Read Drinking Midnight Wine Online
Authors: Simon R. Green
Drinking Midnight Wine (4 page)
And all through the parking lot, and perhaps all through the world, everything stopped. The noise of the town and the rain was suddenly gone, as though someone had just thrown a switch. The silence was so complete that Toby could hear his breathing and his heartbeat. The rain was stopped, every drop suspended in midair, glistening and shining with a strange inner light. It seemed as though nothing was moving in the whole damned world but Toby and the woman before him. The air was full of anticipation, of imminence, of something vitally important balanced on the edge of becoming. There was a feeling deep in Toby’s bones and in his water that, perhaps for the first time in his life, what he did next mattered.
The woman walked through the door that shouldn’t be there, disappearing into the darkness beyond, and the door slowly began to close behind her. Toby ran forward, desperate not to lose his chance with her, and plunged through the narrowing doorway. The door closed behind him with a loud, definite sound, and in that moment, everything changed.
Forever.
Toby stepped through the door and found himself standing in the lot again, with the station building behind him. He stopped dead, and blinked a few times. The feeling that the world was holding its breath was gone, but something new and rather more frightening had taken its place. The parking lot looked just as it had done before, and the distant sounds of the town had returned, but it was no longer raining. It was bright and sunny, with a clear blue sky and not even a trace of dampness on the ground. Everything looked just as it normally did, but everything felt different. And the woman with the perfect mouth was standing right in front of him, studying him silently with an unreadable expression on her face.
“You really shouldn’t have done that,” she said finally, and her voice was everything he could have hoped for: deep, warm, music to the ears.
“Done what?” said Toby. “I mean . . . what just happened here? Where are we?”
“In the magical world. It’s all around you, all the time, but most people choose not to see it, for the sake of a sane and simple life. But sometimes people from the everyday world find their way here by accident. Go where they shouldn’t, follow someone they shouldn’t . . . and then nothing can ever be the same again.” She looked at him almost sadly. “You now have a foot in both worlds; in the real world of Veritie, and the magical world of Mysterie. And it’s a dangerous thing, to be a mortal man in a world of magic.”
“OK,” said Toby. “Hold everything. Let’s start with some basics. I’m Toby Dexter. Who are you?”
“I’m Gayle. I should have noticed you were here, but I was . . . distracted. The weather was supposed to be sunny all day. There wasn’t even a chance of rain. And I am never wrong about these things. But today something changed, in your world and in mine, and it worries me that I can’t see how or why such an impossible thing should happen. Why did you follow me, Toby Dexter?”
“I wanted to talk to you. Ask you if you’d like to go out, for dinner, or something . . .”
Gayle smiled and shook her head. “I’m afraid that’s quite impossible.”
“Oh,” said Toby, disappointed but not incredibly surprised. “Well, I suppose I’ll see you around.”
“Yes,” said Gayle. “I’m rather afraid you will.”
She turned and walked off into the bright sunny evening, and didn’t look back once. Toby stood there, with his dripping umbrella, and there was no sign of rain anywhere at all.
Two
The Reality Express
A
GHOST TRAIN is coming to Bradford-on-Avon, thundering down the tracks, puffing smoke and steam. It is coming in the early hours of the morning, long before the dawn, in the hour of the wolf, the hour when most babies are born and most people die, when no train is scheduled to run.
GHOST TRAIN is coming to Bradford-on-Avon, thundering down the tracks, puffing smoke and steam. It is coming in the early hours of the morning, long before the dawn, in the hour of the wolf, the hour when most babies are born and most people die, when no train is scheduled to run.
A great black iron train, with hot steam raging in its boiler, avatar of a different age, it fills the night air with dirty smoke and flying cinder flecks, pulling old-fashioned carriages that bear names from companies long since vanished into the mists of history. The heavy black iron of the train’s body is scored all over with runes and sigils and names of power. The great wheels are solid silver, striking singing sparks from the steel tracks. The smoke billowing from the tall black stack smells of brimstone, and the whistle is the cry of a damned soul. The train plunges headlong through the night, faster than any train has a right to go, ancient or modern. The carriages shake and sway, rattling along behind, the windows illuminated with the eerie blue glow of underwater grottoes. The Reality Express is coming into town, right on time.
