“I’m going to have to write a special editorial on the passing of King of Skin when I get back. Doing him justice will be a challenge.”
“Will you be mentioning in passing that one of the co-founders of the new Authorities was actually a major serial killer, who wrapped himself in the living skins of his victims?” I said innocently.
“The Night Times stands for the truth,” Julien said stiffly. “Just not all the truth, all the time. In cases like this, it can be better to let the truth come out a bit at a time, so as not to . . . overwhelm people. On the other hand, we can’t hold some things back for fear of being scooped. You did say Bettie Divine was there . . . Damn. I’m going to have to try and balance the good with the bad. King of Skin did do admirable things, in his time. He did help found the new Authorities, and you might remember that he fought alongside us during the Lilith War. A lot of innocent people are only alive today because he put his life on the line to protect them.”
“Innocent?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “In the Nightside?”
“You know what I mean.”
“King of Skin only took on Lilith’s armies because they were destroying his own personal playground,” I said, letting the empty decanter drop onto the floor at my feet. Somebody should have refilled it; I’d only got a few drinks out of the damned thing. I sighed, feeling suddenly tired. Contemplating the endless ambiguities of the Nightside can take a lot out of you. “Just because the enemy of your enemy is your ally, it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s your friend,” I said.
The voice at the other end of the speaker-phone asked, rather nervously, if he should continue, and Julien told him to get on with it. Possibly I wasn’t the only one who was feeling tired. We listened silently as the voice did its best to hit the high spots of what was happening in the Nightside. Apparently someone had dumped a whole bunch of piranha into a private swimming pool because someone had blackballed their membership bid. No-one had ever seen so many people leave a pool so quickly. They then turned the heating all the way up, broiled the piranha, and ate the lot. There was a metaphor for the Nightside in there somewhere, but I was too tired to work it out. Someone else had opened the wrong kind of book in the H. P. Lovecraft Memorial Library, and now there was a whole new building standing in the same place, the Linda Lovecraft Library of Spiritual Erotica. Explorers in protective suits were currently investigating the new contents. And something really unpleasant had possessed the lady news-reader of the local television station, on air, right in the middle of a broadcast. It had her saying really nasty and untruthful things for some time before anyone noticed. She had to be wrestled out of her seat and dragged off air, all the time speaking in tongues and swivelling her head round and round. Which is a really bad thing to do when you’re projectile vomiting something very like pea green soup. I had to smile. You’d think a Nightside television station would have enough sense to keep an exorcist on staff for emergencies like this. Some savings really are false economies.
On the other hand, apparently that particular news show boasted the highest ratings the station had ever known, and had already been nominated for several awards.
• • •
The black limousine moved smoothly out of the bad lands and into the mainstream traffic lanes. The roar of never-ending traffic embraced us immediately though hardly any of it got past the limo’s soundproofing. The usual mixture of unusual vehicles passed by on either side. Ambulances that ran on distilled suffering. Huge articulated trucks with no-one visible in the driver’s seat, carrying unknown goods to unknowable destinations. One of them had a big sign on the back, saying COMPLAIN ABOUT MY DRIVING. GO ON. I DARE YOU. And all kinds of cars, from a shocking pink souped-up Model T Ford, to an Edsel with tall, shiny fins and a radioactive back burner, to a 2020 Velociraptor Special, with a motor so powerful it rattled the fillings in my teeth as it shot past.
Most of the traffic had enough sense to give the black limousine plenty of room on the grounds that anything so obviously expensive was bound to have top-of-the-line armaments and protections; but something that only looked like a car moved quickly through the adjoining lanes to ease in alongside us. Up close, it quickly became apparent there was something seriously wrong with the car’s shape and details. All the windows were pure black, including the windscreen, the wheels didn’t turn, and the thing moved in sudden darts and rushes that would have had its passengers ricocheting around the interior. I drew Julien’s attention to whatever it was that was coming our way, but he didn’t seem particularly worried. The car thing lurched in close beside us, our two sides almost touching. The all-black window nearest us disappeared, and dozens of dark green arms ending in hooked and clawed hands shot out to attack our windows. They slammed to a halt against the glass and skittered angrily over it, unable to break or even scratch it.
