Slide On The Run

by Mick Farren

  Rosa leaned close to Slide and whispered. "Our dear Miss Crabtree lost her arm in her wild youth when she went a bit native and ran off with the Black Pirates of Kamtol."

  Slide puffed on his cigar. "Indeed." He was starting to believe that Extrosylvania might be a place where a demon could hide for a while, despite his misgivings back at Doc Zen's.

  After a fifteen full and painful, stinging birch strokes, the squirming victim cried out with a high and lispingly theatricality. "Oh! Oh, Richard! I beg and implore you. I swear I will be a good girl in the future. Oh please, my love! My painful lesson is quite learned. Oh, tell the remorseless Miss Crabtree to stay the birch! Tell her to put up the instrument. Enough is enough. I am well whipped and abjectly repentant. I plead, Richard,…oh! for pity's sake…I plead to be flogged no more!"

  The naked blonde's entreaties were a little too rehearsed to be altogether plausible, and certainly did not seem to evoke any pity in the tall dark aristocrat who sat at the other end of the table. He was a distinguished figure in frock coat, muttonchop side-whiskers, and a monocle, and as he took in the flagellation from what was clearly the best seat in the house, one hand held a cigar and a brandy glass, and the other caressed the velvet scalp of Green hostess who knelt at his knees and served him.

  Rosa leaned close to Slide and whispered. "That's Captain Sir Richard Pendragon Barton, the Queen's Special Agent getting his joint copped by the Green, while the one getting her rump warmed is his current mistress Miss Harriet Marwood. Usually she has the whip hand, so to speak, but they must have contracted for some ringing of the changes tonight."

  "This isn't how they normally carry on?"

  Rosa shook her head. "Oh dear me no. I have it on good authority that, in the boudoir, it is the good Sir Richard who regularly bares his bum to the lash, arse-up, groveling, and loving it."

  "On good authority?"

  "Many a time I have sent girls over to assist in their tea-dance debauchery."

  "And how does the Queen feel about her Special Agent being the bum-striped whipping boy in private life."

  "She totally ignores it. Queen Mina is above such things. Fancies herself as a philosopher queen, she does. Even though she was once little better than Dracula's whore. Plus he's far too good at his trade, our Captain Dick, to have to contain himself in private. Barton may be a stone libertine and godless masochist, but don't underestimate him, Slide. There's some who say, despite being so deep into the now-track, and in the pay of the Turquoise Tower, and also tight with some of our nastier local upstarts like the Silver Legion and the Red Knights, he keeps a link to Imperial Intelligence, and might even be full IIA."

  "The IIA has agents this far out?"

  "All the things are relative."

  Slide nodded. "I guess so." He pointed in the direction of two men sitting next to Barton, one who simply watched, while the other made sketches in a small note book. "And who are they? A couple of his operatives?"

  Rosa shook her head. "All I know is that they are new in town and call themselves Mr. Moore and Mr. O'Neill."

  "And what about the one behind, the big, bullnecked character with the slouch hat pulled down over his face?"

  "I know even less about him. He only arrived today, a little before you did. He has a Italian accent, and goes by the name of Nightshade. And I could swear he smelled of vampire."

  Before Slide could quiz Rosa further about either Nightshade or Mr. Moore and Mr. O'Neill, the birch once more swished and stung and Miss Harriet Marwood cried yet out again. "Oh Richard, my lord, my love. Say I have been punished enough. My tender extremity now throbs beyond endurance."

  This time the melodrama was greeted by some chuckles from the crowd, and even Sir Richard Barton slowly smiled. "I'm sorry, my dear, but you know I have to be deaf to your entreaties, no matter how tearfully moving. That was part of the bargain."

  Now a ripple of approval went round the room, and Barton clearly played to the crowd. "I would suggest you ask Miss Crabtree to lay on five more, five more stripes to the weave of your striations, as a penalty for speaking up too soon."

