Tales of the Hidden World (6 page)

I make a stop at the biggest Chinese Christian Church in London and chat with the invisible Chinese demon that guards the place from troublemakers and unbelievers. It enjoys the irony of protecting a Church that officially doesn’t believe in it. And since it gets to eat anyone who tries to break in, it’s quite happy. The Chinese have always been a very practical people.

Just down the street is an Indian restaurant once suspected of being a front for Kali worshippers. On the grounds that not everyone who went in came back out again. Turned out to be an underground railroad, where people oppressed because of their religious beliefs could pass quietly from this dimension to another. There’s an Earth out there for everyone, if you only know where to look. I helped the restaurant put up an avoidance spell, so only the right kind of people would go in.

I check out the Dumpsters around the back, while I’m there. We’ve been having increasing problems with feral pixies, just likely. Like foxes, they come in from the countryside to the town, except foxes can’t blast the aura right off you with a hard look. Pixies like Dumpsters; they can play happily in them for hours. And they’ll eat pretty much anything, so mostly I just leave them to get on with it. Though if the numbers start getting too high, I’ll have to organize another cull.

I knock the side of the Dumpster, but nothing knocks back. Nobody home.

After that, it’s in and out of all the pokey little bars in the back streets, checking for the kind of leeches that specialize in grubby little gin joints. They look human enough, especially in a dimly lit room. You know the kind of strangers, the ones who belly up to the bar next to you with an ingratiating smile, talking about nothing in particular, but you just can’t seem to get rid of them. It’s not your company or even your money, they’re after. Leeches want other things. Some can suck the booze right out of you, leaving you nothing but the hangover. Others can drain off your life energy, your luck, even your hope.

They usually run when they see me coming. They know I’ll make them give it all back, with interest. I love to squeeze those suckers dry.

Personal demons are the worst. I hate demons. They come in with the night, swooping and roiling down the narrow streets like leaves tossed on the breeze, snapping their teeth and flexing their barbed fingers. Looking to fasten on to any tourist whose psychic defenses aren’t everything they should be. They wriggle in, under the mental barricades, snuggle onto your back and ride you like a mule. They encourage all their host’s worst weaknesses, greed or lust or violence, all the worst sins and temptations they ever dreamed of. The tourists go wild, drowning themselves in sensation, and the demons soak it all up. When they’ve had enough, they let go and slip away into the night, fat and engorged, leaving the tourists to figure out where all their money and self-respect went. Why they’ve done so many things they swore they’d never do. Why there’s a dead body at their feet and blood on their hands.

I can See the demons, but they never see me coming. I can sneak up behind them and rip them right off a tourist’s back. I use special gloves; I call them my emotional baggage handlers. A bunch of local nuns make them for us, blessed with special prayers, every thread soaked in holy water and backed up with nasty silver spurs in the fingertips. Personal demons aren’t really alive, as such, but I still love the way they scream as their flimsy bodies burst in my hands.

Of course some tourists bring their own personal demons in with them, and then I just make a note of their names, to pass on to the Big Boys. Symbiosis is more than I can handle.

I bump into my first group of Gray aliens, and make a point of stopping to check their permits are in order. They look like ordinary people to everyone else, until they get up close, and then they hypnotize you with those big black eyes, like a snake with a mouse, and you might as well bend over and smile for the probe. Up close, they smell of sour milk, and their movements are just
wrong
. . . . Their dull gray flesh slides this way and that, even when they’re standing still, as though it isn’t properly attached to the bones beneath.

I’ve never let them abduct anyone on my watch. I’m always very firm: no proper paperwork, no abduction. They never argue. Never even react. It’s hard to tell what a Gray is thinking, what with that long, flat face and those unblinking eyes. I wish they’d wear some kind of clothes, though. You wouldn’t believe what they’ve got instead of genitals.

Even when their paperwork is in order, I always find or pretend to find something wrong, and send them on their way, out of my area. Just doing my bit, to protect humanity from alien intervention. The Government can stuff their quotas.

Not long after, I run across a Street Preacher, having a quiet smoke of a hand-rolled in a back alley. She’s new: Tamsin MacReady. Looks about fifteen, but she must be hard as nails or they’d never have given her this patch. Street Preachers deal with the more spiritual problems, which is why few of them last long. Soon enough they realize reason and compassion aren’t enough, and that’s when the smiting starts, and the rest of us run for cover. Tamsin’s a decent enough sort, disturbed that she can’t do more to help.

