“Look at this,” said Suzie. She’d found a printout listing all the patients in the ward. No details, no instructions, only basic identities. Suzie and I flicked through the pages, and a whole bunch of familiar names jumped out at us. Not just Percy’s friends, the beautiful people from the colour supplements; but the rich and the powerful, the real movers and shakers of the Nightside. I went back into the ward, moving quickly down the rows of beds, staring into faces. I recognised quite a few, but none of them recognised me. Even with their eyes open, they saw nothing, nothing at all.
At least they were breathing . . .
The next big clue was that they all looked so much older than they should—all wrinkled faces, sagging flesh, and shrivelled limbs. I’d seen many of them recently, and they’d all looked in their prime, as usual. Now their faces and bodies showed the clear ravages of time and much hard living, along with any number of destructive antisocial diseases. There were also clear signs of elective surgery, some of it quite extensive, on faces and body parts. Some of the patients were so heavily wrapped in blood-stained bandages they were practically mummified. It was like touring a hospital in a war zone, and many of the patients looked like they’d been through hell. Some were clearly barely hanging on, only kept alive by invasive medical technology.
It took me a while to get it. A very new twist on a very old practice. The voodoo book was the key. These patients on their beds of pain weren’t the real rich and famous faces of the Nightside; they were living duplicates. The techniques in the book had been used to turn them into the equivalent of voodoo dolls, but in reverse. Instead of whatever happening to the doll happening to the victim, what happened to the original happened to the duplicate. Like Dorian Gray’s painting, these poor bastards soaked up the excesses of the real people’s lives, so they could go on being young and beautiful and untouched . . . The patients aged and suffered and underwent the elective surgeries, while the rich and powerful reaped all the benefits.
No wonder poor Percy D’Arcy couldn’t compete.
I ran it through for Suzie, and she wrinkled her nose. “Now that...is tacky. Where are they getting all these duplicates from? I mean, they’d have to be exact doubles for this to work.”
“Any number of options,” I said. “Clones, homunculi, doppelgängers . . . It doesn’t matter. The point is, I very much doubt any of these people are here by choice. The heavy restraints are a bit of a give-away there. This isn’t a hospital ward; it’s a torture chamber.”
In the end, we found the answer behind a very ordinary-looking door. The sophisticated electronic lock aroused our suspicions, and Suzie opened it easily with her skeleton keys. (Magic still trumps science, usually by two falls and a submission.) She pulled the door open, and we both stepped quickly back. There was nothing behind the door. Lots and lots of nothing. Space that wasn’t space, filled with squirming, shimmering lights you could only see with your mind, or your soul. There was a terrible appeal to it, an attraction, that made you want to throw yourself into it and fall forever . . . I carefully pushed the door shut again.
“A Timeslip,” I said. “Someone’s stabilised a Timeslip and held it in neutral; a ready-made door into another reality.” That would take time and serious money. Timeslips are inherently unstable. The universe is self-correcting, and it hates anomalies. “The only people I know to have worked successfully with Timeslips are Mammon Emporium, that mall that specialises in providing goods and services from alternate time-lines. And they’ve never shared that knowledge with anyone.”
“Could they be behind this?” said Suzie.
“No. I don’t think so. They’ve already made themselves rich beyond the dreams of tax accountants by legitimate means. Why risk all that, for this? Still, at least now we know where the duplicates come from. Whoever owns this place goes fishing in some other world, for that place’s equivalent of our important people. Exact physical duplicates . . . forcibly abducted and brought here, to suffer every conceivable illness, surgery, and self-inflicted injury, so their other selves don’t have to and can remain young and pretty forever . . .”
We both looked round sharply. Someone was coming. A lot of people were coming. Suzie and I moved quickly to stand shoulder to shoulder, facing the main doors. There was something odd about the sound, though; the pounding feet sounded muffled, flat . . . And it took me a moment to realise that the sound was approaching from below, not above. Coming up the stairs, from some further, lower level. The main doors finally burst open, and a small army of heavily armed nurses stormed into the ward in perfect lock-step. Suzie and I stood very still. The guns were no surprise, but the nature of the nurses was.
They weren’t alive. They were constructs, their bodies made entirely from bamboo woven and twisted into a human form. Their faces were blank bamboo ovals with neither mouths nor eyes, but every one of them orientated on Suzie and me. They all wore the same starched white nurse’s uniform, right down to the little white cap on the backs of their bamboo heads. Not living, not even aware, as such, but quite capable of following orders. And their guns were real enough. The nurses scurried forward with inhuman speed, their bamboo feet scuffing across the floor, spreading out into a perfect semicircle to cover us. Suzie swept her shotgun back and forth, looking for a useful target, knowing she was outnumbered and outgunned, but refusing to be intimidated. I was intimidated, but I made a point of striking a defiantly casual pose, while waiting for the puppet master to show himself.
Whoever ran the nurses wouldn’t miss an opportunity to gloat over the capture of two such famous faces as Suzie Shooter and John Taylor. If he’d been sensible, he’d have had the nurses shoot on sight, but the bigger the ego, the bigger the need to show off.
