I could feel a subtle tension on the air, a wrongness; as though there was a reason why the ghost shouldn’t be there. She was an unusually strong manifestation; no transparency, no fraying around the edges. That usually meant a strong character, when she was alive. She didn’t flinch as I looked her over thoughtfully. She was a tall, slender brunette, with neatly-styled hair and under-stated makeup, in a long white dress of such ostentatious simplicity that it had to have cost a bundle.
“Do you know your name?” I said finally.
“Holly De Lint.”
“And what’s a nice girl like you doing in a dive like this?”
“I don’t know. Normally, I wouldn’t be seen dead in a place like this.”
We both smiled slightly. “Could someone have brought you here, Holly? Could that person have…”
“Murdered me? Perhaps. But who would I know, in a place like this?”
She had a point. A woman like her didn’t belong here. So I left her sitting at my table, and made my rounds of the bar, politely interrogating the regulars. Most of them didn’t feel like talking, but I’m John Taylor. I have a reputation. Not a very nice one, but it means people will talk to me when they wouldn’t talk to anyone else. They didn’t know Holly. They didn’t know anything. They hadn’t seen anything, because they didn’t come to a bar like this to take an interest in other people’s problems. And they genuinely might not have noticed a ghost. One of the side effects of too much booze is that it shuts down the Sight; though you can still end up seeing things that aren’t there.
I went back to Holly, still sitting patiently at the table. I sat down opposite her, and used my gift to find out what had happened in her recent past. Faint pastel images of Holly appeared all around the bar, blinking on and off, from where she’d tried to talk to people, or begged for help, or tried to leave and been thrown back. I concentrated, sorting through the various images until I found the memory of the last thing she’d done while still alive. I got up from the table and followed the last trace of the living Holly all the way to the back of the bar, to the toilets. She went into the Ladies, and I went in after her. Luckily, there was no one else there, then or now; so I could watch uninterrupted as Holly De Lint opened a cubicle, sat down, and then washed down a big handful of pills with most of a bottle of whisky. She went about it quite methodically, with no tears or hysterics, her face cold and even indifferent, though her eyes still seemed terribly sad. She killed herself, with pills and booze. The last image showed her slumping slowly sideways, the bottle slipping from her numbed fingers, as the last of the light went out of her eyes.
I went back into the bar, and sat down again opposite Holly. She looked at me inquiringly, trustingly. So what could I do, except tell her the truth?
“There was no murderer, Holly. You took your own life. Can you tell me why…”
But she was gone. Disappeared in a moment, blinking out of existence like a punctured soap bubble. No sign to show that anyone had ever been sitting there.
So I went back to the bar and told Maxie what had happened, and he laughed in my face.
“You should have talked to me first, Taylor! I could have told you all about her. You aren’t the first stranger she’s approached. Look, you know the old urban legend, where the guy’s just driving along, minding his own business, and then sees a woman in white signaling desperately from the side of the road? He’s a good guy, so he stops and asks what’s up. She says she needs a lift home, so he takes her where she wants to go. But the woman doesn’t say a word, all through the drive, and when he finally gets there; she’s disappeared. The guy at the address tells the driver the woman was killed out there on the road long ago; but she keeps stopping drivers, asking them to take her home. Old story, right? It’s the same here, except our woman in white keeps telling people that she’s been murdered, but doesn’t remember how. And when our good Samaritans find out the truth, and tell her; she disappears. Until the next sucker comes along. You ready for another drink?”
“Can’t you do something?” I said.
“I’ve tried all the usual shit,” said Maxie. “But she’s a hard one to shift. You think you could do something? That little bitch is seriously bad for business.”
I went back to my table in the corner, to do some hard thinking. Most people would just walk away, on discovering the ghost was nothing more than a repeating cycle… But I’m not most people. I couldn’t bear to think of Holly trapped in this place, maybe forever.
