Nightside 03 - Nightingales Lament

heading directly for the front door. I suppose there's nothing like having already died to put everything else in perspective. I gritted my teeth, hugged myself tightly to keep from falling apart, and stumbled forward into the teeth of the psychic assault.
    We got to the door without anything nasty actually turning up to rip chunks off us, and Dead Boy rattled the door handle. From his expression, I gathered it wasn't supposed to be locked. He pushed at it with one hand, and it didn't budge. Dead Boy pulled back his hand and looked at it thoughtfully. I put my hand against the solid steel door, and it gave spongily, as though the substance, the reality of it, was being slowly leached out of it. My skin crawled at the contact, and I snatched my hand back and rubbed it thoroughly against my jacket. Dead Boy raised one booted foot and kicked the door in. The great slab of steel and silver flew inwards as though it were weightless, torn away from its hinges. It fell forward and slapped against the floor inside, making a soft, flat sound. Dead Boy strode over it into the entrance hall beyond. 1 hurried in after him as he struck a defiant pose, hands on hips, and glared into the gloom ahead of him.
    "Hello there! I am Dead Boy! Come out here so I can kick your sorry arse! Go on, give me your best shot! I can take it!"
    "You see?" I said. "This is why other people don't want to work with you."
    "Bunch of wimps," he said, indifferently.
    The smell was really bad. Blood and rot and the scent of things that really belonged inside the body. The only light in the great open hall came from a thin, shifting mist that curled slowly on the air, glowing blue-silver like phosphorescence. My eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light, then I wished they hadn't as for the first time I saw the walls, and what was on them. All around us, the walls were covered with a layer of human remains. Corpses had been stretched and flattened and plastered over the walls from floor to ceiling, layering the hall with an insulating barrier of human skin and guts and fractured bones. There were hundreds, thousands of distorted faces, from bodies presumably torn from the graveyard out back. The human remains had been given a kind of life. They stirred slowly as they became aware of us. Eyes rolled in tightly spread faces, tracking the two of us as we advanced slowly across the great open hall. Hands and arms stretched out from the walls as though to grab us, or appeal for help. I could see hearts and lungs, pulsing and swelling in a mockery of life. I was just glad I didn't recognise any of the faces.
    At least the floor was clear. Dead Boy strode forward, not even glancing at the walls, and I went with him. I felt somebody sane should be present when push inevitably came to shove. The sound of our feet on the bare floor was strangely muffled, and the shadows around us were very dark and very deep. It felt like walking down a tunnel, away from our world and its rules into . . . somewhere else.
    We were almost half-way across the hall before we got our first glimpse of what was waiting for us. At the far end, in the darkest of the shadows, barely illuminated by the light of the swirling mists, were five huge figures. The corpsicles. Thawed from unimaginable cold, revived from the dead, reanimated by abhuman spirits from Outside, they didn't look human any more. The forces that possessed the vacant bodies were too strong, too furious, too other for merely human frames to contain. They had all grown and expanded, forced into unnatural shapes and configurations by the pressures within, and now they were changed and mutated in hideous ways. It hurt to look at them. Their outlines seethed and fluctuated, trying to contain more than three dimensions at once. Mere flesh and blood and bone should have broken down and fallen apart, but the five abominations were held together by the implacable will of the creatures possessing them. They needed these bodies, these vacant hosts. The corpsicles were their only means of access to the material world. I kept wanting to look away. The shapes the bodies were trying to take were just too complex, too intricate for simple human minds to deal with.
    We were getting too close. I grabbed Dead Boy by the arm and made him stop. He glared at me.
    "We need information," I murmured. "Talk to them."
    "You talk to them. Find me something useful I can hit."
    One of the shapes leaned forward. It was twice as tall as a man, and almost as