“Bullet-proof, shatter-proof, waterproof,” said Julien, a bit complacently.
“Make a good watch,” I said, deliberately unimpressed.
The claws and hooks clattered in vain against the heavy glass, then all the arms snapped back into the car thing. The black window reappeared. The car thing cut its power and fell back behind us, taking up a position right on our bumper. Long machine-gun barrels protruded from its dully gleaming grill-work, and the car thing opened fire. Luckily, our rear windows were equally bullet-proof. The limousine hardly rocked at all under the impact. The blonde chauffeuse made an adjustment to something on her dash-board, and flame-throwers opened up from the back of the limousine. The car thing shrieked shrilly as terrible flames washed over it. The featureless exterior scorched and bubbled, charring and blackening like roasted flesh under the extreme heat. The car thing burned fiercely, then exploded. Bits of burning car flesh flew through the air, tumbling end over end, bouncing and splattering off the surrounding traffic.
“James Bond, eat your heart out,” said Julien Advent.
I couldn’t find it in my heart to feel sorry for the car thing. Some predators are too damned nasty for sympathy. The black limousine moved smoothly on through the night traffic, which treated us with a little more respect than before.
• • •
It took us a while to reach the Hospice of the Blessed Saint Margaret. The Nightside’s one and only hospital is located right on the outskirts, not far from the Necropolis. So that when things go wrong, they don’t have far to move the body. It also allows the rest of the Nightside population to feel that little bit more secure in case anything should escape. Or anyone. Julien made a series of important phone calls to the editorial desk of the Night Times, and I passed the time dozing on the back seat with my mouth open. Eventually, the black limousine eased to a halt, and I opened my eyes to find we were right in the middle of the Hospice car-park. The chauffeuse turned to address Julien, and he lowered the intervening glass panel.
“You want me to wait, chief?”
“No thank you, Gloria,” said Julien. “Hospital car-parks charge a fortune. You take some time off. I’ll call you if I need you.”
“Suits me, chief. Try not to pick up anything nasty in there. I’d hate to have to fumigate the car again.”
“Again?” I said, but Julien already had the back door open and was climbing out. I got out after him, and the moment I was clear, the back door slammed shut, and the limousine pulled quickly away. I hunched my shoulders inside my trench coat against the chill of the night air, and stood beside Julien while we looked the Hospice over from a safe distance. Despite having lived most of my very dangerous life in the Nightside, I’d never actually seen the Hospice before. Julien saw me frowning.
“Something wrong?”
“Don’t like hospitals,” I said bluntly. “They get on my nerves. And don’t even get me started on dentists. On bad days, I need a local anæsthetic, even to make an appointment.”
“Back in my old days, the hospital was where you went to die,” said Julien, reflectively. “In Victorian times, surgeons were butchers, survival rates were frankly t
errifying, and we had none of today’s wonder drugs. You had to be tough to survive a Victorian hospital. And don’t even get me started on the Elephant Man.”
The Hospice itself was a huge, bright, white-walled building, sweeping up into the night sky. Searchlights blazed from the roof, to guide in air ambulances, flying carpets and the occasional winged unicorn. They’d had a dragon drop in on the roof once, many years ago, and they’re still talking about it. Still trying to get the last bits of dragon dung out of the guttering, by all accounts. That was one sick dragon. All the windows were mirrored one-way glass, to ensure privacy and keep passers-by from seeing things that might upset them. The Hospice was named after the original Saint Margaret, who founded the place when she passed through the Nightside, many centuries ago.
“She didn’t stay long,” said Julien, when I tried to impress him with my limited knowledge. “We don’t get many saints in the Nightside, as a rule.”
“Gosh,” I said. “Imagine my surprise.”