  Harriet Marwood's voice completely changed. It dropped and octave and snarled more naturally. "Damn you, Richard. Do I have to bleed fo you, and in public?"

  Barton sipped his brandy. "Such was the agreement when you lost the bet." He glanced towards where Rosa stood beside Slide in the back of the room. "I think Mrs Coote will confirm that."

  Rosa Coote laughed, clearly happy to play the recognized referee in these evening sports of the upper orders. "That was the deal Captain Dick. All signed and sealing and on a paper in my safe. I believe 'thrashed beyond all sentimental mercy' were the words used and agreed."

  For a moment, Barton looked directly at Slide and slight frown crossed his face, as though he had sensed something, but then Harriet Marwood snarled angrily, redirecting his attention. "Damn you again, Richard. Damn you to hell."

  "Behave yourself, Harriet. You have an audience. The game must be played out."

  "Oh very well." Marwood resumed the lisping theatre of the sweet girlish soprano. "Please Miss Crabtree, may I have five more, please?"

  Miss Crabtree gestured curtly to the Red Martians, who had momentarily relaxed sufficiently for Marwood to raise her head, and speak. Again the bare shoulders were pressed down so her face was turned, cheek hard against the table. Miss Crabtree flexed her mechanical arm, then the flexible birch fell again causing the smarting recipient to jerk and squeal with a decided sincerity. Barton watched the next three cuts of the birch, but on the fourth he turned and again glanced in the direction of Rosa Coote and Slide, and, this time, his eyes lingered on him as though Slide posed a question, or presented something of a puzzle. The radium revolver under Slide's coat was a comfort, although perhaps not that much of one.

  Story so far: Having deserted from the Battle of the Fifteen Armies, and with the backstory fast distorting around him, Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, arrives on ancient Mars via Doc Zen's Carter Machine, only to discover that a coterie of extraordinarily perverse neo-Victorians have established a faux-British Raj on the Red Planet.

  Episode Six

  An Encounter In Albert Park

  Slide walked slowly along a bridle path, through the leafy fabrications of the park, away from the lights of the Establishment of Rosa Coote, sauntering somewhat, taking his time, but still watching his surroundings with some caution. Every now and again, pony girls would clatter by with ardently embracing lovers riding behind them, and he also had stepped prudently aside when an aloof company Red Martian lancers rode ponderously past, harness jingling, sabers rattling, the plumes on the their turbans bobbing, and their thoats snorting at being held so tightly in check. The Victorians liked to parade their ceremonial military presence. He had bid farewell to Rosa before taking his leave of her establishment, and promised he that he would call on her in a day or so. Prior to his departure, he had spent some hours of distraction in the private company of an enthusiastic brace of Green Martian hostesses provided, on the house, by Rosa. Private had seemed preferable to remaining in the main salon. His encounter with Sir Richard Barton had been enough to tell him that, in his dust-streaked duster coat, and with his off-world, demon ways, he was making himself a far too obvious outsider amid a gathering of the Extrosylvanian elite indulging in semi-public depravity.

  When Miss Harriet Marwood's painful birching was finally completed, the oiled Red Martians had released her, then indoor pony girls draped her in a blue silk robe, to cover her smarting stripes, and assisted from the room. With the show concluded, Barton had risen to his feet, as if he intended to follow his mistress to some rear dressing room or antechamber, but, before doing that, he had discreetly, but very deliberately walked by Yancey Slide.

  "I sense you carry a gun, sir."

  "Do you now?"

  "A radium revolver, if I'm not mistaken."

  Slide's voice was chill. No side-whiskered Victorian, no matter how well connected,
was going to intimidate him. "You would appear very perceptive, sir. Especially from across a crowded room with so much else going on."

  "Are you a hired assassin or perhaps a Continental Operative? Slide dismissed the question as though it was of little importance. "Neither, at this particular moment."

  "Maybe in the pay of our local Gorthan Assassins?"

