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“You’ve seen the stories in the news about the occasional whale who becomes confused, gets lost, and ends up swimming along the River Thames, right into the heart of London? Of course you have. Well, something much larger and decidedly less kiddie friendly was making a nuisance of itself in the Thames. To be exact, a kraken had risen up from the depths, taken a wrong turn, and was threatening to block the Thames with its massive bulk and disturbingly long tentacles. Big things, kraken. Also very dim and even harder to argue with. Especially when you’re trying to hide the bloody thing from public gaze.
“There wasn’t a hope in hell of persuading it to turn around and go back, and there wasn’t time to come up with an elegant or even particularly nice solution. So I used the Hiring Hall to call together every ghoul operating in and around London, provided them all with knives and forks, and told them to get stuck in. All the sushi you can eat, provided you eat every last bit of it.
“And they did. Ghouls will eat anything.”
“I may never eat calamari again,” said Walker. He didn’t look especially disturbed, but then he never did. “My turn, I believe. A tale of the Nightside, then, where it’s always dark. Always three o’clock in the morning, and the hour that tries men’s souls. Except . . . someone wanted to change all that. There’s always someone pla
“Apparently this particular group believed that if only bright healthy sunshine could be hauled into the Nightside, by brute force if necessary, then suddenly everyone there would have an abrupt change of heart and start playing nicely together. Save me from well-meaning idealists; they do more harm than all the monsters . . .
“Anyway, my illustrious lords and masters the Authorities very definitely preferred the Nightside the way it was, turning out a regular profit for them. So I was very firmly instructed to put a stop to this nefarious scheme by any and all means necessary. Didn’t take me long to track down the man funding the operation. People are always ready to tell me things when I ask in just the right tone of voice. The instigator of this illuminating scheme turned out to be a failed businessman, failed politician, failed . . . well, everything, really. But still convinced that he had a destiny and a right to change the world for the better, according to his beliefs.
“He found religion in jail, and once he was out found a whole bunch of followers, as his kind usually does. Somehow he got his hands on a grimoire, Quite Appallingly Powerful Spells for Dummies, and somehow again managed to smuggle it into the Nightside. Which is not unlike a terrorist smuggling a backpack nuke into an armoury. Actually, I think I would have preferred a backpack nuke. I know how to deal with those.
“I found the man and his nasty little book easily enough, because that’s what I do. Or rather, that’s what I’ve trained my people to do for me. I’ve always believed in delegating the hard work, and then strolling on stage at the end to take all the bows. I confronted the troublemaker in what he thought was his secret lair and did my best to explain to him why what he was pla
“He was wrong, of course. I know my duty. I did what was necessary, and he died with a rather surprised look on his face. He really should have known better. You don’t get to lay down the law in a place like the Nightside unless you’re prepared to be even colder and more focused than anyone else in that corrupt place.”
All of us looked at Walker, and he looked calmly back. It’s always the quiet ones you have to watch out for.
“Well,” I said, and everyone turned to look at me. “My turn. A tale of the Droods. And the messes we have to clean up.”
“A few years back, I was called in to investigate a strange collection of murders in one of the most quiet and law-abiding suburbs of London. Strange, in that although the same person was identified as the killer in each of the seven cases, that individual always had an unbreakable alibi for each and every killing. At the exact time the victims were dying horribly, the woman identified by dozens of witnesses as the killer was out in public somewhere else, surrounded by friends and caught very clearly on surveillance cameras. Even though there was all kinds of forensic evidence linking the woman to the murders, there was no way in hell she could have done it. Unless she was twins. Which she wasn’t. First thing I checked.
“The police couldn’t do a thing. So I took over.
“I learned all there was to know; read all the files, checked all the evidence, ruled out clones . . . and then watched the woman from a safe distance, steeping myself in her boring, suburban, everyday life. A quiet, reserved lady of a certain age, with a nice house and a nice life and not an enemy in the world. One ex-husband, with whom she got on fine. No children. A boring but worthy job, and no hidden life at all. No dark secrets, and certainly no reason to savagely kill and dismember seven people. The only odd thing in her file, so mild it hardly qualified as odd, was that for a short period earlier that year, she’d attended meditation classes.
“When I looked into that, I finally turned up something interesting which wasn’t in the files. She’d left the meditation group because it wasn’t doing anything for her, but she moved on from one group to another, searching for . . . something. And ended up as part of a very quiet, very under-the-radar . . . really quite extreme group that specialised in exploring the deepest, darkest recesses of the human mind. Extreme beliefs, extreme practices, and just occasionally . . . extreme results. God alone knows how such a quiet little soul ended up in that group. Maybe someone thought it was fu
“If so, the joke was on them, because my timid little miss took to these new disciplines like a duck to water. At first, it was hard to get anyone in the group to talk to me, but it’s amazing how persuasive I can be when I’ve someone by the balls with an armoured hand. Turned out the group threw her out because they were scared of her. Scared of what she was achieving. She’d gone deeper into her mind than any of the others had managed. And when she came back . . . she brought something with her.
“Do I really need to tell you that all the murder victims had been members of the group?
“I confronted the woman in her nice little house. Showed her my armour, calmed her down, and explained who and what I was. Told her that I was there to help her if I could. But she had to be honest with me. She burst into tears then, but they were tears of relief. It might have been my reassuring ma
“The group she’d worked with had been all about identifying and confronting one’s own i