Eager faces press against the shimmering glass of the carriage windows, desperate for a first glance of their destination, excited and fearful at the same time. Not all the faces are human. They have paid for their tickets with everything they had, or might have been, and it is far too late now to change their minds. They are refugees from the magical world of Mysterie, seeking asylum and safe harbour in the cold sanity of Veritie. The Reality Express is a one-way trip, and only the desperate and the truly needy apply.
The great iron beast hammers down the tracks, as fast as misfortune and as implacable as destiny, sounding its awful whistle as the town of Bradford-on-Avon draws near. And standing quiet and calm in the shadows of the chimney stack on the station’s waiting-room roof is Jimmy Thunder, God For Hire, with his great hammer in its holster on his hip. The only private eye in the magical realms raises his head and smiles as he hears the terrible cry of the dark old train, and looks up the track, curious as to what the night will bring. The product of gods and mortals, Jimmy Thunder has a foot in each world and a home in neither—a dangerous man to both.
And somewhere in the dark, waiting for the train’s arrival, two figures stand, scarier than the Reality Express or a God For Hire could ever hope to be.
Jimmy Thunder stood on the sloping tiled roof of the station’s waiting room, leaning casually against the disused chimney stack. There was a cold wind blowing, but he didn’t feel it. He’d chosen the roof for his stake-out because in his experience, people rarely look up, even when they’re expecting unwanted interest. And the shadows were so very deep and comforting tonight, almost as if they knew something. Jimmy pricked up his ears as he caught the exact moment the Reality Express dropped out of Mysterie and into Veritie, its awful cry of the damned dopplering down into nothing more than the rush of escaping steam. The train would be here soon, disgorging its cargo of the lost and the wretched, and then he would see what he would see.
Jimmy Thunder was a great bull of a man, with long red hair and a jutting red beard. He had a chest like a barrel, muscled arms the size of most men’s thighs, and shoulders so broad he often had to turn sideways to pass through doors. He had legs that could run for miles, and feet that never complained, despite all the standing around his job entailed. He wore black leathers adorned with brightly gleaming chains and studs, and looked every inch what every biker wants to be when he grows up. His eyes were as blue as the sea, and twice as deadly, though he had a charming smile, when he could be bothered. Descended, at many, many removes, from the Norse god Thor, Jimmy was fast and strong and disturbingly powerful—when he put his mind to it. Long-lived, though by no means immortal, he was a god by chance and a private eye by choice. His godliness was diluted by a hell of a lot of generations of mortals, but the power of storms, of thunderclap and lightning strike, was still his. Not many people worshipped him any more, for which he was quietly grateful. He’d always found it rather embarrassing.
Also his was the ancient mystical hammer Mjolnir, a (mostly) unstoppable force that (sometimes) came back when he threw it. The hammer had once been Thor’s, and in its day had changed the fate of men and nations. It was his only material inheritance. It stirred in its sleep in its holster, snoring quietly. Mjolnir was a good weapon, but it was getting old and forgetful. Forged from stone or crystal or metal at the dawn of Time, or perhaps from some starstuff that no longer existed in the material world, Mjolnir was not what it once was. It was created to be immortal, a weapon that would endure till Ragnarok or Judgement Day; but nothing lasts for ever. Ask Thor, if you can find his body.
Jimmy Thunder was the only private eye in Bradford-on-Avon, in reality or otherwise, and he had a reputation for getting things done, whatever the cost. During his long life he’d investigated many cases, both mundane and bizarre, and his unwavering pursuit of the truth had seen to it that a lot of not very nice people had good reasons for wanting him dead. Just as well he was a god, really. Even if he did have to chase after his hammer sometimes. He poured the last of the hot sweet tea out of his Thermos and into the plastic cup, and sipped at it carefully. It was still pleasantly warming, but not nearly bracing enough for the early hours of a very cold morning, so he goosed it up a bit with a tiny lightning bolt from his index finger. The wind had no damn business being so disturbingly cold this deep into summer, but then the weather had been strange of late; whimsical, almost willful. Jimmy was quietly hoping someone would hire him to look into that.
