Just Another Judgement Day

ONE Retro Voodoo and the Spirit of Dorian Gray

You don’t go to Strangefellows for the good company. You don’t go to the oldest bar in the world for open-mike contests, trivia quizzes, or theme nights. And certainly not for happy hour. You don’t go there for the food, which is awful, or the atmosphere, which is worse. You go to Strangefellows to drink and brood and plan your revenges on an uncaring world. And you go there because no-one else will have you. The oldest bar in the world has few rules and fewer standards, except perhaps for Mind your own damned business.

I was sitting in a booth at the back of the bar that particular night, with my business partner and love, Suzie Shooter. I was nursing a glass of wormwood brandy, and Suzie was drinking Bombay Gin straight from the bottle. We were winding down, after a case that hadn’t gone well for anyone. We didn’t talk. We don’t, much; we don’t feel the need. We’re easy in each other’s company.

My long white trench coat was standing to attention beside our table. I’ve always believed in having a coat that can look after itself. People gave it plenty of room, especially after I happened to mention that I hadn’t fed it recently. The trench coat is my one real affectation; I think a private eye should look the part. And while people are distracted by the cliché, they tend not to notice me running rings around them. I’m tall, dark, and handsome enough from a distance, and no matter how bad things get, I never do divorce work.

Suzie Shooter, also known as Shotgun Suzie, was wearing her usual black motorcycle leathers, complete with steel studs and chains and two bandoliers of bullets crossing over her impressive chest. She has long blonde hair, a striking face with a strong bone structure, and the coldest blue gaze you’ll ever see. My very own black leather Valkyrie. She’s a bounty hunter, in case you hadn’t guessed.

We were young, we were in love, and we’d just killed a whole bunch of people. It happens.

Strangefellows was full that night... the night he came to the Nightside. We thought it was just another night, and the joint was jumping. Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” was pumping out of hidden speakers, and thirteen members of the Tribe of Gay Barbarians were line-dancing to it, complete with sheathed broadswords, fringed leather chaps, and tall ostrich-feather head-dresses. Two wizened Asian conjurers in long, sweeping robes had set their tiny pet dragons to fighting, and already a crowd had gathered to place bets. (Though I had heard rumours that only the dragons were real; the conjurers were merely illusions generated by the tiny dragons so they could get around in public without being bothered.) Half a dozen female ghouls, out on a hen night, were getting happily loud and rowdy over a bottle of Mother’s Ruination and demanding another bucket of lady-fingers. It probably helps to be a ghoul if you’re going to eat the bar snacks at Strangefellows. And a young man was weeping into his beer because he’d given his heart to his one true love, and she’d put it in a bottle and sold it to a sorcerer in return for a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes.

In a more private part of the bar, a small gathering of soft ghosts were flickering in and out around a table that wasn’t always there. Soft ghosts—the hazy images of men and women who’d travelled too far from their home worlds and lost their way. Now they drifted through the dimensions, from world to world and reality to reality, trying desperately to find their way home, fading a little more with every failure. A lot of them find their way to Strangefellows, and stop off for a brief rest. Alex Morrisey keeps the memories of old wines stored in Klein bottles, just for them. Though what they pay him with is beyond me. The soft ghosts clustered together, whispering the names of lands and heroes and histories that no-one else had ever heard of and comforting each other as best they could.

Alex Morrisey is the owner and main bartender of Strangefellows, last of a long line of miserable bastards. He always wears black, right down to designer shades and a snazzy black beret pushed well back on his head to hide his spreading bald spot, because, he says, anything else would be hypocritical. Alex wakes up every evening pissed off at the entire world, and his mood only gets worse as the night wears on. He has a gift for short-changing people, doesn’t wash the glasses nearly often enough, and mixes the worst martinis in the world. Wise men avoid his special offers.

Strangefellows attracts a varied crowd, even for the Nightside, and Alex has to be able to cater to all kinds of trade, with everything from Shoggoth’s Old and Very Peculiar, Angel’s Urine (not a trade name, unfortunately), and Delerium Treebeard (taste that chlorophyll!). Alex will never say where he obtained some of the rarer items on his shelves, but I knew for a fact he had contacts in other dimensions and realities, including a whole bunch of disreputable alchemists, tomb-robbers, and Time-travellers.

I poured myself another glass of the wormwood brandy, and Suzie tossed aside her empty gin bottle and reached for another. Both our hands were steady, despite everything we’d been through earlier. A Springheel Jack meme had entered the Nightside through a Timeslip, sneaking in from an alternate Victorian England. The meme had spread unnaturally quickly, infecting and transforming the minds of everyone it came into contact with. Soon there were hundreds of Springheel Jacks, raging through the streets, cutting a bloody path through unsuspecting revellers. Every bounty hunter in the Nightside got the call, and I went along with Suzie, to keep her company.

We killed the Jacks as fast as they manifested, but the meme spread faster than we could stamp it out. Bounty hunters filled the Nightside streets with the sound of gunfire, and bodies piled up while blood ran thickly in the gutters. We couldn’t save any of them. The meme had completely overwritten their personalities. In the end I had to use my gift to find the source of the infection, the Timeslip itself. I put in a call to the Temporal Engineers, they shut it down, and that was finally that. Except for all the bodies lying in the streets. The ones the Springheel Jacks killed, and the ones we killed. Sometimes you can’t save everyone. Sometimes all you can do . . . is kill a whole bunch of people.

Business as usual, in the Nightside.

There was a sudden drop in the noise level as someone new entered the bar. People actually stopped what they were doing to follow the progress of the new arrival as he strode majestically through the packed bar. In a place noted for its eccentrics, extreme characters, and downright lunatics, he still stood out.

A tall and slender figure, with a gleaming black face and an air of aristocratic disdain, he wore a bright yellow frock coat over a powder-blue jerkin and green-and-white-striped trousers. Calfskin boots and white satin gloves completed the ensemble. He didn’t look like he belonged in Strangefellows, but then, I would have been hard-pressed to name anywhere he might have looked at home. He stalked arrogantly through the speechless crowd, and they let him pass untouched, awed by the presence of so much fashion in one person. He was too weird even for us; an exotic butterfly in a dark place. And, of course, he was heading straight for my table.

He swayed to a halt right before me, looked down his nose at me, ignored Suzie completely, which is never wise, and struck a dramatic pose.

“I am Percy D’Arcy!” he said. “The Percy D’Arcy!” He looked at me as though that was supposed to mean something.

“Good for you,” I said generously. “It’s not everyone who could bear up under a name like that, but you it suits. Now what do you want, Percy? I have some important drinking and brooding to be getting on with.”

“But...I’m Percy D’Arcy! Really! You must have seen me in the glossies, and on the news shows. It isn’t a fabulous occasion unless I’m there to grace it with my presence!”

