“It isn’t here for people,” said Polly. Her face was full of an emotion I couldn’t read, her eyes blazing.
“Does it have a name?” I said.
“It’s old,” said Polly. “Names come and go, but the church remains. It is a place of power, and it has been here for a very long time. So long that people have forgotten who it was originally created to venerate and preserve.”
“The Lady of the Lake?” I said. “She’s here?”
“Help me open the dimensional gate, and you’ll see,” said Polly.
There were no guards, no protections to get past. The door wasn’t even locked, opening easily at Polly’s touch. There wasn’t actually a sign over the door saying Enter at Your Own Risk, but there might as well have been. I could feel all the hackles rising on the back of my neck as I followed Polly in.
The interior was no bigger or smaller than it should have been, an open, empty space surrounded by four stone walls, heavy with shadows, only the barest light seeping in through a narrow-slit window at the far end. No pews, no altar, just the open space. The air was still and uncomfortably warm, as though some great furnace were still operating down below. There was no sign anyone had been here in ages, but no dust either, or any sign of neglect.
Whatever might have been worshipped here in the past, it hadn’t been a good or a wholesome thing. I could feel it, in my bones and in my water. Bad things had happened here. The horror of them still vibrated on the air, like the echoes of a scream that never ended. I looked at Polly, but she seemed entirely unaffected by the atmosphere. She trotted happily down the length of the empty church, with me stumbling along in the gloom behind her, trying to look in all directions at once. She dropped suddenly to one knee, and her fingers scrabbled against the floor for a moment before finally closing around the metal ring of a large trap-door I would have sworn wasn’t there a moment before. The trap-door itself was solid metal and must have weighed half a ton, but she pulled it open easily with one hand before letting it fall back onto the stone floor. It landed hard, but even so, the echoes were strangely muted, as though the grim atmosphere was soaking up the sound. I looked at Polly, only a pale gleam in the gloom. There was no way a woman of her size could have handled that much weight so easily. I’d suspected she was keeping things from me, and now it seemed I was about to find out what.
Beneath the hole in the floor was a set of bare stone steps, leading down and down into darkness. Polly produced her Looking Glass and started down them without even looking to see if I was following. She knew I wouldn’t hang back, not now I’d come so far.
I followed Polly and her light down into the dark, and wasn’t at all surprised when the trap-door slammed shut again, over our heads.
The steps were rough and unmarked. The bare stone walls to either side were close enough to touch, hot enough to burn the fingers. The air was hot enough to bring a sheen of sweat to my face. I had to wonder exactly how far down we were going. My legs were aching from the strain of continuous descent when the stairway finally came to an end, and Polly stopped abruptly. She held up the Looking Glass, but its light couldn’t penetrate more than a few inches into the dark. She laughed lightly, made the Glass disappear, and snapped her fingers imperiously. A harsh light sprang up, illuminating a huge cavern dug out of the bedrock far beneath the Street of the Gods. It wasn’t any normal light; long streams of electrical fire crackled up and down the stone walls and crawled across the ceiling like living lightning. The fierce light hurt my eyes, but didn’t seem to bother Polly at all. She looked back at me, and smiled.
“What are you waiting for, sweetie? This is it. This is what you came here for. Come on down, Larry Oblivion, and claim your prize.”
She bestowed her most winning smile on me and batted her eye-lashes, but it looked grotesque now, clearly artificial, and practised. All of the attraction I once felt for her was gone, perhaps because I was seeing her clearly for the first time. But I went down to join her anyway. Because I’d come this far, and I wanted to know why. I wanted to know what treasure had been buried here if it wasn’t the Lady of the Lake. Polly took me by the hand, and my flesh actually crawled at her touch. I went with her, deep into the cavern, until finally she stopped, let go my hand, and indicated with a warm smile what she’d brought me all this way to see.