Why would a woman, with apparently everything to live for, kill herself in a dive like this? I raised my gift, and once again pastel-tinted semi-transparent images of the living Holly darted back and forth through the dimly-lit bar, lighting briefly at this table and that, like a flower fairy at midnight. It didn’t take me long to realize there was one table she visited more than most. So I went over to the people sitting there, and made them tell me everything they knew.
Professor Hartnell was a grey-haired old gentlemen in a battered city suit. He used to be somebody, but he couldn’t remember who. Igor was a shaven-headed kobold with more piercings than most, who’d run away from the German mines of his people to see the world. He didn’t think much of the world, but he couldn’t go back, so he settled in the Nightside. Where no one gave a damn he was gay. The third drinker was a battered old Russian, betrayed by the Revolution but appalled at what his country had become. No one mentioned the ice-pick sticking out the back of his head.
They didn’t know Holly, as such, but they knew who she’d come here after. She came to the Jolly Cripple to save someone. Someone who didn’t want to be saved — her brother, Craig De Lint. He drank himself to death, right here in the bar, right at their table. Sometimes in their company, more often not, because the only company he was interested in came in a bottle. I used my gift again, and managed to pull up a few ghost images from the Past, of the living Craig. Stick thin, shabby clothes, the bones standing out in his grey face. Dead, dead eyes.
“You’re wasting your time, sis,” Craig De Lint said patiently. “You know I don’t have any reason to drink. No great trauma, no terrible loss… I just like to drink, and I don’t care about anything else. Started out in all the best places, and worked my way down to this. Where someone like me belongs. Go home, sis. You don’t belong here. Go home, before something bad happens to you.”
“I can’t just leave you here! There must be something I can do!”
“And that’s the difference between us, sis, right there. You always think there’s something that can be done. But I know a lost cause when I am one.”
The scene shifted abruptly, and there was Holly at the bar, arguing furiously with Maxie. He still smiled, even as he said things that cut her like knives.
“Of course I encouraged your brother to drink, sweetie. That’s my job. That’s what he was here for. And no, I don’t give a damn that he’s dead. He was dying when he walked in here, by his own choice; I just helped him on his way. Now either buy a drink or get out of my face. I’ve got work to do.”
“I’ll have you shut down!” said Holly, her voice fierce now, her small hands clenched into fists.
He laughed in her face. “Like to see you try, sweetie. This is the Nightside, where everyone’s free to go to Hell in their own way.”
“I know people! Important people! Money talks, Maxie; and I’ve got far more of it than you have.”
He smiled easily. “You’ve got balls, sweetie. Okay, let’s talk. Over a drink.”
“I don’t drink.”
“My bar, my rules. You want to talk with me, you drink with me.”
Holly shrugged, and looked away. Staring at the table where her brother died. Maxie poured two drinks from a bottle, and then slipped a little something into Holly’s glass. He watched, smiling, as Holly turned back and gulped the stuff down, just to get rid of it; and then he smiled even more widely as all the expression went out of her face.
“There, that’s better,” said Maxie. “Little miss ri
ch bitch. Come into my bar, throwing your weight about, telling me what to do? I don’t think so. Feeling a little more … suggestible, are you? Good, good… Such a shame about your brother. You must be sad, very sad. So sad, you want to end it all. So here’s a big handful of helpful pills, and a bottle of booze. So you can put an end to yourself, out back, in the toilets. Bye-bye, sweetie. Don’t make a mess.”
The ghost images snapped off as the memory ended. I was so choked with rage I could hardly breathe. I got up from the table and stormed over to the bar. Maxie leaned forward to say something, and I grabbed two handfuls of his grubby T-shirt and hauled him right over his bar, so I could stick my face right into his. He had enough sense not to struggle.
“You knew,” I said. “You knew all along! You made her kill herself!”
“I had no choice!” said Maxie, still smiling. “It was self-defense! She was going to shut me down. And yeah, I knew all along. That’s why I hired you! I knew you’d solve the elemental business right away, and then stick around for the free drinks. I knew the ghost would approach you, and you’d get involved. I needed someone to get rid of her; and you always were a soft touch, Taylor.”
