The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny (16 page)

Everybody knew my father.

“What’s Tommy doing here?” I said bluntly.

“Winning,” said Wu Fang. “Much to my and everyone else’s surprise. But no matter. The money may move round and round the table, but it always comes back to me, eventually.” Another swift smile. “I do so love to see you white boys lose.”

He glided away like a Chinese ghost in a Chinese garden, and I hurried over to stand beside Tommy. Polly tried to grab my arm, but I avoided her. Family always comes first. I could feel her angry gaze burning into my back as I tapped Tommy briskly on the shoulder. He looked up and smiled happily at me.

“Oh, hi, Larry. Does Dad know you visit places like this? Ooh, like your new girlfriend. Tasty. Why is she glaring like that?”

He hadn’t adopted his effete existentialist act then.

“What are you doing here, Tommy?”

“Winning,” he said proudly. “I read this book, you see, and it suggested a whole new approach to cards I hadn’t even considered before.”

“You should have asked me,” I said. “I’ve always known what you’re doing wrong. You’re crap at cards.”

Tommy laughed and gestured grandly at the piles of poker chips laid out before him. Some of them were in colours I hadn’t ever seen before. Sitting around the table were Maggot McGuire, Big Alois, and Lucky Lucinda. Card sharks, all of them. Professional card-players, red in tooth and claw. They looked as much mystified as upset, though on the whole I think upset was rapidly coming to the fore. Their piles of chips were noticeably smaller. Tommy fanned out his current hand for me to have a look, and I almost fainted. He had a pair of threes.

Big Alois and Lucinda took one look at my face, misinterpreted what they saw, and folded immediately. That left the Maggot, a man not known for losing gracefully. Tommy grinned at him, and shoved all his chips forward, betting everything he had on his pair of threes. Maggot didn’t have enough chips to match him, so he pulled a magic charm from his pocket and slapped that down on the pile. Tommy considered, nodded, and produced several handfuls of poker chips from his pockets and added them to the pile on the table. Maggot threw down his cards in disgust, pushed back his chair, and rose to his feet with a gun in his hand. But before he could aim it, two empty suits of armour moved quickly in on either side and grabbed him by the arms. One metal hand squeezed hard, until blood ran down Maggot’s fingers, and he had no choice but to drop the gun. Then they dragged him away from the table. Wu Fang’s enforcers were always good at anticipating trouble.

Tommy whooped with joy, and scooped up all the chips on the table, gathering them in with both arms.

Polly was suddenly there beside me, elbowing me discreetly in the ribs. I looked round, and she showed me the chaos dice in her hand, before quickly making them disappear about her person. While everyone’s attention had been fixed on Tommy’s triumph, Polly had got on with the job. Which meant there was now an empty display case on view, and it was well past time Polly and I were leaving. I said as much to Tommy, and he nodded easily.

“Catch you later, brother. I have some serious debauchery to be getting on with.”

I had to smile. “What is this wonderful new card skill, that you learned from a book?”

He grinned cheerfully. “Betting entirely at random, with absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. No thought, no studying; half the time I didn’t even look at my cards. Baffled the hell out of them.”

Polly pulled me away before I could hit him.

I was still trembling and twitching, just a bit, when Polly and I arrived at our next destination: Savage Hettie’s Lost and Found. (We Ask No Questions.) Polly’s list of ingredients for opening her demon gate called for a Hand of Glory made from a monkey’s paw. As if such a thing wasn’t dangerous enough as it is, without meddling. Be like walking around with a tactical nuke in your pocket and the pin half-pulled. Savage Hettie specialised in items that were frequently as dangerous to you as they were to your enemies. Mostly because it amused her.

