Mean Streets

*

ONE

It was three o'clock in the morning, in the oldest bar in the world, and I was killing time drinking with a dead man. Dead Boy is an old friend, though he's only seventeen. He's been seventeen for some thirty years now, ever since he was mugged and murdered for the spare change in his pockets. He made a deal to come back from the dead and take his revenge on his killers; but he should have read the small print. He's been (rapped inside his dead body ever since, searching for a way out. He's surprisingly good company, for a man with so many strikes against him.

I'm John Taylor, private investigator. I don't do divorce work, I don't chase after the Maltese Falcon, and I am most definitely not on the side of the angels. Either variety. I do, however, wear a white trench coat, get in over my head more often than not, and get personally involved with my female clients far more often than is good for me. I have a gift, for finding things and people. I'd just finished a case that hadn't ended well. A man hired me because his imaginary friend had gone missing, and he wanted me to find out why. Apparently this man's imaginary friend had been his constant companion since childhood, and had never gone off on his own before. The client got quite tearful about it, so I gave him my best professional look, and my most reassuring smile, and promised him I would waste no time in tracking down his imaginary friend. As cases go, it wasn't that difficult. I found the imaginary bastard in the first place I looked. He was having an affair with the client's wife. I put the three of them together in the same hotel room, and left them to it, knowing there was no point in even sending in my bill.

It was all the client's fault, really. Far too imaginative, except when it came to his wife.

And there I was, consoling myself with a large glass of wormwood brandy, while Dead Boy made heavy going of something that heaved back and forth, and looked like it was trying to eat its way through the glass. Being very thoroughly dead, though not in the least departed, Dead Boy doesn't need to eat or drink, but he likes to pretend. It makes him feel more real. And since his taste buds are quite definitely damaged, it takes more than the usual hard stuff to hit his spot. Dead Boy knows this appalling old obeah woman who whips up pills and potions especially for him, potent enough to make a corpse dance and a ghoul show you her underwear. God alone knows what it would do to the living; certainly I've never been tempted to find out. For the moment, Dead Boy was drinking a graveyard punch, made with ingredients from real graveyards. I just hoped it was no one I knew.

For once, Dead Boy was in a better financial state than me, so he was paying for the drinks. He'd just started a new job, as doorman for Club Dead, the special club for zombies, vampires, mummies, and all the other forms of the mortally challenged. (Club motto: We Belong Dead.) I didn't see the job lasting. Dead Boy has all the social graces of a lemming in heat or a sewer rat with bleeding hemorrhoids. But, since he was in the money, I was ordering the best of everything, in a big glass.

The oldest bar in the world is called Strangefellows, these days. You get all sorts in here, the living and the dead and those who haven't made their minds up yet, along with gods and monsters, aliens and shapeshifters, and a whole bunch of things that shouldn't exist but unfortunately do. Something from a Black Lagoon was sitting slumped in one corner, big and green and mossy and stinking of brine, drinking whiskey sours one after the other and mourning over the one that got away. The Tribe of the Gay Barbarians, tall muscular fellows resplendent in fringed leather chaps, nipple piercings, and tall ostrich feather headdresses, were challenging all comers to a game of Twister. A dancing bear was giving it his best John Travolta moves. He looked pretty silly in the white jacket, but given his size no one felt like telling him. And a group of rather disreputable-looking dwarves were selling tickets to see The Incredible Sleeping Woman. (I'd seen her. Forty years of catatonia had not been kind, which was why the dwarves were no longer allowed to bill her as The Incredible Sleeping Beauty.)

One of Frankenstein's female creations was singing a torch song, the transvestite superheroine Ms. Fate was reading a gossip tabloid with great concentration, to see if he was in that week, and Harry Fabulous was doing his rounds, selling chemical adventures, knockoff Hyde formula, and short-time psychoses, for really quite reasonable prices.

Just another night, at Strangefellows.

Hut while the oldest bar in the world has few rules and even fewer standards, we do draw the line at weeping women. So when the tall slender brunette in the expensive outfit came stumbling into the bar, crying her eyes out, everyone fell quiet and turned to look. Weeping women always mean trouble, for someone. She lurched to a halt in the middle of the room and looked about her, and I quickly realized that she was crying hot angry tears of rage and frustration, rather than sorrow. The tears ran jerkily down her cheeks, the sheer force of them shaking her whole body. Something about her gave me the feeling she wasn't a woman who often gave in to tears. She sniffed them back with an effort, and glared about her as defiantly as her puffy eyes and streaked makeup would allow. And then she looked in my direction, and my heart sank as she fixed her attention on me. She pushed her way quickly through the packed tables, and marched right up to me. The bar's normal bedlam resumed, as everyone celebrated someone else getting hit by the bullet. I sighed inwardly, and turned unhurriedly on my bar stool to nod politely to the woman as she crashed to a halt before me and fixed me with dark, haunted eyes.

