Night Fall

by Simon R. Green

  “I’m remembering a story I once heard in Strangefellows,” she said quietly. “Of a house on this street that wasn’t a house but rather some kind of creature: a predator from outside our reality. It only pretended to be a house so it could lure people in and eat them.”

  “That sounds like the Nightside,” said Eddie. “What happened to this hungry house?”

  “John Taylor destroyed it, years ago. Leaving only an empty lot and some rubble. But if I’m remembering the address correctly, and I’m pretty sure I am because things like that have a tendency to stick in your mind, there’s a house standing where the empty lot should be . . .”

  She pointed it out, half-way down the left-hand terrace. It didn’t appear to be any different from all the other houses in the row. Just crumbling bricks and mortar, smeared windows, and no lights showing anywhere. They walked over to it, as though they just happened to be strolling in that direction. Dirty stone steps led up to a paint-peeling front door. Eddie considered the closed door thoughtfully.

  “It feels like the house is looking at me,” he said. “And not in a good way. I can almost hear it breathing. What are your magics telling you, Molly?”

  “Nothing. I’m getting absolutely nothing.” Molly frowned fiercely. “And that’s wrong. If this were just another house, I should be picking up ghost images from the past, emotional undercurrents, psychic imprintings . . . all the usual stuff. But instead it feels like nothing’s there. Which has to mean the house, or someone inside it, is blocking me. And there aren’t many who can do that.”

  They looked at the door, and it looked calmly back, inviting them to enter.

  “Are you going to armour up now?” said Molly.

  “Not just yet,” said Eddie. “I don’t want to frighten off whoever’s in there or give them any warning of what I can do. In your story, the house was alive.”

  “And sentient,” said Molly. “A predator from Outside.”

  Eddie shrugged. “This is the closest thing to a clue we’ve found. I say we go in and kick the crap out of it till it tells us everything we need to know. I’m really in the mood to beat up something evil.”

  “Never knew you when you weren’t,” said Molly. She grinned back at him. “Let’s do it.”

  They strode up the stone steps to the door. Up close, Eddie thought the house looked . . . off. As though the details didn’t quite add up. The texture of the wall wasn’t right, and the dimensions of the door and the windows were subtly wrong. As though someone had built a house without ever having seen one, only heard a description from someone else. Eddie stood before the closed front door and looked it over, careful not to touch it. He couldn’t see any obvious booby-traps. Molly reached out and grabbed hold of the door-handle, then snatched her hand back, grimacing.

  “It felt like a slug!”

  “Don’t even think of wiping your hand on my sleeve,” Eddie said sternly.

  Molly scowled at the door and gestured sharply with her left hand. The door slammed back against the inside wall, with a crash loud enough to wake the living and the dead. There was no reaction from anywhere inside the house. The hallway appeared entirely ordinary, and completely empty, but so dimly lit it was barely brighter than the street.

  Eddie looked at Molly. “I could have done that.”

  “You were taking too long.” Molly wrinkled her nose. “What is that smell?”

  “Damp, nasty, and decidedly organic,” said Eddie. “Much like the door in the alley-way . . .”

  “Well spotted.”

  “I thought so.”

  Eddie strode into the house like he’d come to condemn it, tear it down, then piss on the rubble. Molly hurried to catch up with him. The bare floor-boards gave queasily under their feet. They didn’t feel like wood; they felt soft, almost spongy. The plaster walls were cracked, and heavily spotted with damp and mould. Eddie glanced behind him. The front door had already closed itself. The only other door was at the far end of the hallway, ensuring they would have to go deeper into the house. Into the belly of the beast. Eddie headed straight for the door, not even looking around. Nothing here mattered, it was all just part of the illusion, the come-on. The real house was waiting for him inside. He stopped before the door and reached out for the handle. He braced himself, anticipating the same bad reaction as Molly, but the handle felt perfectly normal. As though the house didn’t need tricks any more. Not now it had its prey right where it wanted. Eddie opened the door and stepped quickly through, before the house could change its mind, and Molly was right there with him.