It hung on the wall before us, opened up and stretched out over twenty feet or more. I couldn’t tell whether it had been a man or a woman originally, but the guts and organs had been spread out and pinned to the stone with silver daggers. The skin had been stretched terribly without tearing, to make a background. The face had been expertly peeled from the skull, and extended so far I couldn’t recognise any features in it but the eyes, wide and gleaming and very aware. The whole thing was still alive, despite its state. That was the point. The suffering was fuel for the magic, feeding and maintaining the gateway that pulsed like an alien wound deep in the exposed guts of what had once been a man or a woman.
Not a dimensional gate. Not a dimensional gate at all. A hellgate. A doorway into Hell itself.
Awful sounds burst briefly from the gate, screams and howls and endless destruction.
“What is that?” I said. “Is that Hell?”
“No, sweetie,” Polly said happily. “That’s the future. That’s what the future will sound like, in the hell on Earth we’re going to make for all Humankind.”
We stood facing each other before the hellgate. Her smile was wide with anticipation, her face alive with enjoyment at the secret she’d kept from me, now to be revealed. I should have known it would end up like this. I’ve always had rotten luck with women.
And when you can’t see the patsy in the deal, it’s almost certainly you.
“So, Polly,” I said, calm as calm could be. “No Lady in the Lake, and the pretty face was just a come-on. So what’s the deal? What do you need a hellgate for?”
“Sometimes, the living can be cast down into Hell,” said Polly. “Damned to the Houses of Pain, forever. Unless you can send down a worthy replacement.”
“That’s why the scavenger hunt,” I said. “You didn’t need any of those things to open a hellgate. You wanted to test my mettle, see if I was ... worthy.”
“Exactly. I knew your reputation, but I needed to see you in action. After all, reputations are ten a penny in the Nightside. And the items we acquired will make a fine tribute for my long-lost mistress.”
“Who?” I said. My mouth was dry, though my face was streaming with sweat, and I had to clench my hands into fists to stop them trembling. “Who are you planning to raise up out of Hell?”
“Can’t you guess?” she said, and just like that she didn’t look like Polly Perkins any more, or anything human.
She was tall and supernaturally slender, her glowing skin pale as the finest porcelain. Her ears were long and pointed, and her eyes had slitted cat pupils. She wore a simple white shift with the arrogance of nobility and a necklace of human fingers. Delicate elven script had been branded in a straight line across her forehead. Just looking at her now roused a kind of arachnid revulsion in me. There’s nothing worse than something that looks like human, but isn’t.
“You’re an elf,” I said, and my voice sounded dull and defeated, even to me. “Never trust an elf.”
“Exactly,” she said, and her voice was rich and sweet and cloying, like poisoned honey. “You’re here to help me bring back our lost mistress, Queen Mab. Oldest and greatest of our kind, thrown down into Hell by the traitors Oberon and Titania. But any living thing damned to Hell can be rescued or redeemed by another living thing. One of the oldest rules there is .. She stopped, and looked at me, thoughtfully. ”I wonder if the same rule applies to Heaven? What sport, what joy, to drag a noble person back from Paradise! But that’s a thought for another day. Bye-bye, sweetie. Give my regards to the Inferno. It’s been fun; but now it’s over.“
She lunged at me while she was still speaking, moving inhumanly quickly, expecting to catch me off-b
alance. But I was ready for her. I had the wand. She’d been so caught up in her moment of triumph that she’d forgotten to take it from me. I said the Words, and the wand stopped Time. Polly hung in mid air before me, her elongated alien form suspended between one moment and the next. I looked at her for a while. Thinking of what might have been. We’d worked well together, and I had enjoyed her company. But I’m nobody’s patsy. So I took careful hold of her, turned her around in mid air so that she was facing the hellgate, and started Time up again.
She screamed, just once, as she saw what lay before her, then the gate sucked her in and sent her down, and she was gone while the echo of her scream still hung on the hot air. I looked at the hellgate, at the suffering human eyes in what had once been a human face, and thought about killing it. I knew how. I’d done it before. But to disrupt the hellgate while the transfer was still in progress could release unimaginable energies. I certainly wouldn’t survive it. Wand or no wand. I didn’t want to die, not while I still had so much life ahead of me ... So even though I knew what was coming, I waited and watched, as Queen Mab of the Fae returned to the world of the living. One of the old monsters, Humanity’s Ruin.