“People come here to satisfy the needs of the flesh, not the spirit,” I say, handing her back the hand-rolled. “And we’re here to help, not meddle.”

“Oh, blow it out your ear,” she says, and we both laugh.

It’s not long after that I run into some real trouble: someone from the Jewish Defense League has unleashed a Golem on a march by British Nazi skinheads. The Golem is picking them up and throwing them about, and the ones who aren’t busy bleeding or crying or wetting themselves are legging it for the horizon. I feel like standing back and applauding, but I can’t let this go on. Someone might notice. So I wade in, ducking under the Golem’s flailing arms, until I can wipe the activating word off its forehead. It goes still then, nothing more than lifeless clay, and I put in a call for it to be towed away. Someone higher up will have words with someone else, and hopefully I won’t have to do this again. For a while.

I take some hard knocks and a bloody nose, before I can shut the Golem down, so I take time out to lean against a stone wall and feel sorry for myself. My healing spells only work on other people. The few skinheads picking themselves up off the pavement aren’t sympathetic. They know where my sympathies lie. Some of them make aggressive noises, until I give them a hard look, and then they remember they’re needed somewhere else.

I could always turn the Golem back on, and they know it.

I head off on my beat again, picking them up and slapping them down, aching quietly here and there. Demons and pixies and golems, oh my. Just another night, in Soho.

Keep walking, keep walking. Protect the ones you can, and try not to dwell on the ones you can’t. Sweep up the mess, drive off the predators, and keep the world from ever finding out. That’s the job. Lots of responsibility, hardly any authority, and the pay sucks. I say as much to Red when we bump into each other at the end of our shifts. She clucks over my bruises and offers me a nip from her hip flask. It’s surprisingly good stuff.

“Why do you do it, Charlie boy? Hard work and harder luck, with nothing to show but bruises and bad language from the very people you’re here to help? It can’t be the money; I probably make more than you do.”

“No,” I say. “It’s not the money.”

I think of all the things I See every night, that most of the world never knows exists. The marvelous and the fantastic, the strange creatures and stranger people: gods and monsters and all the wonders of the hidden world. I walk in magic and work miracles, and the night is full of glory. How could I ever turn my back on all that?

“Why don’t you just walk away?” says Red.

“What?” I say. “And leave show business?”

I’ve never made any secret of the fact that the Nightside is based on London’s Soho, or at least Soho as I knew it back in the day, when history was already turning into legend—when the bad old days were mostly over, but there was still plenty of sin to go around if you knew where to look. With this story, I wanted to show an ordinary working stiff, cleaning up the supernatural messes other people leave behind. The people and the setting are probably the closest I’ve ever come to describing the Soho I knew.

Death Is a Lady

I once had a near-death experience. This was back in 1972, before they became fashionable and everyone was having them. Which is probably why mine bears little or no resemblance to latter descriptions. Or perhaps I just need to be different in everything.

I was on a walking holiday in the Lake District. Seventeen years old, bright and bushy-tailed, hair halfway down my back. Well, it was 1972. I walked fifteen miles a day and spent every evening in the pub. I couldn’t do that now; it would kill me.

Halfway through the week, I took a nasty fall, split my head open, and woke up in hospital. But while I was out, I had a dream that was not a dream. It did not feel anything like a dream, but it was some years, before I was able to put a name to it.

There was darkness, and then I was sitting in a stuffed leather chair before a crackling open fire in an old Victorian study. Books on the walls, gas lamps, blocky old Victorian furniture. Slow ticking clock. A bit dark, but not gloomy. Peaceful. It was a place I had never seen before or since, but I felt immediately at home there.

Sitting in the chair on the other side of the fire was a tall, dark-haired, pale-faced woman, dressed in black. The height of Victorian fashion. She was beautiful and, although I had never seen her before, I trusted her immediately. I can see her face as clearly now as then, but it is no one I have ever known. I fell in love with her at first sight. She knew and smiled, understanding.

She was Death. I knew that as clearly as I know my own name.

She told me in a warm, reassuring voice that I had arrived there too soon. It was not my time yet, and I had to go back. I did not want to go, but she was sympathetically insistent. I could not stay. It was not my time. She would see me again, eventually.

And I woke up in hospital with stitches in my head.

