The Hyde looked around, daring anyone to say anything; and then his gaze fell upon me.
“What are you looking at, corpse face?”
I wasn’t going to get involved. I really wasn’t. But there are limits.
I got up and strolled over to his table. People and others hurried to get out of my way, and a kind of hush fell over the bar. Followed almost immediately by an expectant buzz, as everyone started placing bets. The Hyde looked uneasily around him. He was new here. But he still should have known better. I stood over the Hyde and smiled slowly at him.
“Say you’re sorry,” I said. “Doesn’t matter what for. Say you’re sorry, and you can still walk away.”
The Hyde lurched to his feet. His size made him awkward. He snarled some pointless obscenity at me and punched me in the head. The blow had a lot of weight behind it, but not enough to move my head more than an inch. There was a sound like a fist hitting a brick wall, and the Hyde yelled in surprise as he hurt his hand. I sneered at him.
“You’ll have to do better than that if you want me to feel anything.”
The Hyde hurled himself at me, hitting me again and again with fists the size of mauls. I let him do it for a while, to see if he could hurt me. When you’re dead, one sensation is as good as another. But the pills were wearing off, and the blows were as distant to me as the sounds they made, and soon enough, I got bored. So I hit him, with my dead hands and my dead strength, and he started screaming. His bones broke, and his flesh tore, and blood flew thickly on the smoke-filled air. We crashed back and forth among the nearby tables, and other fights sprang up along the way. With cries of You spilled my drink! and You’re breathing my air! the bar regulars cheerfully went to war with each other. Chairs and bodies flew through the air, and all through Strangefellows, there was the happy sound of fisticuffs and people venting.
And behind me, I could hear the Hyde’s girl screaming at me Please! Don’t hurt him! Which was typical.
The Hyde hung limply from my blood-soaked hands. I shook him a few times to see if there was any life left in him, then lost interest. I dropped him carelessly to the floor and went back to my seat at the bar. The business woman crouched, crying, over the broken Hyde. You can’t help some people. The bar fight carried on without me. I couldn’t be bothered to join in. It’s hard to work up the enthusiasm when you can’t feel pain or take real damage.
I drank some more brandy, and it might as well have been tap-water. I drew cigar-smoke deep into my lungs, and they didn’t even twitch. The pills’ effects never last long. Which is why I always make a point of enjoying what I can, when I can. I was getting ready to leave when Walker came strolling casually through the bar towards me. Walker, in his smart city suit and his old-school tie, his bowler hat, and his furled umbrella. The Voice of the Authorities, those grey, background figures who run the Nightside, inasmuch as anyone does or cares to. Walker moved easily through the various fights, and not a single hand came close to touching him. Even in the heat of battle, everyone there had enough sense not to upset Walker. He strode right up to me and smiled briefly; and if my heart could have sunk, it would. Whenever Walker deigns to take an interest in you, it’s always going to mean trouble.
“Dead Boy,” he said, perfectly calmly. “You’re looking . . . very yourself. But then, you haven’t changed one little bit since you were murdered here in the Nightside, more than thirty years ago. Only seventeen years old, mugged in the street for your credit cards and the spare change in your pockets. Left to bleed out in the gutter, and no-one even stopped to look; but then, that’s the Nightside for you. Very sad.
“Except, you made a deal, to come back from the dead to avenge your murder. You’ve never said exactly who you made this deal with . . . It wasn’t the Devil. I’d know. But anyway, you should have read the small print. You rose from your autopsy slab and went out into the night, tracked down and killed your killers. Very messily, from what I hear. So far, so good; but there was nothing in the deal you made about getting to lie down again afterwards. You were trapped in your own dead body. And so it’s gone, for more than thirty years. Have I missed anything important?”
Walker does so love to show off. He knows everything, or at least everything that matters. In fact, I think that’s part of his job description.
“I killed the men who killed me,” I said. “They didn’t rise again. And after all the terrible things I did to them, before I let them die, Hell must have come as a relief.”
