The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny (Nightside) Read online

  I strolled unhurriedly between the two long rows of teeth and descended the winding stone stairs into the belly of the beast, the huge stone chamber spread out beneath the street. It was years since I’d last been here, a lifetime. It was yesterday. Sometimes you do things to yourself so bad that the memories have barbs and never let you go. I’d known what the place was, all those years ago, and what it could do to me, but I’d descended into hell anyway. I had come here because what it offered ... was what I wanted. The slow, sweet suicide of addiction.

  I was so much younger then, and beset on all sides by threats and questions and destinies I couldn’t face any more. So I ran away, from friends and enemies alike, buried myself in the delightful depths of the Dragon’s Mouth, and gave myself to a very harsh and demanding mistress. I’d still be there, if Razor Eddie hadn’t come and got me out. No-one says no to the Punk God of the Straight Razor. I stayed with him a while, with all the other homeless who washed up in Rats’ Alley. I’d thought I couldn’t fall any further. Until Suzie Shooter came looking for me, for the price on my head; and I ran headlong from the Nightside and everything in it, with Suzie’s bullet burning in my back.

  I thought I was done with the Nightside forever, but destiny called me home, where I belonged, with all the other monsters.

  I descended the smooth stone steps into the great cavern below, and it all looked just as I remembered. As though I’d merely stepped out for a moment, and all the last years of my life had been only another smoke dream. I stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked about me, fighting to keep my face calm and unconcerned. The stone chamber was packed with people, standing and sitting and lying down, but the whole buzz of conversation was little more than a susurrus of whispers. You didn’t come to the Dragon’s Mouth to talk.

  The air was thick with a hundred kinds of narcotic smoke, and already my lips and nostrils were going numb. You could experience a dozen different highs just strolling round the room, and long-buried parts of me stirred slowly, awakening, remembering. I took a deep breath. The smoky air smelled of sour milk and brimstone. I smiled slowly, and I knew it wasn’t a pleasant smile.

  Some of the people there recognised me. They smiled and nodded, or scowled and made the sign against the evil eye; and some crept further back into the concealing shadows. But nobody said anything, and nobody did anything. Held tightly in the jealous arms of their own particular mistresses, they trusted the club’s staff to see that they remained undisturbed. There was never any trouble in the Dragon’s Mouth because on the few occasions anyone was stupid enough to start anything, old Mother Connell would take measures. Very extreme and unpleasant measures.

  She sat where she always sat, behind an ornately carved Restoration desk, right at the bottom of the entrance steps. You couldn’t see the top of the desk for all the piled-up currency, gold, jewels, and credit cards. Mother Connell sat at her ease in a frighteningly huge padded chair; four hundred pounds of overwhelming femininity wrapped in a purple toga topped off with a long, pink feather boa, draped loosely around her huge, wattled neck. Sometimes the boa stirred, as though it were alive, or dreaming. Mother Connell dominated anywhere she was, just by being there, through the sheer force of her appalling personality. And her complete willingness to make use of her mallet-sized fists at the first hint of any unpleasantness.

  Harsh and sweaty under an obviously fake curly blonde wig, her wide red face was marked by heavily mascaraed eyes and a scarlet gash of a mouth, along with heavy jowls that disappeared into the pink feather boa. I always thought she looked like she’d just eaten half a dozen drag queens for breakfast. She had a smile for everyone because a smile cost nothing; but it wasn’t a pretty sight. Her huge hands moved restlessly over the piled-up wealth before her, endlessly counting and sorting and rearranging it. In a rare moment of companionship, she’d once told me that when the cash really came rolling in, there was so much that she didn’t have time to count it; so she weighed it.

  She looked up and caught my eye. Mother Connell never forgot a face and never took any good-bye as final. Her scarlet lips pulled back to reveal yellow teeth, and she beckoned me over with one meaty hand. Her voice was deep and harsh, like a dog growling.

  “Hello again, Mr. T. Been a while. Still looking for your Shanghai Lil?”

  “That was long ago, in another land, and besides, the wench is dead,” I said. “I understand you’re letting in elves these days?”