The experience was as real to me then as anything else I had ever known. It is real to me now. Every moment of the experience remains clear and distinct to me. And I know that when my time does finally come, she will be waiting to greet me again. As she promised.

Death is a lady.

T
his is a true story. It all happened, just the way I’ve written it. I was on a school walking-and-climbing holiday, when I was seventeen. I took a bad fall and smashed in the side of my head. I’m told I was technically dead for several seconds, before I snapped back. I actually woke up some time later, at the hospital, while they were putting stitches in my head. But this is what I remember happening in between. My very own Near Death Experience. It all happened long ago, before such things became fashionable and everyone was having one. Which is probably why mine is a bit different. Is this a real experience? I don’t know. I think so. All I’ll say is this: when Neil Gaiman introduced his Lady Death in the Sandman comic, it was like a validation. . . .

Dorothy Dreams

D
orothy had a bad dream
. She dreamed she grew up and grew old, and her children put her in a home. And then she woke up and found it was all real. There’s no place like a rest home.

Dorothy sat in her wheelchair, old and frail and very tired, and looked out through the great glass doors at the world beyond. A world that no longer had any place, or any use, for her. There was a lawn, and some trees, all of them carefully cut and pruned and looked after to within an inch of their lives. Dorothy thought she knew how they felt. The doors were always kept closed and locked. Because the home’s residents—never referred to as patients—weren’t allowed outside. Far too risky. They might fall, or hurt themselves. And there was the insurance to think of, after all. So Dorothy sat in her wheelchair, where she’d been put, and looked out at a world she could no longer reach. As far away . . . as Oz.

Sometimes, when she lay in her narrow bed at night, she would wish for a cyclone to come to carry her away again. But she wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Her children told her they chose this particular home because it was the best. It just happened to be so far away that they couldn’t come to visit her very often. Dorothy never missed the weather forecasts on the television, but it seemed there weren’t any cyclones here, in this part of the world.

Dorothy looked down at her hands. Old, wrinkled, covered with liver spots. Knuckles that ached miserably when it rained. She held her hands up before her and turned them back and forth, almost wonderingly.
Whose hands are these?
she thought.
My hands don’t look like this.

A young nurse came and brushed Dorothy’s long gray hair with rough, efficient strokes. Suzie, or Shirley, something like that. They all looked the same to Dorothy. Bright young faces, often covered with so much makeup it was a wonder it didn’t crack when they smiled. Dorothy remembered her own first experiences with makeup, so many years ago.
Been at the flour barrel again,
Uncle Henry would say, trying to sound stern, but smiling in spite of himself. So long ago . . .

Suzie or Shirley pulled the brush through Dorothy’s fine gray hair, jerking her head this way and that, chattering happily all the time about people Dorothy didn’t know and things she didn’t care about. When the nurse was finished, she showed Dorothy the results of her work in a hand mirror. And Dorothy looked at the sunken, lined face, with its flat gray hair pulled back in a tight bun, and thought,
Who’s that old person? That’s not me. I don’t look like that.

Eventually, the nurse went away and left Dorothy in peace. To sit in a chair she couldn’t get out of without help. Though that didn’t really matter, because it wasn’t as though there was anything she wanted to do. . . . To sit, and think, and remember, because her memories were all she had left. The only things that still mattered.

Don’t get old, dear,
her auntie Em had said, back on the farm.
It’s hard work, being old.

Dorothy hadn’t listened. There was so much she could have learned, from wise, old Aunt Em and hardworking Uncle Henry. But she was always too busy. Always running around, looking for mischief to get into, dreaming of a better place far away from the grim gray plains of Kansas. She dreamed a wonderful dream, once, of a magical land called Oz. Sometimes she remembered Oz the way it really was, and sometimes she remembered it the way they showed it in that movie. . . . She’d seen the movie so many times, after all, and only saw the real Oz once. So it wasn’t surprising that sometimes she got them muddled up in her mind. The movie people made all kinds of mistakes, got so many of the details wrong. They wouldn’t listen to her.
Silver shoes,
she’d insisted, not that garish red. All the colors in the movie Oz had seemed wrong: candy colors, artificial colors. Nothing like the warm and wonderful world of Oz.

Dorothy dozed in her wheelchair, and fell asleep; and dreamed a better dream.