Something came rising up out of Hell. I could feel it, in the deepest part of what made me human. Something old and powerful, and huge beyond bearing, was rising up out of the dark latitudes, up from the Houses of Pain, forcing her way back into a natural world that wanted no part of her. Rising up, like a shark through bloody waters, like a tidal wave come to sweep away every living thing before it, up she came, Queen Mab, rising faster and faster. Coming at me like a meteor crashing to the Earth, like a bullet with my name on it.
Screaming in an ancient tongue, laughing horribly, swearing damnation and torment on all her many enemies; Queen Mab came back.
She stood before me in all her terrible glory. The hellgate lay in ruins on the wall behind her, incinerated by her passage through it, nothing now but small pieces of cooked meat pinned to the wall. The gate was closed, its victim released. That was something. Queen Mab fixed me with her fierce gaze, and I couldn’t have moved to save my life. She was eight feet tall, slender, graceful, overbearingly regal. Horribly abhuman and utterly evil. Her presence filled the cavern, and I knelt to her. I still like to think I had no choice.
“This place was once dedicated to me,” she said, and her voice was calm and casual, like a cat playing with a mouse. “Nice to know I haven’t been completely forgotten. And I have been brought back by a human through the sacrifice of an elf. Love the irony. You can keep the wand, for now. Never let it be said Queen Mab failed to reward her servant. But now I’m back, and must be about my business.”
She laughed, and I wanted to vomit.
“Ah, the things I’ll do, now I’m back.”
I never told anyone, Who could I tell? Who would believe it wasn’t my fault?
FIVE
Everybody’s Talking at Me
I listened to Larry’s story without interrupting, then offered him my glass of Valhalla Venom again. He all but grabbed it out of my hand and knocked the stuff back in several large gulps. There are times when a stiff drink isn’t just traditional ; it’s a psychological necessity. The vicious liquor didn’t seem to affect Larry at all; presumably being dead helped. We both sat silently for a while, each of us considering our own thoughts. A lot of Larry’s story had struck home with me. I knew how it felt to be trampled on and used by greater powers.
“I could have stopped her,” Larry said finally. “I could have stopped Queen Mab coming through if I’d been willing to die to do it. But I wasn’t.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“I never will, now. Through my weakness, or at best my hesitation, I let one of the old monsters back into the world. And now I’m dead, Heaven and Hell seem a lot closer. I can’t just lie down and let go; I don’t dare. My only hope is atonement ; and for now that means finding Tommy. Are you in?”
I thought about it. Several things in his story had struck me forcefully. There were an awful lot of elves in the Nightside recently. Far more than usual. And then there were the Arthurian elements; did Polly Perkins pick them at random to lure Larry in? Or could they be linked to Puck’s warning about Excalibur? Something was going on. But then, this is the Nightside. Something’s always going on.
To unravel a mess, pull on any strand. So Tommy it was.
“I’ll help you find out what happened to Tommy,” I said. “But all I can offer is the truth. Don’t blame me if you don’t like what I find.”
“That’s what I always say to my clients,” said Larry. “Only I usually put it a little more tactfully.”
We managed a small smile for each other. We were never going to be close; but we could work together.
Then the whole bar went quiet. Conversations ceased, laughter and tears died away, and the piped music stopped so fast it briefly went into reverse. Heads turned and craned, and not a few lowered themselves and hoped not to be noticed. The whole bar seemed to be holding its breath because Walker had arrived.
He hadn’t bothered with his usual slow descent of the metal steps, to let everyone know he was coming and make a grand entrance. He simply appeared suddenly out of nowhere, standing right there in the middle of the bar, leaning casually on his furled umbrella, smiling easily about him. Most of the clientele avoided meeting his eyes, not wanting to draw attention to themselves. Because if Walker was on the scene, it meant someone was in trouble; and given that Walker moves in more mysterious ways than half the Beings on the Street of the Gods, it might just be you. Walker was infamous for knowing things he shouldn’t and doing something horribly punitive about it—pour discourager les autres.