  Slide made a stiff gesture of ronin denial. "In no one's pay, I assure you." "But you felt the need to arm yourself?"

  "Let's say the weapon came with the package."

  "That must have been an interesting package."

  "Not particularly. I suppose it depends on your perspective."

  "I didn't catch your name, sir."

  "I didn't release it to be caught, Sir Richard."

  Barton had looked bleakly at Slide, and drew hard on his cigar. Rosa Coote quickly intervened and made a fast introduction. The two men shook hands, and Barton's smile was courteous but, at the same time, hard eyed as he excused himself. "Right now, Miss Marwood is expecting me, and I cannot keep her waiting after all that she has been through, and, indeed, neither would I want to. I suspect, however, we will be meeting again, Mr. Slide."

  Slide had nodded, knowing that a kind of unspoken challenge had been issued, but to what exactly he wasn't sure. All he knew was that Barton intended to make the predicted meeting happen. "I will look forward to it, Sir Richard."

  "You do that, Mr. Slide. You do that."

  After the exchange, Rosa had made it clear that it was not a good idea for Slide to be loitering in the public rooms of her Establishment. She wanted to stash him, with suitable means of amusement, in some more private sector of the house. Slide was in total agreement with that, if perhaps for different reasons. The two Green Martian hostesses, with their flexibility, ingenuity, wanton zealousness and, of course, those extra Martian orifices, would divert the body allowing the essential Idimmu, that was the core of Slide, to float free to the place of abstraction where his demon essence could, for the duration of the stoned and physical games, find an untroubled, demon stability. After all the drugs, and its prodigious journey across space and time, Slide's adopted body

  now bore little resemblance to the long gone Johnny Yuma, and was rapidly taking on the Slide more standard gaunt features. Nothing, however, was able to change the unconscious tactile memories contained in the cadaver's Orlac cells, and these urged it first to load up on the local advanced opiates, hallucinogenics, and then drift sideways, delightedly responding to the attentions of the two nubile Martians, who caressed extraordinary local stimulants into the body's eagerly receptive cells, some of which were actually secreted from their own lewd flesh, and then continued to work on him with hands, multiple tongues and other extremities, practicing extreme and vigorous obscenity until the body writhed and screamed, exactly echoing their own alien passion howls as the three way coupling rose to a climax.

  When all was done, Slide returned to ex-Yuma body. He dismissed the hostesses and dressed for the world outside. The temptation was simply to remain at Rose Coote's establishment as long as she would endure him as a guest, but, once again, his demon curiosity got the better of him. The body wanted to sleep, but Slide would not be dictated to by any annexed carcass and its imagined needs. He wanted to see more of this strange human city set down in an ancient Martian landscape, and that was how a further half hour found him walking in Albert Park, approaching a grove of faux-oaks, and a small stone henge-circle of modern fabrication that had been rather poorly distressed to make it resemble an ancient ruin. The structure would have fooled no one who had ever seen the real thing, and Slide assumed it was a pretentiously decorative folly, until he read the discreetly engraved bronze sign attached to one of the megaliths that claimed it as the property and sacred place of the Victorian Order of Martian Druids. Slide hoped he would be spared having to meet the VO of MD. They would not be dangerous, but, as a self-respecting demon, he had no desire to bored to distraction by occult whimsey.

  Slide was about to leave the fake henge when he felt the movement, a motion quite beyond his human senses, but with the resonance of a solid mass to his demon perceptions. What gave him paused was the inability of his demon perceptions to pinpoint location of this mass. He immediately went on the searching defensive, but still didn't catch the intrusion until it suddenly appeared in the form of a supposedly human figure, bullnecked and powerful, dressed in a flowing black overcoat and slouch hat.

  "Hold up there, daemon."

  Slide halted and turned to face the intruder. He might look like a man, but Slide knew instinctively that it was no more human than he. A human was unable simply to appear out of nowhere with quite such a supernatural sense of drama, and no human could conjure the ground fog that was suddenly drifting between the trees and around the megaliths of the stone circle, and certainly no human could recognized Slide as a demon in a man's body quite so easily. He been both made and surprised, and that was not good. No choice but the bluster.

