“Talk to me, John! What’s happening here? What is this house, really?”
I took a deep breath. It didn’t steady me nearly as much as I’d hoped, but at least the shakes were starting to wear off now. Like so many times before in the Nightside, I had found the truth at last, and it didn’t please or comfort me one bit.
“The house is a predator,” I said. “An alien thing, from some alien place, far outside our own space, where life has taken very different forms. It makes itself into what it needs to be, taking on the colour of its surroundings, hiding in plain sight, calling its prey to it with a voice that cannot be resisted. Its prey is the lost and the lonely, the unloved and the uncared for, the discarded flotsam and jetsam of the city that no-one ever misses when it washes up here, on Blaiston Street. The house calls, in a voice that no-one ever disbelieves, because it tells them just what they want to hear. It even sucked in a few supposedly important people, people perhaps a little too susceptible for their own good. Being important doesn’t necessarily protect you from the secret despairs of the hidden heart.”
“Stick to the point, John,” said Suzie, shaking me by the shoulder. “The house lures people into it, and then?”
“And then it feeds on them,” I said. “It sucks them dry, absorbing all they are into itself. It grows strong by feeding on their strength, keeping them happy while they last, so they won’t try to escape. So they won’t even want to.”
“Jesus,” said Suzie, looking down at Cathy’s emaciated body. “From the look of the kid, the house has already taken most of her. Shame. We have to get out of here, John.”
“What?” I said, not understanding, or perhaps not wanting to.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Suzie said flatly. “We got here too late. Even if we could maybe cut the kid free from the floor, odds are she’d bleed to death before we even got her to the street. She’s already as good as dead. So we leave her, and get the hell out of here while we still can. Before the house turns on us.”
I shook my head slowly. “I can’t do that, Suzie. I can’t just walk away and leave her here.”
“Listen to me, John! I don’t do lost causes. This case is over. All that’s left to us is to give the kid a quick death, maybe cheat the house out of some of its victory. Then we get out of here, and come back with something heavy in the explosive line. You get Joanna moving. I’ll take care of the kid.”
“I didn’t come all this way, just to abandon her! She’s coming back with us!”
“No-one’s leaving,” said Cathy. “No-one’s going anywhere.”
Behind us, the door groaned loudly in its frame. Suzie and I looked round sharply, just in time to see the door slam shut and then vanish, its edges absorbed into the surrounding wall. The door’s colours faded out, and within moments there was only an unmarked, unbroken expanse of wall, with no sign to show there’d ever been a door there. And all around us, the four walls of the enclosed room rippled suddenly, expanding and contracting in slow sluggish movements; becoming steadily more organic in appearance, soft and puffy and malleable. Thick purple traceries of veins spread across the walls, pulsing rhythmically. And a great inhuman eye opened in the ceiling above us, cold and alien, staring unblinkingly down at its new victims like some ancient and unsympathetic god. A sickly phosphorescent glow blazed from the walls, and I finally knew where the light had been coming from all along. There was a new smell on the air, thick and heavy, of blood and iron and caustic chemicals.
“No-one’s going anywhere,” said Cathy. “There’s nowhere to go.” There was another voice under hers now, harsh and deliberate and utterly inhuman.
Suzie stalked over to where the door had been, reversed her gun and slammed the butt of the shotgun against the wall. The awful pulsing surface gave a little under the blow, but it didn’t break or even crack. Suzie hit it again and again, grunting with the effort she put into it, to no avail. She glared at the wall, breathing hard, and then kicked it in frustration. The leather toe of her boot clung stickily to the wall, and she had to use all her strength to pull it free. Part of the leather toe was missing, already absorbed. Drops of dark liquid fell from the ceiling, and more slid slowly down the walls and oozed up out of the floor. Suzie hissed suddenly, in surprise as much as pain, as a drop fell on her bare hand, and steam rose up from the scorched flesh.
“John, what the hell is this? What’s going on?”