And whatever he does, no-one ever protests. Because he’s Walker.
But there’s always one, isn’t there? Someone always has to learn the hard way. In this case, it was one of Black Betty’s overmuscled goons. She always had half a dozen or so on a leash in case she met a customer. This particular goon decided he was going to impress his mistress, so he stepped forward to face Walker, flexing his steroid-abused muscles in what he clearly thought was a threatening way. Walker considered him thoughtfully. A wise man would have taken the hint and run, but not the goon.
“You’re upsetting my mistress, little man,” said the goon. “Disappear.”
Walker smiled, just a little. “Shit yourself.”
He used the Voice, which commands everyone who hears it, and the goon made a sudden low sound of distress. Quickly accompanied by other, less pleasant sounds. Black Betty pulled a face and dropped his leash. The goon turned away from Walker, slowly and carefully, and trudged miserably off to the toilets. People he passed by wished he hadn’t. The bar as a whole decided the safest thing to do was act as if Walker wasn’t there. Heads turned away, conversations resumed, and the piped music returned. I noticed the bar’s muscular bouncers, Betty and Lucy Coltrane, lurking in the background, ready to give their all at a moment’s notice; but Alex had more sense. He gave Walker his best glare, then busied himself polishing some glasses that didn’t need polishing.
Walker looked unhurriedly about him, taking his time. No-one was fooled by his calm exterior. Walker was always dangerous, even when he was being polite. Perhaps especially then. And, of course, in the end he spotted me, walked over to my booth, and smiled charmingly.
“Hello, John. Can I have a word? It is rather urgent.”
“You’ve got a nerve,” I said. “Just a few hours ago you were doing your best to have me killed.”
“It’s what I do,” said Walker. “Nothing personal, John. You should know that by now.”
“I’ve already taken a case,” I said. “Find someone else to do your dirty work.”
“This isn’t about work. This is personal.”
I sighed. Clearly I wasn’t going to get rid of Walker until I’d listened to what he had to say. I looked at Larry, spreading my hands in a What can you do? gesture.
“You go on ah
ead. I’ll join up with you outside the Cheyne Walk Underground Station, as soon as I can. That’s the last place I saw Tommy alive.”
Larry nodded and rose to his feet, then looked at Walker challengingly. “I’m Larry Oblivion. Do you have anything to say to me?”
Walker looked at him thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think so. Not for the moment.”
“Don’t think you can intimidate me, Walker. I’m dead.”
Walker smiled. “You, of all people, should know that death isn’t the worst thing that can happen. When I want you, I’ll come for you.”
Larry turned his back on Walker and strode out of the bar, his back straight and his head held high. And perhaps only Walker and I knew he was running away. Which is often the best way to deal with Walker. Just head for the nearest horizon the moment you spot him. I gestured resignedly to the empty seat, and Walker sat down opposite me, his every movement elegance and grace personified. He stood his umbrella on end beside his chair, took off his bowler hat and placed it carefully on the table before him, and casually adjusted his old-school tie. In anyone else these would have been mere habitual gestures; but Walker was quietly reminding me where his authority came from. Walker wasn’t part of the System; he was the System.
“Would you care for a drink?” I said, gesturing at the Valhalla Venom with malice aforethought.
Walker studied the bottle without touching it and raised an eyebrow briefly. “Ah, yes ... I wondered what had become of that. The steward at my club tried to persuade me to try some, but I had more sense. That stuff could eat holes in your kirlian aura. But you go right ahead, John. Don’t let me put you off.”
I pushed the bottle and glass to one side. “What do you want, Walker?”
He sighed slightly, as though disappointed by my lack of subtlety. “I understand you’ve learned my little secret, John. Yes; it’s true. I’m dying. And no, there’s nothing that can be done. We all die of something. All that’s left to me is to make arrangements for what will happen afterwards.”