Nightside 10 - The Good the Bad and the Uncanny

lean and hungry look. A man who’ll go the distance in pursuit of the big prize. You provide the brawn, and I’ll provide the brains. Do we have a deal?”
    “You want someone to hide behind when the bullets start flying,” I said.
    “Exactly!” She clapped her little hands together and gave me a smouldering glance. “We’re going to have such fun together ... So, are you in? Or do I have to go looking for someone with bigger ... dreams?”
    I wasn’t entirely stupid, or completely besotted by her charms. Like all good cons, this was just too good to be true. I knew there was a real chance she wanted someone to do all the hard work, then hang around to take all the blame while she disappeared with the prize. But she was pretty, and I was young, and I thought I could hold my own when it came to treachery and back-stabbing. Part of me ... wanted it to be true. Wanted her to be true.
    And I was so very keen to make my name with a really major find.

    “To get to the Lady of the Lake,” said Polly Perkins, as we left the Bar Humbug and tripped lightly through the dark and sleazy streets, “we need to open a very old, and very specialised, dimensional gate. And for that we need several specific, and very rare, items. Think of them as tumblers in a lock.”
    “A dimensional gate?” I said, trying not to sound too appalled. “No wonder you didn’t want to do this alone. Make even one mistake in opening that kind of gate, and we could end up staring into other dimensions, other realities ... even Heaven or Hell. If half the old stories are true, and you’d be surprised how many are.”
    “I’m not an amateur,” said Polly, a bit frostily. “I have done this kind of thing before. Present the gate with the right items, in the right order, and it’ll roll over and play nice like a dog having its tummy tickled. So, ready for a little scavenger hunt? Jolly good! First, we need a magic wand. An elven wand, to be exact.”
    “Oh, this is getting better and better,” I said. “An elf weapon? You are seriously loop the loop! The elves never sell, barter, or give up any of their weapons, so they only ever turn up as lost, stolen, or strayed. They are incredibly dangerous, insanely powerful, and nearly always booby-trapped. You can usually tell when someone’s found one because bits of him are flying through the air. There are those who say the best way to rid yourself of a troublesome rival is to make him a gift of an elven weapon.”
    “If you’ve quite finished hyperventilating, can I point out that you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know? You wanted into the big league, Larry, and it doesn’t get much bigger than this. You have to risk some to get some. Or is my big bold treasure-hunter afraid of a little fairy magic?”
    “Too right I am! So is anyone with two working brain-cells to bang together! I do not want to end up transformed into something small and squishy with eye-balls floating in it. But I said I’m in, so I’m in. Where’s the wand?”
    She grinned, and batted her eye-lashes coyly at me. “How do you feel about a little tomb robbing?”
    “Just call me Indy,” I said resignedly. Some rides you have to follow all the way to the end.

    She took me to the Street of the Gods, and we strolled down the middle of the Street, giving all the churches and temples, their Beings and their supporters, plenty of room. There was a light rain of fish, a brief outbreak of spontaneous combustion among the gargoyles, and ball-lightning rolled down the street like tumble-weeds. Typical weather for the Street of the Gods. An evicted god sat miserably on the pavement outside what used to be his church, clutching at his few possessions. The laws of the Street are strict; if you can’t raise enough worshippers, make way for a Being who can. So the grey little man with the flickering halo would now have to make his own way in the world, as something else. A god no more. A lot of his kind end up doing the rounds on chat shows, selling their sob stories. And even more end up sleeping in cardboard boxes in Rats’ Alley, begging for spare change on street-corners. And it’s a wise man who’ll stop to drop a little something into their outstretched hand, because the wheel of karma turns for us all, and cosmic payback can be a real bitch.
    “I don’t recognise him,” said Polly, as we walked past. “I don’t even know his name. Isn’t that sad?”
    “Half the Beings on this Street are