Tales of the Hidden World Read online

  Wee-winged fairies come slamming down the street like living shooting stars, darting in and out of the lampposts in a gleeful game of tag, leaving long, shimmering trails behind them. Angels go line dancing on the roof of Saint Giles’s Church. And a handful of Men in Black check the details of parked vehicles, because not everything that looks like a car is a car. Remember the missing traffic cops?

  If everyone could See the world as it really is, and not as we would have it, if they could See everything and everyone they share the world with, they’d shit themselves. They’d go stark staring mad. They couldn’t cope. It’s a much bigger world than people imagine, bigger and stranger than most of them can imagine. It’s my job to see the hidden world stays hidden, and that none of it spills over into the safe and sane everyday world.

  I walk up and down the streets, pacing myself, covering my patch. I have a lot of ground to cover every night, and it has to be done the traditional way, on foot. They did try cars, for a while. Didn’t work out. You miss far too much, from a car. You need good heavy shoes for this job, strong legs, and a straight back. And you can’t let your concentration slip, even for a moment. There’s always so much you have to keep an eye out for.

  Those roaming gangs of Goths, for example, all dark clothes and pale faces. Half of them are teenage vampires, on the nod and on the prowl, looking for kicks and easy blood. What better disguise? You can always spot the real leeches, though. They wear ankhs instead of crucifixes. Long as they don’t get too greedy, I let them be. All part of the atmosphere of Soho.

  And you have to keep a watchful eye on the prossies, the hard-faced working girls on their street corners. Opening their heavy coats to flash the passing trade, showing red, red smiles that mean nothing at all. You have to watch out for new faces, strange faces, because not everything that looks like a woman is a woman. Some are sirens, some are succubae, and some are the alien equivalents of the praying mantises. All of it hidden behind a pleasing glamour until they’ve got their dazzled prey somewhere nice and private, and then they take a lot more than money from their victims.

  I pick them out and send them packing. When I can. Bloody diplomatic immunity.

  Seems to me there’s a lot more homeless out and about on the streets than there used to be. The lost souls and broken men, gentlemen of the road, and care in the community. But some have fallen further than most. They used to be Somebody, or Something, living proof that the wheel turns for all of us, and if you’re wise, you’ll drop the odd coin in a cap, here and there. Because karma has teeth, all it takes is one really bad day, and we can all fall off the edge.

  But the really dangerous ones lurk inside their cardboard boxes like tunnel spiders, ready to leap out and batten onto some unsuspecting passerby in a moment, and drag them back inside their box, before anyone even notices what’s happened. Nothing like hiding in plain sight. Whenever I find a lurker, I set fire to its box and jam a stake through whatever comes running out. Vermin control, all part of the job.

  From time to time, I stop to take a breath and look wistfully at the more famous bars and nightclubs, that would never admit the likes of me through their upmarket, uptight doors. A friend of mine, who’s rather higher up the magical food chain, told me she once saw a well-known sit-com star stuck halfway up the stairs, because he was so drunk he couldn’t remember whether he was going up or coming down. For all I know, he’s still there. But that’s Soho for you, a gangster in every club bar and a celebrity on every street corner doing something unwise.

  I stoop down over a sewer grating, to have chat with the undine who lives in the underground water system. She controls pollution levels by letting it all flow through her watery form, consuming the really bad stuff and filtering out the grosser impurities. She’s been down there since Victorian times and seems happy enough. Though like everyone else, she’s got something to complain about; apparently, she’s not happy that people have stopped flushing baby alligators down their toilets. She misses them.

  “Company?” I ask.

  “Crunchy,” she says.

  I laugh, and move on.

  Some time later, I stop off at a tea stall, doing steady business in the chilly night. The local hard-luck cases come shuffling out of the dark, drawn like shabby moths to the stall’s cheerful light. They line up politely for a cup of tea or a bowl of soup, courtesy of the Salvation Army. The God-botherers don’t approve of me any more than I approve of them, but we both know we both serve a purpose. I always make a point to listen in to what the street people have to say. You’d be amazed what even the biggest villains will say in front of the homeless, as though they’re not really there.

  I check the grubby crowd for curses, bad luck spells, and the like, and defuse them. I do what I can.

  Red turns up at the stall, just as I’m leaving. Striding out of the night like a ship under full sail, she crashes to a halt before the tea stall and demands a black coffee, no sugar. Her face is flushed, and she’s already got a bruised cheek and a shiner, and dried blood clogging one nostril.

  “This john got a bit frisky,” she says dismissively. “I told him that’s extra, darling. And when he wouldn’t take the hint, I hit him in the nads with my brass knuckles. One of life’s little pleasures. Then when he was down I kicked him in the head, just for wasting my time. Me and a few of the girls rolled him for all he had, and then left him to it. Never touch the credit cards, though. The filth investigate credit cards. God, this is bad coffee. How’s your night going, Charlie boy?”

  “Quiet,” I say, and work a simple spell to heal her face. “You ever think of giving this up, Red?”

  “What?” she says. “And leave show business?”

