Hex Appeal

by P. N. Elrod

  I had come to the Nightside looking for something different; and I found it, oh yes.

  It’s hard for me to feel anything much, being dead … But with the right mix of these amazing pills and potions I have made up for me specially, by this marvellous old Obeah woman, Mother Macabre, voodoo witch … my dead senses can be fooled into experiencing all the sweet moments of life. I can taste the spiciest foods and savour the finest wines, ride the lightning of the strongest and foulest drugs, and never have to pay the price.

  I even have a girl-friend.

  I do still feel emotions. Sometimes. They are what make me feel most alive, when I can be prodded into experiencing them. Good or bad, it makes no difference. I savour them all, when I can. And avenging old hurts is still at the top of the list of the things that make me feel most alive.

  There was music playing in the bar, clear again now the sounds of battle had died away; but it was all just noise to me. I can’t appreciate music any more; and I do miss it. I have to wonder what else I’ve lost that I haven’t even noticed. I don’t shave, or cut my fingernails, or my hair. I had heard they go on growing after you’re dead, but that turned out not to be the case. I wear brightly coloured clothes to compensate for my dead look, and I act large because I’ve lost my capacity for subtlety. I go on though I often wonder why.

  * * *

  I left the bar, walking unconcerned and untouched through the still-touchy crowd. Everyone gave me plenty of room, and many made the sign of the cross, and other signs, to ward off evil. I do try to be good company, but my people skills aren’t what they were. I made my way out onto the street, and there, waiting for me, was my very own brightly gleaming, highly futuristic car. A long, sleek, steel-and-silver bullet, hovering above the ground on powerful energy fields because it was far too grand to bother with old-fashioned things like wheels or gravity.

  The door opened, and I got in. I announced our destination, and the car purred smoothly away from the curb. I settled back in my seat. I knew better than to touch the wheel. My car always knows where it’s going. I opened the glove compartment and rooted around in it hopefully. And, sure enough, there was just one special pill left. An ugly bottle-green thing, which left a chalky residue on my pale grey fingertips. I washed it down with a few swallows of vodka from the bottle I always keep handy. I like vodka. It gets the job done. My dead taste buds started to fire and flutter almost immediately, and I opened a packet of Hobnobs. I crammed a biscuit into my mouth and chewed heavily, the thick chocolate taste sending a warm glow all through me.

  “So, Sil,” I said, spraying crumbs on the air. “How’s it going?”

  “Everything’s going down smooth, sweetie,” said Sil. My car’s very own artificial intelligence has the rich and smoky voice of a very sexy woman. I never get tired of hearing it. She came to the Nightside through a Timeslip, falling all the way from the twenty-third century. She found me, and adopted me, and we’ve been together ever since. We’re in love. My lover, the car. Only in the Nightside. Nobody else knows; she only ever speaks to me.

  “You really shouldn’t spend so much time in bars, sweetie,” said Sil. “All that booze and brooding; it does you no good, physically or spiritually. Especially when I’m not with you.”

  “I like bars,” I said, finishing the packet of biscuits and tossing the empty wrapper onto the back seat. “Bars … have food and drink, atmosphere and ambience, bad company and good connections. They help me feel alive, still part of the crowd. And it’s not like I need to work. I only ever work to keep busy. To keep from brooding on the bitter unfairness of my condition.”

  “You mustn’t give up,” said Sil. “You have to keep looking. There has to be a way, somewhere, to break your deal and come alive again. This is the Nightside, after all. Where dreams can come true.”

  “Especially the bad ones,” I said. “What if … all I find is how to become completely dead, at last?”

  “Is that what you want?” said Sil.

  “It’s been so long since I could rest,” I said. “I’ve forgotten what sleep’s like, but I still miss it. Just keeping going … can be such an effort. Sometimes, I think of just how good it would feel … to be able to put down the burden of my continuing existence. If that was all I could find, could you let me go?”

  “If that’s what you want,” said Sil. “If that’s what you need. Then yes, I could do that. That’s what love is.”