Not that he was complaining about the cold, or the early hour of the morning. Jimmy liked stake-outs, especially when there was a fair chance of a little hurly-burly in the offing. Smiting the ungodly was right up there on his list of favourite things. He lived to the hilt the role he had chosen, and the more he played it, the less like play it was. A god became a private eye, and an old myth became a new. Jimmy believed in progress. It’s always the legends which cannot or will not change that wither and fade away. Faced with being just another minor deity in a long line of godlings, with no fixed role or future in the modern world, Jimmy had cheerfully embraced a different destiny. The first time he saw a private investigator at the cinema, solving impossible crimes and pursuing awful villains, while surrounded by dizzy dames and femmes fatales, he knew that that was what he wanted to be. It helped that his long life gave him plenty of time to learn from his mistakes, while his divine abilities kept him alive while he learned.
Jimmy liked to know things, and had an insatiable hunger for the truth. Especially things other people didn’t want him to know. He had no time for subterfuge, always preferring to meet things head-on. He had a fondness for the underdog, and a real weakness for damsels in distress, and if he had a fault it was his constant determination to follow a case through to the bitter end, revealing every last truth or secret, come what may. He never could bring himself to accept that while his clients always said they wanted to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they didn’t always mean it. Not when lies or evasions can be so much more comforting.
Jimmy always got to the bottom of a case, but he wasn’t always thanked for his trouble.
Sometimes cases ended messily. As in the case of Count Dracula’s mandolin, where no one got what they wanted, and everyone got hurt—even him. And sometimes Jimmy went into cases knowing from the start that it was all going to end in tears. The Lord of Thorns still hadn’t forgiven Jimmy for proving his fiancée was a golem. But if he’d made enemies, he’d made friends too. Even the Vatican owed him a favour.
(A few years back, Jimmy had been called in by the Pope to investigate a curious case where all the statues in the Vatican had spontaneously started bleeding from vivid stigmata. They’d had to close everything down, and run superhuman damage control to keep it out of the media. All the top-rank exorcists did their best, with gallons of holy water and top-class cross action, and got absolutely nowhere. So Jimmy got the call, on the grounds that while the Vatican certainly wasn’t prepared to accept that he was a god, he could at least be relied on to bring a whole new perspective to the problem. Jimmy had expressed surprise that the Vatican had even heard of him. The Holy Father had smiled and said, “The Vatican has heard of everybody, Mister Thunder.”
(Jimmy had sorted it out, mostly by asking questions and knowing when he was being lied to. It turned out that the Pope had forgotten someone’s birthday. As a reward, Jimmy was allowed access to the Vatican’s secret library for a whole afternoon and an evening, to browse where he pleased. The really dangerous books were kept under lock and key and were chained to the shelves, or in extreme cases immersed in holy water or kept in a vacuum inside a sealed vault, but he still managed to turn up some interesting stuff. Not necessarily useful, but interesting. The Gospel According to Judas Iscariot was a real eye-opener, though the Fourth Prophecy of Fatima turned out to be just what everyone thought it was.
(The one story Jimmy was really interested in remained stubbornly elusive. There were no records, and no one would talk to him about it. Which
only convinced him all the more that there had to be something to it. It was common knowledge that Vatican scientists had been experimenting with computers and Artificial Intelligence for over fifty years, though they kept their achievements to themselves. No one would admit that there had been any success in creating an AI, but it was said that deep in the heart of the Vatican there was a room where no one went, where the door was always locked. And that if you could find your way to that abandoned room, and put your ear to that locked door, you would hear the sound of something crying …
(There are many mysteries inside the Vatican, and only some of them have anything to do with Christianity.)
