Hex and the City Read online

  Jackie Schadenfreud had swollen up like a blowfish, blowing off all the silver buttons on his Nazi greatcoat. He giggled painfully, soaking up the emotions around him, force-fed on feelings beyond his appetite or capacity. Thick bloody tears ran down his pink cheeks as his eyes bulged in their sockets. His dog had already torn its own guts out. The Painted Ghoul ran up a swelling wall, scuttling like an oversized insect, trying to get away from emotions he usually inflicted only on others. Sweat was making his makeup run, and he wasn’t smiling any more.

  Sandra Chance’s magics were mostly useless, being concerned primarily with the dead, not elementals, but she was still fighting back. She stood proudly in a shimmering circle of protection, magnificently angry, forcing back the psychenaut intrusions by sheer force of will. She had an aboriginal pointing bone, and in whichever direction she trained it the animating forces were thrust out of the material world. But only for a while. They always came back.

  The Lord of the Dance and the Dancing Queen, united again by the threat of a common enemy, beat out powerful harmonies on the heaving floor with their dancing feet. They danced their fury and their outrage out into the world, forcing back the invading presences. Their feet slammed down, hammering out marvellous rhythms, their every movement wonderfully graceful, their bodies radiating defiant humanity in the face of the inhuman. They had always danced their best when they danced together.

  Deliverance Wilde stood inside a faerie ring, protected by her compact with the Unseeli Court, but helpless to do anything. She wrung her hands together, looking piteously about her.

  And I stood alone, only marginally affected by the horrors around me, and reluctantly decided I’d have to do something.

  I don’t like actually having to do things. I like to keep what I can and can’t do a mystery; it helps build my reputation. You can do more with a bad reputation than you can with any magic. Usually. But while the psychenauts were holding back from me for the moment, perhaps confused by my nature, there was no guaranteeing how long that would last. I knew what the problem was, and I thought I knew how to solve it, so once again it was up to me to haul everyone back from the gates of Hell. If I was wrong, the odds were I was going to die, in any number of really unpleasant ways; but I was used to that.

  Back when I worked with Carnacki the Ghost Finder, he’d used a charm of Banishing on a psychenaut, driving it out of a haunted funfair, and afterwards I pocketed the charm when he wasn’t looking. He had loads of the things, and I had a feeling it might come in handy someday. I dug through the various mystical junk that accumulates in my pockets and finally hauled out a golden coin that came originally from the land of Nod. It had writing on it no-one could understand, and a face that was mostly worn away, but still subtly disturbing. I’ve never liked relying on such things, but needs must when the Outside is kicking down your door. If it didn’t work, I could hardly go back to Carnacki and complain. Objects of power rarely come with warranties.

  I held up the coin and spoke the activating Word of Power, and a terrible light radiated from the coin, too bright and piercing for merely human eyes. I had to turn my head away, and my hand holding the coin felt like it was on fire. The Banishing leapt out into the Hall, eager to be about its implacable business. It roared through the Hall, speaking words in a tongue older than Humanity, tearing the animating spirits out of the physical creation and forcing them back, down through the bottom of the world, back into the underpinnings of reality. The psychenauts were gone, and with them the overpowering emotions and debilitating fears. The walls and the floor and the ceiling grew still and solid again, and the wooden arms holding men and women fell apart into splinters. People looked slowly about them, daring to believe the worst might be over.

  And Sandra Chance said, in a heartbreakingly matter-of-fact voice, “Something else is coming.”

  It was another psychenaut. A traveller from a higher dimension this time. We could all feel it coming, could feel Something unbearably vast descending into our reality. Something so impossibly big it had to compress itself to fit into our narrow Space/Time continuum. Everyone’s first impulse, including mine, was to run, but the sheer force of the approaching Presence held us helpless where we were, like mice in the gaze of the serpent, or insects caught in the heat focussed through a magnifying glass. Something finally materialised in the Great Auction Hall with us, so huge and powerful it hurt our minds even to think about it, drawing everything towards it like a massive gravity well. It was too Real for our limited reality; so Real it sucked everything else into it.

