The Jolly Cripple was a drinker’s bar. Not a place for conversation, or companionship. More the kind of place you go when the world has kicked you out, your credit’s no good, and your stomach couldn’t handle the good stuff any more, even if you could afford it. In the Jolly Cripple the floor was sticky, the air was thick with half a dozen kinds of smoke, and the only thing you could be sure of was vomit in the corners and piss and blood in the toilets. The owner kept the lights down low, partly so you couldn’t see how bad the place really was, but mostly because the patrons preferred it that way.
The owner and bartender was one Maxie Eliopoulos. A sleazy soul in an unwashed body, dark and hairy, always smiling. Maxie wore a grimy T shirt with the legend IT’S ALL GREEK TO ME, and showed off its various bloodstains like badges of honour. No one ever gave Maxie any trouble in his bar. Or at least, not twice. He was short and squat with broad shoulders, and a square brutal face under a shock of black hair. More dark hair covered his bare arms, hands, and knuckles. He never stopped smiling, but it never once reached his eyes. Maxie was always ready to sell you anything you could afford. Especially if it was bad for you.
Some people said he only served people drink so he could watch them die by inches.
Maxie had hired me to find out who’d been diluting his drinks and driving his customers away. (And that’s about the only thing that could.) Didn’t take me long to find out who. I sat down at the bar, raised my gift, and concentrated on the sample bottle of what should have been gin; but was now so watered down you could have kept goldfish in it. My mind leapt up and out, following the connection between the water and its source, right back to where it came from. My Sight shot down through the barroom floor, down and down, into the sewers below.
Long stone tunnels with curving walls, illuminated by phosphorescent moss and fungi, channeling thick dark water with things floating in it. All kinds of things. In the Nightside’s sewers even trained workers tread carefully, and often carry flame-throwers, just in case. I looked around me, my Sight searching for the presence I’d felt; and something looked back. Something knew I was there, even if only in spirit. The murky waters churned and heaved, and then a great head rose up out of the dark water, followed by a body. It only took me a moment to realize both head and body were made up of water, and nothing else.
The face was broad and unlovely, the body obscenely female, like one of those ancient fertility goddess statues. Thick rivulets of water ran down her face like slow tears, and ripples bulged constantly around her body. A water elemental. I’d heard the Nightside had been using them to clean up the sewers; taking in all the bad stuff and purifying it inside themselves. The Nightside always finds cheap and practical ways to solve its problems, even if they aren’t always very nice solutions.
“Who disturbs me?” said the sewer elemental, in a thick, glutinous voice.
“John Taylor,” I said. Back in the bar my lips were moving, but my words could only be heard down in the sewer. “You’ve been interfering with one of the bars above. Using your power to infuse the bottles with your water. You know you’re not supposed to get involved with the world above.”
“I am old,” said the elemental of the sewers. “So old, even I don’t remember how old I am. I was worshipped, once. But the world changed and I could not, so even the once worshipped and adored must work for a living. I have fallen very far from what I was; but then, that’s the Nightside for you. Now I deal in shit and piss and other things, and make them pure again. Because someone has to. It’s a living. But, fallen as I am … no one insults me, defies me, cheats me! I serve all the bars in this area, and the owners and I have come to an understanding … all but Maxie Eliopoulos! He refuses my reasonable demands!”
“Oh hell,” I said. “It’s a labour dispute. What are you asking for, better working conditions?”
“I just want him to clean up his act,” said the elemental of the sewers. “And if he won’t, I’ll do it for him. I can do a lot worse to him than just dilute his filthy drinks…”
“That is between you and him,” I said firmly. “I don’t do arbitration.” And then I got the hell out of there.
Back in the bar and in my body, I confronted Maxie. “You didn’t tell me this was a dispute between contractors, Maxie.”
He laughed, and slapped one great palm hard against his grimy bartop. “I knew it! I knew it was that water bitch, down in her sewers! I just needed you to confirm it, Taylor.”
“So why’s she mad at you? Apart from the fact that you’re a loathsome, disgusting individual.”
He laughed again, and poured me a drink of what, in his bar, passed for the good stuff. “She wants me to serve better booze; says the impurities in the stuff I sell is polluting her system, and leaving a nasty taste in her mouth. I could leave a nasty taste in her mouth, heh heh heh… She pressured all the other bars and they gave in, but not me. Not me! No one tells Maxie Eliopoulos what to do in his own bar! Silly cow… Cheap and nasty is what my customers want, so cheap and nasty is what they get.”
“So … for a while there, your patrons were drinking booze mixed with sewer water,” I said. “I’m surprised so many stayed.”
“I’m surprised so many of them noticed,” said Maxie. “Good thing I never drink the tap water… All right, Taylor, you’ve confirmed what I needed to know. I’ll take it from here. I can handle her. Thinks I can’t get to her, down in the sewers, but I’ll show that bitch. No one messes with me and gets away with it. Now — here’s what we agreed on.”
He pushed a thin stack of grubby bank notes across the bar, and I counted them quickly before making them disappear about my person. You don’t want to attract attention in a bar like the Jolly Cripple, and nothing will do that faster than a display of cash, grubby or not. Maxie grinned at me in what he thought was an ingratiating way.
“No need to rush away, Taylor. Have another drink. Drinks are on the house for you; make yourself at home.”
I should have left. I should have known better … but it was one of the few places my creditors wouldn’t look for me, and besides … the drinks were on the house.
I sat at a table in the corner, working my way through a bottle of the kind of tequila that doesn’t have a worm in it, because the tequila’s strong enough to dissolve the worm. A woman in a long white dress walked up to my table. I didn’t pay her much attention at first, except to wonder what someone so normal-looking was doing in a dive like this … and then she walked right through the table next to me, and the people sitting around it. She drifted through them as though they weren’t even there, and each of them in turn shuddered briefly, and paid closer attention to their drinks. Their attitude said it all; they’d seen the woman in white before, and they didn’t want to know. She stopped before me, looking at me with cool, quiet, desperate eyes.
“You have to help me. I’ve been murdered. I need you to find out who killed me.”
That’s what comes from hanging around in strange bars. I gestured for her to sit down opposite me, and she did so perfectly easily. She still remembered what it felt like to have a body, which meant she hadn’t been dead long. I looked her over carefully. I couldn’t see any obvious death wounds, not even a ligature round her neck. Most murdered ghosts appear the way they did when they died. The trauma overrides everything else.
“What makes you think you were murdered?” I said bluntly.
“Because there’s a hole in my memory,” she said. “I don’t remember coming here, don’t remember dying here; but now I’m a ghost and I can’t leave this bar. Something prevents me. Something must be put right; I can feel it. Help me, please. Don’t leave me like this.”