And sure enough, the crowd of bamboo nurses suddenly broke apart, silently opening a central aisle for their lord and master to make his entrance. Surprisingly, it was no-one I knew. Not one of the Major Players, not even one of the more ambitious up-and-comers. The man striding quite casually through his army of bamboo nurses was entirely unknown to me, and that doesn’t happen often in the Nightside.
He was tall, well made, well dressed, in a rich cream suit; the kind usually favoured by remittance men banished by their families to hot and far-away places. At first I thought he was a young man, but the closer he got the more the little tell-tale details gave him away. The skin of his face was too tight, too taut, and his eyes were very old. Old and cold. His smile was a dead, mirthless thing, meant to frighten. This was a man who had seen the world, found it wanting, and taken his revenge. His movements had the surety and control that only comes from age and experience, and he walked like a wolf in a world of sheep. He had large, powerful hands, with long, slender fingers—surgeons’ hands. And for all his grace, there was no mistaking the sheer brute power of his wide shoulders and barrel chest. He finally came to a halt, a respectful distance away, nodded to me and smiled at Suzie, ignoring the shotgun she was levelling on his chest.
“The famous John Taylor and the infamous Shotgun Suzie,” he said, in a rich, deep voice with just a hint of an unfamiliar accent. “Well. I am honoured. I should have known that if anyone would find me out, it would be you.” He laughed briefly, as though at some private joke. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Frankenstein. Baron Viktor von Frankenstein.”
He said it as though expecting a flash of lightning and a roll of thunder in the background. I didn’t quite laugh in his face.
“That’s a not uncommon name in the Nightside,” I said. “The place is lousy with Frankensteins. I don’t know how many nephews and nieces and grandsons I’ve run into down the years, along with any number of your family’s monstrous creations. You’d think practice would make perfect, but I’ve yet to see any proof of that. They’re nearly always complete fuck-ups. What is it with you and your family, and grave-yards, anyway? I’m sure it was all very cutting-edge, back at the dawn of medical science, messing about with body parts and batteries and cosmic radiation, but the rest of us h
ave moved on. Science has moved on. You people should have gone into transplants and cloning, like everyone else. So you’re another Frankenstein. What relation, exactly?”
“The original,” said the Baron. “The first... to bring life out of death. To take dead meat and make it sit up and talk.”
“Damn,” said Suzie. “Colour me impressed.”
“Doesn’t that make you over two hundred years old?” I said.
The Baron smiled. There was no humour in it, and less warmth. “You can’t spend as long as I have studying life and death in intimate detail and not pick up a few tips on survival.” He looked around him at the rows of patients suffering silently in their beds and smiled again. “My latest venture. I know—voodoo superstitions and medical science aren’t natural partners, but I have learned to make use of anything and everything that can assist me in my researches. Like these bamboo figures. Pretty little things, aren’t they? And a lot more obedient than the traditional hunchback.”
“I should have known a Frankenstein was involved when I saw this,” I said. “Your family’s always been drawn to the dark side of surgery.”
“Oh, this isn’t my real research,” said the Baron. “Only a little something I set up to fund my real work. The creation of life from the tragedy of death. The prolongation of life, so that death shall have no triumph. What I do, I do for all Mankind.”
“Except for the poor bastards strapped to those beds,” I said. A thought came to me. “You’re not from around here, are you? You came from the same reality as these people. That’s why I never encountered you before.”
“Exactly,” said the Baron. “I came through a Timeslip.”
“Why?” said Suzie. “Another mob with blazing torches? Another creature that turned on you?”
“I’d done all I could there,” said the Baron, entirely unmoved by the disdain in Suzie’s voice. “I found the Timeslip, and I came here, to the Nightside. Such a marvellous locality, free from all the usual hypocrisies and restraints.”
“How did you stabilise the Timeslip?” I asked, genuinely interested.
“I inherited it. Apparently Mammon Emporium had their first premises here. They took their Timeslips with them when they moved to a bigger location . . . but they left one behind. Of such simple accidents are great things born. I shall do great work here. I can feel it.” He wasn’t boasting, or trying to convince himself. He believed it utterly, convinced of his own genius and inevitable triumph. He looked at me dispassionately. “May I enquire...what brought you here, Mr. Taylor?”
“One of your clients was very upset when you turned him away,” I said. “Never underestimate the fury of professionally pretty people.”
“Ah yes . . . Percy D’Arcy. He offered me a fortune, but I couldn’t take it. There was nothing I could do for him, because in the other dimension he was already dead. Percy . . . another loose end that will have to be attended to. Fortunately, I have two very reliable people in charge of my security. I brought them with me, from my home dimension.”
He snapped his fingers, and as though they’d been waiting just out of sight for his signal, a man and a woman came through the doors and strode lightly between the ranks of bamboo nurses to stand on either side of the Baron. The man was tall and blond, and wore black leather motorcycle leathers with two bandoliers of bullets crossing over his chest. The pump-action shotgun in his hands covered me steadily. The woman . . . was tall, dark-haired, and wore a long white trench coat. She grinned at me mockingly.
