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But somehow the dream doesn't quite die. Because in the Nightside, sometimes dreams are all that can keep you going. Give them up, and you're dead.
Growing up in the Nightside, I saw a lot of dead men walking about. They could walk and talk and go through the motions, drifting from bar to bar and from drink to drink, but there was nothing left behind their eyes. Nothing that mattered. My father was a dead man for years, long before his heart finally, mercifully, gave out, and they nailed the coffin lid down. I couldn't help him. I was only a kid.
My gift didn't kick in until much later. A gift I could use, to make a difference. For other people, if not myself.
In the safe nowhere nothing that surrounded and comforted me, gentle waves of love and affection lapped against my mind, wanting me to forget all that. To forget everything but an eternal now of love and happiness, an end to all wanting and needing, and a rest that would never end. A quiet murmuring voice promised me I could have everything I ever wanted; all I had to do was lie back and accept, and give up the fight. But I didn't believe the voice. Because the only thing I really wanted had already been taken from me, when the house took Joa
sneered at it. Because underneath the voice I could still hear the endless, insatiable hunger.
My dreams. My reality. I clung to them like a drowning man, and would not give them up. They made me what I am. Not the father who ignored me, or the mother who abandoned me. Not the mysterious inheritance I never wanted, and not even the faceless hordes who'd hounded me all my life. So many influences trying to shape me, and I disowned them all. I chose to help people, because there'd been no-one there to help me when I needed it. I knew even then that I couldn't trust the Authorities to save me. My father had been one of them, and they still hadn't been able to protect him, or comfort him. I shaped my own life, determined my own destiny; and to hell with everyone and everything else.
My anger was rising now, hot and fierce and strong, and it pushed back the false promises of love and happiness, perhaps because deep down I'd never believed in such things. Not for me, anyway. The empty nothingness was fragmenting, falling apart. I could sense other people around me. Suzie Shooter, a ghost hand in mine, quietly confident in me. Cathy Barrett, understanding for the first time just how much she'd been lied to, manipulated and abused, almost as angry as I was. And somewhere close at hand ... a faint presence, a quiet voice, like the last echoes of someone who had briefly believed them-
selves to be a woman called Joa
I reached out and embraced them, binding them to me with my gift; and together we were stronger than any damned house.
I don't just find things with my gift. It can do other things too. Like identify an enemy's weak spot and attack it. I lashed out with my gift, and the house screamed, in shock and rage, pain and horror. I think it had been a very long time since anyone had been able to hurt it.
The nothing was replaced by something. An in-between place. I was standing on a bare plain that stretched out to infinity in all directions. It was a grey place, soft and hazy and indistinct. Not a real place, but real enough. A place to make a stand. Suzie and Cathy were there with me. Suzie was wearing silver armour, studded with vicious spikes. Cathy looked like she had in her old photo, only mad as hell now. I didn't look down to see how I appeared. It didn't matter. Not too far away there was another presence, too faint to be clearly seen, but I knew who it was. Who it had to be. We were all shining brightly now, luminous beings in a grey world. Together we formed a wide circle around a column of swirling darkness, shot with vivid blood-red traces, that towered endlessly up into the featureless sky. From it came the voice of the house, beating against us like hammer-blows, harsh and inhuman.
"Mine! Mine! Mine!"
But the gift was strong in me, and I just laughed at the voice. All it really had on its side was stealth and lies, and neither could serve the house here. I stepped forward, and Suzie and Cathy moved with me. The dark column actually shrank back from our light, shrinking and contracting away from us. We closed in, and the column became narrower. And all around us, on that wide and endless plain; hundreds and hundreds of insubstantial figures, standing silently, watching and hoping. All the house's victims. It hadn't just eaten their bodies; the damned thing had consumed their souls too, holding them within itself to power its u
Power surged through me, igniting my gift, and I blazed so very brightly as I advanced on the dark column before me. Suzie and Cathy and all the other victims advanced with me, and the house screamed and screamed. The column shrank and compacted, growing thi
woman I could have loved. We were all shining like suns now. I gathered together all our rage and hate and need, cha
The other side of my gift. To find another's death.
I've never carried a gun. I don't need one.
I looked around the endless plain, that grey and empty place, and all the hundreds of victims were gone, their souls released at last to find the only peace left to them. And gone with them, a designed and programmed piece of bait that had briefly learned what it was to be human, and would not give it up.
You have to believe in dreams, because sometimes they believe in you.
I fell back into my body and glared wildly about me. All my strength was back, restored by the departed souls of the house's victims. I was still trapped in an enclosed room, with no way out, but the house was dead now. Already the air was thick with the sweet cloying stench of decay. The eye in the ceiling was closed and gone, and the phosphorescent glow from the walls was slowly fading. Ragged cracks spread
slowly across the walls, tearing them apart like rotting flesh. And there, on the floor, what was left of Cathy Barrett. Gaunt, desiccated and half-dead, but finally separate from the consuming floor, ejected by the house's dying spasms, as I'd hoped. She was struggling to sit up, her face mad as hell. I helped her sit up, and wrapped the long coat around her. She held it closed with hands that were little more than bone and skin, and managed a brief, but real, smile for me.
"It lied to me," she said. "It told me everything I secretly wanted to hear, so I believed it. And when it finally had me, it made me happy; but inside I was screaming all the time. You saved me."
"It's what I do," I said. "It's my job."
She studied me for a while. "If my mother had known I was here, and in trouble, I like to think she would have sent someone like you. Someone ... reliable."
"Look, this is all touching as hell," Suzie said briskly, "but I'd really like to get out of here."
"Good point," I said. "I've only just had this trench coat cleaned."