I let him go. I didn’t want to touch him any more. He backed cautiously away, and sneered at me from a safe distance.
“You feel sorry for the bitch, help her on her way to the great Hereafter! You’ll be doing her a favour, and me too. I told you she was bad for business.”
I turned my back on him, and went back to the drinkers who’d known him best. And before any of them could even say anything, I focused my gift through them, through their memories of Craig, and reached out to him in a direction I knew but could not name. A door opened, that hadn’t been there before, and a great light spilled out into the bar. A fierce and unrelenting light, too bright for the living to look at directly. The drinkers in the bar should have winced away from it, used as they were to the permanent gloom; but something in the light touched them despite themselves, waking old memories, of what might have been.
And out of that light came Craig De Lint, walking free and easy. He reached out a hand, smiling kindly, and out of the gloom came the ghost of Holly De Lint, also walking free and easy. She took his hand, and they smiled at each other, and then Craig led her through the doorway and into the light; and the door shut behind them and was gone.
In the renewed gloom of the bar, Maxie hooted and howled with glee, slapping his heavy hand on the bartop in triumph. “Finally, free of the bitch! Free at last! Knew you had it in you, Taylor! Drinks on the house, people! On the house!”
And they all came stumbling up to the bar, already forgetting what they might have seen in the light. Maxie busied himself serving them, and I considered him thoughtfully, from a distance. Maxie had murdered Holly, and got away with it, and used me to clean up after him, removing the only part of the business that still haunted him. So I raised my gift one last time, and made contact with the elemental of the sewers, deep under the bar.
“Maxie will never agree to the deal you want,” I said. “He likes things just the way they are. But you might have better luck with a new owner. You put your sewer water into Maxie’s bottles. There are other places you could put it.”
“I take your meaning, John Taylor,” said the elemental. “You’re everything they say you are.”
Maxie lurched suddenly behind his bar, flailing desperately about him as his lungs filled up with water. I turned my back on the drowning man, and walked away. Though, being me, I couldn’t resist having the last word.
“Have one on me, Maxie.”
Simon R. Green has worked as a shop assistant, bicycle repair mechanic, actor, journalist, and mail order bride. And every day he’s glad he doesn’t have to do any of that any more. His best known series are the “Deathstalker” books, (like “Star Wars,” only with a plot that makes sense,) the “Nightside” books, and the “Secret Histories,” featuring Shaman Bond, the world’s most secret agent. Although he does not have a website as such, there is a tribute site, to which he sometimes contributes information, at www.bluemoonrising.nl
John Taylor is a private eye who operates in the Twilight Zone, solving cases of the weird and uncanny. His beat is the Nightside, that sour secret heart of London, where the sun has never shone and it’s always three o’clock in the morning, the hour that tries men’s souls. Gods and monsters can be found there, often attending the same self-help groups. John Taylor is your last chance for justice, the truth, and other disturbing things.
Holding the Line: A Jill Kismet Story
by Lilith Saintcrow
I landed hard, ribs snapping and a wash of red agony pouring through me. High tittering laughter from the hellbreed with the primrose-colored eyes, screams of approval from the clustered Traders. Five against one, and here I was on the floor.
This is not going well.
“Oh, Kismet.” The tittering hellbreed actually had the gall to play to his Trader gallery. “Did you fall down?”
Hot salt blood dribbled on my chin. The scar — the mark of a hellbreed’s lips — chuckled wetly on my wrist, a burst of razor-wire power jolting up the bones and cresting over my shoulder, my ribs popping out and hastily fusing back together. My left hand closed around a gun butt, and I found out that the primrose-eyed bastard had thrown me over near my whip.