Eager faces press against the shimmering glass of the carriage windows, desperate for a first glance of their destination, excited and fearful at the same time. Not all the faces are human. They have paid for their tickets with everything they had, or might have been, and it is far too late now to change their minds. They are refugees from the magical world of Mysterie, seeking asylum and safe harbor in the cold sanity of Veritie. The Reality Express is a one-way trip, and only the desperate and the truly needy need apply.
The great iron beast hammers down the tracks, as fast as misfortune and as implacable as destiny, sounding its awful whistle as the town of Bradford-on-Avon draws near. And standing quiet and calm in the shadows of the chimney stack on the station’s waiting-room roof is Jimmy Thunder, God For Hire, with his great hammer in its holster on his hip. The only private eye in the magical realms raises his head and smiles as he hears the terrible cry of the dark old train, and looks up the tracks, curious as to what the night will bring. The product of gods and mortals, Jimmy Thunder has a foot in each world and a home in neither—a dangerous man to both.
And somewhere in the dark, waiting for the train’s arrival, two figures stand, scarier than the Reality Express or a God For Hire could ever hope to be.
Jimmy Thunder stood on the sloping tiled roof of the station’s waiting room, leaning casually against the disused chimney stack. There was a cold wind blowing, but he didn’t feel it. He’d chosen the roof for his stakeout because in his experience, people rarely look up, even when they’re expecting unwanted interest. And the shadows were so very deep and comforting tonight, almost as if they knew something. Jimmy pricked up his ears as he caught the exact moment the Reality Express dropped out of Mysterie and into Veritie, its awful cry of the damned Dopplering down into nothing more than the rush of escaping steam. The train would be here soon, disgorging its cargo of the lost and the wretched, and then he would see what he would see.
Jimmy Thunder was a great bull of a man, with long red hair and a jutting red beard. He had a chest like a barrel, muscled arms the size of most men’s thighs, and shoulders so broad he often had to turn sideways to pass through doors. He had legs that could run for miles, and feet that never complained, despite all the standing around his job entailed. He wore black leathers adorned with brightly gleaming chains and studs, and looked every inch what every biker wants to be when he grows up. His eyes were as blue as the sea, and twice as deadly, though he had a charming smile, when he could be bothered. Descended, at many, many removes, from the Norse god Thor, Jimmy was fast and strong and disturbingly powerful—when he put his mind to it. Long-lived, though by no means immortal, he was a god by chance and a private eye by choice. His godliness was diluted by a hell of a lot of generations of mortals, but the power of storms, of thunderclap and lightning strike, was still his. Not many people worshiped him anymore, for which he was quietly grateful. He’d always found it rather embarrassing.
Also his was the ancient mystical hammer Mjolnir, a (mostly) unstoppable force that (sometimes) came back when he threw it. The hammer had once been Thor’s, and in its day had changed the fate of men and nations. It was his only material inheritance. It stirred in its sleep in its holster, snoring quietly. Mjolnir was a good weapon, but it was getting old and forgetful. Forged from stone or crystal or metal at the dawn of Time, or perhaps from some starstuff that no longer existed in the material world, Mjolnir was not what it once was. It was created to be immortal, a weapon that would endure till Ragnarok or Judgment Day; but nothing lasts for ever. Ask Thor, if you can find his body.
Jimmy Thunder was the only private eye in Bradford-on-Avon, in reality or otherwise, and he had a reputation for getting things done, whatever the cost. During his long life he’d investigated many cases, both mundane and bizarre, and his unwavering pursuit of the truth had seen to it that a lot of not very nice people had good reasons for wanting him dead. Just as well he was a god, really. Even if he did have to chase after his hammer sometimes. He poured the last of the hot sweet tea out of his thermos and into the plastic cup, and sipped at it carefully. It was still pleasantly warming, but not nearly bracing enough for the early hours of a very cold morning, so he goosed it up a bit with a tiny lightning bolt from his index finger. The wind had no damn business being so disturbingly cold this deep into summer, but then the weather had been strange of late—whimsical, almost willful. Jimmy was quietly hoping someone would hire him to look into that.
