by Paula Guran
“What makes you think you were murdered?” I said bluntly.
“Because there’s a hole in my memory,” she said. “I don’t remember coming here, don’t remember dying here; but now I’m a ghost and I can’t leave this bar. Something prevents me. Something must be put right; I can feel it. Help me, please. Don’t leave me like this.”
I always was a sucker for a sob story. Comes with the job, and the territory. She had no way of paying me, and I normally avoid charity work . . . But I’d just been paid, and I had nothing else to do, so I nodded briefly and considered the problem. It’s a wonder there aren’t more ghosts in the Nightside, when you think about it. We’ve got every other kind of supernatural phenomenon you can think of, and there’s never any shortage of the suddenly deceased. Anyone with the Sight can see ghosts, from stone tape recordings, where moments from the Past imprint themselves on their surroundings, endlessly repeating, like insects trapped in amber . . . to lost souls, damned to wander the world through tragic misdeeds or unfinished business.
There are very few hauntings in the Nightside, as such. The atmosphere here is so saturated with magic and super-science and general weird business that it swamps and drowns out all the lesser signals. Though there are always a few stubborn souls who just won’t be told. Like Long John Baldwin, who drank himself to death in my usual bar, Strangefellows. Dropped stone dead while raising one last glass of Valhalla Venom to his lips, and hit the floor with the smile still on his face. The bar’s owner, Alex Morrisey, had the body removed, but even before the funeral was over Long John was back in his familiar place at the bar, calling for a fresh bottle. Half a dozen unsuccessful exorcisms later, Alex gave up and hired Long John as his replacement bartender and security guard. Long John drinks the memories of old booze from empty bottles, and enjoys the company of his fellow drinkers, just as he always did (they’re a hardened bunch, in Strangefellows). And as Alex says, a ghost is more intelligent than a watchdog or a security system, and a lot cheaper to maintain.
I could feel a subtle tension on the air, a wrongness; as though there was a reason why the ghost shouldn’t be there. She was an unusually strong manifestation; no transparency, no fraying around the edges. That usually meant a strong character, when she was alive. She didn’t flinch as I looked her over thoughtfully.
She was a tall, slender brunette, with neatly styled hair and understated makeup, in a long white dress of such ostentatious simplicity that it had to have cost a bundle.
“Do you know your name?” I said finally.
“Holly de Lint.”
“And what’s a nice girl like you doing in a dive like this?”
“I don’t know. Normally, I wouldn’t be seen dead in a place like this.”
We both smiled slightly. “Could someone have brought you here, Holly? Could that person have . . . ”
“Murdered me? Perhaps. But who would I know, in a place like this?”
She had a point. A woman like her didn’t belong here. So I left her sitting at my table, and made my rounds of the bar, politely interrogating the regulars. Most of them didn’t feel like talking, but I’m John Taylor. I have a reputation. Not a very nice one, but it means people will talk to me when they wouldn’t talk to anyone else. They didn’t know Holly. They didn’t know anything. They hadn’t seen anything, because they didn’t come to a bar like this to take an interest in other people’s problems. And they genuinely might not have noticed a ghost. One of the side effects of too much booze is that it shuts down the Sight; though you can still end up seeing things that aren’t there.
I went back to Holly, still sitting patiently at the table. I sat down opposite her, and used my gift to find out what had happened in her recent past. Faint pastel images of Holly appeared all around the bar, blinking on and off, from where she’d tried to talk to people, or begged for help, or tried to leave and been thrown back. I concentrated, sorting through the various images until I found the memory of the last thing she’d done while still alive. I got up from the table and followed the last trace of the living Holly all the way to the back of the bar, to the toilets. She went into the Ladies, and I went in after her. Luckily, there was no one else there, then or now, so I could watch uninterrupted as Holly De Lint opened a cubicle, sat down, and then washed down a big handful of pills with most of a bottle of whisky. She went about it quite methodically, with no tears or hysterics, her face cold and even indifferent, though her eyes still seemed terribly sad. She killed herself, with pills and booze. The last image showed her slumping slowly sideways, the bottle slipping from her numbed fingers, as the last of the light went out of her eyes.
I went back into the bar, and sat down again opposite Holly.
She looked at me inquiringly, trustingly. So what could I do, except tell her the truth?
“There was no murderer, Holly. You took your own life. Can you tell me why . . . ”
But she was gone. Disappeared in a moment, blinking out of existence like a punctured soap bubble. No sign to show that anyone had ever been sitting there.
So I went back to the bar and told Maxie what had happened, and he laughed in my face.
