The Bride Wore Black Leather

  The rows and rows of chairs were packed with people waiting to be seen. Men and women and children, and here and there some individuals who were none of the above and never would be. All of them troubled with wounds and fevers, exotic STDs and partial transmogrifications. A man with his hand stuck somewhere very embarrassing, a hunchback whose hump had slipped, a cyborg with Tourette’s who kept shouting out long strings of binary numbers, and someone whose grip on reality was so weak he kept fading in and out. Half a dozen winged monkeys dressed as cleaners pushed mops and buckets around, labouring to deal with the usual spills of blood, urine, and vomit, and one small but worrying pool of molecular acid.

  Typical night, in the Nightside A&E. I even overheard the traditional interplay between a nurse and a patient.

  Patient: Nurse, it hurts when I do this.

  Nurse: Then don’t do that.

  Patient: I am going to have to kill you now.

  Nurse: I quite understand.

  It’s good to know some people are still ready to keep up the old traditions.

  Right over to one side was a miraculous spring, a large pool of murky water contained within a low stone wall. It was supposed to have amazing curative properties, but only as long as you had faith, real faith, enough to make it work. And real faith has always been hard to come by in the Nightside. One very determined mother was holding her son by the ankle and dunking him in the pool, over and over again. Between a lot of sputtering, the boy could be heard saying; I feel much better! Honest! Look will you please stop this I think I’m developing gills!

  Interesting and entertaining as all this was, Julien and I finally had no choice but to give our full attention to the receptionist at the desk. It was a really pleasant-looking reception desk, with vases of fresh flowers, neat and tidy in and out trays, and an absolute minimum of clutter . . . but I wasn’t fooled. I could See the industrial-strength magical protections hanging on the air, and the built-in weapons systems.

  The receptionist herself was a large matronly figure in a spotless white uniform (that reminded me immediately of the Very Righteous Sisters). She had a pleasant face, cold and unsympathetic eyes, and a mouth like a steel trap. You know the sort; mother was a pit bull, father was a velociraptor. Don’t ask me what they ever saw in each other; but it can get very foggy on the moors. She waited to the very last moment to look up from her form-filling and stop Julien and me in our tracks with a stern warning gaze. She recognised Julien Advent immediately and favoured him with a brief nod. And then she looked at me, recognised me, and one hand moved quickly to a large red emergency button. She gave me a brief, meaningless smile.

  “Tell me where it hurts, don’t bleed on the floor, fill in these forms, and take a number.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Julien. “Neither of us is in need of medical attention. We are here to speak with Dr. Benway.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible,” the receptionist said immediately. “Not without an advance appointment. Dr. Benway is very busy, and I won’t have her bothered. I can book you in for an appointment, but I should warn you there’s a three-week waiting gap. Minimum. If that’s not acceptable, take a number and get to the back of the queue, like everyone else.”

  “I am Julien Advent, representing the Authorities. This is John Taylor, the new Walker. It is vital that we see Dr. Benway immediately!”

  The receptionist indulged herself with a harsh sniff, to show how unimpressed she was. “No queue-jumping. We don’t care who you are, here.”

  “But this is urgent!” said Julien. “Vital, I tell you! The safety of the entire Nightside itself is at risk!”

  “Save your breath,” said the receptionist. “I’ve heard it all before. Are you actually dying? Bleeding out? Missing a major organ?”

  “We’re not,” I said. “But you could be. You know me; you know what I can do. So stop pissing me off, or I’ll send your spleen to Mars.”

  I gave her my most cheerful smile. The receptionist opened her mouth to say something, looked me in the eye, then thought better of it. Her hand hovered over the red button, then moved away. She sighed, in her best put-upon way, and reached for the phone.

  “If you two gentlemen will give me a moment, I’ll ask Dr. Benway if she can make time to see you. But I’m not promising anything!”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Why break the habit of a lifetime?”

  “Stop it . . .” murmured Julien. “She’ll turn nasty in a moment.”

  The receptionist got through to Dr. Benway, spoke quietly for a moment, and listened. She nodded, put the phone down, and gave Julien and me a wintry smile.

  “Dr. Benway will see you; but she is very busy right now. So you’ll have to wait. With everyone else.”

  Julien grabbed me forcefully by the arm and hauled me away from the reception desk. It took a while to find a couple of seats together, in the very crowded waiting area, and as far away from the more obviously infectious and messy people, but when we finally sank down into the chairs, they really were very comfortable.

  “I think we won that encounter on points,” I said. “All right, we still have to wait, but we didn’t have to take a number.”

  “Would you really have . . . ?” said Julien.

  “Almost certainly,” I said. “I have deep-seated problems with authority figures.”

  “But you are one!”

  “I know! I can only assume the universe has a really mean sense of humour.”