She woke up, and she was back where she belonged: in Oz. A country of almost overwhelming beauty, bright and glorious as the best summer day you ever yearned for. Great stretches of greensward ranged all around her, dotted here and there with groves of tall, stately trees bearing every fruit you could think of. Banks of flowers in a hundred delicate, delightful hues. All kinds of birds singing all kinds of songs, in the trees and in the bushes. Wonderfully patterned butterflies fluttered on the air, like animated scraps of whimsy. A small brook rushed along between the green banks, sparkling in the sunshine, and the open sky was an almost heartbreakingly perfect shade of blue.

Dorothy was just a little disappointed. When she’d imagined returning to Oz in the past, she’d always thought there would be a great crowd of Munchkins waiting for her, with flags and banners and songs, happy to welcome her back. Those marvelous child-sized people, in their tall hats with little bells around the brim. But there was no one there to greet her. No one at all.

Dorothy was surprised to find herself a young woman, in a smart blue-and-white dress and silver shoes, rather than the small child she’d been the last time she visited Oz. Though this was how she’d thought of herself for many years, long after she stopped seeing that image in the mirror. She patted herself down, vaguely, and was surprised at how solid and real she felt. And not a pain or an ache anywhere . . .

She jumped up and down and spun around in circles, waving her arms around and laughing out loud, glorying in the simple joy of easy movement. And then she stopped abruptly, as a dog came running up to her, wagging its tail furiously. A little black dog, with long, silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled so very merrily. It danced around her, jumping up at her, almost exploding with joy, and Dorothy knelt down to smile at it.

“You look just like the dog I used to have when I was just a little girl,” she said. “Its name was Toto.”

The dog sat back on its haunches and grinned at her. “That’s because I am Toto,” said the dog, in a rough breathy voice. “Hello, Dorothy! I’ve been waiting here for such a long time for you to come and join me.”

Dorothy stared at him blankly. “You can talk?”

“Of course!” said Toto, scratching himself briskly. “This is Oz, after all. . . .”

“But you’re dead, Toto,” Dorothy said slowly. “You died . . . a long time ago.”

“What does that matter, where Oz is concerned?” said the little dog. “Aren’t you glad to see me again?”

Dorothy gathered the little dog up in her arms and hugged him to her tightly, as though to make sure no one could ever take him away from her again. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and Toto lapped them up gently with his little pink tongue.

Finally, she had to let him go, if only so she could look at him again, and Toto backed away, to regard her seriously with his head cocked on one side.

“You have to come with me now, Dorothy.”

“Where?” said Dorothy.

“Along the yellow brick road, of course,” said Toto. “To where all your old friends are waiting, to meet you again.”

Dorothy straightened up and looked, and sure enough there it was: a long straight road stretching off into the distance, paved with yellow bricks. A soft, butter yellow, easy and inviting on the eye. Nothing like the gaudy shade in the movie. Dorothy smiled and set off briskly down the road, with Toto scampering happily along beside her. She had no doubt the road would lead her to answers, just as it always had.

The sun shone brightly, with not a cloud anywhere in that most perfect of skies. Birds sang sweetly, a cool breeze caressed her face, and Dorothy’s heart was so full of simple happiness it felt like it might break apart at any moment. It felt good to be just striding along, stretching her legs, after so long in that damned wheelchair. Neat fences stretched along either side of the yellow brick road, painted a delicate duck’s-egg blue, just as she remembered. Beyond them lay huge open fields full of every kind of crop, so that the whole land was one great checkerboard of primary colors.

Soon enough, she came to a small summerhouse of gleaming white wood, standing stiff and upright all on its own at the side of the road. Bright green jade and rich blue lapis lazuli made delicate patterns over the gleaming white. And there, inside the summer house, sitting at a table, were two women she recognized immediately. Glinda the Good Witch, and the Wicked Witch. They were taking tea together and chatting quite companionably. They stopped their conversation and put down their teacups to smile brightly at Dorothy.

She stopped a cautious distance away and studied them both carefully. Toto sat down at her feet, apparently entirely undisturbed. The witches looked pleasant enough: two cheerful young women who didn’t seem any older than Dorothy was. Now. Glinda wore white, and the Wicked Witch wore green, but otherwise there wasn’t much to choose between them. They might have been sisters. Dorothy remembered them as being much older the first time she encountered them, but then, she had been just a small child at the time. All adults seemed old, then. Dorothy crossed her arms tightly and gave both witches her best hard look.

“It seems to me,” she said firmly, “that an explanation is in order.”

Glinda and the Wicked Witch shared an understanding smile and then both of them beamed sweetly at Dorothy.