  It didn’t look like the inside of a house any more. It looked like the interior of the Wulfshead Club, but again the details were all wrong . . . twisted and distorted. The Club stretched away before them, like one of those dark corridors that seem to go on forever in nightmares. The floor was sticky, dragging at their feet and making every step an effort. The air was close and hot, thick with the stench of blood and death and decay. Instead of the Club’s usual bright fluorescent lights, a dim blood-red glow seemed to issue from everywhere at once. As though they were walking through something’s guts.

  The plasma screens covering the walls, which should have been showing private indiscretions of the rich and powerful for the amusement of the patrons, were all blank. The walls bowed in, and the ceiling slumped down. The long high-tech bar appeared half-melted, as though the solid steel had run like candlewax. The bloody light seemed to thicken and congeal up ahead, as though hiding secrets yet to be revealed.

  It was like being inside a bad fever-dream of the Wulfshead.

  “This is why the Nightside was able to take the Club, despite its protections,” Molly said quietly. “When the long night expanded, this predator from another reality just swallowed up the Club with everyone in it. I can’t see far in this light. Can you?”

  “Not without putting on my armour,” said Eddie. “And I don’t think I want this place to know about that just yet. I can feel it watching me. It can tell there’s something different about me, that’s why it’s holding off for the moment. It’s curious. Stick close.”

  “Damn right,” said Molly.

  They moved slowly forward, and the floor groaned with anticipation at every step. Eddie could feel a pressure on the air, a sense of resistance, as though he were underwater. The walls bulged slowly in and out, and he could hear a heavy susurration, like breathing. The air was uncomfortably warm and sweaty, like the inside of a hothouse. The smell of death and decay was almost overwhelming. And then Eddie stopped, and Molly stopped with him, as the blood-red light cleared a little to show them what lay sprawled on the floor ahead.

  Bodies lay scattered the whole length of the Club, or the thing that looked like the Club. Dozens of dead men and women in ungainly poses, left to lie where they had fallen. Eddie couldn’t see any obvious signs of violence. They looked like they’d died because they couldn’t survive in the new environment the house had made when it engulfed the Wulfshead and changed it. The bodies had sunk part-way into the floor, as though it was slowly sucking them down. Their flesh looked withered, drained, used up from where the house was feeding on them.

  “I know these people,” said Molly. Her voice was sharp and clear in the quiet, and very dangerous. “Allies and enemies, and everything in between. People I laughed and drank with, and occasionally tried to kill, for money or a cause. And now they’re so disfigured, I can’t even tell which of them were important to me.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Eddie. “We’ll avenge them all.”

  Not far away lay Monkton Farley, the consulting detective. In his smart Nineteen Twenties suit, complete with snap-brimmed fedora hat. Only his head and one shoulder still protruded above the floor. The house had eaten the rest of him. His face was so shrivelled and sunken it was easier for Eddie to recognise the outfit. He knelt beside what was left of the body, and the floor gave under his knee, just
to remind him the house was watching.

  “I can’t say I ever really liked him,” said Eddie. He might almost have been talking to himself. “I admired him, sometimes. He was very good at what he did, when he wasn’t standing around letting his fans tell him how great he was. And he was half Drood, after all. One of the family.”

  He patted Farley on the shoulder, as though apologising, and rose to his feet. His face was set in harsh lines, and his eyes were cold.

  “Tell me, Molly. How do you kill a predator the size of a house?”

  “John Taylor did it,” said Molly. “But how wasn’t part of the story.”

  “Of course not. That would be too easy.”

  The floor rose and fell suddenly, as though something below had taken a deep breath. Eddie and Molly staggered back and forth, clinging to each other for support and to avoid tripping over the half-sunken bodies. The walls bowed heavily inwards, while a thick liquid dripped down from the bulging ceiling.

  “What is this stuff?” said Molly.

