The night air was crisp and clear, the pavements were slick from a recent rain, and the scene was jumping, like always. There might be rumours of riot and mayhem and imminent apocalypse, but that was simply business as usual in the Nightside. Especially at weekends. And yet… I sensed a growing jittery feeling among people I passed, a sense of nervous anticipation, even if no-one seemed too sure about what. I fought down an urge to hurry, not wanting to attract attention to myself. I had time. Even with Walker taken out of the picture, the Authorities would still be able to throw whole armies into Lilith’s path, armed with guns and blades and magics and all the usual nasty surprises. They’d slow her down. For a while.
People around me kept glancing up at the night sky, as though half-expecting the stars to have changed position, or the oversized full moon to have turned bloodred. Something new and dangerous had come into the Nightside, and they could all sense it, like cattle approaching a slaughterhouse. Everyone seemed sharper and almost spookily alert, and the intensity of the night moved up another notch.
Striding back and forth outside the ever-welcoming doors of disreputable clubs, the barkers hawked their wares with a new urgency, while on every street corner the come-ons from the scarlet lips of the twilight daughters was a little bit more aggressive. Tides of people surged this way and that, the casual stroll giving way to the determined march, as though the punters were afraid that what they were looking for might not be there when they got there. A new Special Edition of the Nightside’s only daily paper, the Night Times, was just hitting the streets, and people crowded round the news vendors, almost snatching the papers out of their hands, then chattering animatedly over the heavy black headlines. I had no doubt that Lilith had made the front page, and probably most of the other pages, too. I needed to get my plan up and running before everything started falling apart. And for that, I needed Dead Boy.
It wasn’t hard to find the lap-dancing club where he was working as a bouncer. Bit of a come-down, for the Nightside’s most eminent vigilante, dark avenger, and first line of defence against the legions of the dead, but presumably there were fringe benefits. I stopped before the club and studied it carefully from what I hoped was a safe distance. The flashing neon sign over the gaping door spelled out the club’s name, not fade away, in colours so bright and garish they practically stabbed into my eyes. To either side were neon figures of dancing girls, jiggling eternally from one uncomfortable-looking position to another, back and forth, back and forth. A grubby window held photographs of the glamorous girls one could hope to find inside the club, though experience led me to believe the girls actually on display would look nothing like the photos.
The barker lounging by the door inhabited a brightly coloured check coat, with a revolving bow tie and a grin so fixed it bordered on the unnatural. He’d started out life as a ventriloquist’s dummy, and never really got over it. Seeing my interest he fixed me with his brightly shining eyes and launched into his spiel.
“They’re dead, they’re naked, and they dance!”
I fixed him with my best cold stare. “Do I look like a tourist?”
He sneered and moved away from the door, waving me in. I passed him by with as much dignity as was possible under the circumstances. Inside the lap-dancing club, someone tried to take my coat, and I punched him out. Start as you mean to go on… The transition from chilly night to sweltering lounge was abrupt, and I stopped inside the main area to get my bearings. The management kept the lights down to a comforting gloom, partly to give the punters a sense of privacy, but mostly so you wouldn’t get too good a look at the rest of the clientele. The air was thick with all kinds of smoke, and rank with the stink of sweat and desire and desperation. There were ratty-looking tables and chairs for the scattered audience, and cheap plywood booths at the back for more private encounters. The customers were mostly men, mostly human, their eyes fixed hungrily on the four separate spotlighted stages where the dancers swayed back and forth to the over-amplified music.
There were girls, up on the stages and in and among the audience, showing off what they’d got and what they could do, all of them naked, all of them dead. The spirits of departed women, condemned to wander the Earth for this reason or that, lap-dancing for the living. Some seemed completely real and solid, while others were only wisps of smoke or mist, tinted all of the colours of the rainbow by the coloured gels rotating in front of the stage lights. Most of the girls drifted from one state to the other and back again, as they stamped and spun and shook their breasts, pumping their hips and curling around the steel poles on the stages, all the time favouring the nearest customers with wide smiles that meant nothing, nothing at all. Ghostly girls, the dancing dead—the ultimate look but don’t touch.
There was a tacky-looking bar set to one side, and leaning up against it, the legendary Dead Boy himself. Technically speaking, he wasn’t old enough to be in a club like this. Dead Boy was seventeen, and had been for some thirty years, ever since he was murdered—clubbed down in the street for his credit cards and mobile phone. He came back from the dead, after making a deal with someone he still preferred not to name, and took a terrible vengeance on his killers, only to find that his deal made it impossible for him to go to his rest afterwards. And so he walks the Nightside, forever young, forever damned, his spirit possessing his own dead body, doing good deeds in the hope that eventually he’ll accumulate enough goodwill in Heaven to break the terms of the deal he made.
He was tall and adolescent thin, wrapped in a dark purple greatcoat, over black leather trousers and tall calfskin boots. He wore a black rose on one lapel and a large floppy black hat perched on the back of his head. His coat hung open, revealing a corpse-pale torso held together with stitches and staples and duct tape. He doesn’t feel pain any more, but he can still take damage. If I looked closely I could see the bullet hole in his forehead that he’d filled in with builder’s putty.
His long white face had a weary, debauched look, with burning fever-bright eyes and a pouting sulky mouth with no colour in it. He had experimented with makeup, but mostly he just couldn’t be bothered. Long dark hair fell to his shoulders in oiled ringlets. He looked calm, casual, even bored. He was drinking whiskey straight from the bottle and eating Neapolitan ice cream straight from the tub. He nodded easily as I came over to join him.
“Hello, Taylor,” he said indistinctly, around a mouthful of ice cream. “Pardon my indulgence, but when you’re dead you have to take your pleasures where you can find them. I’d offer you a drink, but I’ve only got the one bottle. And don’t order anything from the bar—their prices are appalling, and the drinks are worse.”
I nodded. I already knew that. I’d been here once before, working a case, and had allowed myself to be persuaded to order what passed for champagne. It tasted like cherry cola. Nothing was what it seemed here. Even the waitress had an Adam’s apple.
“So you’re the bouncer?” I said, leaning easily back against the bar beside him.
“I run security here,” he corrected me. “I keep an eye on things. Most of the punters take one look at me, and know better than to start anything.”
“I thought you had a steady gig, body-guarding that singer, Rossignol?”
He shrugged. “She’s off touring Europe. And I… prefer not to leave the Nightside. This job’s just temporary, until I can scare something else up. Even the dead have to earn a living. Hence the girls here.”
I nodded. The Nightside accumulates more than its fair share of ghosts and revenants, one way and another, and they all have to go somewhere.