  More and more drunks on the street now, stumbling and staggering this way and that, thrown out of the clubs and bars once they run out of money. I work simple spells from a safe distance. To sober them up, or help them find a safe taxi, or the nearest Underground station. I work other protections, too, that they never know of. Quietly removing weapons from the pockets of would-be muggers; driving off minicab drivers with bad intent, by giving them the runs; or breaking up the bigger street gangs with basic paranoia spells, so they turn on one another instead. Always better to defuse a situation, than risk it all going bad, with blood and teeth on the pavement. A push here and a prod there, a subtle influence and a crafty bit of misdirection, and most of the night’s trouble is over, before it’s even started.

  I make a stop at the biggest Chinese Christian Church in London and chat with the invisible Chinese demon that guards the place from troublemakers and unbelievers. It enjoys the irony of protecting a Church that officially doesn’t believe in it. And since it gets to eat anyone who tries to break in, it’s quite happy. The Chinese have always been a very practical people.

  Just down the street is an Indian restaurant once suspected of being a front for Kali worshippers. On the grounds that not everyone who went in came back out again. Turned out to be an underground railroad, where people oppressed because of their religious beliefs could pass quietly from this dimension to another. There’s an Earth out there for everyone, if you only know where to look. I helped the restaurant put up an avoidance spell, so only the right kind of people would go in.

  I check out the Dumpsters around the back, while I’m there. We’ve been having increasing problems with feral pixies, just likely. Like foxes, they come in from the countryside to the town, except foxes can’t blast the aura right off you with a hard look. Pixies like Dumpsters; they can play happily in them for hours. And they’ll eat pretty much anything, so mostly I just leave them to get on with it. Though if the numbers start getting too high, I’ll have to organize another cull.

  I knock the side of the Dumpster, but nothing knocks back. Nobody home.

  After that, it’s in and out of all the pokey little bars in the back streets, checking for the kind of leeches that specialize in grubby little gin jo
ints. They look human enough, especially in a dimly lit room. You know the kind of strangers, the ones who belly up to the bar next to you with an ingratiating smile, talking about nothing in particular, but you just can’t seem to get rid of them. It’s not your company or even your money, they’re after. Leeches want other things. Some can suck the booze right out of you, leaving you nothing but the hangover. Others can drain off your life energy, your luck, even your hope.

  They usually run when they see me coming. They know I’ll make them give it all back, with interest. I love to squeeze those suckers dry.

  Personal demons are the worst. I hate demons. They come in with the night, swooping and roiling down the narrow streets like leaves tossed on the breeze, snapping their teeth and flexing their barbed fingers. Looking to fasten on to any tourist whose psychic defenses aren’t everything they should be. They wriggle in, under the mental barricades, snuggle onto your back and ride you like a mule. They encourage all their host’s worst weaknesses, greed or lust or violence, all the worst sins and temptations they ever dreamed of. The tourists go wild, drowning themselves in sensation, and the demons soak it all up. When they’ve had enough, they let go and slip away into the night, fat and engorged, leaving the tourists to figure out where all their money and self-respect went. Why they’ve done so many things they swore they’d never do. Why there’s a dead body at their feet and blood on their hands.

  I can See the demons, but they never see me coming. I can sneak up behind them and rip them right off a tourist’s back. I use special gloves; I call them my emotional baggage handlers. A bunch of local nuns make them for us, blessed with special prayers, every thread soaked in holy water and backed up with nasty silver spurs in the fingertips. Personal demons aren’t really alive, as such, but I still love the way they scream as their flimsy bodies burst in my hands.

  Of course some tourists bring their own personal demons in with them, and then I just make a note of their names, to pass on to the Big Boys. Symbiosis is more than I can handle.

  I bump into my first group of Gray aliens, and make a point of stopping to check their permits are in order. They look like ordinary people to everyone else, until they get up close, and then they hypnotize you with those big black eyes, like a snake with a mouse, and you might as well bend over and smile for the probe. Up close, they smell of sour milk, and their movements are just wrong. . . . Their dull gray flesh slides this way and that, even when they’re standing still, as though it isn’t properly attached to the bones beneath.

  I’ve never let them abduct anyone on my watch. I’m always very firm: no proper paperwork, no abduction. They never argue. Never even react. It’s hard to tell what a Gray is thinking, what with that long, flat face and those unblinking eyes. I wish they’d wear some kind of clothes, though. You wouldn’t believe what they’ve got instead of genitals.

  Even when their paperwork is in order, I always find or pretend to find something wrong, and send them on their way, out of my area. Just doing my bit, to protect humanity from alien intervention. The Government can stuff their quotas.

  Not long after, I run across a Street Preacher, having a quiet smoke of a hand-rolled in a back alley. She’s new: Tamsin MacReady. Looks about fifteen, but she must be hard as nails or they’d never have given her this patch. Street Preachers deal with the more spiritual problems, which is why few of them last long. Soon enough they realize reason and compassion aren’t enough, and that’s when the smiting starts, and the rest of us run for cover. Tamsin’s a decent enough sort, disturbed that she can’t do more to help.

  “People come here to satisfy the needs of the flesh, not the spirit,” I say, handing her back the hand-rolled. “And we’re here to help, not meddle.”

