Nightside 07 - Hell to Pay

spectacular fireworks display, illuminating the narrow trails and shifting jungle interior with flares and flashes of vivid light.
    Some of the plants turned to watch as the car glided smoothly past them.
    There were trees with trunks big as houses, their dark, mottled bark glistening wetly in the uncertain light. Heavy, swollen leaves, red as blood, pulsed gently on the lowering branches. Huge flowers blossomed, big as hedges, garish as Technicolor, petals thick and pulpy like diseased flesh. Hanging vines fell like bead curtains over the narrow trails, shivering and trembling like dreaming snakes. Now and again some small scuttling thing would brush up against the tips of the liana, and they would snap and curl around the helpless creature and haul it up, kicking and screaming, into the darkness above. The squealing would stop abruptly, and blood would drip down for a while. Green leafy masses with purple flowers for eyes and rings of thorns for teeth lurched and crashed along the narrow paths, stopping at the very edge of the road to shake their heavy bodies defiantly at the intrusion of light into their dark domain.
    I’d hate to be the Griffins’ gardener. Probably have to go pruning armed with a cattle prod and a flame-thrower. As the car drove on, I thought I saw something that might have been a gardener, leaning patiently on a wooden rake at the side of the road to watch me go by. He looked like he was made out of green leaves.
    The road rose before me, growing steadily steeper as I approached the summit, and Griffin Hall. The jungle was full of ominous sounds, deep grunts and sibilant rustlings, and the occasional quickly stifled scream. Everything in the jungle seemed to be moving slowly, stirring and stretching as though waking from a deep sleep, disturbed by the intruder in their midst. I was safe, of course. I’d been personally summoned by Jeremiah Griffin himself. I had the current passWords. But I didn’t feel safe. The car’s windows were all firmly closed, and the future vehicle had more built-in weapons than some armies, but still I didn’t feel safe. Being simply a passenger made me feel…helpless. I’ve always preferred to protect myself rather than rely on others. I trust my own capabilities.
    A thrashing mass of barbed vines lurched suddenly into the middle of the road, stretching out to block my way. There wasn’t time to slow, never mind stop, and the living barrier looked heavy and solid enough to stop a tank. I braced myself for the impact, and at the last moment a roaring circular buzz-saw rose up out of the car’s bonnet. We slammed into the thorny mass at full speed, and the howling saw tore right through it, spraying green leafy fragments in all directions. Many of them were still twitching. The great green thing screamed shrilly, its thorns trailing harmlessly along the car’s armoured sides as we punched through the green mass and out the other side.
    Long, twisting branches lowered themselves into the road ahead, any one of them big enough to snatch up the car and feed it to the overhead canopy. The buzz-saw sank back into the bonnet, and twin flame-throwers rose up in its place. Vicious flames roared out to attack the branches, their flaring light bright and clean against the dark. The heavy branches shook and shuddered as the flames took hold, and they shrank back from the car. We drove on through the opening gap, while the burning branches tried to beat out the flames by slamming themselves repeatedly against the road with terrific force.
    Nothing else bothered us. In fact, most of the vegetation seemed to draw back more than a little as we passed by.

    It still took a long time to get to Griffin Hall, the road rising higher and higher, increasingly steep and twisting as I ascended far above the neonlit streets of the Nightside and all the little people who lived there. It felt like I was scaling the heights of Mount Olympus to meet with the gods, which was probably the intention. Griffin Hall stood at the very top of its own private mountain, looking out over the Nightside as though the whole area was the Griffins’ own private preserve. As though they owned everything they could see, for as far as they could see. And if Jeremiah Griffin didn’t actually own all of the Nightside, and everyone who lived in it, it certainly wasn’t for want of trying.
    In the past the Authorities had kept him in his place, but they were all dead and gone now, so who knew what the