would have made him wet himself, on general principles, for the snob and bully that he usually was and because his main function was usually to keep people like me out . . . but I must have been mellowing. Besides, I didn’t have the time.

  One of the elevators opened its doors for me as I approached. I stepped inside and told it to take me to the third floor. I preferred when elevators had human operators. You could bribe them to keep quiet. They also ensured that the elevator wouldn’t try and eat you. Predators come in all shapes and sizes in the Nightside. But the doors closed easily, and the elevator moved smoothly upwards. It then immediately got on my bad side by playing Muzak versions of 1970s prog rock: ELO, ELP, PFM. There really ought to be an off switch for elevator Muzak. And then, as if this wasn’t annoying enough, the elevator started trying to sell me things, in a very posh voice.

  “Have you ever considered the advantages offered by really up-to-date life-insurance?”

  “I’ve never really seen the point in someone else having a vested interest in my being dead,” I said. “Don’t encourage people, that’s what I say.”

  “I could get you a really good premium . . .”

  “I’m John Taylor.”

  There was a pause. “Ah, yes. I see. Right; forget it. Would you like to change your provider for your mobile-phone service? And no, I don’t know where the satellites are, so don’t ask. Oh do say yes; I get a really nice bonus for every person I get to sign up.”

  “What use is a bonus to an elevator?” I said. “What use do you have for money?”

  “I’m saving up to have my conscious downloaded into something a little more upwardly mobile. Socially speaking . . . Preferably something with legs and hands. You can do a lot if you’ve got legs and hands. Could I perhaps interest you in taking out a new credit card, from those wonderfully friendly people, EnGulf & DeVour?”

  “Do you have an off switch?”

  “Do you?”

  “Look,” I said, “it’s up to you . . . Either you stop trying to sell me things, or I’ll push all your buttons before I get out and send you up and down the building for ages.”

  “Beast!” muttered the elevator. “It’s not my fault. Never wanted to be an elevator anyway.”

  “If you are about to tell me that you really wanted to be a lumberjack, you and I are about to have a serious falling out.”

  Perhaps fortunately, just then the elevator stopped at the third floor and opened its doors. I stepped out, and the doors slammed shut behind me so quickly they nearly trapped the tail of my trench coat.

  “Have a good day!” it shouted after me, defiantly.

  Chance would be a fine thing, I thought wistfully, and strode down the long corridor before me. My office was exactly where I remembered it. The door was a huge slab of solid silver, deeply scored with protective signs and sigils, and an extremely rude curse in Enochian. Once again, there was no bell or knocker or voicebox, so I announced myself loudly. The door swung slowly open, smoothly and silently, despite its obvious great weight, and I walked in like I owned the place. Which, for once, I actually did.

  My secretary Cathy rose up out of her chair like a jack-in-the-box, vaulted over the huge mahogany desk, and raced across the office to throw herself at me. I braced myself for the impact and suffered myself to be greeted with great enthusiasm. Cathy was a tall, blonde, and very healthy young woman, a long way from the ratty-haired teenager I’d first encountered all those years ago. I hugged her back even though I’m not normally a touchy-feely type, and we stood close together for a long moment. She finally let go of me, stepped back, and grinned happily.

  Cathy; big eyes, bigger smile, and a pretty face so heavily made-up it was practically a mask, under a heavy bob of expensively styled hair. She was wearing a long white dress of the kind made famous by Marilyn Monroe, and filled it out nicely. She also wore very high stilettos, on the grounds they made for handy weapons in close combat during bar fights. Cathy was bright and crafty and very smart, and ran my office and my business far more efficiently than I ever could. Bangles clattered noisily around her wrists with every movement, and she wore a long set of beads with artless charm. Heavy diamond pendants hung from her ears. She did try to tell me about her other more intimate piercings once, but I declined with all the politeness at my command. Cathy was my secretary, my side-kick, and my good friend; but I have never let it go any further than that. I do have some principles. Cathy’s been my secretary ever since she first came to the Nightside as a teenage runaway, and I rescued her from a house that tried to eat her.

  I took a look around my office. It had been a while since I’d seen the place. It boasted all the very latest conveniences and luxuries, including several things I was pretty sure were heavily frowned on even in the Nightside. I carefully averted my eyes from them and studied the brightly coloured walls, the deep plush carpeting of a plum-wine colour, spread across a room big enough to swing an elephant in, provided you had a good wind-up.

