quiet.
Please don’t let them hear me.
Norma shook her head, trying to clear it. This was wrong… what she was feeling… what she was enduring… wrong. She was an eighteen-year-old girl and this, she kept reminding herself, was just a computer simulation. Eighteen-year-old girls didn’t get hurt or feel pain and panic in make-believe worlds. Even make-believe worlds as made-believable as the DemiMonde.
You didn’t feel fear playing a computer game, not horrible gut-wrenching, stomach-churning fear like this. It was wrong. Totally, totally wrong. If what they – they? – were putting her through was deliberate, it was sadistic.
Bastards.
She looked around. It was pitch-dark, the only illumination provided by the light seeping out from behind a half-open door at the end of the cobbled alley, the light spilling onto the facing wall to show the graffiti crawling over the scarred brickwork.
The only Good nuJu is a Dead nuJu
Welcome to the Demi-Monde.
She tried to relax. The alley was a good place to hide. Except… except that it was a dead end. She was trapped. She felt the bilious taste of panic rising up in her throat. Her head swam and she thought she would faint from cold, exhaustion and sheer unadulterated terror. Maybe she was ill. What did the Prof call it… ill-ucinating?
Ill-ucinating.
A condition caused by the confusion of Realities, often experienced by inveterate players of hyper-realistic computer simulations such as the Demi-Monde. The Prof had a lot to answer for.
Bastard.
When she told her father what she’d been through there’d be hell to pay. He’d go ballistic. The cyber- torturing of his daughter wasn’t something the President of the United States would be big on. The things she’d tell her father when she got back.
If she got back.
She heard the scrape of boot heels on cobbles. She pressed back into the darkness, hardly daring to breathe, motionless apart from the shivers of cold rippling over her flesh. She clenched her jaw tight shut, trying to stop her teeth chattering.
A shout, the voice hard and merciless but at the same time childish… Clement’s voice. She should have known Clement would be the one leading the hunt. Lunatic he might be but he was smarter than all of them. It would be his Hounders who had followed the bloody tracks she’d left in her wake.
Hounders: horrible, horrible things.
She could hear orders being shouted, could hear the snapped replies from Clement’s SS troopers. She hated the SS. The SS were the most fanatical of the fanatical. They never questioned orders. They were the true believers. They were the ones charged with the protection of the ForthRight’s black soul and of enforcing the perverted creed of UnFunDaMentalism. They were the ones responsible for safeguarding the Demi-Monde from Daemons… Daemons like Norma.
She heard an urgent and heated conversation coming to her from around the corner of the alleyway. Maybe they’d lost her? Maybe the snow had come in the nick of time? She edged her head out of her doorway, trying to make out what was being said. The conversation stopped, only the whimpering of a Hounder signalling that Clement’s hunting party was still nearby. The silence seemed oppressive… threatening. Her body was taut with panic: she was ready to run again. Run for her life.
Run where?
The pain as the cane lashed across her knee was indescribable; it smashed up through her body, paralysing her in shock.
Norma had never imagined that the human body could have so much suffering inflicted upon it. The pain was so bad that she didn’t even scream or cry out: she was stunned into a gagging silence, her eyes bleeding tears of agony, her right leg twitching in numbed torment. Her ruined knee buckled and she sank to the cobbles.
She must have blacked out. When she came to, she found herself lying in a pool of icy water. A dozen or so men moved to circle her, their shadowed faces peering down. She felt all hope drain out of her: even in the Demi- Monde the two men who stood at the front of the pack were known as the hardest and the cruellest of them all.
Singularities.
They were men without pity, without conscience and without remorse. Men who could laugh even as they slaughtered the innocent and the helpless: psychopaths.
Bastards.
Evil, evil bastards.
Norma knew the two men who stood over her. Su Xiaoxiao had warned her about them when she had first entered the Demi-Monde. Told her to avoid them. Told her they represented the more dangerous of the Dupes that populated this cyber-world, warned her that Matthew Hopkins was Clement’s creature and Clement was, in turn, the unthinking disciple of His Holiness Comrade Crowley.
Automatically, instinctively, the would-be politician cowering inside Norma’s bruised and bloodied body studied the two men. She’d always been fascinated by psychopaths, the most fatally flawed of men, whose souls were blistered and hardened by hatred and wickedness, and it was this fascination that Crowley had used as bait to lure her into the Demi-Monde. But it was one thing to read textbooks and write papers on the genesis, on the diagnosis and on the treatment of psychotics: it was quite another to look such evil full in the face. Their eyes were empty, crystal-cold and shark-black. They were eyes that contained no humanity and no forgiveness.
Dolls’ eyes.
Suddenly one of the Blood Hounders sprang at Norma, the beast obviously incensed by the smell of blood coming from her tattered knees. Clement beat at the creature with the leather switch he carried. ‘Back, damn your eyes, you spawn of Loki,’ he snarled, thrashing the Hounder until the pain of the whipping exceeded the creature’s bloodlust and it cowered back. ‘You,’ he growled at the Hounder’s handler, ‘hold the thing fast or by ABBA ah’ll knout you to ribbons and rip out your eyes.’
Terrified by the venom in the boy’s voice, the handler hauled on the rope tethered to the Hounder’s collar and pulled the hideous creature away from Norma. She hated Hounders. Half-man, half-animal, they were the obscene creation of Archie Clement who had abducted perfumiers from the Quartier Chaud, and by blinding and deafening them, by ripping out their tongues and chopping off their fingers, he had removed all their senses but one: their sense of smell. Then he had stoked their bloodlust to a frenzy. The result was that these monsters could smell a single drop of blood at a hundred yards. Clement used Hounders to track Daemons. Daemons like Norma.
Clement stepped forward to stand over her as she lay shivering on the cobbles.
Little Archie Clement, who in the Real World had ridden for the Confederacy under Bloody Bill Anderson, who had fallen into the habit of scalping all the men, women and children he murdered as he rampaged through the South, and who was friend and partner in crime to Jesse James.
Even if she hadn’t been forewarned by Su Xiaoxiao that his boyishness and his wide-eyed innocence masked a spirit so twisted and bent that he could hardly be called human, she would have known to avoid him. Yes… though small, almost frail-looking, Clement had such a hateful aura about him that even the ferocious Beria was careful in his presence.
Clement took off his peaked cap and wiped his brow with his sleeve. It still shocked Norma how real Demi- Mondians were; how flawlessly these Dupes had been rendered. No, that wasn’t right: it was the very fact that they weren’t flawless that made them so perfect. Little things… like the mud-flecked slush that splattered the black of the boy’s uniform; how down-at-heel his boots were; how spittle sprayed from his mouth whenever he spoke; and how wonderfully contrived was his sweet, noxious body odour that perfumed the still air of the Demi-Monde, an odour that reeked of Solution, tobacco and a negligent attitude to washing.
The perverted genius of the Demi-Monde was in the detail. Loki was in the detail. ABBA was in the detail.
And ABBA was God in the Demi-Monde.
Clement smiled down at Norma, a smile that displayed his tobacco-blackened teeth and sucked all the hope