  Her smile disappeared in a moment. “Hard times, Mr. T. Decadence and debauchery isn’t what it was. I blame television.”

  “Tell me at least you didn’t let him pay you with faerie gold.”

  She cackled briefly. “Not likely, Mr. T. He had a Master-Card.”

  “How very appropriate,” I murmured. “Where can I find this elf, Mother Connell?”

  She stabbed a meaty finger at the back of the room, her heavy underarm swinging ponderously. “In the smoking section, Mr. T. Do us all a favour; get him the hell out of here. He’s lowering the bleeding tone something awful.”

  “Well, naturally,” I said.

  I waggled my fingers in a good-bye, and she grinned back at me like a shark scenting blood in the water. I turned away, with a certain sense of relief, and moved off into the cavern, drifting deeper into the depths of the Dragon’s Mouth. No-one paid me any attention, as they all were sunk deep in their own personal heavens and hells. But one man saw me, and knew me, and came striding daintily out of the smoky mists with his professional smile of greeting fixed firmly in place. No-one knew precisely how old the Host was, or even if he was, technically speaking, human; he’d been with the Dragon’s Mouth since it opened, over a century and a half ago. The Host was there to make you feel welcome, to see to your every need, and to see that you got everything that was coming to you. He’d find you somewhere comfortable, help you with the pipe or the pills, or the needle and the tourniquet, whisper suggestions in your ear when you looked to be hesitating, and encourage you to try things you’d never even contemplated before. He’d cuddle you when the shakes were bad, hold your hair back as you vomited, and take you for every penny you had. And when you died in the Dragon’s Mouth, his would be the last face you ever saw. Still smiling.

  Do I really need to tell you why?

  He was currently wearing the very best suit Savile Row had to offer, complete with an old-school tie I was pretty sure he wasn’t entitled to wear. He’d painted his face stark white with arsenic; his smiling mouth was crimson with heavy lipstick, and his dark shining eyes never blinked once. His jet-black hair had been slicked down so fiercely it looked painted on, and a small silver ankh hung from his left ear-lobe. His every movement and gesture were elegance personified, and he moved through the world as though everyone in it was merely a supporting player to his star turn.

  The Host could get you anything, anything at all. And the worse it was for you, the wider he smiled. The Host was always delighted to be of service. He’d been only too happy to supply me with what I thought I needed, all those years ago. He drifted to a halt before me, bowed ever so politely, and clasped his pale, long-fingered hands together across his sunken chest.

  “Well, well,” he said, in a happy, breathy voice positively brimming with artificial bonhomie and fake sincerity. “Back again, Mr. Taylor? How nice. We’re always happy to welcome back one of our straying sons. What can I get you, Mr. Taylor ? Your usual?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not here for that. I’m here to meet someone.”

  His dark red smile widened, just a little. “That’s what they all say. Don’t be shy, Mr. Taylor; you’re amongst friends here. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in the Dragon’s Mouth. Indulge yourself. It’s what we’re here for.”

  “It’s not what I’m here for,” I said steadily. “I’m here on business. So stand aside.”

  He didn’t move, his unblinking eyes fixed on mine, his gaze full of a malign intensity. “No-one ever leaves the Dragon’s Mouth, Mr. Taylor. Not really. They only
pop out for a while, then they come back. Who else knows you as well as us; who else can provide you with what you really need? You belong here, Mr. Taylor; you know you do. Come with me. Let me lead you to your old cubicle. It’s still here. Nothing’s changed. Let me prepare the needle for you and pop up a vein. You never really left; the world outside was just a cruel dream. You’ve always been here, where you belong.”

  I laughed right in his face, and he actually fell back a step. “Dream on,” I said. “I’m a lot more than I used to be.”

  The Host rallied almost immediately. “Are you sure I can’t offer you a little taste, Mr. Taylor? On the house, of course.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” I said.

  The Host stepped gracefully to one side, bowing his head, admitting defeat. For the moment.

  “Be seeing you, Mr. Taylor.”

  “Not if I see you first,” I said to his elegantly retreating back.