She sat in her chair by the open door, fanning herself with a paper fan covered in filthy pictures. Hugely fat, overflowing her chair on all sides, in a dark sack of a dress that fitted where it touched. Her red sweaty face was topped with a patently obvious wig of blonde curls. Her huge fingers were tattooed with the words
DIE
and SCUM. Her front two teeth were missing, and her tongue kept poking through the gap as she sucked the insides out of variously sized eggs that she kept in a sack by her chair. She radiated shifty malevolence but barely looked me over before fixing her piggy eyes on Polly. Savage Hettie sniffed loudly.

“I don’t let just anyone in here, you know,” she said, in her harsh East End accent. “And you look dead sneaky, girl. Hiding something, aren’t you? Ho yes; I know your sort, girl.”

“She’s with me,” I said flatly. “And you know me, Hettie.”

She sniffed again. “I knows your father, you mean. Ho yes. I knew him very well, back in the day.”

“Who didn’t?” I said, resignedly.

She cackled loudly. “But I knew him intimately, as you might say. I didn’t always look like this, you know.”

I moved quickly past her, pushing Polly ahead of me, and Hettie’s cackling laughter followed me into the dark interior of her shop. There are some mental images you really don’t want to dwell on.

Hettie’s place was always a mess, on a grand scale. All gloom and shadow and heaps of things, set out apparently at random. No order, no rationale, and absolutely no presentation. Handwritten price tags for everything; and no haggling. Pay Hettie’s price or go somewhere else; except if you could have found it anywhere else, you wouldn’t have ventured into Savage Hettie’s appalling lair. There were shelves and boxes and tottering piles, and you had to dig for what you needed. At your own risk, of course. Touch the wrong thing in the wrong way, and it would have your hand off. Or turn you into a frog, or steal your soul. Browser very much beware; and watch your back at all times. Some of the items in Savage Hettie’s Lost and Found had a way of sneaking up on you from behind.

Hettie didn’t give a damn. Except to laugh loudly when something really horrible happened.

Polly and I moved gingerly between stacks of magic boxes, enchanted dancing-shoes, and nasty old magazines, careful not to touch anything. There was fabulous and seriously valuable stuff to be found, if a person was not too fussy over little things like provenance, or guarantees. Savage Hettie was a fence as well as a dealer, and didn’t care who knew it.

We passed by glass jars labelled
Manticore musk, Vampire’s teeth
(which clattered and ground against the glass if you got too close), and a wine bottle covered in cobwebs marked simply
Drink Me You Bastard.
I was briefly distracted by a pile of old magazines that I couldn’t resist leafing through (once I’d put some gloves on). The private schoolgirls’ issue of
Oz, International Times
with a naked Paul and Linda on the front cover, and a battered copy of
Playbeing,
with something utterly revolting on the front cover. Polly, though, was not one for distractions. She stalked up and down the narrow aisles, seemingly following her nose, until finally she stopped abruptly before a sealed glass jam-jar. I joined her, and peered over her shoulder. In the jar was a small, withered thing, with half the hair fallen out, the stiff fingers made into candles with delicate little wicks. The stump was blackened, from where it had been sealed shut with a naked flame. I reached for the jar, and the fingers stirred slowly, like spider’s legs. I snatched my hand back instinctively. Polly snorted dismissively and picked up the jar without hesitating in the least.

We took it back to Savage Hettie, who shocked me rigid by refusing to take any payment. She reared back in her chair rather than touch the jam-jar, and leered at Polly, the tip of her tongue poking provocatively through the gap in her teeth.

“I know your kind, missie, ho yes I do. Don’t want no dealings with you and yours, and I ain’t going to risk being beholden to you. Take the nasty thing. Glad to be rid of it.” She sniffed loudly, then looked at me. “Surprised to see an Oblivion boy with one of her lot, but I suppose you knows what you’re doing. Blinded by a pretty face and bemused by the smell of pussy. Just like your dad.”

Polly and I walked quickly away.

“Do you know what she was talking about?” she said, after a while.

“Haven’t a clue,” I said determinedly.

“Probably just as well,” said Polly.

