The Unnatural Inquirer (2 page)

“No,” Walker said immediately. “Partly because the loa will cause havoc looking for him. Like most gods, they can be very single-minded when it comes to revenge. It’s already become clear they aren’t following standard bounty hunter etiquette and allowing informers to live after they’ve informed. But mostly I want Max back in my hands because the Nightside takes care of its own problems. Can’t let outsiders think they can just walk in here and throw their weight around.”

He stopped abruptly, and Suzie and I stopped with him. He took an old-fashioned gold repeater watch from his waistcoat-pocket, checked the time, put it away, and gave me a measuring look.

“Don’t screw this up, John. I’m under a lot of pressure to get this done quickly, efficiently, and with no loose ends. That’s why I’m handing this case over to you instead of just flooding the Nightside with my own people. If you can’t locate Max, and the Key, within the next three hours, I’ll have no choice but to unleash my dogs of war, which will make me very unpopular in all sorts of areas. So don’t let me down, John, or I shall be sure to blame it all on you.”

Suzie looked at him steadily, and give the man credit, Walker didn’t flinch.

“You come for him,” Suzie said coldly, “you come for me.”

“Sooner or later, I come for everyone,” said Walker.

“Under pressure?” I said thoughtfully, and he looked back at me. I grinned right into his calm, collected face. “From whom, precisely? Whom do you serve, now the Authorities are all dead and gone?”

But he just smiled briefly, nodded to me, and tipped his bowler hat to Suzie, then turned and walked away, disappearing unhurriedly back into the night.

Suzie Shooter and I went to the Spider’s Web. A sort of up-market cocktail bar, owned by Max Maxwell ever since he had its previous owner killed, stuffed, mounted, and put on display; it was widely known as his seat of power, where he did business with the poor unfortunates who came before him. By the time we got there, the place had already been very thoroughly trashed. Bits of it were still smouldering. Suzie drew her pump-action shotgun from its rear holster with one easy movement and led the way as we entered through the kicked-in front door.

The lobby was wrecked, with bodies everywhere. None of them had died easily. Blood had soaked into the carpet, splashed up the walls, and even stained the ceiling. Severed hands had been piled up in one corner, and all the heads were missing their faces. Suzie and I moved slowly and cautiously between the bodies, but nothing moved. The furniture looked like it had exploded.

Max Maxwell’s inner office at the back of the club didn’t look much better. No blood or bodies, though, which suggested Max had got out in time. A pack of tarot cards had been left scattered across the top of a huge mahogany desk, which had been cracked casually in half. Thick mats of ivy crawled across all four walls, reportedly part of Max’s early-warning system; but every bit of it was dead, withered away as though blasted by a terrible frost. Here and there, something had gouged deep claw-marks through the ivy and into the wood beneath. The bare floor was covered with cabalistic symbols, a whole series of overlapping defence systems.

A lot of good they’d done.

“This man had to be seriously worried to have so many protections in one place,” said Suzie.

“He had good reason,” I said. “Gods really don’t like it when worshippers start forgetting their place and flexing their muscles.”

I fired up my gift, and the world changed around me. I couldn’t use my gift to pin down Max’s current location; I need a specific question to get a specific answer. But there’s more than one way to find someone who doesn’t want to be found. I opened up my inner eye, my third eye, and Saw the world as it really is. There’s a lot going on around us that most people aren’t aware of, and it’s probably just as well. If they knew who and what we share this world with, an awful lot of them would probably rip their own heads off rather than see it.

There were things in the office with us, drifting on currents unknown to mortal men, filling the aether like the tiny creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. And just as ugly. I focused my gift, concentrating on Max Maxwell, and his ghost image appeared before me—his past, imprinted on Time.

Max was just as big as everyone said he was. A giant of a man, huge and looming even in this semi-transparent state. Eight feet tall, and impressively broad across the chest and shoulders, he wore an impeccably cut cream-coloured suit, presumably chosen to contrast with the deep black of his harsh, craggy face. He looked like he’d been carved out of stone, a great brooding gargoyle in a Saville Row suit. He was scowling fiercely, his huge dark hands clenched into fists.