Jimmy drank the last of the very hot sweet tea, flicked the cup a few times to empty it and then screwed it back onto the Thermos. He’d only half filled the Thermos, anyway. Bad idea to drink too much on a stake-out, especially when you didn’t know how long you’d have to hold your ground. He put the Thermos down on the roof beside him and leaned back against the chimney stack, which shifted slightly under his great weight. Stretched out before him lay the sleeping town, still and quiet now, just an army of street lights pushing back the darkness. There was the tower and spire of Trinity Church, and beyond it row upon row of terraced houses and cottages, ascending the steep hills that enclosed the town—ordinary people sleeping in their ordinary town, all’s quiet, all’s well. But that was just in Veritie.
In the magical world, every bit as clear to Jimmy Thunder’s semi-divine eyes, the town was never quiet. Bradford-on-Avon was an old, old locality, littered with all the remnants of the past. The very old creature that lived Under the Hill stirred restlessly, as though it could feel the thunder god’s gaze, and deeper still, things and shapes and presences out of times past slept and dreamed down among the bones of the town. On the last day, when the earth gives up its dead for judgement, many of those buried in Bradford-on-Avon’s cemeteries will be surprised to find out who some of their neighbours have been.
Old buildings flickered in and out of sight, ghosts of the town that was. Pale figures sat glumly at the base of the old gallows in the Bull Pit, swapping hard-luck stories and old, old claims of innocence, while in the park next to Westbury House, old soldiers guarded the war memorial, and made rude comments about the new pale green Millennium Statue in the gardens opposite. From the River Avon came undine songs of unbearable melancholy, sometimes drowned out by the terrible cry of the Howling Thing, still imprisoned in the Chapel on the Bridge. Powers and Dominations sat at feast in the ghostly remembrance of what had once been a seventeenth-century eating place, The Three Gables, sharing secrets in loud, carrying voices and deciding men’s fates with a laugh and a shrug and a careless quip. King Mob still held sway in the town centre, as men and women long dead rioted over the changing fortunes of the cloth trade. And all across the town there were flaring lights and voices in the earth, and unnatural creatures flying on the night winds.
Business as usual, in Bradford-on-Avon, in Mysterie.
Jimmy Thunder looked up at the full moon, and nodded hello. He’d always been on good terms with the Moon, unlike some of his predecessors, though her skittish ways made her difficult to understand and dangerous to know. But you never knew when you might need a friend. The town was jumping tonight, and the Reality Express was fast bearing down on the station. Jimmy let his sight slip out of Mysterie and back into Veritie, as the big black train came roaring in, right on time.
The Waking Beauty had hired Jimmy Thunder to investigate the matter of the Reality Express, and Jimmy had nodded politely and said of course he would, no problem, because no one said no to the Waking Beauty if they knew what was good for them; not even a god. She hadn’t offered to pay, and he’d known better than to ask. He was just building up credit that he might some day need to redeem. The Waking Beauty was older than the town, and the town was very old indeed. She hadn’t volunteered why she was suddenly interested in the Reality Express, or what he was supposed to be looking for. A lot of people disapproved of it, for all kinds of reasons, but as yet no one had actually got around to doing anything about it. The trade in refugees between the two worlds wasn’t exactly illegal, but it did tend to undermine the status quo. And a lot of people had a great deal invested in maintaining the status quo. No one had any idea who owned or operated the Reality Express, and those foolish enough to go looking for answers tended not to come back. So it was just there, a service for those who needed it.
Jimmy didn’t even know who drove the damned train.
It irked him that he was working for nothing. Normally he charged all that the traffic could bear, on the grounds that, after all, even gods had to eat; and because he lived in horror of some day being required to get a proper job. His few remaining worshippers would have been only too happy to provide him with everything he might need or desire, but that was a dangerous road to start down. He didn’t want to become dependent on his worshippers. It would have given them a measure of control over him, and Jimmy Thunder took pride in being his own man. Or god.
With a roar and a cry and a blast of escaping steam, the great black train finally slowed to a halt beside the opposite platform. Jimmy stood very still in the deepest of the shadows, but his eyes missed nothing. Steam billowed out onto the narrow platform like low fog, as doors began opening down the length of the carriages, their slamming sounding loudly on the night like a long roll of applause. People stepped slowly down onto the platform, looking confusedly about them, unsettled to be suddenly only human. They clung together in little groups, all wide eyes and chattering mouths, finding what comfort they could in the familiar proximity of old friends or enemies.