  “Smell that sharp acidic tang?” said Eddie. “Digestive fluids. I think the house has run out of patience.”

  A large mirror on the wall behind Eddie slumped forward and fell on him. It snapped around him like a cloak, then contracted with vicious strength. Eddie lurched back and forth on the bucking floor, tearing at the mirror with his hands, unable to throw the thing off. Molly fought her way forward to help him, against everything the floor could do to stop her.

  “Don’t touch the thing with your bare hands!” Eddie yelled to her. He had to stop and gasp for breath, as the mirror contracted again. “All right! I’ve had enough!”

  He armoured up, and the golden strange matter swept over him in a moment. The living mirror flinched away from his armour, as though disgusted or afraid. Eddie used his armoured strength to break the mirror’s hold, then tore the thing off him and threw it away. The mirror oozed across the heaving floor.

  Molly blasted the mirror with fire from her hands. It scorched and blackened, heaving and convulsing, but wouldn’t die. Until Eddie picked it up and tore it apart with his golden hands. The pieces collapsed into rot and slime.

  Molly turned her fires on the nearest wall. The heaving surface darkened like burned meat, but the flames didn’t catch and couldn’t spread. The floor bucked, as though in pain, throwing Eddie and Molly this way and that. He grabbed onto the high-tech bar to support him, and his hands tore through the steel, as though it had gone soft. Across the walls, thick purple traceries of throbbing veins spread like vines. A slow, heavy thudding sounded on the air, like a giant heart-beat.

  Eddie grew sharp spikes from the soles of his golden feet, to help him keep his balance. The floor shuddered. Eddie laughed briefly.

  “Apparently I’m not to its taste. Are you all right, Molly?”

  “Fine!” she said loudly. “Just fine!”

  She drew up both her feet and folded her legs under her, so that she was hovering in mid air. Thick digestive fluids rained down on Molly, burning her bare flesh. She cried out, as much in disgust as pain, and surrounded herself with a field of shimmering protective energies. Eddie knew how much that took out of her. And, that she couldn’t keep it going for long. The digestive fluids trickled slowly down his armour, unable to make any impression.

  A huge, inhuman eye opened in the wall next to Eddie and studied him with godlike scorn. Eddie punched it with his golden fist. His arm plunged on into the eye, right up to the elbow, and the eye snapped shut and disappeared. Leaving nothing behind but a wall with Eddie’s arm trapped inside it. He planted one foot against the wall to brace himself and heaved back with all his armoured strength. The wall clamped down and wouldn’t release him. Digestive fluids splashed over him in a shower, only to run harmlessly down the golden armour. Eddie pulled back, and the wall stretched out . . . until finally it was forced to release him, with a wet, sucking sound. Eddie staggered backwards. Steam rose up from the open wound in the wall where his arm had been, as though just the touch of his armour had hurt it.

  Long, fleshy tentacles snapped down from the ceiling to wrap themselves around Molly as she hovered in mid air. They closed around her protective field, applying a crushing pressure from all sides, trying to force their way in, to get to her. Molly tried to expand her field, to force them back, but already she was getting tired. More and more tentacles dropped down from the lowering ceiling. A glowing witch knife appeared in Molly’s hand, and she thrust it through the shimmering energies to saw doggedly at one jerking tentacle after another.

  Eddie looked around him. The floor had swallowed up most of the bodies. The blood-red light was thicker and darker, and the interior of the Wulfshead Club looked more than ever like something’s guts. Digestive fluids rained down. The house was hungry . . . and the door through which Eddie and Molly had entered was gone, long gone.

  “Molly!” Eddie yelled. “Teleport yourself out of here!”

  She stopped sawing at a tentacle to glare at him. “I’m not going anywhere without you!”

  “I’m safe, inside my armour! You’re not, because that field isn’t going to last. Go! I’ll join you in a few moments.”

  “How are you going to get out?”

  “I have a plan!”

  “Oh well,” said Molly. “If you’ve got a plan . . . Because that’s always worked out so well in the past.”