  I looked around the chamber, and various significant details loomed up out of the slowly swirling smoke. The old place hadn’t changed since I was here last. Hiding from a world that had broken and defeated me, in pretty much every way there was. I hadn’t so much lost hope, as thrown it away; because hope hurt too much. The sheer weight of my life had become too much to carry, and I couldn’t stand to see my reflection in the eyes of my friends. I’d failed; at everything that mattered and a few things that didn’t. So I came here, to the Dragon’s Mouth, asking only for pain’s ease and forgetfulness. For the one thing drugs could give you that was better than pleasure—the cold, quiet comfort of feeling nothing at all.

  There were hanging silk curtains and embroidered standing screens, to provide privacy for those who still cared about such things. Tables and chairs and camp beds, scattered in little clusters. Shadowy grottos and cells cut deep into the dark stone walls. Blood and piss and vomit on the floor. And all around me, men and women and other things, lost in dreams and might-have-beens. Dying, by inches ... but I couldn’t find it in myself to feel much for any of them. No-one comes to the Dragon’s Mouth by chance. Everyone knows what happens here. You have to want it, and choose it, in the same way you’d choose a gun or a noose or the razor’s blade.

  And I had wanted it so very badly once upon a time.

  I shook my head hard. I’m not normally one for dwelling in the past or regretting old mistakes. The tainted smoke curling on the still air was getting to me. I moved forward, making my way carefully between the packed tables and chairs, and stepping over the occasional dim shape on the floor; looking about me for the elf. A few people turned their backs as I passed them. Either they knew me, or they didn’t want to know me. I didn’t recognise any faces.

  Two Hydes were fighting in a pit gouged raggedly from the stone floor. Overmuscled forms, with taut skin and bulging veins, they slammed together again and again, tearing at each other with clawed hands and bared teeth. Blood and sweat coursed down their distorted forms, and they grunted and snarled like beasts, while a few languid spectators roused themselves to lay bets on which Hyde would survive. The dead Hyde would be recycled, so as not to waste any of the drug. Junkies know everything there is to know about making a drug go further.

  A cyborg from some future time-line was main-lining a fierce and nasty future drug called Blood. Tech implants protruded from his grey flesh, discharging sudden bursts of static. His eyes glowed golden as they rolled up into his head, and his slack mouth was full of metal teeth. You can fill the future with all the high tech you want, but people will still be people.

  A long row of camp beds had been pushed up against one wall, and a dozen or so pretty young things stared sightlessly up into the smoky air, enjoying the complete out-of-the-body experience, courtesy of the banned African drug taduku. Blasted loose from the chains of their bodies, their minds were free to drift into the past or the future or any number of alternate dimensions or realities. Sometimes they came back, and sometimes they didn’t. You can probably imagine what happens to the bodies of those who don’t come back.

  Brother Frank was experimenting with Angel Breath again, the old deep fix, trying to separate out the various levels of his consciousness so he could have conversations with himself. You had to be careful around Brother Frank. He did so love to spike a drink, so to speak.

  A huge cage with reinforced iron bars held those who had chosen to indulge in the ancient alien drug known as Revert. A sly and deceitful drug that could throw your evolution into reverse, transforming you into the Neanderthal state, or even further, if you could stand it. In the cage, amongst the heavy, low-browed figures, there were other, even more disturbing shapes.

  And, finally, a small and rather furtive group were smoking Martian red weed from hookah pipes. Devotees claim it helps you think in whole new ways. Smoke enough of the stuff, and you can think like a Martian. Smoke too much, and your body will actually turn into a Martian. And then everyone around you will rise up and club you to death because even the Nightside has its standards.

  A couple of soft ghosts wandered through the thick air, hand in hand, looking for anything familiar. They were vague, indistinct, half-transparent, their very existence worn down and eroded by too much travelling in other dimensions. Human once, they had gone too far and seen too much, and now they could no longer remember how to find their way home, or even what home had been like. The details of their faces had grown smooth and doubtful, like the statues of cemetery angels worn down by time and the elements. The smoke ghosts drifted here and there, desperate for a familiar face or an accent, asking in their soft, distant voices of cities and peoples and worlds that no-one had ever heard of.

