The Bride Wore Black Leather

many sobbed and whimpered and read out-of-date magazines, but the size of the waiting crowd never seemed to change much. Julien stared patiently off into the distance, tapping one foot in a thoughtful manner. I recognised the signs. He’d already decided exactly how much time he was going to allow Dr. Benway; and then he was going to go and look for her himself. And God help anyone who got in his way. I’d never seen Julien walk right over a receptionist before. I was quite looking forward to it. Reassured at the prospect of loud and nasty unpleasantness in the near future, I killed time by studying the long list of wards, and their particular areas of expertise, laid out on an old-fashioned wooden wall plaque. They were all carefully numbered, but a lot of the descriptions were in Greek and Latin. I nudged Julien in the ribs and drew his attention to the dead languages. He gave me a long-suffering look.
    “In my young days, we were all taught Latin and Greek at school.”
    “Was that before or after they shoved you up chimneys or down the mines?” I said.
    Julien sighed, heavily, and translated the various descriptions for me. With rather more hesitations and uncertainty than you’d expect from someone who was supposed to have had a first-class private education. But after a while he got interested and started a running commentary on what each new description implied.
    “Here at the Hospice, they deal with all the more unusual medical problems and conditions of the Nightside. Resulting in some very specialised care and services. There are doctors here to take off curses, put souls or identities back where they came from, reverse transformations, and undo teleport pod mishaps. They can restore kirlian fields and retune your chakras. Can’t say I really approve of all this New Age stuff, but you can’t ignore alternative medicine these days. Fortunately, I don’t see anything here about crystals or flower aromatherapy, or I would have to say something very unfortunate. There are wards here for every need and speciality, including every kind of species you can think of. The Hospice doesn’t discriminate. And then, of course, there’s Ward 12A, though most people don’t like to talk about that.”
    “Why not?” I said immediately. “What goes on in Ward 12A?”
    Julien pressed on, deliberately ignoring my question. “There are wards for unicorns who need reshoeing with pure silver hooves, and for werewolves with the mange. I understand Leo Morn’s a martyr to it, in the winter months. For vampires who’ve made themselves ill by drinking the wrong blood group: Rhesus intolerant. And, of course, a ward to treat all the rare and nasty diseases that will keep turning up in the Nightside through Timeslips: from the Past and any number of unfortunate futures. You really don’t want to know about the Plague Ward, John.”
    He carried on, talking with increasing enthusiasm, extolling the many virtues of the Hospice, genuinely proud of all the incredible services its staff could provide. Often only because of his vigorous fund-raising though, of course, he never mentioned that bit. He talked at length of the giant spiders who lived in the basement, spinning bandages, and the ghouls who were bused in every day to eat the medical waste, and the occasional body too toxic to dispose of in a normal manner. Or too tough to burn. A ghoul’s digestion can handle anything, up to and including nuclear waste. Though you really don’t want to be around them when they fart.
    And, sometimes, ghouls would be called in to deal with certain bodies that were too dangerous to be buried. Any villain who ever said
I’ll be back!
as he went to his death at the hands of a triumphant hero . . . never met a Nightside ghoul. But I couldn’t help noticing that Julien was saying most of this to cover up the fact that he didn’t want to talk about Ward 12A. I mused on this while noticing that all of the porters, including those pushing patients around in wheel-chairs, were actually very familiar-looking cat-faced robots. I pointed this out to Julien as a matter of urgency, but he just nodded easily.
    “I know,” he said. “The Authorities bought them at auction, from one of the vaults discovered after the Collector’s death. We donated them to the Hospice. Mark always did have a fondness for this particular kind of automaton, brought back from some future iteration of China, I believe. You don’t have to worry, John;