“Digestive juices,” I said. “We’re in a stomach. The house has decided we’re too dangerous to absorb slowly, like Cathy. It doesn’t want to savour us. We’re going to be soup. Suzie, make us an exit. Blast a hole right through that wall.”
Suzie grinned fiercely. “I thought you’d never ask. Stand back. This could splatter.”
She trained her shotgun on the wall where the door had been, and let fly. The wall absorbed the blast, the point-blank impact producing only ripples spreading slowly outwards, like when you throw a stone into a pond. Suzie swore briefly and tried again, reloading and firing repeatedly till the close air stank of cordite, and the sound was overwhelming. But even as the roar of the gun died away, the ripples were already disappearing from the unmarked wall. Suzie looked back at me.
“We are in serious trouble, John. And don’t look now, but your shoes are steaming.”
“Of course,” I said. “The house isn’t fussy about what it eats.”
Suzie looked at me steadily, waiting. Without an enemy she could hit or shoot, she was pretty much lost for another option; but she trusted me to find a way out of this mess. She’d always been too ready to trust me. That was one of the reasons why I’d left the Nightside in the first place. I got tired of letting my friends down. I thought hard. There had to be a way out of this. I hadn’t come back after all these years, fought my way through all the madness, just to die in an oversized stomach. I hadn’t come back to fail again. I looked at Cathy, and then I looked at Joanna, still standing very still by the living wall. She hadn’t said a word or moved an inch since the house revealed itself. Her face was eerily calm, her eyes unfocused. She hadn’t even flinched when Suzie opened fire right next to her. Shock, I supposed, then.
“Joanna!” I said loudly. “Come over here and talk to your daughter. See if you can focus her mind on you, separate her from the house. I think I’ve got an idea on how to break her and us free, but I don’t know what effect it might have on her… Joanna! Listen to me!”
She turned her head slowly to look at me, and there was a slow horror forming in her eyes that made me want to look away.
“Why are you talking to her about me?” said Cathy.
“Because I need your mother’s help in this,” I said.
“But that’s not my mother,” said Cathy.
The words seemed to resonate endlessly in the quiet room, their sudden awful significance driving all other thoughts out of my head. It never even occurred to me to doubt Cathy’s word. I could hear the truth in her voice, even if I didn’t want to. So many little things that hadn’t made sense suddenly came together, in one terrible moment of insight. Joanna looked at me, and there was nothing in her eyes but a calm, resigned sadness. All the vitality had gone out of her. As though she didn’t have to pretend any more.
“I’m sorry, John,” she said slowly. “But I think it’s all over now. My purpose is over, now you’re here. I think I did care for you … but I don’t think I’m who I thought I was…” Her voice changed, and under it I heard the harsh alien voice that had briefly spoken through Cathy. “I’m just a Judas Goat, the perfect bait, designed and programmed specifically to lure you back into the Nightside, so that you could be … dealt with.”
“Why?” I said, and my voice was little more than a whisper.
“The house was provided with all the necessary details—the exact kind of client, the exact kind of case, the exact kind of woman who would most appeal to you. Someone who would slip past all your defences, make you disregard all your instincts, and lead you unresisting to your doom. The
re never was a Joanna Barrett—only a role to play, a function to perform. But they made me too well, John; and for a time I actually forgot what I was. I thought I was a real woman, with real feelings. There’s enough left of me to be sorry about what’s going to happen to you … but not enough for me to stop it.”
“Was none of what we had real?” I said.
“Only you were real, John. Only you.”
“And all… this?” I said. “Was all this set up just for me? Was the house invited into the Nightside, allowed to hunt and feed and kill, just to get me? Why? I’d left the Nightside! I was no threat to anyone any more! Why bring me back now?”
“Ask your mother,” said the thing with Joanna’s voice. “It seems she’s coming back. And you … are a loose thread that could unravel everything.”