  I perked up as Sil bullied her way into the main flow of traffic. All kinds of cars and other vehicles, from the Past, the Present, and all kinds of Futures, thunder endlessly back and forth through the Nightside, never slowing, never stopping, intent on their own unknowable business. I’m one of the few people who actually enjoys navigating through the deadly and aggressive Nightside traffic because you can be sure that Sil and I are always the most deadly and aggressive things on the road.

  A lipstick red Plymouth Fury sped by, with a grinning dead man at the wheel, followed by a stretch hearse, with two men in formal outfits and top hats in the rear, struggling to force something back into its coffin. A car with far too much chrome and truly massive tail fins, and a highly radioactive afterburner, slammed bad-temperedly through the slower-moving traffic, occasionally running right over smaller vehicles that didn’t get out of its way fast enough. And something that blazed fiercely with an unnaturally incandescent light flashed in and out of the traffic at impossible speed, laughing and shrieking and throwing off multi-coloured sparks.

  While I was busy watching that, an oversized truck pulled in behind Sil, sticking right on her tail. She drew my attention to it, and I looked in the rear-view mirror just in time to see the whole front of the truck open up like a great mouth, full of row upon row of rotating teeth, like a living meat-grinder. The truck surged forward, the mouth opening wider and wider, to draw Sil in and devour her. And me, of course.

  Sil waited till the truck thing was right behind us, then opened up with her rear-mounted flame-throwers. A great wave of harsh yellow flames swept over the truck, filling its gaping mouth. The whole truck caught fire in a moment, massive flames leaping up into the night sky. The truck screamed horribly, sweeping back and forth across the road as though trying to leave the consuming flames behind, while the rest of the traffic scattered to get out of its way. The truck thing exploded in a great ball of fire; and, after a moment, chunks of burning meat fell out of the sky. I lowered the side-window and inhaled deeply, so I could savour the smell. Take your fun where you can find it; that’s what I say.

  * * *

  Sil finally drew up outside the Literary Auction House, in the better business area of the Nightside, and pulled right up onto the pavement to park. Secure in the knowledge that absolutely no-one was going to dispute her right to be there. She opened the door for me, and I got out. I took a moment to adjust my purple greatcoat fussily, and be sure my floppy hat was set at just the right jaunty angle. Making the right first impression is so important when you’re about to march in somewhere you know you’re not welcome … probably make a whole lot of trouble, and almost certainly beat important information out of people.

  The Literary Auction House is where you go when you’re looking to get your hands on really rare books. Not just the Necronomicon or the unexpurgated King in Yellow. I’m talking about the kind of books that never turn up at regular auctions. Books like The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene, The True and Terrible History of the Old Soul Market at Under Parliament, and 101 Things You Can Get for Free If You Just Perform the Right Blood Sacrifices. All the hidden truths and secret knowledges that They don’t want you to know about. Usually with good reason.

  I swaggered in through the open door, and the two guards on duty took one look at me, burst into tears, and ran away to hide in the toilets. Not an uncommon reaction where I’m concerned. Inside the main auction hall, the usual unusual suspects were standing around, enjoying the free champagne and studying the glossy catalogues while waiting for things to start. I grabbed a
glass of champagne, drained it in one swallow, and spat it out. I never bother with domestic. Even my special pills can’t make that stuff interesting. There were platters of the usual nibbles and delicacies and flashy foody things, so I filled my coat pockets for later. And only then did I peer thoughtfully at the crowd, pick out some familiar faces, and head right for them. Smiling my most disturbing smile, just to let them know I was here for a reason and wouldn’t be leaving till I’d got what I wanted.

  Deliverance Wilde was there, fashion consultant and style guru to the Fae of the Unseelie Court, tall and black and loudly Jamaican in a smartly tailored suit of eye-wateringly bright yellow. Jackie Schadenfreude, the emotion junkie, wearing a Gestapo uniform and a Star of David, so he could feed on the conflicting emotions they evoked. And the Painted Ghoul, the proverbial Clown at Midnight, in his baggy clothes and sleazy make-up. Chancers and con men, minor celebrities and characters for pay: the kind of people who’d know things and people they weren’t supposed to know. As I approached, they all moved to stand a little closer together, for mutual support in the face of a common danger. It would probably have worked with anyone else. I stopped right before them, stuck my hands deep in my coat pockets, and rocked back and forth on my heels as I looked them over, taking my time.

