Mean Streets

them. Pretty much everything passes through the Nightside, at one time or another and sometimes simultaneously, and it's always in a hurry. Foot down, everything forward and trust in the Lord, and Devil take the hindmost. That isn't traffic out there; that's evolution in action. Which is why we can't get where we're going by just hopping on the crosstown bus. We are waiting for Dead Boy, and his marvelous car of the future.'

'The sky, the traffic, creatures and demons walking openly in the street…' Liza shook her head just a bit dazedly. 'Where is this place, John?'

'Good question,' I said. 'Of this world, but not necessarily in it. Halfway between Heaven and Hell, but beholden to neither. A place of infinite jest and appalling possibilities. But don't let it get to you. The Nightside is just a place where people go, in search of all the things they're not supposed to want. Forbidden knowledge, forgotten secrets, and all the nastier kinds of sex. A place where the shadows are comfortably deep, and the sun never rises because some things can only be done in the dark.

'It's the Nightside.'

Liza looked at me. 'You do like the sound of your own voice, don't you?'

'You asked,' I said.

Perhaps fortunately, Dead Boy arrived at that moment in his fabulous futuristic car, and Liza had something else to stare at. Dead Boy's car is always worth a good look. It glided silently to a halt before us, hovering a few feet above the ground. A car from the future, so stylish it didn't even bother with wheels anymore. It originally arrived in the Nightside through a Timeslip, from some future time line, and adopted Dead Boy as its driver. Bright gleaming silver, long and sleek and streamlined to within an inch of its life, the car hovered arrogantly before us, looking like it ran on distilled starlight. The long curving windows were polarised so no one could see in, and the mighty engines didn't so much as deign to murmur.

The driver's door swung open, to reveal Dead Boy lounging languidly behind the steering wheel. He had a half-empty bottle of vodka in his hand.

'All aboard for the badlands, boys and girls! Feel free to admire my beautiful ride's elegance and style. This is what every car would be, if they only had the ambition.'

'You're late,' I said sternly.

'I'm always late. I'm the late Dead Boy.' He sniggered at his own joke, and took a healthy pull from his vodka bottle.

'I am not getting into that!' Liza said firmly. 'It hasn't got any wheels. It looks like something from a bad seventies sci-fi movie.'

'Hush, hush, my beauty!' Dead Boy said soothingly to his car. 'She is an uneducated barbarian, and doesn't mean it.' He appeared to listen for a moment. 'All right, yes, she probably did mean it, but you mustn't take it personally. She is a mere tourist, and knows nothing of cars. Please let her in. And please don't activate the ejector seat, no matter how annoying she gets.'

There was a pause, and then the other doors opened, slowly enough to express a certain reluctance. Liza looked at me.

'Does he often have conversations with his car?'

'Oh, yes,' I said. 'Only he can hear her, though.' 'I see. And does this car really have an ejector seat?'

'Oh, yes. More than powerful enough to blast you into a whole different dimension.'

'I'll be more polite to the car from now on,' said Liza.

'I would,' I said.

'But I'm still not sitting next to Dead Boy.'

So we both got in the back. Liza jumped just a bit as the door shut itself behind us. The seats were bloodred leather, and very comfortable. There was a faint perfume of crushed roses on the slightly pressurised air. There were no seat belts, of course. Their very existence would have been an insult to the car's driving skills. Liza leaned forward and stared openly at the frankly futuristic display screens where the dashboard dials should have been. In fact, there were enough screens and displays and flashing lights to suggest anything up to and including warp speed.

'Can you get warp speed on this thing?' said Liza, proving that great minds think alike.

'Only in emergencies,' said Dead Boy. He didn't seem to be kidding.

Liza took in the whiskey, brandy, and gin bottles lined up on top of the monitor screens, all of which showed signs of extensive sampling, and sniffed loudly. Dead Boy took this as a hint, and gestured generously at the bottles, and the open dashboard compartment full of honeyed locusts, spiced potato wedges, and assorted chocolate biscuits.

'Help yourself,' he said, around a mouthful of chocolate hobnob. Liza declined. Dead Boy shrugged, finished his biscuit, knocked back a handful of glowing green pills, finished off the last of the vodka, and slung the bottle through the window, which didn't happen to be open. The bottle passed right through the glass without stopping. They really have thought of everything, in the future.

'Where to, John?' Dead Boy said easily. 'My car requires directions. She is powerful and lovely and full of surprises, but she is not actually prescient. Apparently that only came as an optional extra.'

'Head for the badlands,' I said. 'I should be able to provide more specific directions once we get there.'

'I love mystery tours,' Dead Boy said happily. 'Off you go, girl.'

