Something from the Nightside

'I hate to see London like this,' Joanna said quietly. 'It was always so alive. I always thought it would go on forever. That we built it so well, ran it so tightly, loved it so much, that London would outlast us all. I guess I was wrong. We all were.'

'Maybe we just went away and built another London somewhere else,' I said. 'And as long as people are around, we'll always need a Nightside, or something like it.'

'And what if people aren't around, any longer? Who knows how far into the future we are now? Centuries? Millennia? Look at this place! It's dead.

It's all dead. Everything ends. Even us.' She shuddered abruptly, and then glared at me, as though it was all my fault. 'Nothing's ever easy around you, is it? A Timeslip ... Is this sort of thing usual, in the Nightside?'

'Well,' I said carefully, 'it's not unusual.'

'Typical,' said Joanna. 'You can't even trust Time in the Nightside.'

I couldn't argue with that, so I looked around me some more. Millennia? The ruins looked old, but surely not that old. 'I wonder where everyone is. Did they just up and leave, when they saw the city was doomed? And if so, where did they go?'

'Maybe everyone's gone to the moon. Like in the song.'

That was when I finally looked up, and the chill sank past my bones and into my soul. It was suddenly, horribly, clear why it was so dark. There was no moon. It was gone. The great swollen orb that had dominated the Nightside sky for as long as anyone could remember was missing from the dark sky. Most of the stars were gone too. Only a handful still remained, scattered in ones and twos across the great black expanse, shining only dimly, a few last sentinels of light against the fall of night. And since the stars are so very far away, perhaps they were gone too, and this was just the last of their light to reach us ...

How could the stars be gone? What the hell had happened...

'I always thought the moon seemed so much bigger in the Nightside because it was so much closer here,' I said finally. 'Perhaps ... it finally fell. Dear Jesus, how far forward have we come?'

'If the stars are gone,' Joanna said softly, 'do you suppose our sun has gone out too?'

'I don't know what to think...'

'But...'

'We're wasting time,' I said roughly. 'Asking questions we have no way of answering. It doesn't matter. We're not staying. I've got the far boundary fixed in my head. I'm taking you there, and we are getting the hell out of here, and back to where we belong.'

'Wait a minute,' said Joanna. 'The far boundary? Why can't we just turn around and go back the way we came, through the door that brought us here?'

'It's not that simple,' I said. 'Once a Timeslip has established itself, nothing less than an edict from the Courts of the Holy is going to shift it. It's here for the duration. If we go back, we'll just re-emerge by the Fortress again, and the Timeslip will still be between us and Blaiston Street. We'd have to go around the Timeslip to reach Blaiston Street, and for that we'll need a fairly major player to map the Times-lip's extent and affected area. Or we'll just keep ending up here again.'

'How long could such a mapping take?' 'Good question. Even if we could find someone powerful enough who wouldn't charge us an arm and a leg, and could fit it into his schedule straightaway ... we're talking days, maybe even weeks.' 'How big could a Timeslip be?' 'Another good question. Maybe miles.' 'That's ridiculous,' said Joanna. 'There must be another way of reaching Blaiston Street!'

I shook my head reluctantly. 'The Timeslip's connected to Blaiston Street, on some level. I can feel it. Which makes me think this can't be coincidental. Someone, or something, is protecting its territory. It doesn't want us interfering. No. Our best bet is to cross this space to the far boundary, where I can force an opening, and we should emerge right next to Blaiston Street. Shouldn't be too difficult. This is all pretty unpleasant, but I don't see any obvious dangers. Just stick with me. My gift will guide us right there.'

Joanna looked at me, and I looked back, trying hard to seem confident. Truth be told, I was just winging it, going by my guts and my instincts. In the end, she looked away first, staring unhappily about her.

'I hate this place,' she said flatly. 'We don't belong here. No-one does, any more. But Cathy's been gone too long already, so ... Which way?'

I pointed straight ahead, and we set off together.

Joanna held her lighter out before her, but the yellow glow didn't travel far at all. The small flame stood still and upright, untroubled by even the slightest murmur of breeze. I tried not to think about how much longer it would last. The purple light around us seemed even darker in comparison. I was feeling colder all the time, as though the empty night was leeching all the human warmth out of me. I would have improvised a rough torch of some kind, but I hadn't seen any wood anywhere. Just bricks and rubble, and the endless dust.

The quiet was getting on my nerves. It just wasn't natural, to be so completely quiet. This was the quiet of the tomb. Of the grave. It had an almost anticipatory quality, as though somewhere off in the darkest and deepest of the shadows, something was watching, and waiting, and biding its time to attack. The city might be empty, but that didn't mean the night was. I was reminded suddenly of how I'd felt as a small child, when my father would put me to bed at night and turn out the light. Back when he still cared enough, and was sober enough, to do such things. Children know the secret of the dark. They know it has monsters in it, which might or might not choose to reveal themselves. Now here we were, in the darkest night of all; and more and more I was convinced something was watching us. There are always monsters. That's the first thing you learn, in the Night-side.

Some of them look just like you and me.

Perhaps the monster here was London itself. The dead city, resenting the return of the living. Or maybe the monster was just loneliness. A man and a woman, in a place that life had left behind. Man isn't meant to be alone.

Our footsteps seemed to grow louder and more carrying as we made our way down what had once been a main street. The dust should have absorbed the sound. There was enough of it. It was everywhere, thick layers of it, undisturbed for God alone knew how long. It was at its worst in the street, but we'd learned the hard way that we had no choice but to stick to the very middle of the street. Buildings had a tendency to collapse, if we got too close. Just the vibrations of our tread were enough to disturb their precarious rest, and whole sections of wall would crumble and fall away, crashing to the ground in great angry clouds of the grey dust. I picked up one brick, and it fell apart in my hand. I tried to work out how ancient it must be, to have become so delicate, but the answers I came up with made no sense. The human mind isn't comfortable with numbers that big.

Just when I thought I was finally coming to terms with where and when I was, things got worse. I started hearing things. Sounds, noises, so faint at first I thought I'd imagined them. But soon they were coming from all around us, from before and behind,

subtle, disturbing sounds that seemed to be gradually creeping closer. I don't have that good an imagination. The sounds were almost familiar, but not quite, giving them a strange, sinister feel. And all the time, drawing gradually, remorselessly, closer. I didn't turn my head, but my eyes probed every shadow as I approached it. Nothing. I increased our pace, and the sounds kept right up with me. Following us, tracking us, keeping their distance for the moment, but never too far away. My hands were sweating now. Clattering, chattering noises, that I could almost put a name to. Joanna had picked up on them too, and was glaring openly about her. The flame in the lighter flickered so wildly I was afraid it would go out, and I put a hand on her arm, ostensibly to slow our pace again.

'What the hell is that?' she said fiercely. 'Could there be something here with us, after all? Something alive?'

'I don't know. But the sound's coming from a lot of directions at once, which suggests that there's a lot of them, and they're all around us.' I glared at the shadows from which the ruins grew, but I couldn't make out a damned thing. Anything could have been hiding in there. Anything at all. I was getting less happy by the minute. 'Whatever they are, they seem to be content for the moment to keep their distance. Could be they're more afraid of us than we are of them.'

'Don't take bets on it,' said Joanna. 'How much further to the boundary?'

I checked with my gift. 'Half an hour's walk. Maybe half that, if we run. But running might send the wrong message.'