“You’re not a celebrity, are you?” I said cautiously. “Only I should point out Suzie has a tendency to shoot celebrities on general principles. She says they have a tendency to get too loud.”

Percy actually curled his lip, and made a real production out of it, too. “Please! A celebrity? Me? I . . . am a personality! Famous just for being me! I’m not some mere actor, or singer. I’m not functional; I’m decorative! I am a dashing man about town, a wastrel and a drone and proud of it. I add charm and glamour to any scene simply by being there!”

“You’re getting loud, Percy,” I said warningly. “What do you do, exactly?”

“Do? I’m rich, dear fellow, I don’t have to do anything. I have made myself into a living work of art. It is enough that I exist, that people may adore me.”

Suzie made a low, growling noise. We both looked at her nervously.

“Your existence as a work of art could come to an abrupt end any moment now,” I said. “If you don’t leave off fancying yourself long enough to explain what it is you want with me.”

Percy D’Arcy pouted, in a wounded sort of way, and pulled over a chair so he could sit down facing me. He gave the seat a good polish with a monogrammed silk handkerchief first, though. He shot Suzie an uncertain glance, then concentrated on me. I didn’t blame him. Suzie gets mean when she’s on her second bottle.

“I have need of your services, Mr. Taylor,” Percy said stiffly, as though such directness was below him. “I am told you find things. Secrets, hidden truths, and the like.”

“Those are the kinds of things that usually need finding, yes,” I said. “What do you want me to find, Percy?”

“It’s not that simple.” He looked round the bar, looking at everything except me while he gathered his courage. Then he turned back, took a deep breath, and made the plunge. It was a marvellous performance; you’d have paid good money to see it in the theatre. Percy fixed me with what he thought was a commanding gaze and leaned forward confidentially.

“Usually my whole existence is very simple, and I like it that way. I show up at all the right places and at all the right parties, mingle with my friends and my peers, dazzle everyone with my latest fashions and devastating bon mots, and thus ensure that the occasion will be covered by all the right media. I do so love to party, and make the scene, and generally brighten up this dull old world with my presence. There’s a whole crowd of us, you see; known each other since we were so high, you know how it is . . . There isn’t a club in the Nightside that doesn’t benefit regularly from the sheer spectacle of our presence . . . But now it’s all changed, Mr. Taylor! And it’s not fair! How can I be expected to compete for my moment in the spotlight when all my friends are cheating? Cheating!”

“How are they cheating?” I said, honestly baffled.

Percy leaned in very close, his voice a hoarse whisper. “They’re staying young and beautiful, while I’m not. I’m aging, and they’re not. I mean; look at me. I’ve got a wrinkle!”

I couldn’t actually see it, but I took his word for it. “How long has this been going on?” I said.

“Months! Almost a year now. Though I’ve had my suspicions . . . Look, I know these people. Have known them all my life. I know their faces like I know my own, down to the smallest detail. I can always tell when someone’s had a little work done, around the eyes or under the chin . . . but this is different. They look younger, untouched by time or the stresses of our particular life-style.

“It started last autumn, when some of them began patronising this new health club, the Guaranteed New You Parlour. Very expensive, very elite. Now all my friends go there, and every time they appear in public, they’re the absolute peak, the very flower of beauty. Not a detail that isn’t perfect, no matter how dissolute their private lives may be. I mean, people like us, Mr. Taylor, we live . . . extreme lives. We experience . . . everything. It’s expected of us, so the rest of you can live the wild life vicariously, through us. Drink, drugs, debauchery, every night and twice on Saturday. It all gets just a bit tiring, actually. But anyway, as a result, we’ve all been in and out of those very discreet clinics that provide treatments for the kind of diseases you only get by being very social, or help in getting over the kind of good cheer that comes in bottles and powders and needles. We all need a little help to be beautiful all the time. A little something to help us soldier on to the next party. We all need damage repair, on a regular basis.

“But that’s all stopped! They don’t need the clinics any more, just this Parlour. And they all look like teenagers! It’s not fair!”

“Well,” I said reasonably, “If this Parlour is doing such a good job, why don’t you go there, too?”

“Because they won’t have me!” Percy slumped in his chair, and suddenly looked ten years older, as though he could only maintain his air of glamour through sheer effort of will these days. “I have offered to pay anything they want. Double, even triple the going rate. I begged and pleaded, Mr. Taylor! And they turned me away, as though I were nobody. Me! Percy D’Arcy! And now my friends don’t want me around any more. They say I don’t . . . fit in.

“Please, Mr. Taylor, I need you to find out what’s going on. Find out why the Parlour won’t let me in. Find out what they’re really doing behind those closed doors . . . and if they are cheating, shut them down! So I won’t be left out any more.”

“It’s not really my usual kind of case,” I said.

“I’ll pay you half a million pounds.”

“But clearly this is something that needs to be investigated. Leave it with me, Percy.”

He stood up abruptly, pulling his dignity back about him. “Here’s my card. Please inform me when you know something.” He tossed a very expensive piece of engraved paste-board on to the table before me, then stalked off back through the crowd with his head held high. A smattering of applause followed him. I picked up the card, tapped it thoughtfully against my chin a few times, and looked at Suzie.

“It’s something to do,” I said. “You interested?”

“I’ll come along,” said Suzie. “Just to keep you company. Will I get to kill anybody?”

“Probably not.”

Suzie shrugged. “The things I do for love.”

In the sane and normal world outside the Nightside, if you’re getting older and starting to look your age, there’s always cosmetic surgery and associated treatments. In the Nightside, the rich and the famous and the powerful have access to other options, some of them quite spectacularly nasty and extreme.

The Guaranteed New You Parlour was situated in Uptown, the very best part of the Nightside, offering only the very best services for the very best people. Suzie and I went there anyway. The rent-a-cops in their colourful private uniforms took one look at us and decided they were needed urgently somewhere else. The neon there was just as hot, but perhaps a little more restrained, and the clubs and restaurants and discreet establishments glowed in the night like burning jewels. And the lost souls filling the streets and squares were all pounding the pavements in search of a better class of damnation.

In Uptown, even the Devil wears a tie.

The Guaranteed New You Parlour occupied the site of what used to be a rather tacky place called The Cutting Edge, an S&M joint for people with a surgery fetish. It got closed down for cutting corners on the after-care services, and for being too damned tacky even for the Nightside. The new owner had pulled the old place down and started over, so the Parlour was a gleaming new edifice of steel and glass, style and class, with pale-veined marble for the entrance lobby. Someone had spent a lot of money pushing the place up-market, and it showed. But then, money attracts money.