  She snapped her fingers and disappeared. The tentacles tangled together in the place where she’d been. And then they reached out to Eddie, standing alone. The digestive fluids were coming down in torrents now, and the light was going out. Eddie could just see the last of Monkton Farley sinking into the floor. Eddie moved quickly over, took a firm grip on what was left of the body, and ripped it out of the floor. He threw it aside and peered into the dark gap left behind. A great breach in the flesh of the house, leading down to its stomach. Eddie could see massive teeth grinding together and horrible things moving. He laughed behind his featureless mask and jumped down into the hole.

  * * *

  • • •

  Out on Blaiston Street, Molly stood in the middle of the road, staring at the house. It still looked deceitfully ordinary from the outside. Not even a hint of blood-red light at any of the windows. It had been some time since Molly teleported out, and there was still no sign of Eddie. Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. She should never have left him. He thought nothing could touch him while he was in his armour; but this was the Nightside. She drew her glowing witch knife again and started determinedly toward the front door. If the house wouldn’t open up, she’d cut her way in.

  And then the whole house shook and shuddered. The road trembled under Molly’s feet, as though in sympathy. The house screamed, an awful, inhuman sound wracked with pain and horror . . . and collapsed suddenly, falling in upon itself, as though everything that had held it together had just been torn away. The house that was not a house, and never had been, rotted and fell apart until there was nothing left but pieces of disturbingly organic rubble on an empty lot.

  And there was no sign of Eddie anywhere.

  Molly ran forward, calling his name, ready to blast the whole tenement apart and everything underneath it. Only to stop short when the empty lot erupted as a golden fist punched up through the ground. Eddie dug his way out and stood swaying for a moment while he got his breath back. He saw Molly, armoured down, and strode off the lot to join her, grinning broadly.

  “Hi, Molly. Miss me?”

  She made her witch knife disappear, then threw her arms around Eddie and hugged him fiercely. Finally she stepped back and punched him hard on the shoulder.

  “Ow!” said Eddie. “What was that for?”

  “For worrying me!” said Molly. “What did you just do?”

  “I let the house try to eat me,” he said. “Jumped right down into its stomach. The teeth broke against my armour, and when the h
ouse tried to digest me anyway . . . the golden strange matter poisoned it. I thought it might. Remember how the floor flinched away from my feet, and just the touch of my hand burned the wall?”

  “You took one hell of a risk,” said Molly.

  He smiled easily. “That’s the job, when you’re a Drood.”

  Eddie and Molly stood together, looking at the empty lot. The house was gone now, and so was what little had remained of the Wulfshead Club. Along with all the people who’d been inside it when the Nightside broke its barriers. Blaiston Street was completely still and utterly silent. Even after everything that had happened, no one had come out to see what was going on. Because this was a street where people only survived by minding their own business.

  “So many dead . . .” said Eddie. “And I couldn’t even save the bodies, for their families.”

  “They wouldn’t have wanted to see what was left,” said Molly.

  “We lost a lot of good people,” said Eddie.

  “Good and bad and in between,” said Molly. “The Wulfshead always was that kind of Club.”

  “So it was,” said Eddie.

  They managed a small smile for each other.

  “We’d better go,” said Eddie. “Once I called on my armour, the crown stopped hiding me. You can bet people are already hurrying here to ask a whole bunch of questions I have no intention of answering, then shout at me a lot.”

  “Better use the Merlin Glass,” said Molly. “Get us out of here fast. So we’re done?”

  “No,” said Eddie. “The house wasn’t responsible for the Nightside’s expanding; it just took advantage of it. Someone’s behind all of this. They have to be found and stopped. Whatever it takes. Because if the Nightside keeps spreading, keeps pushing its way into our world . . . This is what’s coming for all Humanity.”

  He made a door with the Merlin Glass, and he and Molly stepped through. The door disappeared after them, and only the long night remained: cold and quiet and empty.