“Well, quite,” said Walker. “Except . . . they weren’t your everyday muggers. Your death was no accident. Someone paid those three young thugs to kill you.” He smiled again, briefly. “You really should have taken the time to question them before you killed them.”
I just stared at him. It had never even occurred to me that there had been anything more to my death than . . . being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Who?” I said, and my voice sounded more than usually cold, even to me. “Who hired them to kill me?”
“A man called Krauss,” said Walker. “Very big in hired muscle, back in the day. You’ll find him at the Literary Auction House, right now. If you hurry.”
“Why?” I said. “Why would anyone have wanted me dead? I wasn’t anyone back then.”
“If you’re quick, you can ask him,” said Walker.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked him, honestly curious.
He gave me his brief, meaningless smile again. “You can owe me one.”
He tipped his bowler hat to me, turned away, and looked at the mass of heaving, fighting bodies before him, blocking his way to the exit. They were all well into it now, too preoccupied with smiting the enemy to pay attention to Walker. So he raised his Voice and said, Stop that. Right now. And they did. The Authorities had given Walker a Voice that could not be denied. There are those who say he once made a corpse sit up on its slab to answer his questions. Everyone stood very still as Walker strolled unhurriedly through them and left. And then everyone looked around and tried to remember what it was they’d been fighting about.
I sat at the bar, pondering the nature of my dead existence and my past. I’d been dead a lot longer than I’d been alive, and it was getting harder to remember what being alive had been like. To have a future, and a purpose, instead of going through the motions, filling in the time. Had it really been more than thirty years since anyone had said or even known my real name? Thirty years of being Dead Boy? I’d never made any attempt to contact my family or friends. It wouldn’t have been fair on them. They all thought I was dead and departed; and they were only half-right.
I came to the Nightside looking for something different; and I found it, oh yes.
It’s hard for me to feel anything much, being dead . . . But with the right mix of these amazing pills and potions I have made up for me specially, by this marvellous old Obeah woman, Mother Macabre, voodoo witch . . . my dead senses can be fooled into experiencing all the sweet moments of life. I can taste the spiciest foods and savour the finest wines, ride the lightning of the strongest and foulest drugs, and never have to pay the price.
I even have a girl-friend.
I do still feel emotions. Sometimes. They are what make me feel most alive, when I can be prodded into experiencing them. Good or bad, it makes no difference. I savour them all, when I can. And avenging old hurts is still at the top of the list of the things that make me feel most alive.
There was music playing in the bar, clear again now the sounds of battle had died away, but it was all noise to me. I can’t appreciate music any more; and I do miss it. I have to wonder what else I’ve lost that I haven’t even noticed. I don’t shave, or cut my fingernails, or my hair. I had heard they go on growing after you’re dead, but that turned out not to be the case. I wear brightly coloured clothes to compensate for my dead look, and I act large because I’ve lost my capacity for subtlety. I go on though I often wonder why.
• • •
I left the bar, walk
ing unconcerned and untouched through the still-touchy crowd. Everyone gave me plenty of room, and many made the sign of the cross, and other signs, to ward off evil. I do try to be good company, but my people skills aren’t what they were. I made my way out onto the street, and there waiting for me was my very own brightly gleaming, highly futuristic, car. A long, sleek, steel-and-silver bullet, hovering above the ground on powerful energy fields because it was far too grand to bother with old-fashioned things like wheels or gravity.
The door opened, and I got in. I announced our destination, and the car purred smoothly away from the curb. I settled back in my seat. I knew better than to touch the wheel. My car always knows where it’s going. I opened the glove compartment and rooted around in it hopefully. And sure enough, there was one special pill left. An ugly, bottle-green thing that left a chalky residue on my pale grey fingertips. I washed it down with a few swallows of vodka from the bottle I always keep handy. I like vodka. It gets the job done. My dead taste-buds started to fire and flutter almost immediately, and I opened a packet of Hobnobs. I crammed a biscuit into my mouth and chewed heavily, the thick, chocolate taste sending a warm glow all through me.