The futuristic car moved smoothly out into the vicious traffic, and absolutely everything slammed on the brakes or changed lanes in a hurry, to give us plenty of room. Everybody knew Dead Boy's car, and the awful things it could and would do if it got even slightly annoyed.

'I can't help noticing you're not even touching the steering wheel,' Liza said to Dead Boy.

'Oh, I wouldn't dare,' he said. 'My sweetie's a much better driver than I'll ever be. I don't interfere.'

Liza leaned back in her seat, watched the traffic for a while, and then looked thoughtfully at me. 'Why are you helping me, John? It's not like I'm even paying you for your services.'

'I'm curious,' I said honestly. 'And… I don't like to see an innocent caught up and crushed under the Nightside's wheels. There's enough real evil here, without adding cruel and casual stuff. Good people shouldn't end up here, but if they do, they need to be protected. Just on general principles.'

'If this is such a bad place,' she said, 'what are you doing here?'

'I belong here,' I said. She settled for that, and went back to watching the traffic. I took out the two pieces of her photo, fitted them together, and concentrated on the image of her husband. My gift barely stirred, manifesting just enough to keep a firm hold on Frank's location. Husband Frank. He'd better be worth all this trouble. Liza clearly loved him with all her heart; but women have been known to fall for complete bastards before now. His face in the photo didn't give anything away. The smile seemed genuine enough, but I wasn't so sure about the eyes.

Frank hadn't moved since I first sensed his location, and I got the feeling he hadn't moved in some time. As I concentrated on his image, I began to get a feel for his surroundings, and the first thing I felt was the presence of technology. Advanced, future tech, not from this time and place. Frank seemed to be surrounded by it, fascinated by it… and the more I concentrated, the more my images of this future technology were tainted by distinctly organic touches.

Sweating steel and cables that curled like intestines; lubricated pistons rising and falling, and machines that murmured like people disturbed in their sleep. Strange nightmare devices, performing unnatural tasks, with hot blood coursing through their systems.

What had Frank got himself into?

I was beginning to get a really bad feeling about this. Especially when Frank's image in the photo suddenly turned its head to look right at me. His face was drawn, tired, and burning with a strange delirium. His eyes were dark and fever-bright… and he never even glanced at his wife, Liza, sitting right next to me. He locked his gaze onto mine, and his faraway voice sounded in my head.

Go away. I don't want you here. Don't try and find me. I don V want to be found.

'Your wife's here,' I said silently to the photo. 'Liza's here, in the Nightside. Looking for you. She's very worried about you.'

/ know. Keep her away. For her sake.

And just like that, the photo was only a photo, and his face was just an image from the past. I didn't tell Liza what had just occurred. It didn't matter to me whether Frank wanted to be found or not; I was working for his wife. And she wanted to know what her husband was up to, even if she hadn't actually put it that way. This is why I don't do divorce work. No matter what the client says, they never really want the truth. Still, the unexpected contact with Frank, brief as it was, had given me a more definite fix on his position.

'I've found Frank,' I announced, to Liza and Dead Boy. 'He's on Rotten Row.'

'Ah,' said Dead Boy, sucking noisily on his whiskey bottle. 'That is not good.'

'Why?' Liza said immediately. 'What happens on Rotten Row? What do people do there?'

'Pretty much everything you can think of, and a whole lot of things most people have never even contemplated,' said Dead Boy. 'Rotten Row is for the severely sick and disturbed, even by the Nightside's appalling standards.'

Liza turned to me. 'What is he talking about?'

'Rotten Row is where people go to have sex with the kind of people, and things, that no sane person would want to have sex with,' I said, just a bit reluctantly. 'Sex with angels, or demons. With computers or robots, slumming gods or other-dimensional monsters; worms from the earth or some of the nastier versions of the living dead. Rotten Row is where you go when the everyday sins of the flesh just don't do it for you anymore. Where men and women and all the many things they can do together just don’t satisfy. Sex isn't a sin or a sacrament on Rotten Row; it's an obsession.'

Liza looked at me, horrified. 'Sex with… how is any of that even possible?'

'Love finds a way,' Dead Boy said vaguely.

Liza shook her head stubbornly, as though she could prove me a liar if she was just firm enough. 'No. You must be wrong, John. My Frank would never… never lower himself to… He just wouldn't! He's always been very… normal. He'd never go to a place like that!'

'We all find love where we can,' said Dead Boy.

'You're talking about sex, not love!' snapped Liza.

'Sometimes… you have to go a little off the beaten path to get what you really need,' said Dead Boy philosophically. 'There's more to life than just boy meets girl, you know.'

And that was when all the car's alarms went off at once. Flashing red lights, followed by a rising siren, and the sound of an awful lot of systems arming themselves. Dead Boy sat bolt upright, tossed his whiskey bottle onto the passenger seat, and studied his various displays with great interest. Dead Boy