Well. Better late than never. My right hand shot out, grabbed the bullwhip’s handle, and the sonofabitch was still laughing when I rolled up off the floor and the leather flashed out, a high hard crack that was the jingling silver flechettes at the end of the whip breaking the sound barrier. The hip leads in whip-work, a slight advantage women have. When added to speed and cussedness and the etheric force humming through the scar and jacking me up into superhuman, it was all I was going to get.
It was going to have to be enough.
Naked light bulbs swung at the end of cords, crazy-dappling shadows over the warehouse’s interior. The whip lashed, and flayed the primrose-eyed hellbreed’s face. It cut him off mid-chuckle, and if I wanted him dead now would have been the time to shoot him.
But I didn’t. Instead, I shot the Trader springing at me in midair, and to my right, the one who had somehow cottoned on that I wasn’t down and out yet. He’d swapped some of his humanity for superstrength and superspeed, but my aim was true and half his hell-trading head evaporated. That took the pep out of him, bigtime.
Lucky shot. I was just lucky all over tonight.
The screaming started, and from there it was straightforward. My next shot took out one of the hellbreed ringmaster’s bending-backward little knees. He had folded down and was screaming, the black ichor that passes for their blood bubbling out past the thin fingers clasping his face. Said face was now a mess of hamburger and there were three more Traders to deal with.
I hadn’t thought they’d be stupid enough to stay at their last known hangout. Not when they knew I was after them. I hadn’t precisely made a mistake — I’d just thought about questioning them before I started killing.
Mikhail would have told me not to bother. But he wasn’t here. Twenty-nine days since the Weres lit his pyre and his soul rode the smoke to Valhalla.
I was on my own.
Four minutes later the last Trader died gibbering at the end of a long smear of black-tinted blood, the corruption eating up his tissues and making the body do a St. Vitus’s dance. The pacts Traders make claim more than the soul, and maybe they would think twice about mortgaging themselves if they could see what happens when one of them bites it.
I don’t know. All I see are the ones who chance it.
I turned back to the hellbreed. He wasn’t so pretty now, and I hoped I’d gotten one of his eyes, popped it like a bubble. The whip coiled neatly and stowed itself, habitual movements while I kept the blubbering hellbreed covered. I ached all over and my ribs twitched, bone resetting itself. The scar pulse-burned on my right wrist, sawing against the nerves of my arm.
Slow and easy here, Jill.
My smart eye was hot and dry, watching the plucking under the fabric of the surface of the world. He could really be that hurt, burbling and moaning into his hands. But the tension in his shoulders — clad in once-elegant navy Brooks Brothers, now spattered with blood and other fluids — told me otherwise. His suit coat flopped around a little, low on his right side where the first bullet had taken a chunk out of him. Black ichor dripped and the noises he was making were straight out of a nightmare.
“Cut it out.” My voice sliced through his. The silver charms tied in my hair rattled and buzzed, blessed metal reacting against the contamination in the air. “You’re not that hurt.”
“Bitch,” he blubbered into his hands. “Oh you bitch.”
You’d think they’d find something more original to call a female hunter. I kept the gun on him, every muscle quivering-alert. The scar burned, working into my flesh. “You can guess what I’m after.” Each word very carefully weighted. “Slade. A hunter. Taller than me. Black hair, silver charms. Disappeared about twelve hours ago.”
“Bitch,” he moaned again.
I didn’t have time. So I blew away his other knee. The report boomed and caromed through the warehouse’s interior, and he crawfished on the floor, whisper-screaming because he’d run out of air.
“You have arms, too,” I reminded him. “Shoulders. Ribs. Genitalia. Start talking.”
In the end it took one of his elbows, too. By then the Traders were smears of bubbling black, corruption eating at their tissues, and the primrose-eyed ‘breed screamed until I put him out of his misery. Silence descended through the foul reek.
I swallowed hard, set my jaw, and took just enough time to clean the contamination of hellbreed away with whispering blue banefire, shaken off my fingers like oil, before I got going. I didn’t even stop to wash the blood off my face.
Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives Page 8