“So, Sil,” I said, spraying crumbs on the air. “How’s it going?”
“Everything’s going down smooth, sweetie,” said Sil. My car’s very own Artificial Intelligence has the rich and smoky voice of a very sexy woman. I never get tired of hearing it. She came to the Nightside through a Timeslip, falling all the way from the twenty-third century. She found me, and adopted me, and we’ve been together ever since. We’re in love. My lover, the car. Only in the Nightside. Nobody else knows; she only ever speaks to me.
“You really shouldn’t spend so much time in bars, sweetie,” said Sil. “All that booze and brooding; it does you no good, physically or spiritually. Especially when I’m not with you.”
“I like bars,” I said, finishing the packet of biscuits and tossing the empty wrapper onto the back seat. “Bars . . . have food and drink, atmosphere and ambience, bad company and good connections. They help me feel alive, still part of the crowd. And it’s not like I need to work. I only ever work to keep busy. To keep from brooding on the bitter unfairness of my condition.”
“You mustn’t give up,” said Sil. “You have to keep looking. There has to be a way, somewhere, to break your deal and come alive again. This is the Nightside, after all. Where dreams can come true.”
“Especially the bad ones,” I said. “What if . . . all I find is how to become completely dead, at last?”
“Is that what you want?” said Sil.
“It’s been so long since I could rest,” I said. “I’ve forgotten what sleep’s like, but I still miss it. Keeping going . . . can be such an effort. Sometimes, I think of how good it would feel . . . to be able to put down the burden of my continuing existence. If that was all I could find, could you let me go?”
“If that’s what you want,” said Sil. “If that’s what you need. Then yes, I could do that. That’s what love is.”
I perked up as Sil bullied her way into the main flow of traffic. All kinds of cars and other vehicles, from the Past, the Present, and all kinds of Futures, thunder endlessly back and forth through the Nightside, never slowing, never stopping, intent on their own unknowable business. I’m one of the few people who actually enjoys navigating through the deadly and aggressive Nightside traffic because you can be sure that Sil and I are always the most deadly and aggressive things on the road.
A lipstick-red Plymouth Fury sped by, with a dead man grinning at the wheel. Followed by a stretch hearse, with two men in formal outfits and top hats in the rear, struggling to force something back into its coffin. Something with far too much chrome and truly massive tail fins, and a highly radioactive afterburner, slammed bad-temperedly through the slower-moving traffic, occasionally running right over smaller vehicles that didn’t get out of its way fast enough. And something that blazed fiercely with an unnaturally incandescent light flashed in and out of the traffic at impossible speed, laughing and shrieking and throwing off multi-coloured sparks.
While I was busy watching that, an oversized truck pulled in behind Sil, sticking right on her tail. She drew my attention to it, and I looked in the rear-view mirror just in time to see the whole front of the truck open up like a great mouth, full of row upon row of rotating teeth, like a living meat-grinder. The truck surged forward, the mouth opening wider and wider, to draw Sil in and devour her. And me, of course.
Sil waited till the truck thing was right behind us, then opened up with her rear-mounted flame-throwers. A great wave of harsh yellow flames swept over the truck, filling its gaping mouth. The whole truck caught fire in a moment, massive flames leaping into the night sky. The truck screamed horribly, sweeping back and forth across the road as though trying to leave the consuming flames behind, while the rest of the traffic scattered to get out of its way. The truck thing exploded in a great ball of fire; and after a moment, chunks of burning meat fell out of the sky. I lowered the side window and inhaled deeply, so I could savour the smell. Take your fun where you can find it, that’s what I say.
• • •
Sil finally drew up outside the Literary Auction House, in the better business area of the Nightside, and pulled right up onto the pavement to park, secure in the knowledge that absolutely no-one was going to dispute her right to be there. She opened the door for me, and I got out. I took a moment to adjust my purple greatcoat fussily and make sure my floppy hat was set at the right, jaunty angle. Making the right first impression is so important, when you’re about to march in somewhere you know you’re not welcome . . . probably make a whole lot of trouble, and almost certainly beat important information out of people.