Suzie and I studied the Parlour from the other side of the street. Very rich people came and went, in stretch limousines and private ambulances, but though a great many old people went in, only young people came out. Which was . . . odd. There are ways of turning back the clock to be found in the Nightside, but the price nearly always involves your soul, or someone else’s. And there are any number of places that will sell you false youth, but nothing that lasts. What did the Guaranteed New You Parlour have that no-one else could provide?

I headed for the main door, Suzie right there at my side. Her steel chains jangled softly, and the butt of her pump-action shotgun stood up behind her head from its holster down her back. There were two very large gentlemen in well-fitting formal suits standing on either side of the door. Security, but discreet, so as not to frighten the nice ladies and gentlemen. They tensed visibly as they saw Suzie and me approaching but made no move to challenge us. We swept past them with our noses in the air and strolled into the lobby as though we were thinking of buying the place. We got various looks from various people, but no-one said anything. We walked right up to the huge state-of-the-art reception desk, and I smiled pleasantly at the coldly efficient young lady sitting behind it. She wore a simple white nurse’s uniform with no markings on it, and her smile was completely professional while at the same time possessing not an ounce of any real warmth. She didn’t bat an eye at my trench coat or Suzie’s leathers. This was the Nightside, after all.

“Welcome to the Guaranteed New You Parlour, Mr. Taylor, Ms. Shooter,” said the receptionist.

I considered her thoughtfully. “You know who we are?”

“Of course. Everyone knows who you are.”

I nodded. She had a point. “We’re here about Suzie’s face,” I said.

Suzie and I had already decided this was our best chance for getting a close look at the Parlour’s inner workings. One side of Suzie’s face had been terribly burned during an old case, leaving it a mess of scar tissue. Her left eye was gone, the eyelid sealed shut. It didn’t affect her aim. The damage was my fault. She’d never have been hurt if she hadn’t been helping me out. Suzie forgave me almost immediately. But I don’t forgive me, and I never will.

She could have had her face healed or repaired in a dozen different ways. She chose not to. She believed a monster should look like a monster. I never pushed her on it. We monsters have to stick together.

The receptionist’s smile didn’t waver one bit. “Of course, Mr. Taylor, Ms. Shooter. If you’ll just fill out these forms for me . . .”

“No,” I said. “We want to see what this place has to offer first.”

The receptionist gathered her papers together again. “One of our interns is on his way here, to give you a guided tour,” she said, still professionally cheerful. If I smiled like that on a regular basis, my cheeks would ache. “Ah, here he is. Dr. Dougan, this is . . .”

“Oh, I know who you are, Mr. Taylor, Ms. Shooter,” the intern said cheerfully. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“Our reputation precedes us,” I said dryly, shaking his proffered hand. He had a firm, manly grip. Of course. He offered his hand to Suzie, but she just looked at it, and he quickly pulled it back out of range and stuck it in his coat pocket as though he’d meant to do that all along. He wore the traditional white coat, along with the traditional stethoscope hanging loosely around his neck.

“Every medico in the Nightside knows about you two,” he said, still cheerful. “Most of us get our training in the emergency wards, patching up people who’ve come into contact with you.”

I looked at Suzie. “If nothing else, it seems we provide employment.”

Dr. Dougan babbled on for a while, telling us how marvellous the Parlour was, and how fantastic its new techniques were, while I looked him over. His coat was starched blindingly white and had clearly never seen a bloodstain in its life. And he was far too young and handsome for a real hands-on doctor, which meant he was a shill. He was just for show. He wouldn’t know anything about the real inner workings of the Parlour. But we followed him through the rear doors into the show ward behind the lobby, because you’ve got to start somewhere. Dr. Dougan never stopped talking. He’d been given a script designed to sell the Parlour’s services, he’d learned every word of it, and by God we were going to hear it.

The show ward turned out to be very impressive, and utterly artificial. Neat patients in neat beds, none of them suffering from anything unsightly or upsetting, attended to by very attractive young nurses in starched white uniforms. There were flowers everywhere, and even the antiseptic in the air had a trace of perfume in it. Lots of light, lots of space, and no-one in any pain at all. A complete dream of a hospital ward. We weren’t actually allowed to talk to any of the patients or nurses, of course. The intern did his best to blind us with statistics about recovery rates, while I looked around for something, anything, out of place. The ward looked absolutely fine, but... something about it disturbed me.

It took me a while to realise that the whole ward was simply too normal for the Nightside. If this was all the rich and powerful patients wanted, they could get it in Harley Street. The clincher was that not one of the patients or the nurses so much as glanced at me, or Suzie. And that was very definitely not normal.

Dr. Dougan broke off from his speech when the doors burst open behind us and half a dozen security men moved quickly forward to surround us. Large men, with large bulges under their jackets where their guns were holstered. Suzie looked at them thoughtfully.

“We’re not here to make any trouble,” I said quickly. “We’re just looking.”

“Visiting hours are over,” said the largest of the security men. “Your presence is disturbing the patients.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They do look disturbed, don’t they? We’ll come back another day, when they’re feeling more talkative.”

He didn’t smile. “I don’t think that would be wise, Mr. Taylor.”

“Is he giving us the bum’s rush, John?” said Suzie. Her voice was calm and lazy and very dangerous. The security men held themselves very still.

“I’m sure the nice gentleman didn’t mean anything of the kind,” I said carefully. “Let’s go, Suzie.”

Suzie fixed the man with her cold blue eye. “He has to say please, first.”

You could feel the tension on the air. Everyone’s hands were only an impulse away from their guns. Suzie was smiling, just a little. The main security man gave her his full attention.

“Please,” he said.

“Let’s get out of this dump,” said Suzie.

The security men escorted us out, maintaining a respectful distance at all times. I was impressed at their professionalism. I’d known Suzie to reduce grown thugs to tears with only a look. Which begged the question—why would a supposedly straightforward operation like the Guaranteed New You Parlour need heavy-duty security like them? What kind of secret were they hiding, that needed this level of protection?

I couldn’t wait to find out.

We gave it a few hours before we went back again. Long enough to make them think we were thinking it over and still planning our next move. We killed the time at a pleasant little tea-shop nearby, where I enjoyed a nice cup of Earl Grey while Suzie wolfed down a whole plate of tea-cakes, and amused herself by practising her menacing glare on the trembling uniformed maids and the steadily decreasing number of fellow customers. The place was pretty much empty by the time we left, and the maids were refusing to come out of the kitchen. I left a generous tip.

“Can’t take you anywhere,” I said to Suzie.

“You love it,” said Suzie.