  “You know something I want to know,” I announced loudly. “And the sooner you tell me, the sooner I’ll go away and leave you alone. Won’t that be nice?”

  “What could we know that you’d want to know?” said Deliverance Wilde, doing her best to look down her long nose at me.

  “You want a book?” said the Painted Ghoul, smiling widely to show his sharpened teeth. “I’ve got books that will make you laugh till you puke blood. All the fun of the unfair, with cyanide-sprinkle candy-floss thrown in…”

  He stopped talking when I looked at him, the smile dying on his coloured mouth. Jackie Schadenfreude screwed a monocle into one eye.

  “What do you want, Dead Boy? Please be good enough to tell us, so we can thrust it into your unworthy hands and be rid of you.”

  “Krauss,” I said. “There’s a man here called Krauss, and I want him.”

  “Oh him,” said Deliverance Wilde, visibly relaxing. “Don’t know why you’d want him, but I’m only too happy to throw him to the lions. Take him, and do us all a favour.”

  “Why?” I said. “What is he?”

  “You don’t know?” said Jackie Schadenfreude. “Krauss is the Bad Librarian. A booklegger. Specialises in really dangerous books, full of dangerous knowledge.”

  “The kind no-one in their right mind would want,” said the Painted Ghoul, sniggering. “All the terrible things that people can do to people. Usually illustrated. Heh heh.”

  I nodded slowly. I knew the kind of book they meant. After I came back from the dead and found I was trapped in my body, I did a lot of research on my condition, in many of the Nightside’s strange and curious libraries. I know more about all the various forms of death, and life in death, than most people realise. I’d acquired some of my more esoteric research materials from men like Krauss.

  “Krauss is bad news,” said Deliverance Wilde, mistaking my thoughtfulness for indecision. “He deals in books that show you how to open dimensional doorways, and let in Things from Outside. Books that can teach you to raise Hell. Literally. The book equivalent of a back-pack nuke.”

  “Books full of the secrets of Heaven and Hell,” said Jackie Schadenfreude. “And all the hidden places in between.”

  “Pleasures beyond human comprehension,” said the Painted Ghoul, licking his coloured lips. “Practices to make demons and angels cry out in the night. Heh heh.”

  “Knowledge of the true nature of reality,” said Deliverance Wilde. “That drives men mad because reality isn’t what we think it is and never has been. Take him and be welcome, Dead Boy. It’s bookleggers like Krauss that give people like us a bad name.”

  “Where is he?” I said.

  All three of them pointed in the same direction. None of their hands were particularly steady.

  I headed straight for Krauss, and everyone along the way fell back to give me plenty of room. Krauss was a nondescript, elderly man in a tweed suit with leather patches on the elbows, wearing an old-school tie he almost certainly wasn’t entitled to. He was so immersed in his auction catalogue, circling things and making notes, that he didn’t even see me coming till I was right on top of him. He looked up abruptly, alerted by the sudden silence around him, and peered at me over the top of a pair of golden pince-nez.

  “Hello,” he said, carefully. “Now what would the low and mighty Dead Boy want with a mere booklegger like myself? Can I perhaps be of service, help you locate something? Some suitable tome on the pleasures to be found in dead flesh, perhaps? Something explicit, on the delights of the damned? Satisfaction and complete discretion guaranteed, of course.”

  “You don’t even recognise me, do you?” I said.

  “But of course I do, my good sir! You’re Dead Boy! Everyone in the Nightside knows Dead Boy.”

  “You only think you know me,” I said. “But then, it has been thirty years and more since you paid three young thugs to mug and murder me, down on Damnation Row.”

  His jaw actually dropped, and all the colour fell out of his face. “That was you? Really? I can’t believe it … I helped create the legendary Dead Boy? I’m honoured!”

  “Don’t be,” I said.

  Krauss chuckled a little, relaxing now he thought he knew what this was about. “Well, well … I can’t believe my past has caught up with me, after so many years…” He tucked his catalogue neatly under one arm and looked me up and down, studying the results of his work. “I haven’t been involved in the muscle trade for … well, must be decades! Yes! That was a whole other life … I was a different person, then.”