He stamped silently around his office, as though looking for something. He didn’t seem scared, or even concerned. Simply angry. He unlocked a drawer in his desk and brought out something wrapped in a blood-red cloth. He made a series of signs over the bundle and then unwrapped it, revealing a bulky square contraption made up of dully shining metal pieces joined together in a way that made my eyes hurt to look at it. The Aquarius Key, presumably. It looked like a prototype, something that hadn’t had all the bugs hammered out of it yet.

Max weighed the thing thoughtfully in one oversized hand, then looked round sharply, as though he’d heard something he didn’t like. He gestured grandly with his free hand, and all the cabalistic signs on the floor burst into light. The ivy on the walls writhed and twisted, as though in pain. One by one, the lines on the floor began to gutter and go out. Max headed for the door.

I went after him, Suzie right there at my side. She couldn’t see what I was Seeing, but she trusted me.

In as much as she trusted anyone.

We tracked Max Maxwell’s ghost half-way across the Nightside. I had to fight to concentrate on his past image. When my inner eye is cranked all the way open, I can See all there is to See in the Nightside, and a lot of it the human mind just isn’t equipped to deal with. The endlessly full moon hung low in the star-speckled sky, twenty times the size it should have been. Something with vast membranous wings sailed across the face of the moon, almost eclipsing it. The buildings around us blazed with protective signs, magical defences, and shaped curses scrawled across the storefronts like so much spitting and crackling graffiti. A thousand other ghosts stamped and raged and howled silently all around me, memories trapped in repeating loops of Time, like insects in amber.

Dimensional travellers flashed and flared in and out of existence, just passing through on their way to somewhere more interesting. Demons rode the backs of unsuspecting souls, their claws dug deep into back and shoulder muscles, whispering in their host’s ear. You could always tell which ones had been listening; their demons were particularly fat and bloated. Wee winged sprites, pulsing with light, shot up and down the street, fierce as fireworks, buzzing around and above each other in intricate patterns too complex for human eyes. And the Awful Ones, huge and ancient, moved through our streets and buildings as though they weren’t even there, about their unguessable business.

I kept my head down, focused on Max Maxwell, and Suzie saw to it that no-one bothered me or got in our way. She had her shotgun out and at the ready, and no-one ever doubted that she’d use it. Suzie had always been a great believer in the scorched-earth solution for all problems, great and small.

Max led us right through the centre of the Nightside, and out the other side, and I had a bad feeling I knew where he was headed. Bad as the Nightside undoubtedly is, even it has its recognised Bad Places, places you simply don’t go if you’ve got any sense. One of these is Fun Faire. It was supposed to be the Nightside’s very first amusement park, for adults. Someone’s Big Idea; but it never caught on. The people who come to the Nightside aren’t interested in artificial thrills; not when there are so many of the real thing available on every street corner. Fun Faire was shut down years ago, and the only reason it’s still taking up valuable space is because the various creditors are still arguing over who owns what. Now, it’s just a collection of huge rusting rides, great hulking structures left to rot in the cold, uncaring night.

Last I’d heard, they’d run through fourteen major league exorcists, merely trying to keep the place quiet.

Max had chosen Fun Faire as his bolt-hole precisely because so many bad things had happened there. So much death and suffering, so much cheerful slaughter and infernal malice, had turned the Fun Faire grounds into one big psychic null spot. The genius loci had become so awful, so soaked in blood and terror, that no-one could See into it. Which made it a really good place to hide out, for as long as you could stand it.

Suzie and I stopped at the amusement park entrance, and stood there, looking in. Max’s ghost image had snapped off the moment he walked through the main archway. I shut down my Sight. The great multi-coloured arch loomed above us, paint peeling and speckled with rust. The old neon letters along the top that had once blazed the words FUN FAIRE! to an unsuspecting public were now cracked and dusty and lifeless. Someone had spray-painted over them ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. Graveyard humour, but I had to admire their nerve. Beyond the archway it was all dark shapes and darker shadows, the metal bones of old rides standing out in stark silhouettes against the night sky. No lights, anywhere in Fun Faire. Only the uneasy shimmering blue-white glare of the full moon, marking out the paths between the rides. A glowing maze, where the monster wasn’t trapped in the centre any more. A slow breeze issued out of the arch, pressing against my face, cold as the grave.