When we returned to the Guaranteed New You Parlour, the whole place had been locked down tight. Doors were firmly closed, windows were covered with reinforced steel shutters, and a dozen security men were making themselves very visible, politely informing anyone who approached the Parlour that it was currently closed to all visitors and new patients. Some very rich and famous people wanted to get inside very badly, but for once, shouting, bribes, and temper tantrums got them nowhere. The Parlour was closed. I felt quite flattered that I’d made such an impression. Though to be honest, a lot of it was probably due to Suzie. Quite a few places close early when they see her coming, which is why I usually end up doing the shopping.

The security men looked like they knew what they were doing, so Suzie and I wandered casually round the side of the building. Not to the back. That’s an amateur’s mistake. Any security force worth its wages knows enough to guard the back doors as closely as the front. But there’s nearly always a side entrance, used by staff and maintenance, that most people don’t even know exists or think to mention. There were still a few oversized gentlemen keeping an eye on things, but they were so widely spaced it was easy to sneak past them.

The side door was right where I expected it to be. Suzie dealt with the lock in a few seconds, and as easily as that, we were in. (Getting past locked doors is just one of the many skills necessary to the modern bounty hunter. Though it does help if you’ve got a set of skeleton keys made from real human bones. Personally, I’ve always attributed Suzie’s skills with locks to the fact that they’re as scared of her as everyone else is.) We found ourselves in a narrow corridor, whitely tiled and brightly lit, with not a shadow to hide in anywhere. There was no-one about, for the moment. Suzie and I moved quickly down the corridor, trying doors at random along the way, to see what there was to see. A few store-rooms, a few offices, and a toilet that could have used a few more air fresheners. It all seemed normal and innocuous enough.

A set of swing doors let us into the main building. The lights were bright, every surface had been polished and waxed to within an inch of its life, but still there was no-one about. It was as though the whole place had been evacuated in a hurry. The silence was absolute, not even the hum of an air-conditioner. I looked at Suzie. She shrugged. I’d seen that shrug before. It meant You’re the brains; I’m the muscle. Get on with it. So I chose a corridor at random and started down it. Several corridors later, we still hadn’t encountered anyone, not even a guard doing his rounds. Surely they couldn’t have shut the whole place down just because Suzie and I had expressed an interest? Unless . . . there never had been anything going on there, and the whole place was only a front for something else . . .

I was starting to get a really bad feeling about this. When hospitals go bad, they go really bad.

It didn’t take long to find the ward we’d been shown earlier. It was as still and silent as everywhere else. I quietly pushed the door open, and Suzie and I slipped inside. The lights had been turned down low, and the patients were shadowy shapes in their beds. There were half a dozen nurses, but they were all standing very still, in the central aisle between the two rows of beds. They didn’t move a muscle as Suzie and I slowly advanced on them.

It was so quiet I could hear Suzie’s steady breathing beside me.

Up close, the nurses seemed more like mannequins than people. Their faces were utterly empty, they didn’t breathe, and their fixed eyes didn’t blink. Suzie produced a penlight and briefly shined it in a nurse’s face, but the eyes didn’t react at all. Suzie put the light away, then punched the nurse in the shoulder; but she only rocked slightly on her feet. We checked the beds. The patients lay flat on their backs, staring sightlessly upwards. They weren’t dead. It was more like they’d never really been alive. A show ward, with show nurses and show patients, not a bit of it real. I murmured as much to Suzie, and she nodded quickly.

“Window dressing. But if this is just a show for the visitors, where’s the real deal? Where are the real wards and the real patients? Percy D’Arcy’s celebrity chums?”

“Not here,” I said. “I think we need to dip below the surface, see what’s underneath all this.”

“Underneath,” said Suzie. “The real deal’s always going on underneath, in the Nightside.”

We made our way quickly through the ward, heading for the far doors. I kept expecting the nurses and patients to come suddenly alive, and raise the alarm, or even attack us. Instead, the nurses stood very still, and the patients lay unmoving in their beds, like toys that weren’t currently being played with. A horrible suspicion came over me, that perhaps the whole world was like this, whenever I turned my back . . . By the time we got to the far doors, I was practically running.

We found a stairwell easily enough and descended a set of rough concrete steps to the next level. There were no signs on the walls, nothing to indicate where the stairs might lead. Clearly either you knew where you were going, or you weren’t supposed to be there. The air was very still, and there wasn’t a sound to be heard except for our feet on the rough concrete. The steps fell away before us for quite a while, taking us deep down into the bedrock under the streets. At the bottom of the steps we found another set of swing doors, perfectly ordinary, with no lock or alarm. Suzie and I pushed cautiously through them, and found ourselves in an entirely different kind of ward.

It was huge, with rows and rows of beds stretching away into the distance. And in these beds were hundreds and hundreds of very real patients served by more high-tech medical equipment than I’d ever seen in one place. Suzie and I moved slowly forward. There were no doctors, no nurses, just naked men and women lying flat on their backs, hooked up to intravenous drips, and respirators, and heart and lung and kidney monitors. Breathing tubes and catheters and more than one set of heavy leather restraints . . .

I found my first clue in the nurse’s cubicle. There was a large book lying open on a table, next to a row of monitor screens. The old-fashioned printed pages were written in English, French, and Creole, and I understood enough of it to know what it was about. Voodoo. The gods of the loa, their powers and practices, and all the things you could do with their help.

“Look at this,” said Suzie. She’d found a printout listing all the patients in the ward. No details, no instructions, only basic identities. Suzie and I flicked through the pages, and a whole bunch of familiar names jumped out at us. Not just Percy’s friends, the beautiful people from the colour supplements; but the rich and the powerful, the real movers and shakers of the Nightside. I went back into the ward, moving quickly down the rows of beds, staring into faces. I recognised quite a few, but none of them recognised me. Even with their eyes open, they saw nothing, nothing at all.

At least they were breathing . . .

The next big clue was that they all looked so much older than they should—all wrinkled faces, sagging flesh, and shrivelled limbs. I’d seen many of them recently, and they’d all looked in their prime, as usual. Now their faces and bodies showed the clear ravages of time and much hard living, along with any number of destructive antisocial diseases. There were also clear signs of elective surgery, some of it quite extensive, on faces and body parts. Some of the patients were so heavily wrapped in blood-stained bandages they were practically mummified. It was like touring a hospital in a war zone, and many of the patients looked like they’d been through hell. Some were clearly barely hanging on, only kept alive by invasive medical technology.

It took me a while to get it. A very new twist on a very old practice. The voodoo book was the key. These patients on their beds of pain weren’t the real rich and famous faces of the Nightside; they were living duplicates. The techniques in the book had been used to turn them into the equivalent of voodoo dolls, but in reverse. Instead of whatever happening to the doll happening to the victim, what happened to the original happened to the duplicate. Like Dorian Gray’s painting, these poor bastards soaked up the excesses of the real people’s lives, so they could go on being young and beautiful and untouched . . . The patients aged and suffered and underwent the elective surgeries, while the rich and powerful reaped all the benefits.