  “So was I,” I said. “I was alive.”

  His smile disappeared. “But you can’t blame me for what I did, all those years ago! I’m a changed man now!”

  “So am I,” I said. “I’m dead. And I’m not happy about it.”

  “What … what do you want from me?” said Krauss. “I didn’t know … I had no idea…”

  “Who paid you?” I said. “Who hired you to have me killed? I want to know who, and why. I wasn’t anybody back then. I wasn’t anyone special. I was just a teenager.”

  Krauss shrugged quickly. There was sweat on his face. “I never asked why. Wasn’t any of my business. I hired out muscle; that was what I did! I never asked her why, and she never said.”

  “She … She who, exactly?”

  “Old voodoo woman,” said Krauss. “Called herself Mother Macabre. Spooky old bat. Not the kind you ask questions of.”

  He had more to say, about how he shouldn’t be blamed for someone else’s bad intentions, that he just supplied a service, that if he hadn’t done it, somebody else would have; but I wasn’t really listening. Mother Macabre was the name of the old Obeah woman who’d been supplying me with all those special pills and potions, for more than thirty years. Could it really be the same woman? Why would she pay to have me killed, then help me out? Guilt? Not likely; not in the Nightside. It didn’t make sense; but it had to be her. She was why Walker had pointed me in this direction. I looked Krauss in the eye, and he stopped talking abruptly. He started to back away. I dropped one heavy, dead hand on his shoulder, to hold him still. He winced at the strength in my hand and whimpered.

  “I helped make you who you are!” he said desperately. “I helped make you Dead Boy!”

  “Let me see,” I said. “How do I feel about that?”

  I closed my hand abruptly, and all the bones in his shoulder shattered. He screamed. I hit him in the head. The whole left side of his face caved in, and his scream was choked by the blood filling his throat. I hit him again and again, breaking him, watching dispassionately as pain and horror and blood filled Krauss’s face. Because the last pill had worn off, and I didn’t feel anything. I thrust one hand deep into his
chest, closed my cold, dead fingers around his living heart, and tore it out of his body. He fell to the floor, kicked a few times, and lay still. I looked at the bloody piece of meat in my hand, then let it drop to the floor.

  I’d killed the man who arranged my death, and it didn’t touch me at all. I sat down on the bloody floor, picked up Krauss’s body, and held it in my arms, cradling it to my chest. I still didn’t feel anything. I let him go and got up again. I looked around me. Even hardened denizens of the Nightside were shocked at what I’d done. Some were crying, some were vomiting. I smiled slowly.

  “What are you looking at?”

  I didn’t really care; but I had a reputation to maintain.

  * * *

  Outside, Sil was waiting patiently. She opened the door for me, and I took a rag out of the inner compartment and scrubbed the blood off my hands. There was more blood soaked into the front of my greatcoat, but that could wait. My coat was used to hard times. I got into the driver’s seat, the door closed, and Sil set off again.

  “Where now?” she said.

  “Just drive for a while,” I said. “And hush, please. I have a lot to think about.”

  She drove on, cruising through the hot, neon-lit streets, while I looked at nothing and tried to make sense of what I’d learned. Mother Macabre, my trusted old Obeah woman, who’d helped me hang on to what was left of the real me for more than thirty years. Why would she have wanted me dead? I wasn’t anybody then. Nobody special. What … purpose could my poor death have served? The thoughts went round and round in my head and got nowhere. I’m not a great one for thinking. No. Much better to go to the source and ask some very pertinent questions, in person.

  “Sil,” I said. “Take me to Mother Macabre. Take me to the Garden of Forbidden Fruits.”

  * * *

  You can find the Garden of Forbidden Fruits not far from the main business centre of the Nightside. It’s where you go when you want something a bit alternative to all the usual sin and sleaze. Just the place to buy an inappropriate gift, like a killer plant that will sneak up on the recipient while they’re asleep. Or seeds that will grow into something really disturbing. And very special drugs, to give you glimpses of Heaven and Hell or rip the soul right out of you. If it grows, if it fruits and flowers in unnatural ways, you’ll find it somewhere in the Garden of Forbidden Fruits.