The Bride Wore Black Leather

the top third of the steel door. Benway walked right up to it, listened carefully for a moment, then peered cautiously through the porthole. I looked at Julien and gave him my best hard stare.
    “I think this would be a really good time for you to fill me in on what’s so important about Ward 12A, don’t you? What do they do in there; what kind of patients do they treat?”
    “Ward 12A is reserved exclusively for those unfortunate enough to have been damaged by coming in contact with forces or beings from Outside the realms we know,” Julien said quietly. “Remind you of anything?”
    “The Entities from Beyond,” I said.
    “Exactly,” said Julien.
    I looked at the very solid steel door and hoped it was as locked and sealed as the young doctors had said. “You think . . . maybe the Sun King is in there? Could he really have got here ahead of us, that fast?”
    “Who knows what he’s capable of, now?” said Julien. “But let’s not add to our problems until we have to.”
    “If you two have finished muttering secrets to each other, perhaps you’d like to take a look,” Benway said acidly.
    Julien and I moved forward to join her. Burke and Rabette seized the opportunity to back away. Benway had her face pressed up close against the porthole, so Julien and I moved in on either side of her, our heads pressed close together. All I could see were flaring bright lights, sharp and intense, so bright I couldn’t even be sure what colours they were. The glare didn’t simply blaze through the porthole; it outlined the steel door itself. Great, angry, roaring sounds rose and fell on the other side of the door, none of them in any way human. I glanced at Benway.
    “What exactly have you got in there? What’s wrong with these patients?”
    “In Ward 12A, we deal mainly with possessions and abductions. Men and women, and sometimes children, unfortunate enough to have attracted the attention of forces from Outside. We try to treat people who have been taken and changed, physically and mentally, to adapt them to live on other worlds, or in other realities. Places where merely human forms couldn’t hope to survive. Of course, after these beings have finished with their experiments, they abandon their victims and dump them back where they found them. They never bother to undo the changes they’ve made, don’t care that the poor bastards have been altered so much they can’t cope with Earth conditions any more. Some of them end up at the Fortress, but the most damaged, or dangerous, are brought here. We do what we can for them, but mostly they’re contained here, in a secure facility. Ward 12A.”
    “And the others?” said Julien.
    She looked at him, then looked away. “Some things you don’t want to know, Julien. Unless it’s your job and your responsibility. Doctors deal with death and worse, every day. It’s the part of the job no-one else wants to hear you talk about.”
    “How dangerous can these patients be?” I said, as a particularly loud roar made the steel door tremble in its frame.
    “Some patients have been here for years,” said Dr. Benway. “Some of them are more alien than others. Some contain whole worlds, other realities, inside them—living gateways to other places.”
    “Think of the Trojan horse,” Julien said to me.
    “We’ve spent years developing ways to help these people,” said Benway. “Of freeing them from the terrible burdens placed upon them. We use surgery to undo physical changes, telepaths to undo mental changes, and now and again we get our hands on some discarded alien tech that we can use to drag alien booby-traps out of human minds and souls. But sometimes the beings behind the changes fight back. Burke, Rabette, what have you . . . Dr. Rabette, you get your cowardly arse right back here, right now! And tell me what, exactly, is going on inside Ward 12A? Which patient is responsible for all this?”
    “We don’t have a name,” muttered Rabette, not even trying to meet her gaze. “He’s John Doe X number 47.”
    “Something inside him, or beyond him, is fighting to break through,” said Burke. His face was white with shock and wet with sweat. “Some other reality is using him as a gateway, to get to ours. And I really don’t think it’s any kind of reality we would want to meet.”
    I looked sharply at Julien. “A hellgate. They’re talking about a hellgate, draining someone’s soul energies to create a doorway between one reality and