No wonder poor Percy D’Arcy couldn’t compete.

I ran it through for Suzie, and she wrinkled her nose. “Now that...is tacky. Where are they getting all these duplicates from? I mean, they’d have to be exact doubles for this to work.”

“Any number of options,” I said. “Clones, homunculi, doppelgängers . . . It doesn’t matter. The point is, I very much doubt any of these people are here by choice. The heavy restraints are a bit of a give-away there. This isn’t a hospital ward; it’s a torture chamber.”

In the end, we found the answer behind a very ordinary-looking door. The sophisticated electronic lock aroused our suspicions, and Suzie opened it easily with her skeleton keys. (Magic still trumps science, usually by two falls and a submission.) She pulled the door open, and we both stepped quickly back. There was nothing behind the door. Lots and lots of nothing. Space that wasn’t space, filled with squirming, shimmering lights you could only see with your mind, or your soul. There was a terrible appeal to it, an attraction, that made you want to throw yourself into it and fall forever . . . I carefully pushed the door shut again.

“A Timeslip,” I said. “Someone’s stabilised a Timeslip and held it in neutral; a ready-made door into another reality.” That would take time and serious money. Timeslips are inherently unstable. The universe is self-correcting, and it hates anomalies. “The only people I know to have worked successfully with Timeslips are Mammon Emporium, that mall that specialises in providing goods and services from alternate time-lines. And they’ve never shared that knowledge with anyone.”

“Could they be behind this?” said Suzie.

“No. I don’t think so. They’ve already made themselves rich beyond the dreams of tax accountants by legitimate means. Why risk all that, for this? Still, at least now we know where the duplicates come from. Whoever owns this place goes fishing in some other world, for that place’s equivalent of our important people. Exact physical duplicates . . . forcibly abducted and brought here, to suffer every conceivable illness, surgery, and self-inflicted injury, so their other selves don’t have to and can remain young and pretty forever . . .”

We both looked round sharply. Someone was coming. A lot of people were coming. Suzie and I moved quickly to stand shoulder to shoulder, facing the main doors. There was something odd about the sound, though; the pounding feet sounded muffled, flat . . . And it took me a moment to realise that the sound was approaching from below, not above. Coming up the stairs, from some further, lower level. The main doors finally burst open, and a small army of heavily armed nurses stormed into the ward in perfect lock-step. Suzie and I stood very still. The guns were no surprise, but the nature of the nurses was.

They weren’t alive. They were constructs, their bodies made entirely from bamboo woven and twisted into a human form. Their faces were blank bamboo ovals with neither mouths nor eyes, but every one of them orientated on Suzie and me. They all wore the same starched white nurse’s uniform, right down to the little white cap on the backs of their bamboo heads. Not living, not even aware, as such, but quite capable of following orders. And their guns were real enough. The nurses scurried forward with inhuman speed, their bamboo feet scuffing across the floor, spreading out into a perfect semicircle to cover us. Suzie swept her shotgun back and forth, looking for a useful target, knowing she was outnumbered and outgunned, but refusing to be intimidated. I was intimidated, but I made a point of striking a defiantly casual pose, while waiting for the puppet master to show himself.

Whoever ran the nurses wouldn’t miss an opportunity to gloat over the capture of two such famous faces as Suzie Shooter and John Taylor. If he’d been sensible, he’d have had the nurses shoot on sight, but the bigger the ego, the bigger the need to show off.

And sure enough, the crowd of bamboo nurses suddenly broke apart, silently opening a central aisle for their lord and master to make his entrance. Surprisingly, it was no-one I knew. Not one of the Major Players, not even one of the more ambitious up-and-comers. The man striding quite casually through his army of bamboo nurses was entirely unknown to me, and that doesn’t happen often in the Nightside.

He was tall, well made, well dressed, in a rich cream suit; the kind usually favoured by remittance men banished by their families to hot and far-away places. At first I thought he was a young man, but the closer he got the more the little tell-tale details gave him away. The skin of his face was too tight, too taut, and his eyes were very old. Old and cold. His smile was a dead, mirthless thing, meant to frighten. This was a man who had seen the world, found it wanting, and taken his revenge. His movements had the surety and control that only comes from age and experience, and he walked like a wolf in a world of sheep. He had large, powerful hands, with long, slender fingers—surgeons’ hands. And for all his grace, there was no mistaking the sheer brute power of his wide shoulders and barrel chest. He finally came to a halt, a respectful distance away, nodded to me and smiled at Suzie, ignoring the shotgun she was levelling on his chest.

“The famous John Taylor and the infamous Shotgun Suzie,” he said, in a rich, deep voice with just a hint of an unfamiliar accent. “Well. I am honoured. I should have known that if anyone would find me out, it would be you.” He laughed briefly, as though at some private joke. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Frankenstein. Baron Viktor von Frankenstein.”

He said it as though expecting a flash of lightning and a roll of thunder in the background. I didn’t quite laugh in his face.

“That’s a not uncommon name in the Nightside,” I said. “The place is lousy with Frankensteins. I don’t know how many nephews and nieces and grandsons I’ve run into down the years, along with any number of your family’s monstrous creations. You’d think practice would make perfect, but I’ve yet to see any proof of that. They’re nearly always complete fuck-ups. What is it with you and your family, and grave-yards, anyway? I’m sure it was all very cutting-edge, back at the dawn of medical science, messing about with body parts and batteries and cosmic radiation, but the rest of us have moved on. Science has moved on. You people should have gone into transplants and cloning, like everyone else. So you’re another Frankenstein. What relation, exactly?”

“The original,” said the Baron. “The first... to bring life out of death. To take dead meat and make it sit up and talk.”

“Damn,” said Suzie. “Colour me impressed.”

“Doesn’t that make you over two hundred years old?” I said.

The Baron smiled. There was no humour in it, and less warmth. “You can’t spend as long as I have studying life and death in intimate detail and not pick up a few tips on survival.” He looked around him at the rows of patients suffering silently in their beds and smiled again. “My latest venture. I know—voodoo superstitions and medical science aren’t natural partners, but I have learned to make use of anything and everything that can assist me in my researches. Like these bamboo figures. Pretty little things, aren’t they? And a lot more obedient than the traditional hunchback.”

“I should have known a Frankenstein was involved when I saw this,” I said. “Your family’s always been drawn to the dark side of surgery.”

“Oh, this isn’t my real research,” said the Baron. “Only a little something I set up to fund my real work. The creation of life from the tragedy of death. The prolongation of life, so that death shall have no triumph. What I do, I do for all Mankind.”

“Except for the poor bastards strapped to those beds,” I said. A thought came to me. “You’re not from around here, are you? You came from the same reality as these people. That’s why I never encountered you before.”