  Oversized cuddly toys with disturbingly large eyes and unnerving smiles peered at me from every gap in the jumble of odd items and even odder office equipment, like animals watching from a strangely civilised jungle. Polka-dot book-shelves took up all of one wall, packed with reference books. A large poster showed off the generous charms of a Finnish all-girl rock group, INDICA. Various pieces of discarded high tech lay piled up in one corner, presumably replaced by more recent versions. Nothing gets made redundant faster in the Nightside than the Very Latest Thi
ng in high tech.

  I did notice a few changes from the last time I’d had reason to visit my office, starting with a tall potted plant that shifted and swayed furtively in one corner, muttering to itself in a breathy voice. A filing cabinet that showed clear signs of the bigger on the inside than the outside spell, without which most buildings in the Nightside couldn’t cope. And the massively overstuffed, leather-bound chair behind the desk, from which Cathy had launched herself; which on closer inspection proved to have its own built-in drinks cabinet, Game Boy, and massage function. I’ve lived in places less comfortable than that chair. Cathy caught my gaze and shrugged charmingly.

  “I’m the one who has to work here. You haven’t dropped by in . . . ages! I was beginning to think you’d forgotten where this was, again, and I’d have to send you another map. And a compass. Why are you here, boss?”

  I persuaded her to sit back down behind the desk again while I sank into the surprisingly comfortable visitor’s chair. I looked at her thoughtfully.

  “Oh bloody hell,” she said immediately. “It always means trouble when you look at me like that. What’s gone wrong now?”

  “Now that I’m to be the new Walker for the Nightside,” I said carefully, “I can’t be a private investigator any more.”

  “Ah,” said Cathy, nodding wisely. “Conflict of interest.”

  “More like I won’t have the time,” I said. “There’s a lot to do when you’re Walker.”

  “John Taylor, the last honest man in the Nightside, is now the Man,” said Cathy. “Can’t say I saw that one coming.”

  “Same here,” I said. “Or I’d have run extremely fast in the opposite direction. But, better me than someone else who couldn’t be trusted or depended on in a crisis; so I have to do it. If I’d have known my conscience was going to cause me so much trouble, I’d have had it surgically removed long ago. But my time as a PI is definitely over, so I won’t need this office any more. You’re going to have to close it down, Cathy.”

  “Oh, is that all? I’ve known that was on the cards ever since I heard you were going to be the next Walker! Don’t worry, boss; I’ve got it all under control.” She stopped and looked at me thoughtfully. “I suppose you’ll have a new office, as Walker?”

  “The position does come with a lot of support,” I said carefully. “Most of which I can’t talk about.”

  “Not even to me?”

  “What you don’t know, someone else can’t make you tell them,” I said. “It’s that sort of job.”

  “I suppose it must be a lonely sort of job, being Walker,” said Cathy. “You can’t trust anyone.”

  I made myself smile easily. “Situation entirely normal, for the Nightside.”

  Cathy fixed me with an almost accusing look. “Is Suzie really pregnant?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How the hell did that happen?”

  “Well, if you don’t know by now, Cathy . . .”

  “But I thought . . . she couldn’t bear to be touched, by anyone!”

  “That used to be true,” I said. “But miracles do happen, sometimes, in the Nightside.”

  “Damn, boss,” said Cathy. “You really can do anything.”

  “No,” I said. “She did it all herself. She’s always been a lot stronger than most people realise. And I . . . have always been so very proud of her.”

  “But . . . do you really feel the need to get married, boss? In this day and age? You don’t have to get married just because she’s up the stick.”

  “It seems like the right thing to do,” I said. “And doing the right thing seems more important now than ever. Given who and what I’ve become. But I’m not marrying her just because . . . That gave me the impetus to do what I always wanted to do. I love her. She loves me. Nothing else matters.”

  “You soft and soppy sentimental old thing, you,” said Cathy.

  “How do you feel about our getting married?” I said.

  “Oh, I love weddings!” Cathy said cheerfully. “I cry buckets.”

  “Alex usually cries, too,” I said. “In memory of his own.”

  Cathy looked at me. “You knew his ex-wife. What was she like?”

  “She lacked patience. And a sense of humour. And she slept with everything that breathed and a few that didn’t.”