The last two items were easy. Deconsecrated host soaked in virgin’s urine and a fine powder made from the crushed wings of wee flower faeries. Women use the strangest things as cosmetics. We found both items at the Mammon Emporium, the Nightside’s premiere mall, and Polly made me shoplift them from their shelves while she kept a lookout. We then stalked imperiously out of the mall, and no-one challenged us. I think I was less scared in the mummy’s burial chamber.

“You know,” I said afterwards, “we could have paid for these.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” said Polly, and I was honestly lost for an answer.

Not entirely to my surprise, we ended up back on the Street of the Gods, standing before a quiet little church in the Street’s equivalent of a backwater. A simple stone structure, with no fancy trimmings and no obvious name. People passed it by without looking, but it must have had something, or some other church or Being would have taken over its location long ago. The door was closed, the windows were dark, and there was no sign of life anywhere.

“Not very inviting,” I said, after a while, because you have to say something.

“It isn’t here for people,” said Polly. Her face was full of an emotion I couldn’t read, her eyes blazing.

“Does it have a name?” I said.

“It’s old,” said Polly. “Names come and go, but the church remains. It is a place of power, and it has been here for a very long time. So long that people have forgotten who it was originally created to venerate and preserve.”

“The Lady of the Lake?” I said. “She’s here?”

“Help me open the dimensional gate, and you’ll see,” said Polly.

There were no guards, no protections to get past. The door wasn’t even locked, opening easily at Polly’s touch. There wasn’t actually a sign over the door saying
Enter at Your Own Risk,
but there might as well have been. I could feel all the hackles rising on the back of my neck as I followed Polly in.

The interior was no bigger or smaller than it should have been, an open, empty space surrounded by four stone walls, heavy with shadows, only the barest light seeping in through a narrow-slit window at the far end. No pews, no altar, just the open space. The air was still and uncomfortably warm, as though some great furnace were still operating down below. There was no sign anyone had been here in ages, but no dust either, or any sign of neglect.

Whatever might have been worshipped here in the past, it hadn’t been a good or a wholesome thing. I could feel it, in my bones and in my water. Bad things had happened here. The horror of them still vibrated on the air, like the echoes of a scream that never ended. I looked at Polly, but she seemed entirely unaffected by the atmosphere. She trotted happily down the length of the empty church, with me stumbling along in the gloom behind her, trying to look in all directions at once. She dropped suddenly to one knee, and her fingers scrabbled against the floor for a moment before finally closing around the metal ring of a large trap-door I would have sworn wasn’t there a moment before. The trap-door itself was solid metal and must have weighed half a ton, but she pulled it open easily with one hand before letting it fall back onto the stone floor. It landed hard, but even so, the echoes were strangely muted, as though the grim atmosphere was soaking up the sound. I looked at Polly, only a pale gleam in the gloom. There was no way a woman of her size could have handled that much weight so easily. I’d suspected she was keeping things from me, and now it seemed I was about to find out what.

Beneath the hole in the floor was a set of bare stone steps, leading down and down into darkness. Polly produced her Looking Glass and started down them without even looking to see if I was following. She knew I wouldn’t hang back, not now I’d come so far.

I followed Polly and her light down into the dark, and wasn’t at all surprised when the trap-door slammed shut again, over our heads.

The steps were rough and unmarked. The bare stone walls to either side were close enough to touch, hot enough to burn the fingers. The air was hot enough to bring a sheen of sweat to my face. I had to wonder exactly how far down we were going. My legs were aching from the strain of continuous descent when the stairway finally came to an end, and Polly stopped abruptly. She held up the Looking Glass, but its light couldn’t penetrate more than a few inches into the dark. She laughed lightly, made the Glass disappear, and snapped her fingers imperiously. A harsh light sprang up, illuminating a huge cavern dug out of the bedrock far beneath the Street of the Gods. It wasn’t any normal light; long streams of electrical fire crackled up and down the stone walls and crawled across the ceiling like living lightning. The fierce light hurt my eyes, but didn’t seem to bother Polly at all. She looked back at me, and smiled.