“Who did this?” I said. “Who’s behind this?”
“Can’t you guess?” said Joanna. And her face slowly melted away, leaving behind only the perfect blank mask of the Harrowing.
I think I cried out then; the sound of some small animal as the steel trap finally closes on it. Joanna leaned back into the living wall, and sank into it, the soft pulsing surface closing over her as the house re-absorbed the thing it had created, or birthed. In a moment she was gone, leaving only slow ripples behind, and soon they were gone too. I should have known. I should have remembered. You can’t trust anyone, or anything, in the Nightside, to be what it appears to be. Walker had tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen. I’d forgotten that here, love is just another weapon they can use to hurt you, and that the past never goes away. I felt the tears running down my cheek long before I knew I was crying.
“Damn,” said Suzie, glowering at the wall Joanna had disappeared into. “Guess I’m not going to get paid for this one after all.”
She looked at me, and sighed when I didn’t react. The digestive juices were falling from the ceiling in a steady rain now, stinging and burning my bare face and hands, and I didn’t care at all. Someone, or something, had just punched my heart out, and I didn’t care about anything. Suzie came over and put a hand on my shoulder, staring right into my face. She wasn’t very good with emotions, but she did her best.
“John, you have to listen to me. You can mourn her later. Whatever she was, or might have been. You can’t fall apart now. We have to get out of here.”
“Why?” I said. “Everyone wants me dead; and maybe I do too.”
She slapped me across the face, more professionally than angrily. “What about me, John?”
“What about you?”
“All right, maybe I deserved that. I never should have let you go running off to hide in London. And I wasn’t always the best of friends to you; I don’t seem to have the knack. But what about the kid, John? Cathy? Remember her? The one you came back into the Nightside to save? Are you going to let her down now? Are you going to let her die, just because you’re feeling sorry for yourself?”
I turned my head slowly, and looked at Cathy. What was left of her. “No,” I said finally. “None of this is her fault. And I never let a client down. Take my hand, Suzie.”
“What? This is no time to be getting sentimental, John.”
I looked back at her. “You have to trust me on this, Suzie. Trust me to know what I’m doing. We can’t fight our way out, so that just leaves me, and my gift.”
Suzie looked at me for a long moment, reassuring herself that I was back in control again, and then nodded briskly. She slid her shotgun into the holster behind her shoulder and took my hand in hers. I could feel the calluses on her palm, but her grip was firm and steady. She had faith in me. Which made one of us. I sighed, tiredly, getting ready to fight the good fight one more time, because that was all I had left.
“We need to find the heart of the house,” I said. “Kill the heart, and kill the house. But the heart won’t be anywhere here. The house will have hidden it somewhere else, for protection. Somewhere… no-one would be able to reach it, normally. But then, I’m not normal. I can find it. I can find anything.”
Except what matters most. I reached inside myself and summoned up my gift, opening my mind again. And the house pounced.
For a long time I was nowhere, and it felt good. Good not to have to worry about bills that needed paying, cases that couldn’t be solved, clients who couldn’t be helped. Good not to have to worry about all the mysteries of my life, and the endless pain they brought to me and those I cared for. When I started out I had a dream, a dream of helping people who had nowhere else to turn; but dreams don’t last. They can’t compete with reality. The reality of struggling to find money for food and rent, and the way your feet hurt from pounding the streets looking for people who don’t want to be found.
The harsh, unyielding reality of having to compromise your ideals bit by bit, day by day, just to achieve a few little victories in the face of the world’s malice, or indifference. Until sometimes you wonder if there’s nothing left of you but the shell of the man you intended to be, just going through the motions because you’ve nothing better to do.
But somehow the dream doesn’t quite die. Because in the Nightside, sometimes dreams are all that can keep you going. Give them up, and you’re dead.