“You were just a child when you came here, my dear,” said Glinda. “And you wanted an adventure. So we provided one. In a form you could understand. You can have anything you want here.”

“Glinda played the Good Witch, so I played the Bad,” said the witch in green. “Though you were never in any danger, of course.”

“So nothing that happened here was real?” said Dorothy.

“Well,” said Toto, carelessly, “there’s real; and then there’s real. I always found reality very limiting. I couldn’t talk when I was real.”

“When you were alive . . .” said Dorothy, slowly.

“Yes,” said Toto. He waited a minute, as though for her to grasp something obvious, and then he sighed and got to his feet again. “Look! Here come some more of your old friends!”

Dorothy looked around, and her heart jumped in her breast as she saw the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Lion, hurrying down the yellow brick road to join her, waving and laughing. They all looked just as she remembered them. The Scarecrow was out in front, lurching along, all bulgy and misshapen in his blue suit and pointed blue hat, his head just a sack stuffed with straw with the features painted on. She jumped up and down on the spot, clapping her hands together, until she couldn’t wait any longer, and ran forward to grab the Scarecrow and hug him fiercely, burying her face in his yielding shoulder. He scrunched comfortably in her arms.

The Tin Man was waiting for her when she finally let go of the Scarecrow. All shining metal, with his head and arms and legs jointed on, and not an ounce of give in him anywhere, but she still hugged him as best she could. He patted her back carefully with his heavy hands. And finally, there was the Lion. He towered over her, standing tall on his two legs, a great shaggy beast; and when Dorothy went to hug him, she couldn’t get her arms halfway around him. His breath smelled sweetly of grass.

But when she finally stepped back from her friends, Dorothy was shocked again when they strolled over to the summerhouse and greeted both witches warmly, as old friends. Dorothy’s heart ran suddenly cold. She folded her arms again and hit them all with her hard stare.

“So,” she said harshly. “If you two just pretended to be Good and Bad Witches, does that mean you three just pretended to be my friends?”

“Of course we were your friends,” said the Scarecrow, in his soft, husky voice. “That’s what we were there for. To keep you company, so you wouldn’t be alone and scared. So you could enjoy your adventure.”

“Right,” said the Tin Man. “A doll to hug, a metal man to protect you, and a cowardly lion to feel superior to.”

“Wait just a minute,” said the Lion. “There was a lot more to my role than that. . . .”

“I don’t understand,” said Dorothy, suddenly close to tears.

“Then let me explain,” said a familiar voice.

And when Dorothy looked around, there he was, of course. Oz, the Great and Terrible. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. A little old man with a bald head and a wrinkled face, in the kind of clothes no one had worn . . . since Dorothy was a child. He smiled kindly on Dorothy, and there was such obvious warmth and compassion in the smile that she couldn’t help but smile back. She felt better, in spite of herself.

“I thought you went back to Omaha,” said Dorothy. “In your balloon.”

“Just another part of your adventure,” said the Wizard. “I never really left. I’m always here, in one form or another.”

“Then . . . you were just playing a role, like all the others?”

“I am Oz, the Great and Terrible, the Kind and Beneficent, and everything else you need me to be. I am the man with all the answers. Come walk with me, Dorothy, and all will be made clear.”

Reluctantly, Dorothy allowed the little old man to lead her out along the yellow brick road, and they walked along together, the little old man moving easily beside her. It bothered her, on some level, that all her old friends stayed behind. That even Toto didn’t come with her. As though the little old man had things to tell her that could only be said in private. Or perhaps, because they already knew. As though . . . they shared some great and terrible secret that only the Wizard himself could tell her.

“I always was the one with all the answers,” said the Wizard. “Even if I wasn’t necessarily what I seemed.”

“When I first met you, I saw a huge disembodied Head,” said Dorothy. “The Scarecrow said he saw a lovely Lady. The Tin Woodman, he saw an awful Beast, with the head of a rhinoceros, and five arms and five legs growing out of a hairy hide. And the Lion saw a Ball of Fire. But in the end, you turned out to be just an old humbug, a man hiding behind a curtain. Why do you insist we had to kill the Wicked Witch, before we could all have what we needed?”

“Because gifts must be earned, and good must triumph over evil, if an adventure is to have an end,” said the Wizard. “Did you never wonder why the Wicked Witch, so afraid of water, would keep a bucket of water nearby?”