Nightside 08 - The Unnatural Inquirer

on the floor began to gutter and go out. Max headed for the door.
    I went after him, Suzie right there at my side. She couldn’t see what I was Seeing, but she trusted me.
    In as much as she trusted anyone.

    We tracked Max Maxwell’s ghost half-way across the Nightside. I had to fight to concentrate on his past image. When my inner eye is cranked all the way open, I can See all there is to See in the Nightside, and a lot of it the human mind just isn’t equipped to deal with. The endlessly full moon hung low in the star-speckled sky, twenty times the size it should have been. Something with vast membranous wings sailed across the face of the moon, almost eclipsing it. The buildings around us blazed with protective signs, magical defences, and shaped curses scrawled across the storefronts like so much spitting and crackling graffiti. A thousand other ghosts stamped and raged and howled silently all around me, memories trapped in repeating loops of Time, like insects in amber.
    Dimensional travellers flashed and flared in and out of existence, just passing through on their way to somewhere more interesting. Demons rode the backs of unsuspecting souls, their claws dug deep into back and shoulder muscles, whispering in their host’s ear. You could always tell which ones had been listening; their demons were particularly fat and bloated. Wee winged sprites, pulsing with light, shot up and down the street, fierce as fireworks, buzzing around and above each other in intricate patterns too complex for human eyes. And the Awful Ones, huge and ancient, moved through our streets and buildings as though they weren’t even there, about their unguessable business.
    I kept my head down, focused on Max Maxwell, and Suzie saw to it that no-one bothered me or got in our way. She had her shotgun out and at the ready, and no-one ever doubted that she’d use it. Suzie had always been a great believer in the scorched-earth solution for all problems, great and small.
    Max led us right through the centre of the Nightside, and out the other side, and I had a bad feeling I knew where he was headed. Bad as the Nightside undoubtedly is, even it has its recognised Bad Places, places you simply don’t go if you’ve got any sense. One of these is Fun Faire. It was supposed to be the Nightside’s very first amusement park, for adults. Someone’s Big Idea; but it never caught on. The people who come to the Nightside aren’t interested in artificial thrills; not when there are so many of the real thing available on every street corner. Fun Faire was shut down years ago, and the only reason it’s still taking up valuable space is because the various creditors are still arguing over who owns what. Now, it’s just a collection of huge rusting rides, great hulking structures left to rot in the cold, uncaring night.
    Last I’d heard, they’d run through fourteen major league exorcists, merely trying to keep the place quiet.
    Max had chosen Fun Faire as his bolt-hole precisely because so many bad things had happened there. So much death and suffering, so much cheerful slaughter and infernal malice, had turned the Fun Faire grounds into one big psychic null spot. The genius loci had become so awful, so soaked in blood and terror, that no-one could See into it. Which made it a really good place to hide out, for as long as you could stand it.
    Suzie and I stopped at the amusement park entrance, and stood there, looking in. Max’s ghost image had snapped off the moment he walked through the main archway. I shut down my Sight. The great multi-coloured arch loomed above us, paint peeling and speckled with rust. The old neon letters along the top that had once blazed the words FUN FAIRE! to an unsuspecting public were now cracked and dusty and lifeless. Someone had spray-painted over them ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. Graveyard humour, but I had to admire their nerve. Beyond the archway it was all dark shapes and darker shadows, the metal bones of old rides standing out in stark silhouettes against the night sky. No lights, anywhere in Fun Faire. Only the uneasy shimmering blue-white glare of the full moon, marking out the paths between the rides. A glowing maze, where the monster wasn’t trapped in the centre any more. A slow breeze issued out of the arch, pressing against my face, cold as the grave.
    Bad things had happened here, and perhaps were still happening, on some level. You can’t kill that many people, spill that much blood,