  The Presence settled heavily into our world, spreading out in directions we couldn’t even name; something Huge and Vast downloaded from a higher dimension. Its thoughts smashed into everyone’s minds, as harsh and merciless as a spotlight, searching for the single significant thing that had brought it to this petty, limited place. It didn’t take a genius to realise it must be looking for the chaos butterfly. The only truly unique thing at the auction. The psychenaut couldn’t seem to locate it exactly for the moment, presumably because of the stasis field holding the butterfly temporarily outside of Time and Space. And so the Presence sank deeper into people’s minds, forcing their very selves away in its search for knowledge. All around me people were crying out in pain and shock and horror, shrieking Get it out of me! Even the major players were on their knees, sobbing and shaking. The only one left mostly unaffected in the Hall was me, and I didn’t want to think why.

  The psychenaut wasn’t used to thinking in only three dimensions, but eventually it would locate the chaos butterfly, if only through a process of elimination. The pull of the gravity well was growing steadily stronger. Details of this world’s reality were being stripped away and sucked in, absorbed by the Presence. Not because it chose to, but just because of what it was. The teddy bears lumbered towards it, drawn by some inexorable summons, only to fall one by one to the floor, reduced to just toy bears again. Terrible changes swept through those people closest to the Presence. Suddenly, some could only be seen from the back, no matter which way you looked at them. Faces lost their individuality, becoming blank and generic. Details of clothing disappeared as though smoothed away by an unseen hand, then lost their colour. People became black-and-white two-dimensional photographs, and finally just chalk drawings, until all they were was sucked into the gravity well. Stripped of everything that made them real.

  I made myself ignore the screams and howls of the damned around me, thinking hard. The charm of Banishing wouldn’t work on anything as powerful as this. Hell, nothing I had would even touch it. Powers as significant as this hardly ever gave a damn about lower dimensions like ours. This one was only here because of the chaos butterfly. Presumably because whoever finally took charge of it, the ability to predict and maybe control the future would have repercussions up and down the dimensions. So the psychenauts would just keep coming, from up and down the line, until one of them finally found the butterfly. And none of them would care how much damage they did to this world and the people in it. So there was only one thing left to do.

  I lurched over to the glass display cases, forcing myself against the terrible pull of the gravity well, until finally I stood before the case holding the chaos butterfly. It hung there in its stasis field, such a small thing to hold such potential power. I reached out for the case, and Wilde cried out, afraid I was going to kill the butterfly, even after all its presence had brought about. I used my gift to find things, opening the third eye deep in my mind, my private eye, to locate the necessary Word of Power that would collapse the stasis field.

  I said the Word, the field collapsed, and the butterfly disappeared, free at last to return to the moment in Space and Time from which it had been snatched. And as it moved on, it became just a butterfly again, no longer significant, no longer the first domino in any line of destiny. And so became ordinary again, of no importance to anyone at all.

  The Presence snapped out of reality in a moment, no longer interested, and the gravity well
was gone. All across the Hall people collapsed, mostly in gratitude that their ordeal was over. I sat down with my back to a reliably strong and solid wall and let myself shake for a while.

  Of course, not everyone was pleased with the way things turned out. Deliverance Wilde, for example, wandered miserably around the Hall saying I could have been rich, rich, rich… She could have been dead, in any number of unpleasant ways, but I was too much of a gentleman to point that out. And many of the people who’d come to bid for the butterfly came up to ask pointedly whether I couldn’t have found some better way to deal with the problem. I gave them my best hard look, and they went away again. An awful lot of people were dead, or much diminished, so I helped the Auction Hall staff pile the bodies up in one corner, for the Authorities to deal with, when they finally showed up. No-one else wanted to help. Most people couldn’t get out of the Hall fast enough. I decided it might be best if I was long gone, too, before Walker and his people turned up, asking awkward questions. I said as much to Wilde, and she nodded slowly.