  • • •

  We sat, and waited. People came and went, many sobbed and whimpered and read out-of-date magazines, but the size of the waiting crowd never seemed to change much. Julien stared patiently off into the distance, tapping one foot in a thoughtful manner. I recognised the signs. He’d already decided exactly how much time he was going to allow Dr. Benway; and then he was going to go and look for her himself. And God help anyone who got in his way. I’d never seen Julien walk right over a receptionist before. I was quite looking forward to it. Reassured at the prospect of loud and nasty unpleasantness in the near future, I killed time by studying the long list of wards, and their particular areas of expertise, laid out on an old-fashioned wooden wall plaque. They were all carefully numbered, but a lot of the descriptions were in Greek and Latin. I nudged Julien in the ribs and drew his attention to the dead languages. He gave me a long-suffering look.

  “In my young days, we were all taught Latin and Greek at school.”

  “Was that before or after they shoved you up chimneys or down the mines?” I said.

  Julien sighed, heavily, and translated the various descriptions for me. With rather more hesitations and uncertainty than you’d expect from someone who was supposed to have had a first-class private education. But after a while he got interested and started a running commentary on what each new description implied.

  “Here at the Hospice, they deal with all the more unusual medical problems and conditions of the Nightside. Resulting in some very specialised care and services. There are doctors here to take off curses, put souls or identities back where they came from, reverse transformations, and undo teleport pod mishaps. They can restore kirlian fields and retune your chakras. Can’t say I really approve of all this New Age stuff, but you can’t ignore alternative medicine these days. Fortunately, I don’t see anything here about crystals or flower aromatherapy, or I would have to say something very unfortunate. There are wards here for every need and speciality, including every kind of species you can think of. The Hospice doesn’t discriminate. And then, of course, there’s Ward 12A, though most people don’t like to talk about that.”

  “Why not?” I said immediately. “What goes on in Ward 12A?”

  Julien pressed on, deliberately ignoring my question. “There are wards for unicorns who need reshoeing with pure silver hooves, and for werewolves with the mange. I understand Leo Morn’s a martyr to it, in the winter months. For vampires who’ve made themselves ill by drinking the wrong blood group: Rhesus intolerant. And,
of course, a ward to treat all the rare and nasty diseases that will keep turning up in the Nightside through Timeslips: from the Past and any number of unfortunate futures. You really don’t want to know about the Plague Ward, John.”

  He carried on, talking with increasing enthusiasm, extolling the many virtues of the Hospice, genuinely proud of all the incredible services its staff could provide. Often only because of his vigorous fund-raising though, of course, he never mentioned that bit. He talked at length of the giant spiders who lived in the basement, spinning bandages, and the ghouls who were bused in every day to eat the medical waste, and the occasional body too toxic to dispose of in a normal manner. Or too tough to burn. A ghoul’s digestion can handle anything, up to and including nuclear waste. Though you really don’t want to be around them when they fart.

  And, sometimes, ghouls would be called in to deal with certain bodies that were too dangerous to be buried. Any villain who ever said I’ll be back! as he went to his death at the hands of a triumphant hero . . . never met a Nightside ghoul. But I couldn’t help noticing that Julien was saying most of this to cover up the fact that he didn’t want to talk about Ward 12A. I mused on this while noticing that all of the porters, including those pushing patients around in wheel-chairs, were actually very familiar-looking cat-faced robots. I pointed this out to Julien as a matter of urgency, but he just nodded easily.

  “I know,” he said. “The Authorities bought them at auction, from one of the vaults discovered after the Collector’s death. We donated them to the Hospice. Mark always did have a fondness for this particular kind of automaton, brought back from some future iteration of China, I believe. You don’t have to worry, John; they’ve all been very thoroughly reprogrammed to serve and protect the patients.”

  I decided I was still going to keep a very careful eye on them. These robots, or some very like them, had tried very hard to kill Suzie and me when they worked for the Collector. In fact, I was almost sure some of them were keeping a careful eye on me. I caught a number of cat-featured heads turning away the moment I looked at them. To take my mind off this, Julien pointed out that many of the nurses working in the Hospice were actually probationary nuns, from the Salvation Army Sisterhood. That got my attention. The SAS were the most hard core, extreme Christian Sect in the Nightside. Certainly not anyone you’d want to argue with when they said you needed an enema. Apparently probationary Sisters were sent here to put their faith to the test and to harden them up. Before they could join the Sisterhood proper and go forth to smite the ungodly where it hurt.

  And then suddenly the lobby was full of sirens, bells, flashing red lights, screams and shouts and people yelling at each other. Julien was up on his feet immediately, looking quickly round for people to help and evil to fight. I was still struggling to get to my feet, and looking around for anything that might be coming my way. Everyone else was heading for the front doors, with great speed and determination. Including security people, reception staff, nurses, and robots helping patients, and absolutely everyone in the waiting area. Many of them showed a remarkable turn of speed, considering how ill they were supposed to be. I looked at Julien, to ask whether or not we should be leaving, too, but he was busy looking around to see where the fire was. Or possibly the attack. I grabbed a passing nurse by the arm, and she nearly pulled me over before I brought her to a halt. She was a big girl. Her arm muscle bulged dangerously under my hand, but then the probationary nun recognised who I was and settled for jerking her arm out of my grip.

  “What’s going on?” I yelled at her, over all the sirens and alarums.

