Nightside 10 - The Good the Bad and the Uncanny

travelled on for ages, the air growing steadily colder. Frost appeared on the inside of the carriage, forming harsh abstract faces on the inner walls. I huddled inside my trench coat, my hands thrust deep in my pockets. Larry didn’t feel any of it. Not even when frost began to form whorled patterns on his dead face.
    The train suddenly screeched to a halt, rocking Larry and me back and forth in our seats. The carriage doors jerked open, a few inches at a time, splinters of ice falling from the frozen metal frame. I got to my feet and moved over to the doors, standing well back as I looked out. Larry got up and stood behind me. Outside, on the platform, the lights were a corrupt yellow glow, more organic than electric, like something from the sick-room. Dust and cobwebs everywhere, and deep dark shadows. Hot sweaty air gusted in through the open carriage doors, heavy with the stench of dying things. The frost on the doors melted and ran away. Larry moved forward to leave the carriage, but I stopped him with a raised hand. There was no-one out there on the platform, no obvious threat, but still I felt uneasy. Someone was watching.
    Larry stirred impatiently, and I made myself step out of the carriage and onto the platform. Sweltering hot air hit me like a slap in the face. Larry was at my side, glaring about him. The frost on his dead face quickly melted, running away like unfelt tears. The carriage doors jerked together behind us, and the train roared away, getting the hell out of the station before something bad happened. Ahead of me, the old station sign of Lud’s Gate was set out in heavy black Gothic lettering. The bottom of the sign was soaked in old dried blood.
    Thick mats of vine and ivy covered the station walls, stirring slowly when I looked at them, agitating in long green tremors beside me as I walked slowly down the platform. Fierce bright eyes peered out of the heavy greenery. Black flowers thrust up through the platform floor, turning slowly to watch as Larry and I passed them by. One of them hissed at Larry, and he deliberately stepped on it, crushing it under his heel.
    “Plants should know their place,” he said loudly.
    His voice didn’t echo at all in the quiet. The silence was so deep and long-established it seemed to swallow up all new noises, including our footsteps. It was like walking through a painting of a place rather than the place itself. Larry stopped abruptly and glared about him.
    “Is this supposed to scare me?” he said loudly. “I’m dead! My house is spookier than this!”
    “Way too much information,” I murmured. “And so much for the element of surprise.”
    “Leave it out,” said Larry. “This place is deader than I am. Whatever happened here, it’s over. We missed it. This ... is just the mess it left behind. I want the Collector. Where is he?”
    “He must know we’re here by now,” I said. “But it’s a big station. The entrance to his lair could be concealed anywhere. And I really don’t feel like wandering around ... Lud’s Gate had a really bad reputation back in the day, before the old Authorities sent a squad in to shut it down.”
    “Hadleigh led that squad,” said Larry. “Back when he was the Man ... Didn’t you know?”
    “No,” I said. “But the Nightside does so love its little coincidences.”
    “Couldn’t you ... ?”
    “No, I couldn‘t,” I said quickly. “The Collector knows me of old. The number of times I’ve casually wandered into his secret hideouts and made a complete nuisance of myself, he’s bound to have set up booby-traps, keyed to my gift.”
    “That’s right,” said Larry. “You and he go way back. What’s he like?”
    “Crazy, spiteful, and vindictive, and dangerous with it,” I said. “He’s lots of other things, too, as the mood takes him, but those are the ones to bear in mind.”
    “I meant,” said Larry, “what’s he like as a person?”
    I thought about it. “I’m not sure how much of a person is left any more. He didn’t always use to be like this. He had a name once, a position, friends, and a life. But one by one he gave them all up to pursue his obsessions. And now he’s just the Collector.”
    “So how do we find him?”
    “We won’t have to,” I said. “He’ll find us.”
    We both looked round sharply as a spotlight stabbed down out of nowhere, a brilliant shimmering pillar of light filling one of the exit arches, clear and sharp against the rotten corrupt light of the