Hex and the City

by Simon R. Green

  I looked at Sinner. “Is it just me, or is he starting to make more sense?”

  “It’s probably just you,” said Sinner. “So, what do we do? Knock loudly and announce our presence?”

  “Oh, I think it knows we’re here,” I said. “The Lamentation is a Power and a Domination. Beings like that don’t believe in being surprised.”

  I reached cautiously forward and gave the door a gentle push. It swung slowly inwards, the hinges squealing loudly. Like most of the older Beings, the Lamentation was a traditionalist and a bit of a drama queen. Beyond the doors was a dull red glow, a tense silence, and nothing else. Like opening a gate to Hell. We waited a while, but no-one came to greet us.

  “I’m a bit surprised the door wasn’t locked,” said Sinner. “I mean, this is the Nightside, after all, where communal property tends to be defined as anything that isn’t actually nailed down and guarded by trolls.”

  “Anyone stupid enough to invade the Lamentation’s lair deserves every nasty thing that happens to them,” I said. “And no-one inside ever leaves, except by the Lamentation’s will.”

  “Excuse me,” said Pretty Poison, “but are we ever going in, or is the plan to stand about on the doorstep discussing strategy until the Lamentation gets so bored it comes out to see us?”

  I looked at Sinner. “Pushy girl-friend.”

  “You have no idea,” said Sinner.

  I led the way in, Sinner and Pretty Poison in flanking position, and Madman bumbling along in the rear. Behind us, the door slammed shut without anyone touching it, and none of us were in the least surprised. Drama queens, the lot of them. The interior of the Mausoleum turned out to be much bigger than its modest exterior indicated. The rooms of the original small business had been replaced by a vast, echoing hall, half-full of curling, blood-tinted mists. We couldn’t see the end of the hall from where we were, but the high, vaulted ceiling suggested it was some way off in the distance. We were in a big, big place, and the small sounds of our feet on the uneven flagstones seemed to echo on and on before they reached the distant stone walls. There are those who say space expands to contain all the evil present. And this was the lair of the Lamentation. We had come to a bad place, one of the worst in the world, and all of us could feel it, in our water and in our bones and in our souls.

  “I like it here,” said Pretty Poison. “It feels like home.”

  The air was bitterly cold, but quite still. The bloodred mists moved of their own accord, gusting and billowing, thickening and thinning apparently at random. The flagstones beneath our feet were covered in grave dirt. One wall let in shafts of light, falling through old-fashioned stained-glass windows, each depicting the awful deaths of saints and martyrs, the vivid colours glowing through the mists. A dull red glow from the far end of the great hall coloured the mists, pulsing slowly, so that as we moved cautiously forward, it was like walking through the bloodstream of a dying god. The mists smelled of blood and meat and recent death.

  “Have we come at last to Hell?” said Madman.

  “This isn’t Hell,” said Pretty Poison. “But you can see Hell from here.”

  We kept walking. The end of the hall seemed impossibly far away. I had no idea how long we’d been inside the Mausoleum. We were all shivering now, even Madman. The cold was leaching the living warmth right out of us. We stuck close together. And from out of the bloodred mists, the dead came walking to meet us, to welcome their new guests. There were hundreds of them, men and women and even some children, and there was no mistaking the fact that they were all corpses. They still wore the wounds that killed them, the self-inflicted cuts and rope burns they’d used to end their lives. They showed off their gaping wounds and dried blood, their stretched and broken necks, with simple indifference. Their skins were colourless, even the insides of their injuries only pale, muted colours, and their faces were blank. Until you looked into their unblinking eyes and saw a suffering there that would never end.

  An army of the dead, shuffling forward on unfeeling feet, the rags of their clothes just the tatters of so many scarecrows. They all raised one hand, and beckoned us forward. An aisle opened up through the mass of them, and I led the way into it. The ranks of the dead continued to open silently up before us, then close behind us. We weren’t going anywhere they didn’t want us to. Some of the dead pawed at me, the way the street people had in Rats’ Alley. They looked at me with their dead eyes, and muttered with their pale mouths, in the barest ghosts of voices.