  “I suppose I could always try and track down another chaos butterfly…”

  I silently indicated the wreckage and the piled-up dead, and she shuddered.

  “Or perhaps not.”

  “Stick to fashion,” I said, not unkindly. “It’s a lot less dangerous.”

  She managed a small smile. “Lot you know,” she said, and drifted away.

  I went back to Grave, looking mournfully round her devastated Hall, and told her where she could send the cheque for my services. She glared at me.

  “You don’t seriously expect to get paid, after this debacle?”

  I gave her my very best hard look. “I always get paid.”

  She thought about that for a moment, then said she quite understood my point. I smiled, said good-bye, and went back out into the Nightside.

  TWO

  When Lady Luck Comes Calling…Run

  I eat out, mostly. Partly because the Nightside has some of the best restaurants in this and many other universes, but mostly because I have neither the gift, the time, nor the interest to cook for myself. Though of course in an emergency I am quite capable of sticking something frozen in a microwave and nuking it till it screams. I also much prefer to eat on my own, so that I can give my full attention to the excellent food I’ve just paid a small fortune for. But on this occasion I was lunching with my young secretary, Cathy Barrett. I was doing so because she’d made a point of phoning me from my office, just to tell me so, and as in so many other things where Cathy was concerned, I didn’t get a say in the matter. I have learned to accept such defeats gracefully.

  Not least because whenever Cathy insists that it’s important we meet for a little chat over a meal, it nearly always means bad news is heading in my direction at warp speed. And not just your ordinary, everyday bad news, of which there is never any lack in the Nightside, but the kind of really vicious, unpleasant, and desperately unfair bad news that comes howling in from a totally unexpected direction. I considered the various awful possibilities as I headed into Uptown, and set my course for the restaurant area. Uptown is what passes for class in the Nightside, where mostly we’re too busy screwing each other over to care about such things.

  Hot neon blazed all around me, reflecting blurred colours on the rain-slick roads. Smoky saxophones and heavy bass lines drifted out the doorways of clubs that never close. Dawn never comes in the Nightside, so the drinking and dancing and sinning never has to end, as long as you’ve still got money in your pocket or a soul to barter.

  As far as I knew, I had no outstanding problems. All my cases were closed, with no loose ends left hanging to come back and haunt me. I doubted there was any problem with my office, as Cathy ran it with frightening efficiency. Unless the answerphone had been possessed by Kandarian demons again. Damn, those technoexorcists are expensive. Maybe the tax people were challenging my expenses again. Oh yes; we all pay taxes in the Nightside. Though I’m not always entirely sure to whom…

  Rain pooled on the pavements from the recent brief storm, but the night sky was as clear as ever. Thousands of stars shone more brightly than they ever did in the world outside, and the moon was a dozen times larger than it should be. No-one knows why; or if they do, they aren’t talking. The Nightside runs on secrets and mysteries. As always, the streets teemed with men and women and things that were both and neither, all carefully minding their own business as they concentrated on the private missions and hidden passions that had led or dragged them into the Nightside. You can buy or sell anything here, especially if it’s something you’re not supposed to want in a supposedly civilised world. The price is often your soul, or someone else’s, but then you know that going in. All kinds of pleasures and services beckoned from every window and doorway, and for those of a more traditional bent there were always the gaudy charms of the twilight daughters; love for sale, or at least for rent. The road roared with traffic that rarely stopped, or even slowed. People kept well away from the kerbs. Just because something looked like a car, it didn’t mean it was.

  I reached the arranged meeting place, and for a wonder Cathy had actually got there ahead of me for once. She bounced up and down on her toes, waving wildly, as though there was any chance I might have missed her. Cathy always stood out—a bright spark in a dark place. Seventeen years old, tall and blonde and fashionably slender through an iron will, she looked particularly sharp in a Go-Go checked blouse and miniskirt, with white plastic thigh boots and matching white plastic beret perched precariously on the back of her head. She’d never been the same since my occasional partner in crime Shotgun Suzie introduced her to the old Avengers TV show. Cathy pecked me briefly on the cheek, slipped her arm through mine, and gave me what she thinks is her winning smile.