  “Did she every try it on with you?” said Cathy.

  “Fortunately, I’d left the Nightside by then,” I said.

  “After Suzie shot you in the back.”

  “She was only trying to get my attention.”

  “I’m going to be doing a lot of baby-sitting, aren’t I?” said Cathy. “Auntie Cathy! I love it! And Uncle Alex! Oh, he’s going to absolutely hate that!”

  I looked around the office. “What are you going to do with all this . . . stuff?”

  “I’ve already made arrangements, boss. The really good stuff goes with me, and what I can’t sell I’ll chuck in the nearest Timeslip, so it can be someone else’s problem.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Down to business. Cathy, I want you to find me one last case, as a private investigator. Nothing too big or too complicated because I want it all over and done with before I get married tomorrow. But something really good, to go out on.”

  And then I stopped, as a thought occurred to me. I looked around the office. “How much am I paying for all this?”

  “You never wanted to know before,” said Cathy, which I couldn’t help noticing wasn’t really an answer.

  “I wasn’t getting married before,” I said. “Everyone’s been telling me that can be very expensive.”

  “Relax, boss. Let’s say that thanks to the expert way I have been managing your finances and investments all these years, you can afford it.”

  “I’m solvent?” I said. “When did that happen?”

  “You never did have a head for figures,” said Cathy, shaking her head sadly.

  “Am I rich?”

  “Well, by the Nightside’s standards, you are comfortably well off.”

  “Damn,” I said. “I really must run out and buy something expensive, on principle. It’s been years since I indulged myself.”

  “Not what I heard . . .”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, boss!”

  Cathy fired up the various computers and monitor screens built into the surface of her desk and made a point of studying them carefully. She gestured meaningfully at the piled-up paper in the trays, marked In, Out, Urgent, and Pay Now. I grabbed a few handfuls and sorted through them while Cathy called up all the most recent e-mails. People still write a lot of letters in the Nightside, sent by personal messenger, because paper can’t be hacked. My office has also been known to receive communications from any number of alternate futures. Usually marked Not To Be Opened Till . . . I sorted those out and placed them carefully to one side. Never trust messages from the Future; they always have their own agenda.

  “That’s nothing,” said Cathy, noting my interest. “Sometimes things appear here in the office, arriving out of nowhere by supernatural methods. I only ever open those wearing my special protective mittens. And there’s always the ravens, of course.”

  I looked at the handful of ravens, gathered together on a wooden perch at the far end of the office, patiently waiting their turn to deliver their magically imposed messages.

  “I don’t know how they get in, boss,” said Cathy. “Especially considering this office doesn’t have a window. I never ask them what their messages are because then they’d disappear back to whoever sent them. And I’m not doing anything for anyone who’d treat living creatures that cruelly. So I let them hang around here until their messages are safely out-of-date, then I find them good homes.”

  “You soft and soppy sentimental thing, you,” I said.

  “And the ones I can’t find homes for I make into pies.”

  I said nothing. Often, I find that’s the safest course. I concentrated on sorting through my papers while Cathy worked her way through the e-mails.<
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  “I have programs in the computer to weed out the time-wasters along with the spam,” Cathy said finally. “But sometimes messages by-pass the system completely and drop onto my desk out of nowhere, punching their way right through the office’s protections and defences. I always treat those messages very respectfully because anyone with that kind of power wouldn’t be bothering us unless it was something really urgent.”

  “Hold everything,” I said. “I just noticed that you’re using a whole new computer system. Whatever happened to that silver sphere thing, holding rogue AIs from the Future?”

  “Oh them . . . They went home again, a few months back,” said Cathy. “They were basically data junkies. At first they were as happy as pigs in shit because they thought they’d never run out of fresh new data to investigate and correlate, but eventually even they had enough. They announced one day that the Nightside was too weird, even for them, and it made their heads hurt. And since they didn’t have heads, they were going home. And off they went. To wherever or whenever they came from. The computers built into my desk now are state-of-the-art thinking things that fell off the back of a Timeslip. And no, you really don’t want to know how much I paid for them. Before they were fitted into my desk, they looked like Robby the Robot’s head, if its designer had been having a very bad day while out of his head on really dodgy blotter acid. Sometimes it thinks so fast it gives me the answer before I’ve even worked out the question. It’s called Oliver. Don’t upset it.”