Nightside 10 - The Good the Bad and the Uncanny

up a pickpocket with their invisible mallets.
    Just another day in the Nightside.
    By the time the train got me to Cheyne Walk, I was so relaxed I almost dozed off on my seat, and my head came up with a jerk as the train slammed into the station. I made my way up through the tunnels, swept along with the hurrying crowds, and finally emerged onto the street. The air was hot and sweaty, and a gusting wind blew lighter pieces of garbage this way and that. There are no street-cleaners in the Nightside ; because there’s always something around that’ll eat anything. I strolled down the street, taking my time, looking the place over. It hadn’t been that long since the Lilith War, but you’d never have known there’d ever been any fighting or destruction here. It had all been repaired, rebuilt, renewed. Old shops and businesses destroyed by fire and explosion and the madness of rioting mobs had been replaced by bright new establishments; like a carnival built on a neglected graveyard.
    Heavy-drinking bars stood alongside advanced dance salons, while brightly lit book-shops offered volumes of forgotten lore and forbidden knowledge. In paperback, and usually remaindered. There was even one of those new age soul-massage parlours, guaranteed to put your inner self at rest, and a restaurant from the Strange Offerings chain, spe cialising in food from other worlds and dimensions. For the more adventurous, there was a branch of Baron Samedi’s Bide A Wee; where you can pay to be briefly possessed, just for the kick of it. And for the truly creepy among us, there was the Dreamy Travel Agency, where lucid-dreaming potions allowed the discerning client to go tripping through the Dreamtime, to skinny-dip in other people’s dreams.
    But still the tourists and the punters streamed this way and that, with eyes bigger than their wallets, on the prod and on the prowl, desperate to give away everything they had for everything on offer that was bad for them. The street was alive with noise and bustle and something very like glamour. Candy-coloured neon signs blazed like beacons, and everywhere you looked there was every kind of come-on. The damned leading the damned; the Nightside doing what it did best.
    I stopped half-way along the street, trying to remember exactly where I saw Tommy Oblivion go down; first under a falling wall, then under the clawing hands of a maddened crowd. I always assumed he died here because I saw so many others die that day. Like Sister Morphine, the angel of the homeless. She’d died right in front of me, and there was nothing I could do to help her. There was a war on. I couldn’t save everyone. I could still remember the bodies, piled up like refuse, while blood ran so thickly in the gutters it overflowed the storm drains. I could still hear the screams and pleas from the wounded and the dying ... still see the mobs running wild, driven out of their minds by shock and horror, tearing apart everyone in their path. So many dead, and no memorial for any of them. Not even a plaque on a wall.
    Because the Nightside doesn’t look back.
    I finally caught up with Larry Oblivion at the end of the street. He was standing in front of what had been one of the new business establishments, but was now just a smoking ruin, with broken, blackened walls surrounding a great pit in the earth. A sputtering neon sign had been driven half its length into the ground, like a Technicolor spike. A crowd of interested onlookers was carefully maintaining a discreet distance between them and the blast zone. Or possibly, between them and the heavily scowling Larry Oblivion. They were all cheerfully debating what had happened, how it had happened, why it had happened; and swapping theories on who might be next. Then they saw me approaching and went suddenly quiet. Not so much because they were impressed as because they didn’t want to miss out on anything. Everyone knew about Larry and me. The Nightside does so love to gossip. I made a point of giving Larry my most friendly smile as I joined him, to spite everyone.
    “Hadleigh’s already been here,” Larry said bluntly. “I’ve been talking to people. He scared the crap out of everybody and blew this place up just by looking at it. Typical Hadleigh. At least he only killed a bunch of bad guys this time, and no innocent bystanders. That’s something.”
    “Does he do that, sometimes?” I said. “Kill innocent bystanders?”
    “Who knows what he does, these