She was good-looking enough, in an undemanding way, her long lean body positively burning with thwarted nervous energy. Her clothes were expensive, though somewhat disheveled. She was clutching a white leather shoulder bag as though she would never let it go, and her whole stance screamed stress and tension. Her mouth was compressed into a thin dark red line, and she held herself very stiffly, as though she might fall apart if her control lapsed for just one moment. And yet, behind the clear anger in her eyes, I could see an awful, unfocused fear.

'Hi,' I said, as kindly as I could. 'I'm John Taylor.' 'Yes,' she said jerkily, the words coming out clipped, in sudden bursts. 'I know. You were described to me. The man in the white trench coat. The knight in cold armor. He said you'd help me.

Sorry. I'm not making myself clear… I've had something of a shock. My name is Liza Barclay. I'm lost. I don't know what I'm doing here. I've lost all memory of the last twenty-four hours of my life. I want you to find them for me.'

I sighed again, still inwardly, and handed her my glass. 'Take a sip of brandy,' I said, doing my best to sound kind and helpful and not at all threatening.

She grabbed the brandy glass with both hands, took a good gulp, and immediately pulled a face and thrust the glass back into my hand.

'God, that's awful. You drink that for fun? You're tougher than you look. But then, you'd have to be. Sorry. I'm rambling.'

'It's all right,' I said. 'Take your time, get your breath back. Then tell me how you got here. This isn't an easy place to get to.'

'I don't know!' she said immediately. 'I've lost a day. A whole day!'

I slipped off my bar stool and offered her a seat, but she shook her head quickly. So I just leaned back against the long wooden bar and studied her openly as she looked around Strangefellows, making it very clear with her face and body language that not only had she never seen anything like it, but that she was quite definitely slumming just by being there. I was impressed. The oldest bar in the world isn't for just anyone. Most people take one look and run away screaming, and we like it that way. Strangefellows is a place of old magic and all the very latest sins and indulgences. This is not the kind of bar where everyone knows your name; it's the kind of bar where you can wake up robbed and rolled in someone else's body.

Liza Barclay deliberately turned her back on the disturbing sights and the appalling patrons, and fixed her full attention on me. I did my best to look tall, dark, and handsome, but I couldn't have been that successful because after only a moment she nodded briskly, as though I'd passed some necessary test, but only just. She switched her gaze to Dead Boy, who smiled vaguely and toasted her with his glass. The graveyard punch made a valiant attempt to escape, and he had to push the stuff back in with his fingers.

Dead Boy was tall and adolescent thin, wrapped in a long purple greatcoat spotted with various food and drink stains, and topped with a fresh black rose on his lapel. Scuffed black leather trousers over muddy calfskin boots completed the ensemble. He let his coat hang open, to reveal a bare torso covered with old injuries, bullet holes, and one long Y-shaped autopsy scar. Dead Boy might be deceased, but he still took damage, even if he couldn't feel it. He was mostly held together with stitches and staples and superglue, along with a certain amount of black duct tape lashed around his middle. His skin was a pale gray, and dusty- looking.

He had the face of a debauched and very weary Pre-Raphaelite poet, with dark fever-bright eyes, a sulky mouth with no colour in it, and long dark curly hair crammed under a large floppy hat. He didn't smile at Liza Barclay. He didn't care. Her tears hadn't touched him at all.

Liza shuddered, but didn't look away. She was impressing me more and more. Most people can't stand being around the dead, and that goes double for Dead Boy. Liza glanced around the bar again, at its various strange and unnatural patrons, and rather than being scared or appalled, she just sniffed loudly and turned her back on them again. They were no help to her, or her problem, so they didn't matter. Liza Barclay, it seemed, was a very single-minded lady.

'How can you stand being in a place like this?' she said to me, quite seriously.

'What, Strangefellows?' I said. 'There are worse places to drink in. The ambience isn't up to much, I'll grant you, but…'

'I don't mean just here! I mean… everywhere! This whole area!' A tinge of hysteria had entered her voice. Liza heard it, and clamped down hard on it. She hugged herself suddenly, as though a cold wind had blown over her grave. 'I've been walking back and forth in the streets for ages. This terrible place. I've seen things… awful things. Creatures, walking right out in the open, with normal people, and none of them batted an eye! Where am I? Am I dead? Is this Hell?'

'No,' I said. 'Though on a good day you can see Hell from here. As far as I can tell, you are a perfectly normal woman who has had the misfortune to somehow find her way into the Night-side.'

'The Nightside.' She grabbed on to the word, considered it, and then looked to me for more information. And it wasn't a request; it was a demand. I was liking her more and more.

'The Nightside,' I said, 'the dark secret hidden in the heart of London. The longest night in the world, where the sun has never shone and never will. Where it's always three o'clock in the morning, and the hour that tries men's souls. This is where all (he secret people come, in search of forbidden knowledge and all the pleasures people aren't supposed to want, but still do. You can pursue any dream here, or any nightmare. Sell your soul or someone else's. Run wild in the streets and satisfy any fantasy you over had. As long as your credit holds out. This is the Nightside, Liza Barclay, and it is not a place for normal people like