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TWO
At Home with John and Suzie
Until Walker’s people arrived, Suzie and I stuck around, talking to the newly awakened patients, and comforting them as best we could. Well, I did most of the talking and comforting. Suzie isn’t really a people person. Mostly she stood at the door with her shotgun at the ready, to assure the patients that no-one was going to be allowed to mess with them any more. A lot of them were confused, and even more were in various states of shock. The physical injuries might have been reversed, but you can’t undergo that kind of extended suffering without its leaving a mark on your soul.
Some of them knew each other, and sat together on the beds, holding each other and sobbing in quiet relief. Some were scared of everyone, including Suzie and me. Some . . . just didn’t wake up.
Walker’s people would know what to do. They had a lot of experience at picking up the pieces after someone’s grand scheme has suddenly gone to hell in a hand-cart. They’d get the people help and see them safely back to their home dimension. Then they’d shut down the Timeslip, and slap a heavy fine on the Mammon Emporium for losing track of the damn thing in the first place. If people can’t look after their Timeslips properly, they shouldn’t be allowed to have them. Walker’s people . . . would do all the things I couldn’t do.
When Suzie and I finally left the Guaranteed New You Parlour, Percy D’Arcy was outside waiting for us. His fine clothes looked almost shabby, and his eyes were puffy from crying. He came at me as though he meant to attack me, and stopped only when Suzie drew her shotgun and trained it on him with one easy move. He glared at me piteously, wringing his hands together.
“What have you done, Taylor? What have you done?”
“I found out what was going on, and I put a stop to it,” I said. “I saved a whole bunch of i
“I don’t care about them! What do they matter? What have you done to my friends?” He couldn’t speak for a moment, his eyes clenched shut to try to stop the tears streaming down his face. “I saw the most beautiful people of my generation reduced to hags and lepers! Saw their pretty faces fall and crack and split apart. Their hair fell out, and their backs bent, and they cried and shrieked and screamed, ru
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But they earned it.”
“They were my friends,” said Percy D’Arcy. “I’ve known them since I was so high. I never meant for this to happen.”
“Percy . . .” I said.
“You can whistle for your fee!” said Percy, with almost hysterical dignity. And then he spun around and walked away, still crying.
I let him go. I saw his point, sort of. Some cases, no-one gets to feel good afterwards. So Suzie and I went home.
The Nightside doesn’t have suburbs, as such. But a few areas are a little more safe and secure than anywhere else, where people can live quietly and not be bothered. Not gated communities, because gates wouldn’t even slow down the kind of predators the Nightside attracts, but instead small communities protected by a few magical defences, a handful of force shields, and a really good mutual defence pact. Besides, if you can’t look after yourself, you shouldn’t be living in the Nightside anyway. Suzie and I lived together in a nice little detached house (three up, three down, two sideways) in one of the more peaceful and up-market areas. Just by living there, we were driving the house prices down, but we tried not to worry about that too much. Originally, there was a small garden out front, but since Suzie and I were in no way gardening people, the first thing we did was dig it up and put in a mine-field. We’re not big on visitors. Actually, Suzie did most of the work, while I added some man-traps and a few invisible floating curses, to show I was taking an interest.
Our immediate neighbours are a Time-travelling adventurer called Garth the Eternal, a big Nordic type who lived in a scaled-down Norman castle, complete with its own gargoyles who kept us awake at night during the mating season, and a cold-faced, black-haired alien hunter from the future named Sarah Kingdom, who lived in a conglomeration of vaguely organic shapes that apparently also functioned as her star-ship, if she could only find the right parts to repair it.
We’ve never even discussed having a housing association.
Suzie and I live on separate floors. She has the ground floor, I have the top floor, and we share the amenities. All very civilised. We spend as much time in each other’s company as we can. It’s not easy being either of us. My floor is defiantly old-fashioned, even Victorian. They understood a lot about comfort and luxury. That particular night, I was lying flat on my back in the middle of my four-poster bed. The goose-feather mattress was deep enough to sink into, with a firm support underneath. Some mornings Suzie had to pry me out of bed with a crow-bar. Supposedly Queen Elizabeth I had slept in the four-poster once, on one of her grand tours. Considering what the thing cost me, she should have done cart-wheels in it.
A carefully constructed fire crackled quietly in the huge stone grate, supplying just enough warmth to ward off the cold winds that blew outside. The wood in the fire remained eternally unconsumed, thanks to a simple moebius spell, so the fire never went out. One wall of my bedroom is taken up with bookshelves, mostly Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour Westerns, and a whole bunch of old John Creasey thrillers, of which I am inordinately fond. Another wall is mostly hidden behind a great big fuck-off wide-screen plasma television, facing the bed. And the final wall holds my DVDs and CDs, all in strict alphabetical order, which Suzie never ceases to make remarks about.
I have gas lighting in my bedroom. It gives a friendlier light, I think.
A richly detailed Persian rug covers most of the floor. It’s supposed to have been a flying carpet at some point, but no-one can remember the activating Words any more, so it’s just a rug. Except I always have to be very careful about what I say out loud while I’m standing on it. Scattered about the room are various and assorted odds and ends I’ve collected and acquired down the years, often as part or even full payment for a case. A few purported Objects of Power, some antiques with interesting histories, and a whole bunch of things that might or might not turn out to be valuable or useful someday.
There’s a musical box that plays top-twenty hits from thirty years in the future. Still mostly crap . . . Some Tyra
As I lay on top of the blankets on my huge bed, listening to the wind battering outside and feeling all warm and cosy, it occurred to me how far I’d come since I returned to the Nightside. Wasn’t that long ago I’d been trying to live a normal life in normal London and being spectacularly bad at it. I’d been living in my one-room office, in a building that should have been condemned, sleeping on a cot pushed up against one wall. Eating take-away food and hiding under my desk when the creditors came calling . . . I’d left the Nightside to feel safe. And because I was afraid I was turning into a monster. But there are worse things than that. Failure tastes of cold pizza and over-used tea bags, and the knowledge that you’re not really helping anyone, even yourself.