“Allow me to present Stephen Shooter and Joan Taylor,” said the Baron, savouring the moment. “Where we come from, their legend is as extensive as yours, though perhaps in a more unsavoury fashion. Their destiny led them down different, darker paths. I’ve always found them very useful.” He looked me over, taking his time, then studied Suzie just as carefully. “I would have enjoyed working with you. Opening you up, studying your details, seeing what I could have made of you. Surgery is an art, and I could have worked such miracles in your flesh, with my scalpels . . . But now that you have found me out, others are bound to follow. This operation must be shut down, and I must move on.” He sighed. “The story of my life, really.”
He gestured abruptly, and the bamboo nurses surged forward inhumanly quickly. They snatched the shotgun out of Suzie’s hand and punched and kicked her to the ground. I went to help her, and they clubbed me down with their gun butts. It all happened so quickly. They gathered around us, beating at us with their gun butts, over and over again. I tried to get to Suzie, to shield her, but I couldn’t even do that. In the end, all I could do was curl into a ball and take it.
“Enough,” the Baron said finally, and the nurses fell back immediately. I was a mass of pain, aching everywhere, blood soaking and dripping from my face, but it didn’t feel like anything important was broken. I looked across at Suzie. She was lying very still. I did, too. Let them think they’d beaten the fight out of us. I concentrated on breathing steadily, nursing my rage and hate, trying to find some part of me that didn’t hurt like hell.
“Stephen, Joan, take care of these two,” said the Baron. “Be as creative as you like, as long as the effects are permanent. When you’re finished, come down to me. I have more work for you.”
He turned unhurriedly and walked away. The whole army of bamboo nurses spun on their bamboo heels and stomped out after him. Still in perfect lock-step, the bitches. I sat up slowly, trying not to groan out loud as every new movement sent pain shooting through me. I hate being ganged up on—it’s so undignified. There’s no way you can look good afterwards. Suzie sat up abruptly, and spat a mouthful of dark red blood on to the floor. Then she looked round for her shotgun, and glared at the male version of herself as he waggled the gun mockingly at her.
“Mine! Finders keepers, losers get buried in unmarked graves.”
The female version of me smirked, both hands thrust deep in her trench coat’s pockets. I really hoped I didn’t look like that when I smiled. She leaned forward a little, so she could stare right into my bloodied face.
“Wow. That had to hurt. But that’s what happens when you choose the wrong side.”
I ignored her, climbing slowly and painfully to my feet. Suzie got up on her own. I knew better than to offer to help. We stood together, shoulder to shoulder, more than little unsteady, and considered our counterparts. Stephen Shooter had all the menace of Suzie, but none of her dark glamour. Where she was disturbingly straightforward and driven, he gave every indication of being crude and brutal. Gun for hire, no morals and less subtlety. My Suzie could think rings round him, even as she was blowing his head off his shoulders.
He still had a whole face, untouched by scar tissue. He hadn’t endured what she’d been through.
Joan Taylor looked far more dangerous. Simply standing there, with no obvious weapons, she looked entirely calm and confident. I hadn’t realised how disconcerting that could be. It was strange, looking into her face and seeing so many similarities. I could see myself in her. Her gaze was cool and mocking, her smile an open insult. Take your best shot, everything about her seemed to be saying. We both know it’s not going to be good enough.
“So,” I said, making sure the words came out clear and casual, despite my smashed mouth. “My evil twin. I suppose it had to happen, eventually.”
“Hardly,” Joan said easily. “You and I are the perfect example of the only child. Self-sufficient, self-taught, a legend in our own lifetime by our own efforts. Was your mother . . . ?”
“Yes. Did you . . . ?”
“Yes.” Her smiled widened. “And I made her beg before I killed her.”
I smiled. “We’re not even remotely alike. My partner is a professional. Yours is a psychopath.”
“Perhaps,” said Joan. “But he’s my psychopath.”
Stephen Shooter giggled suddenly. A brief, disturbing sound. “It’s true, it’s true. I do enjoy my work. That’s why I’m so good at it. Practice makes perfect.”
“You tal
k too much,” said Suzie.
“How did the two of you end up here?” I said, before things could get out of hand. I needed to keep Joan talking, buy myself some time, because I was counting on there being one major difference between us and them.
“We made the old home-town a touch too hot for us,” Joan said coyly. “We’d spent years together as soldiers for hire, professional trouble-shooters, whatever euphemism floats your boat, but we made the mistake of taking out a very well-connected functionary called Walker. It was all his fault. Stupid old man, thinking he could tell us who we could and couldn’t kill. We’d have done him for the fun of it, but luckily he had an awful lot of enemies . . . Stephen blew him in half with his shotgun, and we laughed about it all the way home. But it turned out Walker also had friends, rich and powerful friends, and, just like that, no-one loved us any more. So when the Baron very kindly offered us a regular gig and a guaranteed new start . . .”
“We killed a whole bunch of people, settled some old scores, burned down half the town, and escaped here before anyone knew we were gone,” said Stephen. He was grinning, a loose, crafty smile with far too many teeth in it.