The magical world is like an overlay on the real world, and though the real cannot see the magical, it can sometimes still be affected by it. But there has always been traffic between the two, mostly from Mysterie to Veritie, as beings of various kinds exchange the gaudier joys of magic for the more secure bedrock of reality. And there have always been those with a foot in both worlds, like Jimmy Thunder and the Waking Beauty. Many apparently ordinary people and things cast powerful shadows in Mysterie, and, of course, vice versa.
There are always those willing to leave magic behind so that they might live out normal, finite lives in Veritie. Some come to be free of their responsibilities, some to escape the obligations of their particular natures. But just lately there had been whispers that Something Bad was coming to Mysterie. Something awful and unstoppable, that would put an end to the old familiar dance of magic and reality. Jimmy had heard the rumours, and mostly discounted them. There were always rumours. But still people packed the carriages of the Reality Express and paid their fare with gold and gems, magical artefacts and personal power. They all had their reasons: vampires and werewolves who wanted to be freed from the demands of their curses, or undead who craved to know the sensual pleasures of the living, or just to know the simple joy of daylight. In Veritie, they could be mortal men and women, free from fate or duty or geas. The price was always more than they expected. Some of the newcomers were already shaking and shuddering on the platform, shocked at how much smaller they seemed here, how much more diminished and vulnerable the human condition really was.
Some of them had never even been cold before.
Two figures appeared suddenly out of nowhere to welcome the newcomers, and Jimmy leaned forward just a little for a better look. He was surprised, bordering on astonished, that they’d actually been able to arrive at the station without his noticing. And then he saw who the two were, and understood much. The man in charge of this small welcoming committee, speaking so calmly and graciously and comfortingly to the uncertain refugees, was Nicholas Hob, the Serpent’s Son. Very old, very powerful, and irredeemably evil. Jimmy hadn’t known Hob was back in town. To the best of his knowledge, no one had. It had been a hundred years and more since Nicholas Hob had gifted the town with his poisonous presence.
As always, he looked utterly perfect, in style and manners and everything that counted.
He was handsome, elegant, apparently in his late twenties, in great shape and dashing with it. Blond, blue-eyed and almost overpoweringly masculine, Hitler would have loved him on sight. (And probably had, if some of the rumours were true. There were a lot of rumours about Hob.) His suit was of the very latest cut, and quite clearly the most expensive money could buy. Gold and silver gleamed all over his person, and he was charm personified as he welcomed one and all to their new lives in Veritie. He might have been a politician, a successful businessman or a film star, and had been all of those and more, in his time. But they were only the faces he hid behind, the masks he wore for other people. He was the Serpent’s Son, cunning and vicious, potent and foul, who walked through lives and destroyed them, just for the hell of it. No one had ever been known to stand against him and live. He was his father’s son, and he could shine like the sun when he chose.
(It was said that flowers and women withered when he smiled on them, and that he left a trail of blood and suffering wherever he walked. Jimmy Thunder was quite prepared to believe it.)
Hob’s companion looked like a woman, but was actually Angel. In her own disturbing way, she was just as powerful and terrifying as Hob. Incredibly tall, impossibly pale and slender, she dressed in black tatters held together with safety pins and lengths of barbed wire. The pins pierced her flesh, and the wire broke it, but she didn’t seem to care. She wore her jet-black hair cropped brutally close to her skull, and her face was coarsely good-looking, sensual rather than beautiful. Her skin was as pale as death, and her mouth and eyes were the same deep, vivid red. She smiled meaninglessly at the new arrivals, and her hands curled impatiently at her sides, as though impatient to be hurting or breaking things. At her belt hung a rosary made from human fingerbones, and a clutch of supernaturally white feathers that came from no material wings. The newcomers avoided her gaze, as though the very sight of her was painful to them. They all knew her name was more than just a name.