  Help us. Free us from the Lamentation. We didn’t know. We didn’t know it would be like this. We want to lie down, and rest. Help us. Free us. Destroy us.

  And all I could do was keep on walking.

  The Lamentation was an old, old Being. Older than most of what passes for history in the Nightside. Served and powered by suicides, it fed on suffering and despair and death. The dead bodies pressed close around us, showing off the deep noose marks on their crooked necks, or the ragged exit wounds in the backs of their heads where they’d shot themselves in the mouth, or in the eye. There were faces thick and puffy from the gasses they’d breathed, or the pills they’d swallowed. Pale red mouths at wrists and throats. The heavy marks of falls and vehicle collisions. They wore their deaths like open books, not as a warning but as proof of their damnation.

  And finally, signs began to appear that we were nearing the Lamentation itself. Hanging nooses dropped from the high ceiling like jungle liana, and we had to push our way through them. There were great sculptures made entirely out of razor blades, and we edged carefully between them. It was just the Lamentation, making itself at home. The blood-tinged mists were thinning out now, taking on the smells and tastes of all kinds of poisonous gasses.

  That last development almost took me by surprise. The others weren’t affected by the increasingly deadly mists, for their own various reasons, but the first I knew of the danger was when my head began to go all swimmy, and I couldn’t seem to get my breath. My thoughts stuttered and repeated themselves, feeling increasingly far away, and then the voice of the unicorn’s horn pin sounded loudly in my head.

  Poison! Poison gasses, you idiot! Defend yourself! Eat the celery!

  I thrust a numbing hand into an inside coat pocket, pulled out the piece of celery, and chewed on it. I always keep a piece handy, pre-prepared with all kinds of useful substances, for just such occasions as this. It tasted bitter as I chewed, but it cleared my head rapidly. It’s an old trick but a good one, taught me long ago by a Travelling Doctor I met at the Hawk’s Wind Bar & Grill.

  Guns and bullets lay scattered in spirals across the dirty flagstones, and we kicked them out of our way. A rainbow of discarded pills crunched under our feet. The dead closed in around us. I kept staring straight ahead.

  The corpses were all around us now, filling the vast hall, the furthest of them only dim shadows in the churning mists. For the first time, I was sure I’d chosen the right companions for this case. Anyone else would already have run screaming, and I wasn’t far from it myself. The living were never meant to come this close to death and all its horrors. The Lamentation was served by everyone who ever took their own life in the Nightside, and so had acquired the second biggest standing army in the Nightside, behind the Authorities. They allowed this to continue only because the Lamentation had never been much interested in how the Nightside was run. There was never any shortage of suffering and suicides in a place where it’s always three o’clock in the morning, and the comfort of the dawn never comes.

  The blood-tinted mists suddenly blew apart like curtains, revealing the Lamentation hanging supported in its cage. The great and terrible Being was held securely inside an intricate construction of rusting black metal, a massive cube thirty feet on a side. Black iron bars criss-crossed in elaborate patterns to make up the sides, and then thrust back and forth across the interior, piercing and transfixing the inhumanly stretched and distorted body inside the cage. It was hard to tell just how big the Being really was, bent over and twist
ed back upon itself, again and again. Its flesh was stretched taut by the strain of its contortions, and its skin was colourless and sweaty, though whether from pain or pleasure…There was something about it that suggested it might have started out as human, long and long ago…

  Whether the cage had been built around the Lamentation, or it had grown inside the cage, wasn’t clear. There was no sign of a door or entrance in any of the six sides. The inhumanly long arms and legs stretched out from the crooked torso, twisted back upon themselves again and again, in defiance of all the rules of anatomy, held irrevocably in place by the rusting metal bars transfixing them. There was no trace of blood at any of the many puncture points. More iron bars punched in and out of the torso, which showed no signs of breathing or heartbeat, though the thick body hair swirled slowly, making patterns that sucked in the eye. The face thrust up against the bars of the cage, looking out at its new visitors; stretched impossibly wide, the skin was taut to the point of tearing, and a rusty black spike thrust up out of one eye-socket. The nose had rotted away, or perhaps been bitten off, and the ears were gone, too. The mouth was a wide, suppurating wound, full of metal teeth. Cracked and crumbling goat’s horns curled up from the wide, distorted brow.