  "And who might you be? You don't look like any Druid. Even a Martian druid."

  The figure moved closer. "You don't know me?" In fact, Slide did know the figure, after a fashion, or at least he thought he did. It greatly resembled the man at Rosa Coote's, sitting behind Sir Richard Barton, the one who Rosa had pointed out as Nightshade, and had said smelled of vampire. Was Barton so advanced that the had the undead in his employ and had sent this one to waylay Slide?

  "I don't believe I've had the pleasure."

  "But I think you know me."

  Slide was stunned. Now he could smell vampire, and it was all he needed to trigger the recall. His full idimmu memory was vast, but made complicated by infinite dimensional levels and the relativity of time. The result was that large accumulations of data went ignored and unnoticed for sometimes subjective centuries at a stretch, until a random nudge brought long buried facts to the

  conscious surface. Nightshade. More fully Joey Nightshade. The entity was also known Lupo Leomonte, sometimes Lupo Rieti. In other contexts, he was Vincent Satrielli. He was a vampire, one of the colony led by the formidable Victor Renquist, by all accounts with a career of bloody assassination that went back to the Italian Renaissance. All that Slide knew told him that such a being had no such business on Mars at all, let alone eight million years in his own linear past.

  "You are Nightshade?"

  "I prefer the simple Lupo."

  Slide made a routine demon-to-vampire ward-off pass with his right hand, more to indicate that he had made this Nightshade, just as this Nightshade had made him, than as a gesture of protection. "I didn't know they had vampires on Mars?"

  "I would rather you used the word "nosferatu". It's connotations are less negative."

  "I'll try and remember that. I also don't like the term daemon."

  Lupo bowed in sardonic acknowledgment. "Then we must try and respect each other's sensitivities."

  "I am still surprise that a nosferatu should come to Mars."

  "Normally we don't, but She of Fable requested our presence and made it possible."

  "She of Fable?"

  "The queen of this…place. The former Wilhelmina Murray, and the wife of the Slayer Harker. She that was the consort of Count Dracula." Lupo did not sound as though he exactly approved of Mars. Or Harker, or Count Dracula either.

  "And you just arrived here?

  Lupo nodded. "By the same method as you yourself used, demon."

  A mind reading vampire? How else could Lupo know how Slide had come to Mars? He let that go for a moment, however, simply contracting his mind and vampire-perceived aura locking them both down beyond the reach of any Nosferatu psychic delving. "A Carter Machine?"

  "I believe that was the name of the device."

  "You could survive riding the Gridley Wave?"

  "I believe it was somewhat modified to make such a thing possible."

  "And now you're here, the sun doesn't not bother you?"

  Lupo eyed Slide coldly, less than ple
ased at what he obviously considered an interrogation. "Not when it is so very distant. I can feel it as an irritation, but it does me no harm."

  Lupo's response was structured in such a way that it gave discreet warning that further questions on Slide's part might be considered an invasion of Nosferatu privacy. He had forgotten how sensitive old school vampires could be about unwarranted intrusions into what they viewed as their personal business. To gain information was to gain strength, but Slide knew he should, for the moment, curb his curiosity. Lupo could too easily take offense. Slide had seen vampires become offended and it was always violent and most times messy. He wasn't afraid of Lupo, but he knew, in a trial of strength, they were, at the very least, evenly matched and the outcome might be anyone's guess. Fortunately an outside distraction created a natural pause in the conversation. A trio of unsuspecting Fygglhgis came down one of the radiating paths on the far side of the stone circle. Their carapaces and tripod legs clicked as they moved, causing both Slide and Lupo to turn. At the sight of the demon and the vampire, the small crustaceans turned and beat a hasty retreat while exhibiting the body signs of three beings who have suddenly remembered urgent business elsewhere.