Hex In The City

was a stranger. I didn't know what I felt about her. It was all just too sudden.

My mother smiled at me. I think it was supposed to be an understanding smile, but on her it just looked intimidating. Like some graceful feline predator assessing its prey.

'Come on, John, pick up the slack. We have so much to discuss, before Walker arrives. Why, for instance, did I disguise myself as Lady Luck? She was just a mask I hid behind, to get your investigations started.'

'Why did you want me to take the case?' I said finally. 'Why did you send me searching for questions you already know the answers to?'

'Because I wanted you to stir things up. Stir people up. I want everyone to be thinking and talking about the true beginnings of the Nightside, and what it was supposed to be. I wanted everyone talking about how much the Nightside has changed, down the many centuries. And I wanted you to be able to tell them how and why it all began, and who began it, so that they would understand what it meant, that I was coming back.' She fixed me with her burning gaze, and her smiled widened. 'I am back, John. Aren't you glad to see me again, after all these years?'

'You abandoned me,' I said.

She shrugged easily. 'It was necessary. I knew you'd survive. You're my son.'

'Where have you been all this time?'

'Walking up and down in the Nightside, wearing many faces, learning the shape and condition of the current Nightside. It has changed so very much. It was never meant to be as dark as this. Or as tacky.'

'Did you ever love me?' I didn't know I was going to say that, so bluntly, until I said it. The words forced themselves out of me.

'Of course. That's why I left you with your father. So you could be human, and innocent, for a while.'

'Who are you?' I said.

And she said; 'I am Lilith. Adam's first wife, thrown out of Eden for refusing to bow down to Adam's authority. Though, of course, you must understand, that's just a parable. A simple fiction to help you comprehend a far more complicated reality. You don't think I really look like this, do you? I am far greater, and more powerful. This is just another mask, put on for old times' sake. This is the face and body I wore to be your mother, John.'

'Fennella Davis,' I said. Even as I was still thinking, Lilith? My mother is a biblical myth?

'Exactly.'

Madman peeked at her, past my shoulder, his voice shocked almost normal. 'Lilith is just a projection into our limited reality of something much bigger. This female human body is just something Lilith wears to walk around in, like a glorified glove puppet. She's really...' He stopped, hesitating. 'She is really ...' But he didn't have the words. Perhaps there were no words, in our simple rational language. Whatever his mathematics had enabled him to See of her, in his brief glimpse of the Reality behind reality, he still couldn't describe it to us. He started to shake and tremble, then to cry, and the bar and all the things and people in it began to shake along with him. It was as though an earthquake had hit the place. Tables and chairs danced and clattered on the juddering floor. The walls bowed in and out, the solid stone flexing unnaturally. Strange colours came and went, and sounds that made no sense. Distance became uncertain and unreliable, and things were both close and far away at the same time. Directions changed without warning. Madman's hold on reality was weakening again, and reality around him weakened as well. Merlin's great oak tree slammed back into the bar again, taking up the middle of the room; and then it was a tower built of stained and discoloured bones; and then it was gone again. Cracks crawled jaggedly across the floor, opening wide to show vast watching eyes. I could hear things scuttling across the outer walls of our perception. Things that wanted in.

'That's enough of that,' Lilith said sharply.

And just like that, everything was still and normal again. Madman's projected unreality was immediately suppressed, the bar snapping back into sharp focus as Lilith's super-presence stabilised the world, and him. He stopped shaking and crying, and a little colour actually seeped back into his cheeks. Lilith looked at him thoughtfully.

'You Saw what mortal man was never supposed to See. Was not designed to cope with. Let me take the knowledge away from you, so that you can be ignorant and happy again.'

'No,' Madman said firmly, surprising us all. 'Even a bitter truth is better than a comfortable lie.'

'But the truth is killing you,' said Lilith.

'No,' said Madman. 'I'm adapting.'

Somehow, that thought was even more worrying. I cleared my throat loudly, to get everyone's attention.

'So,' I said to my mother, trying really hard to keep my voice calm and casual. 'You're Lilith. I know some of your story. Pew told me, a long time ago, when he was still my teacher.'

'Blind Pew?' said Alex. 'The rogue vicar? The Christian terrorist? Is he still around?'

'Yes,' I said. 'And if you interrupt me again, Alex, I'll have my mother turn you into a tea cosy.'

'That's it,' said Alex, snatching my empty glass off the bar top. 'You're cut off. You get nasty when you've been drinking, John.'

I ignored him, concentrating on Lilith. 'According to the stories, after you were expelled from Eden you went down into Hell, where you coupled with demons and gave birth to all the monsters that have plagued the world.'

'I was young,' said Lilith. 'You know how it is. We all do things we later regret, when we're being rebellious teenagers. Anyway, I got over that phase, and after travelling extensively through the many levels of reality, seeing the sights and working out my options, I finally ended up in the world of men. Not that men had made much of an impression on the place, in those days. Beings and Forces still walked freely, and a new legend was born every minute. I created the Nightside, a world within a world, in a place the Romans would later name Londinium. Interesting people, the Romans. A very savage form of civilisation. Some of them worshipped me, and I let them.

'Now pay attention, John, because this is the important bit. The Nightside was created and designed to be the one place on Earth where Heaven and Hell could not interfere or intimidate. A place set apart from the ordained war between Good and Evil. An alternative way to live. The only truly free place on Earth. It didn't turn out the way I expected, but then, that's life for you.

'Creating the Nightside, on Earth but not of it, stable but entirely separate, seriously weakened me. My power was much diminished, and the rising major players of that time, some human but mostly not, seized the opportunity to band together and thrust me back out of this reality, and into Limbo. So that they could be truly free, even from my intentions. I don't bear them any malice. Not really. I've outlived nearly all of them. And Limbo wasn't the worst place to be exiled to. Limbo is a place, or not-place, where things only exist in potential. Ideas without form.'

'Like the Primal?' I said, just to show I was paying attention.

'Oh, please. They're just chalk-drawings, compared to me. But as an idea without shape or form, I was helpless to do anything. I was trapped in Limbo, unable to open a door into any other realm. Until someone here created an opening I could use. They were trying to incarnate a female principle into physical existence, a part of the Babalon Working, and it was easy for me to push the Transient Being aside and imprint myself upon the summoning. Someone in that group hadn't done his homework properly. He'd left all kinds of openings for a determined mind to take advantage of. And once I'd left Limbo behind, they couldn't keep me out. All the Powers and Dominations that ever were couldn't have stopped me then.

'I came through, decanted myself into the idealised body I found waiting in their minds, then disappeared, losing myself in the Nightside. Partly because I wanted to walk incognito to see how much things had changed in my absence, and partly to conceal myself from any of my old enemies who might have survived. I was still vulnerable, then. I needed to rebuild my power in peace. After some time, when I was myself again, I chose one of my unwitting summoners, who seemed to have grasped a little of the truth, and—disguised as the woman Fennella Davis—I made a child with him. The child rooted me in this reality, so that I could never be forced out again. I hadn't planned to stick around afterwards, but you were so fascinating, John ... I'd never had a human child before. Flesh of my flesh, spirit of my spirit... I was curious to see how you'd turn out. And I enjoyed playing human. Being mother. Carrying out the role I had originally been intended for ...