“But she did hang around long enough to found a much-needed leper Hospice. She ran it herself, tending the lepers with her own hands, until she could find someone brave enough to take over; and then she couldn’t get out of the Nightside fast enough. The lepers didn’t bother her, but she felt contaminated by the general moral ambience. Which is fair enough. The Hospice evolved, through various fits and starts, into the Hospice you see before you, the most impressive and experienced of its kind. It deals with supernatural and super-science medical problems, and all the extreme and unnatural cases that inevitably occur in a free-thinking community like ours. It was either this, or fire-bombing whole areas of the Nightside on a regular basis. And don’t think that wasn’t discussed. The Hospice is supported by many good friends and grateful ex-patients, and even more people with a thoughtful eye to the future.”
“You still wouldn’t catch me dead in there,” I said solemnly.
“That joke was old when I was young,” Julien said crushingly.
• • •
We walked through the car-park and headed for the main front doors. We’d barely got half-way there before a whole bunch of heavily armed security people emerged suddenly from all sides to cover us. Some wore old military outfits, some wore specially adapted battle armour, and every single one of them kept their weapons trained very seriously on Julien and me. I looked casually around, careful to appear conspicuously unimpressed. All the security people had the same cold, focused, dangerous look. I knew who they were immediately. Who they had to be. A lot of them recognised me, and there was a lot of glancing around to find someone ready to make the first move. I could all but see the buck shifting in mid air. After a certain amount of glancing and muttering, they all carefully chose to point their weapons between me and Julien rather than directly at us.
Just so I wouldn’t feel too threatened.
They were all of them graduates of the Fortress, that heavily fortified refuge for people who had been abducted by aliens and were determined never to let that happen again. The Fortress contained more big guns, high explosives, and really nasty booby-traps than anywhere else in the Nightside. They have security cameras in every room and corridor, heavy-duty gun emplacements on the roof, and you’re never more than ten feet from a panic button. They have a stuffed and mounted Grey on display in their lobby, and you don’t even want to think about what they’ve done to the reptiloid on display.
(No relation to the Royal Family. None at all. Trust me on this.)
Of course, it turned out that Julien knew many of them by name, and they all relaxed a bit as he stopped to chat with them. I had heard the Fortress supplied security for the Hospice, but I hadn’t expected there to be quite so many of them. Or that they’d be so well-armed. A lot of them had attended the Hospice as patients—for psychiatric help, removal of implants, and the occasional bit of exploration to make sure no alien had left anything where the sun doesn’t shine. They’d been so impressed by the help and sympathy they’d received, they set up a rota for people to volunteer to help. They made very loyal, very dangerous guards. Exactly what the Hospice needed.
Julien asked a few vague questions about how the shift was going, and if they’d seen anything or anyone . . . unusual. He didn’t mention the Sun King by name, on the grounds of not wanting to start a panic if he didn’t have to. None of them had seen anything out-of-the-ordinary unusual. It was a quiet night, for once. The officer in charge turned up, an ex–sergeant major in the paratroops, with silver-grey hair and a thousand-light-year stare. He wore a battered flak jacket topped off with a bandolier of incendiary grenades. Any alien who tried to take him again was in for a really nasty surprise. He also wore a pair of specially tinted sunglasses, which he assured us allowed him to detect aliens trying to pass as human. I didn’t argue the point. This was the Nightside, after all, and he was holding the biggest gun I’d ever seen. In one hand.
“Why are there so many of you here?” I asked, to make it clear I was part of the conversation.
The ex-SM shrugged briefly. “Always some scumbag trying to break in, sir. Looking for drugs, equipment, magical shit. We show them no mercy. The good doctors keep telling us we’re allowed to bring them in alive; but we don’t believe in taking chances. Besides, the staff here have enough work on their hands without us adding to it with wounded scumbags. So we shoot their legs out from under them, double-tap them in the head, and everybody’s happy.”
“Keep up the good work,” I said, for want of anything else to say.
“Thank you, sir. Would you like an escort to the front doors?”
“We don’t want to draw attention,” Julien said smoothly.