  “Where do you want to eat?” I said, smiling resignedly. “Somewhere fashionably expensive, no doubt. How about Alice’s Restaurant, where you can get anything you want? Or maybe Wonka’s Wondrous Warren; Chocolate With Everything? No? You have changed. There’s a new place just opened up round the corner; Elizabethan Splendour…”

  Cathy pulled a face. “Sounds old-fashioned.”

  “They specialise in the more outre items of fare from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Puffins, for example, which they classified as fish, so they could eat them on Fasting Days in their religion.”

  “But…puffins aren’t fish! They’ve got beaks! And wings!”

  “If the EEC can classify a carrot as a fruit because the Spanish make jam out of it, then a puffin can be a fish. The Elizabethans also ate hedgehogs, when they weren’t using them as hairbrushes; and coneys, which were infant rabbits, torn from the breast.”

  “Crunchy,” said Cathy. “No thank you. I’ve already decided where we’re going.”

  “Now there’s a surprise.”

  “I want to go to Rick’s Café Imaginaire; you know, the place where they make meals exclusively from extinct or imaginary animals. They got this totally groovy review in the Night Times’ lifestyle section just the other week. I know it’s a bit exclusive, but you can get us in. You can get in anywhere.”

  “If only that were true,” I said. “This way, you dolly little epicure.”

  I led her down the street while she clung to my arm, chattering cheerfully about nothing in particular. Apparently the bad news she was nursing was so bad it could only be discussed after a really good meal, to soften the blow. I sighed inwardly, and checked the sliver of unicorn’s horn I carry like a pin in the lapel of my trench coat. Unicorn’s horn is very good at detecting hidden poisons.

  The entrance to Rick’s Café Imaginaire was a simple, almost anonymous green door, tucked away in an alcove under a discreet hand-painted sign. They don’t need to advertise. Everyone comes to Rick’s. The door was spelled to admit only people with confirmed bookings, or celebrities, or those in good standing with Rick, and Cathy was visibly impressed when the door swung open immediately at my touch. We stepped through the door and found ourselves in a jungle
clearing. An open area of sandy ground, surrounded by tall rain forest trees, hanging vines and lianas, for as far as the eye could see. Not that you could see all that far; the heavy jungle canopy kept out most of the light, and the shadows between the trees were very dark indeed. Animal sounds came from every direction, hoots and howls and sudden yelps, occasionally interrupted by a loud growl or scream. The air in the clearing was hot and dry and very still. It was just like being in a real jungle clearing, and perhaps we were. This was the Nightside, after all.

  (No animal has ever been known to venture out of the jungle and into the clearing. They’re probably quite rightly afraid of being eaten.)

  The head waiter glared venomously at me as I led Cathy nonchalantly past the long line of people waiting for a table. A few of them muttered angrily as we passed, only to be hushed quickly by those who recognised me. My name moved quickly up and down the queue, murmured under the breath like a warning or a curse. I came to a halt before the head waiter, and gave him my best Don’t Even Think of Starting Something look. He was a short and stocky man, stuffed inside a splendid tuxedo that was far too good for him, his sharp-edged features screwed up in what appeared to be an expression of terminal constipation. He would clearly have loved to tell me to go to Hell by the express route and call for his bouncers to start us on our way; but unfortunately for him, his boss was standing right beside him. Some of the people waiting in the queue actually hissed in disgust over such preferential treatment, without even a hint of a bribe. Rick ignored them and exchanged nods with me. He didn’t believe in shaking hands. He managed a smile for Cathy, but then, everyone did. He wore a smart elegant white tuxedo, which contrasted strongly with his craggy, lived-in face. There was always a cigarette in one corner of his mouth, and his Café had never even considered having a No Smoking section.