Growing up in the Nightside, I saw a lot of dead men walking about. They could walk and talk and go through the motions, drifting from bar to bar and from drink to drink, but there was nothing left behind their eyes. Nothing that mattered. My father was a dead man for years, long before his heart finally, mercifully, gave out, and they nailed the coffin lid down. I couldn’t help him. I was only a kid.
My gift didn’t kick in until much later. A gift I could use, to make a difference. For other people, if not myself.
In the safe nowhere nothing that surrounded and comforted me, gentle waves of love and affection lapped against my mind, wanting me to forget all that. To forget everything but an eternal now of love and happiness, an end to all wanting and needing, and a rest that would never end. A quiet murmuring voice promised me I could have everything I ever wanted; all I had to do was lie back and accept, and give up the fight. But I didn’t believe the voice. Because the only thing I really wanted had already been taken from me, when the house took Joanna back into itself. The voice spoke more urgently, and I sneered at it. Because underneath the voice I could still hear the endless, insatiable hunger.
My dreams. My reality. I clung to them like a drowning man, and would not give them up. They made me what I am. Not the father who ignored me, or the mother who abandoned me. Not the mysterious inheritance I never wanted, and not even the faceless hordes who’d hounded me all my life. So many influences trying to shape me, and I disowned them all. I chose to help people, because there’d been no-one there to help me when I needed it. I knew even then that I couldn’t trust the Authorities to save me. My father had been one of them, and they still hadn’t been able to protect him, or comfort him. I shaped my own life, determined my own destiny; and to hell with everyone and everything else.
My anger was rising now, hot and fierce and strong, and it pushed back the false promises of love and happiness, perhaps because deep down I’d never believed in such things. Not for me, anyway. The empty nothingness was fragmenting, falling apart. I could sense other people around me. Suzie Shooter, a ghost hand in mine, quietly confident in me. Cathy Barrett, understanding for the first time just how much she’d been lied to, manipulated and abused, almost as angry as I was. And somewhere close at hand … a faint presence, a quiet voice, like the last echoes of someone who had briefly believed themselves to be a woman called Joanna. And I swear I felt another ghostly hand in mine.
I reached out and embraced them, binding them to me with my gift; and together we were stronger than any damned house.
I don’t just find things with my gift. It can do other things too. Like identify an enemy’s weak spot and attack it. I lashed out with my gift, and the house screamed, in shock and rage, pain and horror. I think it had been a very long time since anyone ha
d been able to hurt it.
The nothing was replaced by something. An in-between place. I was standing on a bare plain that stretched out to infinity in all directions. It was a grey place, soft and hazy and indistinct. Not a real place, but real enough. A place to make a stand. Suzie and Cathy were there with me. Suzie was wearing silver armour, studded with vicious spikes. Cathy looked like she had in her old photo, only mad as hell now. I didn’t look down to see how I appeared. It didn’t matter. Not too far away there was another presence, too faint to be clearly seen, but I knew who it was. Who it had to be. We were all shining brightly now, luminous beings in a grey world. Together we formed a wide circle around a column of swirling darkness, shot with vivid blood-red traces, that towered endlessly up into the featureless sky. From it came the voice of the house, beating against us like hammer-blows, harsh and inhuman.
“Mine! Mine! Mine!”
But the gift was strong in me, and I just laughed at the voice. All it really had on its side was stealth and lies, and neither could serve the house here. I stepped forward, and Suzie and Cathy moved with me. The dark column actually shrank back from our light, shrinking and contracting away from us. We closed in, and the column became narrower. And all around us, on that wide and endless plain; hundreds and hundreds of insubstantial figures, standing silently, watching and hoping. All the house’s victims. It hadn’t just eaten their bodies; the damned thing had consumed their souls too, holding them within itself to power its unnatural existence. What was left of a woman called Joanna came forward, holding herself together despite everything the house could do to tear her apart and assimilate her, and again I felt her hand in mine. Through her I reached out to the other captive shades, silently offering them a chance for revenge, and the only freedom they could ever know now … and they reached out to me.