The Literary Auction House is where you go when you’re looking to get your hands on really rare books. Not just the Necronomicon or the unexpurgated King in Yellow. I’m talking about the kind of books that never turn up at regular auctions. Books like The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene, The True and Terrible History of the Old Soul Market at Under Parliament, and 101 Things You Can Get for Free If You Just Perform the Right Blood Sacrifices. All the hidden truths and secret knowledges that They don’t want you to know about. Usually with good reason.
I swaggered in through the open door, and the two guards on duty took one look at me, burst into tears, and ran away to hide in the toilets. Not an uncommon reaction where I’m concerned. Inside the main auction hall, the usual unusual suspects were standing around, enjoying the free champagne and studying the glossy catalogues while waiting for things to start. I grabbed a glass of champagne, drained it in one, and then spat it out. I never bother with domestic. Even my special pills can’t make that stuff interesting. There were platters of the usual nibbles and delicacies and flashy, foody things, so I filled my coat pockets for later. And only then did I peer thoughtfully at the crowd, pick out some familiar faces, and head right for them. Smiling my most disturbing smile, to let them know I was here for a reason and wouldn’t be leaving till I’d got what I wanted.
Deliverance Wilde was there, fashion consultant and style guru to the Fae of the Unseelie Court; tall and black and loudly Jamaican in a smartly tailored suit of eye-wateringly bright yellow. Jackie Schadenfreude, the emotion junkie, wearing a Gestapo uniform and a Star of David, so he could feed on the conflicting emotions they evoked. And the Painted Ghoul, the proverbial Clown at Midnight, in his baggy clothes and sleazy make-up. Chancers and con men, minor celebrities and characters for pay, the kinds of people who’d know things and people they weren’t supposed to know. They all moved to stand a little closer together as I approached, for mutual support in the face of a common danger. It would probably have worked with anyone else. I stopped right before them, stuck my hands deep in my coat pockets, and rocked back and forth on my heels as I looked them over, taking my time.
“You know something I want to know,” I announced loudly. “And the sooner you tell me, the sooner I’ll go awa
y and leave you alone. Won’t that be nice?”
“What could we know that you’d want to know?” said Deliverance Wilde, doing her best to look down her long nose at me.
“You want a book?” said the Painted Ghoul, smiling widely to show his sharpened teeth. “I’ve got books that will make you laugh till you puke blood. All the fun of the unfair, with cyanide-sprinkle candy-floss thrown in . . .”
He stopped talking when I looked at him, the smile dying on his coloured mouth. Jackie Schadenfreude screwed a monocle into one eye.
“What do you want, Dead Boy? Please be good enough to tell us, so we can thrust it into your unworthy hands and be rid of you.”
“Krauss,” I said. “There’s a man here called Krauss, and I want him.”
“Oh him,” said Deliverance Wilde, visibly relaxing. “Don’t know why you’d want him, but I’m only too happy to throw him to the lions. Take him, and do us all a favour.”
“Why?” I said. “What is he?”
“You don’t know?” said Jackie Schadenfreude. “Krauss is the Bad Librarian. A booklegger. Specialises in really dangerous books, full of dangerous knowledge.”
“The kind no-one in their right mind would want,” said the Painted Ghoul, sniggering. “All the terrible things that people can do to people. Usually illustrated. Heh heh.”
I nodded slowly. I knew the kind of book they meant. After I came back from the dead and found I was trapped in my body, I did a lot of research on my condition in many of the Nightside’s strange and curious Libraries. I know more about all the various forms of death, and life in death, than most people realise. I’d acquired some of my more esoteric research materials from men like Krauss.
“Krauss is bad news,” said Deliverance Wilde, mistaking my thoughtfulness for indecision. “He deals in books that show you how to open dimensional doorways, and let in Things from Outside. Books that can teach you to raise Hell. Literally. The book equivalent of a backpack nuke.”