“Exactly,” said the Baron. “I came through a Timeslip.”

“Why?” said Suzie. “Another mob with blazing torches? Another creature that turned on you?”

“I’d done all I could there,” said the Baron, entirely unmoved by the disdain in Suzie’s voice. “I found the Timeslip, and I came here, to the Nightside. Such a marvellous locality, free from all the usual hypocrisies and restraints.”

“How did you stabilise the Timeslip?” I asked, genuinely interested.

“I inherited it. Apparently Mammon Emporium had their first premises here. They took their Timeslips with them when they moved to a bigger location . . . but they left one behind. Of such simple accidents are great things born. I shall do great work here. I can feel it.” He wasn’t boasting, or trying to convince himself. He believed it utterly, convinced of his own genius and inevitable triumph. He looked at me dispassionately. “May I enquire...what brought you here, Mr. Taylor?”

“One of your clients was very upset when you turned him away,” I said. “Never underestimate the fury of professionally pretty people.”

“Ah yes . . . Percy D’Arcy. He offered me a fortune, but I couldn’t take it. There was nothing I could do for him, because in the other dimension he was already dead. Percy . . . another loose end that will have to be attended to. Fortunately, I have two very reliable people in charge of my security. I brought them with me, from my home dimension.”

He snapped his fingers, and as though they’d been waiting just out of sight for his signal, a man and a woman came through the doors and strode lightly between the ranks of bamboo nurses to stand on either side of the Baron. The man was tall and blond, and wore black leather motorcycle leathers with two bandoliers of bullets crossing over his chest. The pump-action shotgun in his hands covered me steadily. The woman . . . was tall, dark-haired, and wore a long white trench coat. She grinned at me mockingly.

“Allow me to present Stephen Shooter and Joan Taylor,” said the Baron, savouring the moment. “Where we come from, their legend is as extensive as yours, though perhaps in a more unsavoury fashion. Their destiny led them down different, darker paths. I’ve always found them very useful.” He looked me over, taking his time, then studied Suzie just as carefully. “I would have enjoyed working with you. Opening you up, studying your details, seeing what I could have made of you. Surgery is an art, and I could have worked such miracles in your flesh, with my scalpels . . . But now that you have found me out, others are bound to follow. This operation must be shut down, and I must move on.” He sighed. “The story of my life, really.”

He gestured abruptly, and the bamboo nurses surged forward inhumanly quickly. They snatched the shotgun out of Suzie’s hand and punched and kicked her to the ground. I went to help her, and they clubbed me down with their gun butts. It all happened so quickly. They gathered around us, beating at us with their gun butts, over and over again. I tried to get to Suzie, to shield her, but I couldn’t even do that. In the end, all I could do was curl into a ball and take it.

“Enough,” the Baron said finally, and the nurses fell back immediately. I was a mass of pain, aching everywhere, blood soaking and dripping from my face, but it didn’t feel like anything important was broken. I looked across at Suzie. She was lying very still. I did, too. Let them think they’d beaten the fight out of us. I concentrated on breathing steadily, nursing my rage and hate, trying to find some part of me that didn’t hurt like hell.

“Stephen, Joan, take care of these two,” said the Baron. “Be as creative as you like, as long as the effects are permanent. When you’re finished, come down to me. I have more work for you.”

He turned unhurriedly and walked away. The whole army of bamboo nurses spun on their bamboo heels and stomped out after him. Still in perfect lock-step, the bitches. I sat up slowly, trying not to groan out loud as every new movement sent pain shooting through me. I hate being ganged up on—it’s so undignified. There’s no way you can look good afterwards. Suzie sat up abruptly, and spat a mouthful of dark red blood on to the floor. Then she looked round for her shotgun, and glared at the male version of herself as he waggled the gun mockingly at her.

“Mine! Finders keepers, losers get buried in unmarked graves.”

The female version of me smirked, both hands thrust deep in her trench coat’s pockets. I really hoped I didn’t look like that when I smiled. She leaned forward a little, so she could stare right into my bloodied face.

“Wow. That had to hurt. But that’s what happens when you choose the wrong side.”

I ignored her, climbing slowly and painfully to my feet. Suzie got up on her own. I knew better than to offer to help. We stood together, shoulder to shoulder, more than little unsteady, and considered our counterparts. Stephen Shooter had all the menace of Suzie, but none of her dark glamour. Where she was disturbingly straightforward and driven, he gave every indication of being crude and brutal. Gun for hire, no morals and less subtlety. My Suzie could think rings round him, even as she was blowing his head off his shoulders.

He still had a whole face, untouched by scar tissue. He hadn’t endured what she’d been through.

Joan Taylor looked far more dangerous. Simply standing there, with no obvious weapons, she looked entirely calm and confident. I hadn’t realised how disconcerting that could be. It was strange, looking into her face and seeing so many similarities. I could see myself in her. Her gaze was cool and mocking, her smile an open insult. Take your best shot, everything about her seemed to be saying. We both know it’s not going to be good enough.

“So,” I said, making sure the words came out clear and casual, despite my smashed mouth. “My evil twin. I suppose it had to happen, eventually.”

“Hardly,” Joan said easily. “You and I are the perfect example of the only child. Self-sufficient, self-taught, a legend in our own lifetime by our own efforts. Was your mother . . . ?”

“Yes. Did you . . . ?”

“Yes.” Her smiled widened. “And I made her beg before I killed her.”

I smiled. “We’re not even remotely alike. My partner is a professional. Yours is a psychopath.”

“Perhaps,” said Joan. “But he’s my psychopath.”

Stephen Shooter giggled suddenly. A brief, disturbing sound. “It’s true, it’s true. I do enjoy my work. That’s why I’m so good at it. Practice makes perfect.”

“You talk too much,” said Suzie.

“How did the two of you end up here?” I said, before things could get out of hand. I needed to keep Joan talking, buy myself some time, because I was counting on there being one major difference between us and them.

“We made the old home-town a touch too hot for us,” Joan said coyly. “We’d spent years together as soldiers for hire, professional trouble-shooters, whatever euphemism floats your boat, but we made the mistake of taking out a very well-connected functionary called Walker. It was all his fault. Stupid old man, thinking he could tell us who we could and couldn’t kill. We’d have done him for the fun of it, but luckily he had an awful lot of enemies . . . Stephen blew him in half with his shotgun, and we laughed about it all the way home. But it turned out Walker also had friends, rich and powerful friends, and, just like that, no-one loved us any more. So when the Baron very kindly offered us a regular gig and a guaranteed new start . . .”

“We killed a whole bunch of people, settled some old scores, burned down half the town, and escaped here before anyone knew we were gone,” said Stephen. He was grinning, a loose, crafty smile with far too many teeth in it.