  It hurt to look at the Lamentation for any length of time. It was just too big, too…other.

  It stank of desperate emotions, of hate and despair and thwarted needs, and the sorrow that can only see one way out, and all of it was thick and overpowering with the headiness of musk. None of this was natural, of course. The Lamentation radiated all the horrors of sudden death, of unnecessary death, of suicides and lives wasted, of potential unrealised and families blighted. For suffering was food and drink for the Lamentation.

  “Whose stupid idea was it to come here?” Sinner said quietly. There was something about the place that imposed quiet, like an anti-church.

  “Yours,” I said.

  “Why do you listen to me?” said Sinner.

  A clump of mists beside the cage suddenly dispersed, blown away by some unfelt breeze, revealing the dead remains of the Brittle Sisters of the Hive. Their bodies had been piled up to a great height, carelessly dumped there like so much rubbish. There had to be hundreds of them, maybe even thousands; enough to boggle the mind. Shimmering shells of insect husks, spindly limbs already rotting where they stuck out of the pile. Their devil’s faces were cold and uninhabited, their compound eyes and complex mouth parts seeming somehow resigned. The Brittle Sisters of the Hive—genetic terrorists, insect saviours, ravagers of the subconscious mind. Hated by pretty much everyone. And yet still it didn’t please me to see them lying broken and shattered, like offerings to the Lamentation.

  When it spoke, the Lamentation’s voice sounded like someone who pretends to be your friend, then whispers lies and distortions in your ear when you’re at your most vulnerable.

  “This is all of them,” it said, its quiet rasping voice the only sound in the great hall. “There are no more. They came here earlier, looking for you, John Taylor. They intended to ambush you and bear you away to the dissecting tables, to open you up and dig out all your secrets. To steal your heritage for themselves. They knew you’d be coming here. They bought the knowledge from an oracle. They really should have inquired further. I will not permit anyone to interfere with my guests, or my intentions. So I lured them all in here, with lies they wanted to believe, then watched them all kill each other under my influence, until none were left. They screamed in quite a satisfactory way, for insects. And now they’re all gone. The Hives stand empty, now and forever. My gift to you, John Taylor.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That was…kind of you.”

  “Not really,” said the Lamentation. “I don’t do kind. Why have you come here, John Taylor?”

  “I’m investigating the origins of the Nightside,” I said.

  “On behalf of the Transient Being known as Lady Luck. My companions are Madman and Sinner and the demon Pretty Poison. I have already consulted with Merlin Satanspawn and Herne the Hunter.” I tried to think of some more names I could drop, but it was taking everything I had just to keep my act together, in the relentless presence of the Lamentation, so I kept it simple and direct. “What can you tell me about the beginnings of the Nightside, of its creation and true purpose?”

  “The Nightside is much older than I,” said the Lamentation, its voice a sly and insinuating murmur. “Older than anyone I know. The only one who could give you the answers you seek…is your mother. Wherever she may be.”

  “What do you know about my mother?” I said.

  “She was gone, but now is returned to us. Lucky old us. Babalon, Babalon. It took an army of the Light and the Dark to rid us of her, all those centuries ago, but only three foolish mortal men to bring her back.”

  “Three men,” I said, my mind racing. “My father, of course, and the Collector, and…Walker?”

  “Of course. Who else? Those three good and true friends, who had such great dreams and meant so well…”

  It stopped talking, thick pus dribbling from one corner of its distorted mouth. It looked at me expectantly with its single unblinking eye. I thought hard. This wasn’t going where I’d expected, but then my whole day had been like that.

