Nightside 10 - The Good the Bad and the Uncanny

in the exposed guts of what had once been a man or a woman.
    Not a dimensional gate. Not a dimensional gate at all. A hellgate. A doorway into Hell itself.
    Awful sounds burst briefly from the gate, screams and howls and endless destruction.
    “What is that?” I said. “Is that Hell?”
    “No, sweetie,” Polly said happily. “That’s the future. That’s what the future will sound like, in the hell on Earth we’re going to make for all Humankind.”
    We stood facing each other before the hellgate. Her smile was wide with anticipation, her face alive with enjoyment at the secret she’d kept from me, now to be revealed. I should have known it would end up like this. I’ve always had rotten luck with women.
    And when you can’t see the patsy in the deal, it’s almost certainly you.
    “So, Polly,” I said, calm as calm could be. “No Lady in the Lake, and the pretty face was just a come-on. So what’s the deal? What do you need a hellgate for?”
    “Sometimes, the living can be cast down into Hell,” said Polly. “Damned to the Houses of Pain, forever. Unless you can send down a worthy replacement.”
    “That’s why the scavenger hunt,” I said. “You didn’t need any of those things to open a hellgate. You wanted to test my mettle, see if I was ... worthy.”
    “Exactly. I knew your reputation, but I needed to see you in action. After all, reputations are ten a penny in the Nightside. And the items we acquired will make a fine tribute for my long-lost mistress.”
    “Who?” I said. My mouth was dry, though my face was streaming with sweat, and I had to clench my hands into fists to stop them trembling. “Who are you planning to raise up out of Hell?”
    “Can’t you guess?” she said, and just like that she didn’t look like Polly Perkins any more, or anything human.
    She was tall and supernaturally slender, her glowing skin pale as the finest porcelain. Her ears were long and pointed, and her eyes had slitted cat pupils. She wore a simple white shift with the arrogance of nobility and a necklace of human fingers. Delicate elven script had been branded in a straight line across her forehead. Just looking at her now roused a kind of arachnid revulsion in me. There’s nothing worse than something that looks like human, but isn’t.
    “You’re an elf,” I said, and my voice sounded dull and defeated, even to me. “Never trust an elf.”
    “Exactly,” she said, and her voice was rich and sweet and cloying, like poisoned honey. “You’re here to help me bring back our lost mistress, Queen Mab. Oldest and greatest of our kind, thrown down into Hell by the traitors Oberon and Titania. But any living thing damned to Hell can be rescued or redeemed by another living thing. One of the oldest rules there is .. She stopped, and looked at me, thoughtfully. ”I wonder if the same rule applies to Heaven? What sport, what joy, to drag a noble person back from Paradise! But that’s a thought for another day. Bye-bye, sweetie. Give my regards to the Inferno. It’s been fun; but now it’s over.“
    She lunged at me while she was still speaking, moving inhumanly quickly, expecting to catch me off-balance. But I was ready for her. I had the wand. She’d been so caught up in her moment of triumph that she’d forgotten to take it from me. I said the Words, and the wand stopped Time. Polly hung in mid air before me, her elongated alien form suspended between one moment and the next. I looked at her for a while. Thinking of what might have been. We’d worked well together, and I had enjoyed her company. But I’m nobody’s patsy. So I took careful hold of her, turned her around in mid air so that she was facing the hellgate, and started Time up again.
    She screamed, just once, as she saw what lay before her, then the gate sucked her in and sent her down, and she was gone while the echo of her scream still hung on the hot air. I looked at the hellgate, at the suffering human eyes in what had once been a human face, and thought about killing it. I knew how. I’d done it before. But to disrupt the hellgate while the transfer was still in progress could release unimaginable energies. I certainly wouldn’t survive it. Wand or no wand. I didn’t want to die, not while I still had so much life ahead of me ... So even though I knew what was coming, I waited and watched, as Queen Mab of the Fae returned to the world of the living. One of the old monsters, Humanity’s Ruin.
    Something came rising up