  The patrons of the Dragon’s Mouth flapped them away with heavy hands, or ignored them completely. The soft ghosts should have known better than to look for help here, but they were attracted to the altered states of consciousness like moths to a flame. One of them tugged gently at my sleeve, trying to attract my attention, but I shrugged it off. I’d spotted my elf.

  I was heading straight for him when someone moved abruptly forward to block my way. I stopped short, because it was either that or walk right over him, then paused to consider the man before me. I knew who he was almost at once, though the years had not been kind. Carnaby Jones, the Wide-Eyed Boy, infamous dandy and free spirit of the old King’s Road, had fallen far from what he once was. His T-shirt and jeans were clean enough, but he looked as if someone else had dressed him. His old muscular frame was gone, the flesh sunk right back to the bone, and his skin was a dull, unhealthy yellow. The skull showed clearly behind the taut skin of his face, his deep-set eyes were lost and murky, and his thin-lipped smile held all the malice in the world. He smelled bad.

  I could still remember when the Wide-Eyed Boy had been the best and bravest.

  “What do you want, Carnaby?” I asked politely.

  He sniggered loudly. “No time for old friends, John? Nothing to say to the old friend you abandoned and left behind? The one who brought you here, and taught you the ropes, and introduced you to pleasures you never knew existed?”

  “I forgave you for that long ago,” I said. “We’re both different people now. Is that a tinge of purple I see in your eye-balls, Carnaby? Been injecting through the tear ducts because you’ve run out of veins? How could you have fallen so far?”

  “Practice,” he said, his grin widening to show rotten teeth. “You’re looking good, John. Really. Very ... healthy. What made you think you could just walk back in here and stroll amongst us with your nose in the air? You owe me, John. You know you do.”

  “You want me to take you out of here, I’ll do it,” I said. “You want help, I’ll get you the best there is.”

  “I don’t want anything from you! Except to see you pay for what you did.”

  “What did I do, Carnaby?” I said patiently. “You broke the rules, John! You got out! No-one’s supposed to get out of here. That’s the point.”

  “I had help,” I said. “Take my hand, Carnaby. Really. I mean it. The
only one keeping you here is you.”

  He looked at me sideways, still smiling his unpleasant smile. “You got out, and now you’re a big man in the Nightside. Oh yes, the news trickles down, even to places like this. Word is you’re a rich man, too. So how about a little something, for an old friend? How about a hand-out, how about the shirt off your back, how about everything you’ve got!”

  He was spitting the words out now, his whole wrecked body shaking with years of pent-up, carefully rehearsed spite and hatred. I sensed old Mother Connell stirring behind her table, and raised one hand to stop her. Because once upon a time the Wide-Eyed Boy really had been a friend of mine, had really had it in him to be the very best of us. Drugs don’t just destroy who you are; they destroy all the people you might have been.

  So I stepped forward, grabbed his bony head firmly with both hands, and held his gaze with my own. He tried to break away, but there was no strength left in him. He tried to look away, but I had him. I concentrated, and he cried out miserably as all the old scabs on his forearms broke open, and dark liquids oozed out and trickled down his arms. Everything he’d ever taken, every last nasty drop of it, ran out of him, and he cried like a baby at the loss of it. When I was finished I let him go, and he fell in a heap before me.

  “There,” I said. “You’re clean. Free as a bird. So you can leave, or you can stay; it’s all up to you. And don’t say I never did anything for you.”

  I left him there and headed for the elf.

  He was sitting alone at a small table, smoking opium through a hollowed-out human thigh-bone. Just because he could. There was a circle of open space around him, despite the crowded conditions of the Dragon’s Mouth, because even the kind of people who habituated a place like this didn’t want anything to do with an elf.

  Long and long ago, humans and elves lived together on the Earth, sharing its wonders and resources. But we never got on. There were battles and wars and horrible slaughters, and in the end we won by cheating; we outbred the pointy eared bastards. They gave up and left our world, walking sideways from the sun, moving their whole race to another world, another reality. The Sundered Lands. The few elves you see walking the world today are rogues, outlaws, remittance men. They live to screw us over because that’s all they’ve got.