  “I met the Primal once,” I said finally. “Ancient demons, from the very dawn of Creation, when they possessed some bodies at the Necropolis. They spoke of my mother. They said, She who was first, and will be again, in this worst of all possible worlds. Do you know what they meant by that?”

  “She is back,” said the Lamentation. “And the Nightside will never be the same again. I remember the early days of the Nightside, back before there were Authorities to curb the appetites and ambitions of those who would play here. We all ran free in those days, the Light and the Dark, and those who couldn’t or wouldn’t choose. That was the point. It was a time of miracles and monstrosities, dreams and damnations built with pride, where anything and everything seemed possible. None of us now are what was intended then. The Nightside was young when the world was young, and all the kingdoms this world has ever known have never produced anything as wild or as free or as glorious as the Nightside was then.”

  “What happened…to that place?” I said.

  “We drove your mother out, for we wished to be free even from her intentions, but without her, we lost our way. The Nightside’s potential collapsed under the weight of our…limitations, and became a shadow of the dream that was. All we have now is a place of small ambitions and furtive pleasures, where all that matters about a thing is the price it will bring.”

  “You knew my mother?” I said.

  “Perhaps. It was all such a long time ago. I no longer remember things clearly. Not even my own past, never mind another’s. But I do know that the Nightside was already old when I was a young thing and newly formed.”

  “And human?” suggested Sinner. I jumped. I’d honestly forgotten anyone else was there.

  “Human?” said the Lamentation, not bothering to hide the scorn in its voice. “Such a little thing to be. I am large and glorious. I have always been here, and always will be.”

  “Nonsense,” Pretty Poison said briskly. She stepped forward to stare closely at the twisted thing in its cage.

  “You’re not one of my kind. You were made, not created, this way. The world, or your own desires, made you what you are. There is nothing of the eternal in you, nothing of the Infernal or the Elect. You’re just meat, with meat’s needs and delusions.”

  The whole cage shook as the Lamentation howled, an awful, disturbing sound, black flecks of rusting iron falling from the metal bars as the distorted body shook with rage, and perhaps shock. It must have been a long time since anyone had dared speak to it in such a fashion. I felt like applauding. The black iron bars rattled, but the cage held. The Lamentation’s skin stretched and tore, but still no blood flowed. The dead bodies in the hall stirred restlessly, and the blood-tinted mists churned and roiled. There was a power pulsing on the
air, and we could all feel it. Pretty Poison watched it all calmly. Sinner and Madman were hiding behind me, and I wished I could hide, too. There was no easy way out of the Mausoleum, no obvious exit, and the rage of a Power and a Domination can be a terrible thing. Just ask the Brittle Sisters of the Hive. Eventually the Lamentation settled down again, fixing me with its one awful eye.

  “You want to know who your mother was?” it said, and its voice was cold, cold. “If I ever knew for sure I have forgotten, or was made to forget, but they could not keep me from thinking and deducing all these years. It is my belief that she was that old and terrible one sometimes called Morrigan, of the Badhbh; the Celtic war goddess, who also manifested as a wolf and a crow and a raven. That old goddess of battlefields and of slaughter, who dressed in the entrails of her worshippers and whose laughter was the gathering storms of war. To whom every dead soldier was a sacrifice, and every massacre a delight. The secret goddess and guiding spirit of the twentieth century, some say. And you are her only son, already spreading death and destruction. You almost brought down the Nightside with your angel war. Whatever will you do next, John Taylor?”

  “You don’t really know a damned thing about her,” I said, with the certainty of sudden insight. “It’s all just guesses and wishful thinking. You gave up or lost your memories, in order to live entirely in the present. To better savour the suffering you steal. How would you know who my mother really was? You can’t even remember your own beginnings, never mind the Nightside’s.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the Lamentation, its dry, whispering voice suddenly calm again. “Your quest stops here. Let the past remain the past; I care only for the way things are. It may be that the old days were not as free and fine as I choose to remember, but I won’t let you threaten what I have now. All the sweet suffering, the despair and damnations…you would take it all away. I don’t think so. I won’t have you digging up old secrets that might overturn the source of my power, and my delight.”