“We’ve been here for ages,” said Joan Taylor. “Doing all sorts of things you wouldn’t approve of. You’ll probably take the blame for a lot of them. Everyone knows about you, but no-one knows about us. Though I can’t say I believe half the things they say about you.”

“Goody Goody Two-shoes,” said Stephen.

“Any chance we can make a deal?” I said.

Joan raised an eyebrow. “Would you?”

“No,” I said. “Your very existence offends me.”

I lunged forward and punched her right in the face. She fell backwards, sprawling awkwardly on the floor. She hadn’t even had the time to take her hands out of her pockets. I looked round, and Suzie had already taken her shotgun away from Shooter and back-elbowed him in the throat. I grinned. Sometime back, Suzie and I had both received werewolf blood, diluted enough that we were in no danger of turning were, but still potent enough that we healed really quickly. My aches were already fading away. I looked down at Joan Taylor and smiled as she scrambled angrily back on to her feet.

We stood facing each other, hands clenched into fists at our sides as we concentrated, both of us calling on our gifts. I opened my inner eye, my third eye, and studied her coldly, searching for some gap in her defences, something I could use against her. I could feel her doing the same thing. Strange energies flickered on and off in the air between us, a tension of unseen forces building and building until they had to explode somewhere. My gift versus hers. It was like arm-wrestling with invisible, intangible arms.

I was vaguely aware of all hell breaking loose in the hospital ward, as Suzie and Stephen went head to head. Shotgun blasts were going off all over the place, accompanied by the roar of grenades. Beds overturned, and patients were thrown out, disconnected from their supporting tech. Dark smoke drifted across the ward as equipment caught fire.

I couldn’t let this go on. We were too evenly matched with our duplicates, and too many innocents were getting hurt. So I found a slippery patch under Joan’s left foot, let her stumble and lose her concentration for a moment, then I yelled to Suzie.

“Hey, Suzie! Switch partners and dance!”

She grasped the idea immediately and turned her shotgun on Joan Taylor. And while Stephen Shooter hesitated, I used my gift to find the one pin that wasn’t secure in his grenades. It popped out, Stephen glanced down, and there was a swift series of explosions, as the one grenade set off all the others. Small parts of Stephen Shooter went flying all over the hospital ward in a soft, pattering, crimson rain. Behind me there was the single blast of a shotgun, and when I looked round Joan Taylor was lying flat on her back, without a head. She probably wasted time trying to find a way to stop Suzie, the fool. No-one stops Suzie Shooter.

“They were good,” I said. “But they weren’t us. They hadn’t been hardened and refined by life in the Nightside.”

“They weren’t us,” Suzie agreed. She came over to me and looked closely at my face. “You took a hell of a beating.”

“So did you. Thank the good Lord for werewolf blood.”

“But you still tried to get to me, to protect me. I saw you. I didn’t even think to do that for you. You’ve always been better than me, John.”

“Forgive me?” I said.

She smiled briefly. “Well, just this once.” She looked at Joan’s headless body. “I’ve never cared for cheap knock-offs.”

“Our dark sides,” I said.

“Well, darker,” said Suzie.

I considered the point. “Do you suppose . . . there might be better versions of us, somewhere? In some other world? More saintly selves?”

“You’re creeping me out now,” said Suzie. “Let’s go find the Baron and shut him down.”

“First things first,” I said. “I’ve had enough of this place. No more suffering innocents. Not on my watch.”

I raised my gift again, and studied the whole ward through my inner eye, until I could See the connection the Baron had forged with his science and his voodoo, between the patients in their beds and their more fortunate duplicates in the Nightside. A whole series of shimmering silver chains, rising from every patient and plunging through the ceiling. And having found them, it was the easiest thing in the world for me to break the weakest of the chains, with the slightest mental touch. Pushed out of its awful balance, the whole system collapsed, the shimmering chains snapping out of existence in a moment. The patients in their beds cried out with a single great voice, as all the traces of age and surgery and hard living disappeared; and, just like that, they were young and perfect again. They didn’t wake up, which was probably as well. Let Walker send some people down to help them, and hopefully get them home again.

Suzie and I had other business.

I considered what must be happening, in all the best clubs and bars and parlours in the Nightside above, as rich and powerful faces were suddenly struck down with years, and the many results of debauchery and surgical choices. I visualised them screaming in pain and shock and horror as they all finally assumed their real faces. What better revenge could there be?

“You’re smiling that smile again,” said Suzie. “That I’ve just done something really nasty and utterly justified and no-one’s ever going to be able to pin it on me smile.”

“How well you know me,” I said. “Now, where were we? Ah yes—the Baron.”

“Bad man,” said Suzie Shooter. She worked the action on her shotgun. “I will make a wicker man out of his nurses and burn him alive.”

“I love the way you think,” I said.

We found another door that opened on to another stairwell, leading down into hell. We crept quietly down the bare concrete steps. The Baron had to have heard the fire-fight above him; but he had no way of knowing who’d won. Suzie led the way, shotgun at the ready, and I struggled to maintain my gift, searching the descent below us with my inner eye for hidden traps or alarms. But the stairwell remained still and quiet, and there wasn’t even a glimpse of a bamboo nurse.

The smell hit me first. A thick stench of spilled blood and spoiled meat, of foul things done in a foul place. It grew stronger as we descended the last few steps and found ourselves facing a simple wooden door. The air was hot and sweaty, almost oily on my bare skin. It was the heat of opened bodies in a cold room, the pulsing warmth of inner things exposed to the light. Frankenstein . . . I pushed quietly past Suzie, and tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. I went inside, and Suzie was right there with me, silent as an avenging ghost.

We were in a great stone chamber, carved out of the very bedrock itself. Rough pitted walls and ceiling, and an uneven floor partly covered with blood-stained matting. Naked light bulbs hung down on long, rusting chains, filling the chamber with harsh and unforgiving illumination. There were shadows, but not nearly enough to hide what had been done in this place. Trestle tables had been set up in long rows, and each of them bore a human body, or bits of bodies. Men and women had been opened up, and the parts dissected. White ribs gleamed in dark red meat. Piles of entrails steamed in the cool air. Heavy leather restraining straps held the bodies to the tables. They had been alive when the cutting began.

The Baron had gone back to his old surgical experiments. Frankenstein, the living god of the scalpel.

He was standing at the far end of the room, wearing a blood-spattered butcher’s apron over his cream suit, half-bent over the body on the table before him. It had been a young woman, though it was hard to tell that now. The Baron looked up at me, startled, his scalpel raised, dripping blood. We’d interrupted him at his work.

“Get out,” he said. “You can’t be here. I’m doing important work here.”

“This isn’t a surgery,” I said. “It’s a slaughter-house.”

