Nightside 11 - A Hard Days Knight

wasn’t even much of the usual strange noises and threatening voices. Perhaps because this wasn’t one of the busy lines. People are always queuing up and even fighting each other to get into the Nightside, but only a few ever go home again. For all kinds of reasons.
    When the train finally ground to a halt at London Proper, I took a deep breath, stood up, and walked steadily out onto the platform. It was, of course, quite empty. No-one else left the train. The door behind me hissed shut, and the train went away. I walked slowly down the empty platform. The air was still and stale, and the sound of my footsteps didn’t echo far, as though the sound didn’t have quite enough energy to make the effort. The walls were utterly bare, no posters or adverts, no graffiti. The whole place had the feel of a stage-set that was only rarely used.
    The blank wall stretched away before me, with no sign of an exit anywhere. I finally stopped before a courtesy phone, set on the wall inside a dusty glass shield. I picked up the phone. There was no dial tone. I said London Proper and put the phone down again. I stepped back, and the wall before me split slowly in two, pulling itself apart in a series of grinding juddering movements until a long, narrow tunnel fell away before me. Its inner walls were dark red, like an opened wound, and the sourceless light was dim and smoky, smelling of corrupt perfumes and crushed flowers. I walked steadily forward, and mists swirled round my ankles like disturbed waters. Faint voices and snatches of strange music faded in and out, like so many competing radio signals. Far and far away, a cloister bell tolled sadly.
    I burst out the other end of the tunnel, and immediately, I was standing on an ordinary, everyday platform, while perfectly normal people hurried past me. None of them seemed to notice that I’d arrived in their midst out of nowhere. I glanced behind me, and the wall was just a wall, with nothing to show it had ever been anything else. Which was as it should be. I joined the crush and followed the crowd down the platform, heading out and up into the real world above.

    I left Whitechapel Station and stepped hesitantly out into a London I hadn’t seen in years. The real world seemed almost defiantly grey after the relentless sound and fury and garish neon of the Nightside. Everywhere I looked, the street and the people were all remarkably ordinary. And the traffic thundering up and down the road was only cars and buses, taxis and messengers on bicycles, and lumbering delivery trucks. They even stopped for the traffic lights and pedestrian crossings. Mostly.
    It was early evening, still quite light, and I wasn’t used to that. I felt ... exposed, and vulnerable, now that I no longer had any shadows to hide in. I stared up at the cloudy grey sky and tried to remember when I’d last seen the sun. I wasn’t impressed. Sunlight’s overrated if you ask me.
    Everything felt different. The pace felt slower, with none of the familiar sense of danger and opportunity, none of the Nightside’s constant pressure to be going somewhere, to do something unwise and probably unnatural. London Proper did have its own bustle and air of excitement, like every big city, but it was strictly amateur hour compared to the Nightside.
    The real difference between the Nightside and London Proper was attitude. In the Nightside, it’s all out and open and in-your-face. From magic to super-science, from the supernatural to the other-dimensional. You can sink yourself into it all, like soaking in a hot bath full of blood. In London Proper, in what we like to think of as the real world, such things are hidden. Behind the scenes, or behind the scenery. You won’t even know it’s there unless you have the Sight; and most don’t. You have to go looking for the hidden world, and even then you probably won’t find it if it doesn’t want to be found.
    I knew I should go straight to Oxford Street, and the London Knights’ secret headquarters ... but it had been a long time since I’d been back, and nostalgia can be a harsh mistress. I felt a need, almost a hunger, to see my old haunts again, to go back to that small grubby place where I had lived and worked, and tried so hard to be normal. So I hopped on a bus, one of the old reliable red London double-deckers, and travelled back into my past.

    I got off the bus at a stop no-one else seemed interested in and strolled down the grim, shabby streets to where my