“Then you shouldn’t have brought John bloody Taylor,” said a voice from the back. There was a certain amount of laughter in the ranks, until the ex-SM glared them all into silence. Julien and I made our way carefully through the security people and headed for the front doors. Some of them bowed to Julien, and some of them nodded to me, and they all kept a careful eye on us right up to the point where we reached the doors, in case we might get lost, on the way. I also heard the name Suzie Shooter mentioned, in quiet mutterings, followed by a lot of nervous looking about. The Fortress had bad memories of Shotgun Suzie’s occasional forced entrances into their building, on the trail of some runaway bounty. Nowhere was off limits to Suzie.
I slowed down as we approached the doors, and Julien looked at me questioningly. “I used to know someone who used to work here,” I explained. “Sister Morphine . . .”
“Ah yes,” said Julien. “I remember her. I wrote a few pieces about her, back in the day. She worked here for several years as a nurse before she had her crisis of faith, and decided it was more important to heal wounded souls than wounded bodies. You knew Sister Morphine, John? I didn’t know that.”
I nodded slowly. “She was there, in Rats’ Alley, when I was there. When I was down and out, just another of the homeless she tried to protect.”
“You don’t talk much about that part of your life,” said Julien.
“Would you?” I said. “Sister Morphine . . . was the kindest woman I ever knew. She looked after us all when we couldn’t look after ourselves, when no-one else gave a damn. She never preached, never held the Bible over us; but she was a great one for stories and parables. She lived with us, amongst us, as one of us. Sometimes we had to force her to eat, when what we could salvage from the Dumpsters and the back doors of restaurants wasn’t enough to go round. She always thought our needs were more important than hers.”
I didn’t tell Julien that when I thought of Sister Morphine now, mostly I thought about her death. A mob killed her, during the Lilith War. I saw it happen. I could have saved her, but I had other people to protect that I thought needed saving more. Because their lives were more important than hers. War does things like that to you. I’m sure she would forgive me, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t forgive me.
• • •
As we entered the Hospice lobby, it
quickly became apparent that this was yet another of those places that was bigger on the inside than the outside. It comes as standard in most of the Nightside, these days. The lobby was huge, breathtakingly so, stretching away before us. Julien and I stopped inside the doors to take a good look around. Everyone else ignored us, intent on their own problems.
“I am moved to wonder,” said Julien. “Given all the pocket-dimension buildings we have these days, whether there is in fact an upper limit to how much Time and Space can be contained within the Nightside, without something . . . giving.”
“We’d better hope not,” I said. “If all the containment spells were to let go at once, and all the space within the Nightside broke its barriers and rolled out into the standard three dimensions . . . the end result would probably cover most of London Proper. Always assuming, of course, that we’re actually contained within present-day London.”
“You don’t think we are?” said Julien.
“Look at the size of the moon,” I said.
“I’ve got something more immediately worrying for you to think about,” said Julien. “Before we can get to see Dr. Benway, we have to get past the receptionist.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I have a way with receptionists.”
“You can’t kill her!” Julien said immediately. “It would make a very bad first impression.”
“Oh ye of little faith,” I said.
I took a little more time to look around while I considered the situation. The lobby was white-walled, brightly lit, and spotlessly clean. And actually quite peaceful. Probably the only place in the Nightside that was. Marble pillars broke up the open space, and there were rows of comfortable chairs and couches for patients and visitors to sit on. Food and drink dispensers seemed to be providing food and drink of a kind that people were actually happy to consume, and pleasant classical music issued from concealed speakers. The air smelled of freshly cut grass and the scent of new-mown hay, all the sweet scents of a summer’s day. A nice change from most hospitals’ use of heavy disinfectant. Though, of course, both sets of smells were only there to cover up the same things: namely, the underlying, ever-present smells of blood and sickness, misery and mortality. Large notice-boards contained a great many overlapping messages, pleas and demands, and stern reminders that anyone who overstayed their welcome in the car-park could end up with several of their more important inner organs clamped.