Bad things had happened here, and perhaps were still happening, on some level. You can’t kill that many people, spill that much blood, delight in that much suffering and slaughter, and not leave a stain on Time itself.

It all started out so well. The Fun Faire did have its share of unusual, high-risk, high-excitement attractions. Just the thing to tempt the jaded palates of Nightside aesthetes. Or perhaps even the worst of us need to play at being children again, just for a while. So, the Dodgems of Doom could hit Mach 2 and came equipped with mounted machine-guns. The planes on the Tilt-A-Wheel had heat-seeking missiles and ejector seats. The Ghost Train was operated by real ghosts, the Tunnel of Love by a real succubus. The roller coaster guaranteed to rotate you through at last five different spatial dimensions or your money back. And the candy floss came treated with a hundred and one different psychotropic drugs.

But eventually someone noticed that though an awful lot of people were going into Fun Faire, a significant percentage weren’t coming out again.

And then it all went to Hell.

No-one’s too sure what started it. Best guess is someone put a curse on the place, for whatever reason. The first clue that something was severely wrong came when the wooden horses on the Merry-Go-Round became possessed by demons and started eating their riders. The Tilt-A-Wheel speeded itself up and sent its mock planes shooting off into space. They didn’t fly far. The roller coaster disappeared into another dimension, taking its passengers with it, and never returned. Distorted reflections burst out of the distorting mirrors and ran amok, killing everyone they could get their hands on.

Screams came out of the Ghost Train, and even worse screams out of the Tunnel of Love. The I-Speak-Your-Weight machines shouted out people’s most terrible inner secrets. The Clown that never stopped laughing escaped from his booth and strode through Fun Faire, ripping off people’s heads and hanging them from his belt. Still laughing. The customers ran for the exit. Some made it out.

The Authorities sealed off Fun Faire, so nothing inside could get out, and soon the whole place was dark and still and silent. No-one volunteered to go in and check for survivors, or bring out the dead. The Nightside isn’t big on compassion.

The owners, and then their creditors, turned to priests and exorcists, air strikes and high explosives, and none of it did any good. Fun Faire had become a Bad Place, and most people had enough sense to stay well clear of it. But, this being the Nightside, there were always those brave enough or stupid enough to use it as a hiding place, secure in the knowledge that only the most desperate pursuers would even think of coming in after them.

I looked at Suzie. “Fancy a stroll around? Check out all the fun of the fair?”

“Why not?” said Suzie.

We strode through the archway, shoulder to shoulder, into the face of the gusting breeze. It was bitterly cold inside the Faire, and the silence had a flat, oppressive presence. Our footsteps didn’t echo at all. The rides and attractions loomed up around us, dark skeletal structures, and the rounded, almost organic shapes of the tattered tents and concession stands. We stuck to the middle of the moonlit paths. The shimmering light couldn’t seem to penetrate the shadows. Here and there, things moved, always on the edge of my vision. Perhaps moved by the gusting wind, which seemed to be growing in strength. Suzie glared about her, shotgun at the ready. It might have been the oppressive nature of the place getting to her, or it might not. Suzie always believed in getting her retaliation in first.

We passed an old-fashioned I-Speak-Your-Weight machine, and I stopped and regarded it thoughtfully.

“I know a guy who collects these,” I said, deliberately casual. “He’s trying to teach them to sing the ‘Halleluiah Chorus.’”

“Why?” said Suzie.

“I’m not sure he’s thought that far ahead,” I admitted.

And then we broke off, as the machine stirred slowly into life before us. Parts moved inside it, grinding against each other, even though neither of us had stepped on it; and the voice-box made a low, groaning sound, as though it was in pain. The flat painted face lit up, sparking fitfully. And in a voice utterly devoid of humanity, or any human feeling, the machine spoke to us.

“John Taylor. No father, no mother. No family, no friends, no future. Hated and feared, never loved, or even appreciated. Why don’t you just die and get it over with?”