Not that he was complaining about the cold, or the early hour of the morning. Jimmy liked stakeouts, especially when there was a fair chance of a little hurly-burly in the offing. Smiting the ungodly was right up there on his list of favorite things. He lived to the hilt the role he had chosen, and the more he played it, the less like play it was. A god became a private eye, and an old myth became a new. Jimmy believed in progress. It’s always the legends that cannot or will not change that wither and fade away. Faced with being just another minor deity in a long line of godlings, with no fixed role or future in the modern world, Jimmy had cheerfully embraced a different destiny. The first time he saw a private investigator at the cinema, solving impossible crimes and pursuing awful villains, while surrounded by dizzy dames and femmes fatales, he knew that that was what he wanted to be. It helped that his long life gave him plenty of time to learn from his mistakes, while his divine abilities kept him alive while he learned.
Jimmy liked to know things and had an insatiable hunger for the truth. Especially things other people didn’t want him to know. He had no time for subterfuge, always preferring to meet things head-on. He had a fondness for the underdog, and a real weakness for damsels in distress, and if he had a fault, it was his constant determination to follow a case through to the bitter end, revealing every last truth or secret, come what may. He never could bring himself to accept that while his clients always said they wanted to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they didn’t always mean it. Not when lies or evasions can be so much more comforting.
Jimmy always got to the bottom of a case, but he wasn’t always thanked for his trouble.
Sometimes cases ended messily. As in the case of Count Dracula’s mandolin, where no one got what they wanted, and everyone got hurt—even him. And sometimes Jimmy went into cases knowing from the start that it was all going to end in tears. The Lord of Thorns still hadn’t forgiven Jimmy for proving his fiancée was a golem. But if he’d made enemies, he’d made friends, too. Even the Vatican owed him a favor.
(A few years back, Jimmy had been called in by the pope to investigate a curious case where all the statues in the Vatican had spontaneously started bleeding from vivid stigmata. They’d had to close everything down and run superhuman damage control to keep it out of the media. All the top-rank exorcists did their best, with gallons of holy water and top-class cross action, and got absolutely nowhere. So Jimmy got the call, on the grounds that while the Vatican certainly wasn’t prepared to accept that he was a god, he could at least be relied on to bring a whole new perspective to the problem. Jimmy had expressed surprise that the Vatican had even heard of him. The Holy Father had smiled and said, “The Vatican has heard of everybody, Mr. Thunder.”
(Jimmy had sorted it out, mostly by asking questions and knowing when he was being lied to. It turned out that the pope had forgotten someone’s birthday. As a reward, Jimmy was allowed access to the Vatican’s secret library for a whole afternoon and an evening, to browse where he pleased. The really dangerous books were kept under lock and key and were chained to the shelves, or in extreme cases immersed in holy water or kept in a vacuum inside a sealed vault, but he still managed to turn up some interesting stuff. Not necessarily useful, but interesting. The Gospel According to Judas Iscariot was a real eye-opener, though the Fourth Prophecy of Fatima turned out to be just what everyone thought it was.
(The one story Jimmy was really interested in remained stubbornly elusive. There were no records, and no one would talk to him about it. Which only convinced him all the more that there had to be something to it. It was common knowledge that Vatican scientists had been experimenting with computers and Artificial Intelligence for over fifty years, though they kept their achievements to themselves. No one would admit that there had been any success in creating an AI, but it was said that deep in the heart of the Vatican there was a room where no one went, where the door was always locked. And that if you could find your way to that abandoned room, and put your ear to that locked door, you would hear the sound of something crying. . . .
(There are many mysteries inside the Vatican, and only some of them have anything to do with Christianity.)
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