The Bride Wore Black Leather

moved slowly forward, careful to keep to the officially designated gravel paths, laid out for those stubborn few who insisted on visiting people who wouldn’t have been buried here if they’d wanted visitors. One of the main reasons for being interred in this very isolated location is to make sure your grave won’t be disturbed or interfered with. So outside the gravel paths, you wander at your own peril. In our cemetery, the helpless dead are defended: by land mines, booby-traps, invisible floating curses, and other less obvious but even nastier forms of security and preservation.
    The cemetery was full of shadows and a grim silence. Enforced peace and solitude hung heavily over the still scene. Even the crunching of my feet on gravel seemed strangely subdued and muffled. I stopped and sat down on a nearby headstone, so I could think. Then I thought to get up and take a look at the stone’s inscription. It read NOT DEAD ONLY SLEEPING . And since this was still the Nightside, I moved along and sat down on another stone with a less worrying inscription. Because you can’t be too careful.
    No-one had followed me; no-one had found me. I was alone.
    I got out my mobile phone and called Alex Morrisey at Strangefellows. While reflecting that it was a good thing I’d recently upgraded my service, to cover all the pocket dimensions and hidden worlds of the Nightside. Alex answered the phone immediately, as though he’d been waiting for my call. His voice came through clearly, and there didn’t seem to be any noise in the background. Which was odd, for Strangefellows.
    “John!” said Alex. “Where are you?”
    “Think I’ll keep that to myself, for the moment,” I said. “Does sound rather quiet, at your end. Would I be right in thinking my stag do is over?”
    “Are you kidding?” said Alex. “Most of the people who were here are now out on the streets looking for you, and not in a good way. Turned out a lot of them were great admirers of Julien Advent, on the quiet. And the reward money the Authorities have put up for you is the biggest anyone’s ever heard of! They want your head, John, preferably in a box.”
    “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised the news is out,” I said. “Nothing travels faster in the Nightside than bad news.”
    “Did you really murder the Great Victorian Adventurer?” said Alex. “Tell me you didn’t, John; tell me this is all some terrible mistake.”
    “It’s all some terrible mistake,” I said. “Really. I did kill him, but . . .”
    “John! How could you?”
    “He asked me to do it! He was dying anyway; and it was the only way to save a whole hospital full of innocents.”
    “You killed Julien Advent!”
    “It wasn’t like that!”
    I did my best to explain about the Sun King, and what he meant to do, and the power he put into Julien . . . but I could tell it sounded unlikely, even for the kind of cases I usually get involved in. I could tell Alex was having trouble believing it. I wanted to say
You had to be there . . .
“The official story is that you murdered Julien Advent in cold blood,” said Alex. “Though no-one seems too sure why. I know you were always jealous of him, John, but . . .”
    “You really think I’m capable of something like that?” I said.
    “You’ve done worse,” said Alex. And I had no answer to that.
    “It’s like the whole Nightside wants you dead,” said Alex. “The Authorities, or what’s left of them, are really mad at you. First, you let King of Skin die, right in front of you; and now you’ve murdered Julien Advent? They think you’ve gone rogue, and possibly feral . . .”
    “How big a reward have they put on my head?” I asked, honestly curious.
    “Big enough to tempt anyone,” said Alex. “If I didn’t have a bar to run . . .”
    “I can’t believe I chose you as my best man,” I said.
    “You don’t really think you’re still getting married tomorrow, do you?” said Alex, incredulously. “The only church service you’re likely to be attending in the near future involves a big hole in the ground and a priest trying to find something positive to say about you.”
    “Alex,” I said. “What am I going to do?”
    “You can’t come here,” Alex said immediately. “It’s the first place they’d look. And I’ve only just got the place cleared up after the last fight you started. Maybe . . . you should leave the Nightside. Go hide out in London Proper, until things calm down