  “Oh, blow it out your ear,” she says, and we both laugh.

  It’s not long after that I run into some real trouble: someone from the Jewish Defense League has unleashed a Golem on a march by British Nazi skinheads. The Golem is picking them up and throwing them about, and the ones who aren’t busy bleeding or crying or wetting themselves are legging it for the horizon. I feel like standing back and applauding, but I can’t let this go on. Someone might notice. So I wade in, ducking under the Golem’s flailing arms, until I can wipe the activating word off its forehead. It goes still then, nothing more than lifeless clay, and I put in a call for it to be towed away. Someone higher up will have words with someone else, and hopefully I won’t have to do this again. For a while.

  I take some hard knocks and a bloody nose, before I can shut the Golem down, so I take time out to lean against a stone wall and feel sorry for myself. My healing spells only work on other people. The few skinheads picking themselves up off the pavement aren’t sympathetic. They know where my sympathies lie. Some of them make aggressive noises, until I give them a hard look, and then they remember they’re needed somewhere else.

  I could always turn the Golem back on, and they know it.

  I head off on my beat again, picking them up and slapping them down, aching quietly here and there. Demons and pixies and golems, oh my. Just another night, in Soho.

  Keep walking, keep walking. Protect the ones you can, and try not to dwell on the ones you can’t. Sweep up the mess, drive off the predators, and keep the world from ever finding out. That’s the job. Lots of responsibility, hardly any authority, and the pay sucks. I say as much to Red when we bump into each other at the end of our shifts. She clucks over my bruises and offers me a nip from her hip flask. It’s surprisingly good stuff.

  “Why do you do it, Charlie boy? Hard work and harder luck, with nothing to show but bruises and bad language from the very people you’re here to help? It can’t be the money; I probably make more than you do.”

  “No,” I say. “It’s not the money.”

  I think of all the things I See every night, that most of the world never knows exists. The marvelous and the fantastic, the strange creatures and stranger people: gods and monsters and all the wonders of the hidden world. I walk in magic and work miracles, and the night is full of glory. How could I ever turn my back on all that?

  “Why don’t you just walk away?” says Red.

  “What?” I say. “And leave show business?”

  I’ve never made any secret of the fact that the Nightside is based on London’s Soho, or at least Soho as I knew it back in the day, when history was already turning into legend—when the bad old days were mostly over, but there was still plenty of sin to go around if you knew where to look. With this story, I wanted to show an ordinary working stiff, cleaning up the supernatural messes other people leave behind. The people and the setting are probably the closest I’ve ever come to describing the Soho I knew.

  Death Is a Lady

  I once had a near-death experience. This was back in 1972, before they became fashionable and everyone was having them. Which is probably why mine bears little or no resemblance to latter descriptions. Or perhaps I just need to be different in everything.

  I was on a walking holiday in the Lake District. Seventeen years old, bright and bushy-tailed, hair halfway down my back. Well, it was 1972. I walked fifteen miles a day and spent every evening in the pub. I couldn’t do that now; it would kill me.

  Halfway through the week, I took a nasty fall, split my head open, and woke up in hospital. But while I was out, I had a dream that was not a dream. It did not feel anything like a dream, but it was some years, before I was able to put a name to it.

  There was darkness, and then I was sitting in a stuffed leather chair before a crackling open fire in an old Victorian study. Books on the walls, gas lamps, blocky old Victorian furniture. Slow ticking clock. A bit dark, but not gloomy. Peaceful. It was a place I had never seen before or since, but I felt immediately at home there.

  Sitting in the chair on the other side of the fire was a tall, dark-haired, pale-faced woman, dressed in black. The height of Victorian fashion. She was beautiful an
d, although I had never seen her before, I trusted her immediately. I can see her face as clearly now as then, but it is no one I have ever known. I fell in love with her at first sight. She knew and smiled, understanding.

  She was Death. I knew that as clearly as I know my own name.

  She told me in a warm, reassuring voice that I had arrived there too soon. It was not my time yet, and I had to go back. I did not want to go, but she was sympathetically insistent. I could not stay. It was not my time. She would see me again, eventually.

  And I woke up in hospital with stitches in my head.

  The experience was as real to me then as anything else I had ever known. It is real to me now. Every moment of the experience remains clear and distinct to me. And I know that when my time does finally come, she will be waiting to greet me again. As she promised.

  Death is a lady.

  This is a true story. It all happened, just the way I’ve written it. I was on a school walking-and-climbing holiday, when I was seventeen. I took a bad fall and smashed in the side of my head. I’m told I was technically dead for several seconds, before I snapped back. I actually woke up some time later, at the hospital, while they were putting stitches in my head. But this is what I remember happening in between. My very own Near Death Experience. It all happened long ago, before such things became fashionable and everyone was having one. Which is probably why mine is a bit different. Is this a real experience? I don’t know. I think so. All I’ll say is this: when Neil Gaiman introduced his Lady Death in the Sandman comic, it was like a validation. . . .

  Dorothy Dreams

  Dorothy had a bad dream. She dreamed she grew up and grew old, and her children put her in a home. And then she woke up and found it was all real. There’s no place like a rest home.