  “Red Alert!” she yelled back at me. “Major Emergency and Get the Hell Out! Look, it’s Ward 12A, you idiot! If you’re not going to run, get out of the way of a nun who can!”

  In an instant, she was off and running again, not even looking back. I turned to look at Julien, only to find that he was off and running, too, but heading in the opposite direction, deeper into the Hospice. I looked round the deserted lobby, sighed deeply, and went after him. Thinking, That man will be the death of me, one day. I knew he was going to Ward 12A to see if he could help anyone and put down whatever trouble had broken out there. Because he was still the Great Victorian Adventurer, and that was what he did. And if he was going, I had to go as well. Because that was the trouble with Julien Advent; he made you be a better person, in spite of yourself, if only because you couldn’t stand to let him down.

  • • •

  We pounded through the Hospice corridors, following the signs on the walls that pointed the way to Ward 12A. We passed a hell of a lot of people going the other way, running as though the Devil himself was hot on their heels. Many of them looked at us incredulously and yelled for us to get out while we still had a chance. Julien kept going, so I had to go on, too. And, of course, along the way we ran into Dr. Benway herself, also heading for Ward 12A. I only knew it was her because Julien actually said her name out loud and smiled with something very like relief. Dr. Benway nodded briefly to Julien and kept going, too.

  We soon caught up with her. Benway was a short, stick-thin figure in the usual white doctor’s coat. She had flat grey hair, cropped short in a functional way, and a hard-set face, lined with all the marks of a long, busy life, filled with more losses than successes. Her eyes were a cool, thoughtful grey, and her mouth was set in a thin, flat line. She looked strong and capable, someone you’d be glad to have around in a crisis. If only she wasn’t leading you right into the heart of it.

  “Good to see you again, Julien,” Benway said brusquely, looking straight ahead as she ran. “We can use all the help we can get.” She glanced at me. “Even him.”

  “You’ve heard of me,” I said reproachfully. “And you know Julien Advent personally. What a surprise.”

  “I know everyone,” said Julien. He wasn’t even breathing hard, the bastard. “How else do you think I know everything?”

  “I know a lot of people, too,” I said.

  “Ah yes,” said Julien. “But you know people like Dead Boy and Razor Eddie, while I know people who matter.”

  “Shut up and run,” said Benway. “Save your breath and your strength. You’re going to need them.”

  She actually increased her speed, racing along with her arms pumping at her sides, sprinting through the deserted Hospice corridors with a turn of speed that was frankly astonishing in a woman who had to be well into her sixties. She darted in and out of a series of short cuts, ignoring the directions on the walls, and soon I hadn’t a clue where I was. The corridors were starting to remind me uncomfortably of the hedgerow maze. But I knew when we were finally getting close to Ward 12A because I started to hear things. From up ahead of us, to every side, and, even more worryingly, behind us, I heard a series of heavy, slamming sounds.

  “That’s the steel security doors dropping down into place,” said Dr. Benway. “Sealing off the corridors. No-one in, no-one out, until this mess is sorted, and the danger is over. If all the security doors are dropped, that means all the patients who can be moved have been; so we’re pretty much alone in here, with the problem.”

  “What about the patients who couldn’t be moved?” said Julien. Typical of the man, to be concerned with innocents even as he raced into danger.

  “They’ll have to take their chances,” Benway said curtly. “They’re under guard; God bless the Fortress. Concentrate on what’s ahead of us, Julien. If we can’t bring this under control quickly, we could lose the whole Hospice.”

  “What is ahead of us?” I said, not unreasonably, I thought. “What the hell has happened in Ward 12 bloody A?”

  “Something got loose,” said Benway, in a voice like the end of the world.

  • • •

  We rounded a final corner, and there at the end of the corridor before us was a heavily reinforced steel door, marked simply: 12A. Two young men in white doctor’s coats were barricading the door with everything they could get their hands on. Furniture, medical trolleys, even a Hot Drink
s! Machine that they were man-handling into place. They suddenly realised they weren’t alone. Their heads snapped round, and they both let out girlish shrieks of alarm. They started to run, only to stop immediately as Dr. Benway yelled at them.

  “Dr. Burke! Dr. Rabette! Stand right where you are!”

  And they did. They turned immediately to look at her, ignoring Julien and me, as the three of us finally came to a halt before the door to Ward 12A. I had black spots dancing before my eyes, my ribs ached, and I had to lean against a wall while I concentrated on getting my breath back. Julien breathed deeply a few times, then strolled forward to observe the barricaded door with a keen interest. Dr. Benway put her hands on her hips and rotated her back a few times. I heard bones creak and crack. She glared at the two young doctors standing uneasily before her, then glared at me.

  “These two young fools are supposed to be in charge here. On the grounds that I can’t do everything myself. Talk to me, Burke, Rabette! What’s the situation?”

  The two young doctors looked at each other guiltily. The older of the two was barely into his midtwenties, and they both looked shocked as well as scared as they glanced at the barricaded door. Finally, the older one, Burke, swallowed hard.

  “The door is locked and sealed. It can’t get out. But we can’t go in there! It’s too dangerous! Who are these two?”