He straightened up, and, with almost prissy precision, put his scalpel down beside the woman’s body. “No,” he said calmly. “A slaughter-house is a place of death. This is a salon dedicated to life. Look beyond the obvious, Mr. Taylor. I am working to frustrate death, to cheat him of his victims. I take dead flesh and make it live again, all through my own efforts. You have no idea of the wonders and glories I’ve seen inside people.”

He came out from behind the table to face Suzie and me, wiping the blood from his bare hands with a bit of rag. “Try to understand and appreciate what I’m doing here. I have gone far beyond merely duplicating nature. Now I seek to improve on her work. I use only the most perfect organs, reshaped and improved by surgical skills perfected over centuries. I . . . simplify things, removing all unnecessary details. And from these perfect parts I have built something new—a living creature completely in balance with itself. I see no reason why it should not live forever, and know lifetimes. It took me so long to understand . . . the key was to work not with corpses, but with the living! To harvest them for what I needed—the most fresh and vital tissues!”

“How many?” I said, cutting him off roughly. There was something almost hypnotic in the brute certainty of his voice.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “How many what?”

“How many victims, you bastard! How many good men and women died at your hands, to make your perfect bloody creature?”

He actually looked a little sulky, angry that I hadn’t got the point, even after he’d explained it all so carefully.

“I really don’t know, Mr. Taylor. I don’t keep count. Why should I? It’s the parts that matter. It isn’t as if they were anyone important. Anyone who mattered. People go missing all the time in the Nightside, and no-one ever cares.”

“He does,” said Suzie, unexpectedly. “Part of why I love him. He cares enough for both of us.”

The Baron looked at her uncertainly, then turned his attention back to me. “Progress always has a price, Mr. Taylor. Nothing is ever gained without sacrifice. And I sacrificed them.” He gestured at all the bodies on all the tables, and smiled briefly. “I do so love an audience. A failing, I admit, this need to explain and justify myself... But I think I’ve rattled on quite long enough. Am I to understand that Joan Taylor and Stephen Shooter will not be joining us?”

“No,” said Suzie. “They rest in pieces.”

The Baron shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I still have my nurses.”

He snapped his fingers, and a whole army of bamboo nurses appeared out of the bare stone walls, snapping into existence, to fill the space between us and the Baron. They surged forward, bamboo hands reaching out to Suzie and to me, but this time I was prepared. I’d been waiting for them. I took the salamander egg from my coat pocket, crushed it in my hand, and threw it into their midst. The egg exploded into flames, and a dozen nurses immediately caught fire. Yellow flames leapt up, jumping from nurse to nurse as the bamboo figures lurched back and forth, spreading the flames with their flailing arms. In a few moments the cellar was full of juddering, burning figures, a hellish light dancing across the bare stone walls. Suzie and I were back by the door, ready to make our escape if necessary, but the Baron was trapped with his back against the far wall. He watched helplessly as the nurses crashed into his trestle tables, overturning them and setting them on fire, too. And in the end he had no choice but to shout the command Word that shut them all down. The figures crashed to the floor and lay there, still burning. The sound of crackling flames was very loud in the quiet.

Suzie and I moved forward into the cellar again, stepping carefully around blackened bamboo shapes. The Baron studied me thoughtfully. He didn’t look nearly as worried as I’d thought he would. He had the air of someone who still had a card left to play.

“Wait,” he said. “I’m sure we can reason together.”

“I’m pretty sure we can’t,” said Suzie.

“You must meet my latest creation,” said the Baron. “See the results of my work. Creature, stand! Show yourself!”

And from a dark, concealing shadow in one corner, something stirred and stood up. It had been sitting quietly on a chair all this time, so inhumanly inert it went unnoticed. Suzie moved quickly to cover the figure with her shotgun as it moved forward into the light. It was beautiful. Tall and perfect, utterly naked, it stood head and shoulders above us all, perfectly proportioned, no scars or visible stitches anywhere, thanks to modern surgical techniques. It had strong androgynous features, and it moved with a sublime and perfect grace.

I hated it on sight. There was something . . . wrong about it. Perhaps simply because it didn’t move like anything human, because its face held no trace of human thoughts or human emotions. I felt the same way looking at the creature as I did when surprised by a spider. An instinctive impulse to strike out, at something with which I could never have any empathy.

“Isn’t it marvellous?” said the Baron von Frankenstein, moving forward to place one large and possessive hand on the creature’s bare shoulder. “Hermaphroditic, of course. Self-repairing, self-fertilising, potentially immortal.”

No breasts and no obvious genitals, but I took his word for it. “Whose brain did you use this time?” I said finally.

“My own,” said the Baron. “Or at least, all my memories, downloaded into a brain wiped clean of its original patterns. Computers have made such a difference to my work. You see, Mr. Taylor? Even if you kill me here, my work goes on. I go on, in every way that matters.”

He patted his creature fondly on the shoulder. It turned its perfect head and regarded him thoughtfully, turned and placed its perfect hands on the Baron’s face, and ripped the Baron’s head right off his shoulders. The body fell jerking and kicking to the floor, the neck stump pumping blood, while the creature held the Baron’s slack face up before its own. The Baron’s eyes were still moving, and his mouth worked, though no sound came out.

“Now that I exist, you are redundant,” said the creature, to the Baron’s dying eyes. Its voice was like music; horrible music—with nothing human in it. “I have all your knowledge, all your techniques, so what use are you? Yes, you made me. I know. Did you think I’d be grateful?”

“I can’t believe he didn’t see that one coming,” said Suzie.

The creature looked into the Baron von Frankenstein’s eyes, satisfied itself that its creator no longer saw anything, and tossed the head aside. Then it turned slowly, thoughtfully, to consider Suzie and me.

“Nice operation the Baron had here,” said the creature. “Think I’ll take it over.”

I shook my head. “Not going to happen.”

“You can’t stop me,” said the creature.

Suzie shot it in the chest at point-blank range. The blast blew half its chest away, and the impact sent the creature staggering backwards. But it didn’t fall, and when it regained its balance the huge wound was already repairing itself. The creature’s mouth moved in something that would have been a smile on anything human.

“My creator made me very well. The best work I ever did.”

I raised my gift, searching for the link that held all the creature’s separate parts and pieces together, but there wasn’t one. The Baron hadn’t used science or sorcery to put his creature together, only expert surgical skills honed over lifetimes of work. I dropped my gift and looked at Suzie.

“We’re going to have to do this the hard way. You ready to get your hands dirty?”

“Always,” said Suzie Shooter.

So we took a scalpel each, slammed the creature to the floor, and took it apart piece by piece. There was a lot of kicking and screaming, and in the end we had to burn all the pieces separately to stop them moving, but we did it.