Nightside 08 - The Unnatural Inquirer

me.”
    “Sooner or later, I come for everyone,” said Walker.
    “Under pressure?” I said thoughtfully, and he looked back at me. I grinned right into his calm, collected face. “From whom, precisely? Whom do you serve, now the Authorities are all dead and gone?”
    But he just smiled briefly, nodded to me, and tipped his bowler hat to Suzie, then turned and walked away, disappearing unhurriedly back into the night.

    Suzie Shooter and I went to the Spider’s Web. A sort of up-market cocktail bar, owned by Max Maxwell ever since he had its previous owner killed, stuffed, mounted, and put on display; it was widely known as his seat of power, where he did business with the poor unfortunates who came before him. By the time we got there, the place had already been very thoroughly trashed. Bits of it were still smouldering. Suzie drew her pump-action shotgun from its rear holster with one easy movement and led the way as we entered through the kicked-in front door.
    The lobby was wrecked, with bodies everywhere. None of them had died easily. Blood had soaked into the carpet, splashed up the walls, and even stained the ceiling. Severed hands had been piled up in one corner, and all the heads were missing their faces. Suzie and I moved slowly and cautiously between the bodies, but nothing moved. The furniture looked like it had exploded.
    Max Maxwell’s inner office at the back of the club didn’t look much better. No blood or bodies, though, which suggested Max had got out in time. A pack of tarot cards had been left scattered across the top of a huge mahogany desk, which had been cracked casually in half. Thick mats of ivy crawled across all four walls, reportedly part of Max’s early-warning system; but every bit of it was dead, withered away as though blasted by a terrible frost. Here and there, something had gouged deep claw-marks through the ivy and into the wood beneath. The bare floor was covered with cabalistic symbols, a whole series of overlapping defence systems.
    A lot of good they’d done.
    “This man had to be seriously worried to have so many protections in one place,” said Suzie.
    “He had good reason,” I said. “Gods really don’t like it when worshippers start forgetting their place and flexing their muscles.”
    I fired up my gift, and the world changed around me. I couldn’t use my gift to pin down Max’s current location; I need a specific question to get a specific answer. But there’s more than one way to find someone who doesn’t want to be found. I opened up my inner eye, my third eye, and Saw the world as it really is. There’s a lot going on around us that most people aren’t aware of, and it’s probably just as well. If they knew who and what we share this world with, an awful lot of them would probably rip their own heads off rather than see it.
    There were things in the office with us, drifting on currents unknown to mortal men, filling the aether like the tiny creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. And just as ugly. I focused my gift, concentrating on Max Maxwell, and his ghost image appeared before me—his past, imprinted on Time.
    Max was just as big as everyone said he was. A giant of a man, huge and looming even in this semi-transparent state. Eight feet tall, and impressively broad across the chest and shoulders, he wore an impeccably cut cream-coloured suit, presumably chosen to contrast with the deep black of his harsh, craggy face. He looked like he’d been carved out of stone, a great brooding gargoyle in a Saville Row suit. He was scowling fiercely, his huge dark hands clenched into fists.
    He stamped silently around his office, as though looking for something. He didn’t seem scared, or even concerned. Simply angry. He unlocked a drawer in his desk and brought out something wrapped in a blood-red cloth. He made a series of signs over the bundle and then unwrapped it, revealing a bulky square contraption made up of dully shining metal pieces joined together in a way that made my eyes hurt to look at it. The Aquarius Key, presumably. It looked like a prototype, something that hadn’t had all the bugs hammered out of it yet.
    Max weighed the thing thoughtfully in one oversized hand, then looked round sharply, as though he’d heard something he didn’t like. He gestured grandly with his free hand, and all the cabalistic signs on the floor burst into light. The ivy on the walls writhed and twisted, as though in pain. One by one, the lines