“You should have talked to me first, Taylor! I could have told you all about her. You aren’t the first stranger she’s approached. Look, you know the old urban legend, where the guy’s just driving along, minding his own business, and then sees a woman in white signaling desperately from the side of the road? He’s a good guy, so he stops and asks what’s up. She says she needs a lift home, so he takes her where she wants to go. But the woman doesn’t say a word, all through the drive, and when he finally gets there; she’s disappeared. The guy at the address tells the driver the woman was killed out there on the road long ago; but she keeps stopping drivers, asking them to take her home. Old story, right? It’s the same here, except our woman in white keeps telling people that she’s been murdered, but doesn’t remember how. And when our good Samaritans find out the truth, and tell her; she disappears. Until the next sucker comes along. You ready for another drink?”
“Can’t you do something?” I said.
“I’ve tried all the usual shit,” said Maxie. “But she’s a hard one to shift. You think you could do something? That little bitch is seriously bad for business.”
I went back to my table in the corner, to do some hard thinking. Most people would just walk away, on discovering the ghost was nothing more than a repeating cycle . . . But I’m not most people. I couldn’t bear to think of Holly trapped in this place, maybe forever.
Why would a woman, with apparently everything to live for, kill herself in a dive like this? I raised my gift, and once again pastel-tinted semi-transparent images of the living Holly darted back and forth through the dimly-lit bar, lighting briefly at this table and that, like a flower fairy at midnight. It didn’t take me long to realize there was one table she visited more than most. So I went over to the people sitting there, and made them tell me everything they knew.
Professor Hartnell was a gray-haired old gentlemen in a battered city suit. He used to be somebody, but he couldn’t remember who. Igor was a shaven-headed kobold with more piercings than most, who’d run away from the German mines of his people to see the world. He didn’t think much of the world, but he couldn’t go back, so he settled in the Nightside. Where no one gave a damn he was gay. The third drinker was a battered old Russian, betrayed by the Revolution but appalled at what his country had become. No one mentioned the icepick sticking out the back of his head.
They didn’t know Holly, as such, but they knew who she’d come here after. She came to the Jolly Cripple to save someone.
Someone who didn’t want to be saved—her brother, Craig de Lint. He drank himself to death, right here in the bar, right at their table. Sometimes in their company, more often not, because the only company he was interested in came in a bottle. I used my gift again, and managed to pull up a few ghost images from the Past, of the living Craig. Stick thin, shabby clothes, the bones sta
nding out in his gray face. Dead, dead eyes.
“You’re wasting your time, sis,” Craig de Lint said patiently. “You know I don’t have any reason to drink. No great trauma, no terrible loss . . . I just like to drink, and I don’t care about anything else. Started out in all the best places, and worked my way down to this. Where someone like me belongs. Go home, sis. You don’t belong here. Go home, before something bad happens to you.”
“I can’t just leave you here! There must be something I can do!”
“And that’s the difference between us, sis, right there. You always think there’s something that can be done. But I know a lost cause when I am one.”
The scene shifted abruptly, and there was Holly at the bar, arguing furiously with Maxie. He still smiled, even as he said things that cut her like knives.
“Of course I encouraged your brother to drink, sweetie. That’s my job. That’s what he was here for. And no, I don’t give a damn that he’s dead. He was dying when he walked in here, by his own choice; I just helped him on his way. Now either buy a drink or get out of my face. I’ve got work to do.”
“I’ll have you shut down!” said Holly, her voice fierce now, her small hands clenched into fists.
He laughed in her face. “Like to see you try, sweetie. This is the Nightside, where everyone’s free to go to Hell in their own way.”
“I know people! Important people! Money talks, Maxie, and I’ve got far more of it than you have.”
He smiled easily. “You’ve got balls, sweetie. Okay, let’s talk.
Over a drink.”
“I don’t drink.”
“My bar, my rules. You want to talk with me, you drink with me.”
Holly shrugged, and looked away. Staring at the table where her brother died. Maxie poured two drinks from a bottle, and then slipped a little something into Holly’s glass. He watched, smiling, as Holly turned back and gulped the stuff down, just to get rid of it; and then he smiled even more widely as all the expression went out of her face.
“There, that’s better,” said Maxie. “Little miss rich bitch. Come into my bar, throwing your weight about, telling me what to do? I don’t think so. Feeling a little more . . . suggestible, are you? Good, good . . . Such a shame about your brother. You must be sad, very sad. So sad, you want to end it all. So here’s a big handful of helpful pills, and a bottle of booze. So you can put an end to yourself, out back, in the toilets. Bye-bye, sweetie. Don’t make a mess.”
The ghost images snapped off as the memory ended. I was so choked with rage I could hardly breathe. I got up from the table and stormed over to the bar. Maxie leaned forward to say something, and I grabbed two handfuls of his grubby T-shirt and hauled him right over his bar, so I could stick my face right into his. He had enough sense not to struggle.
“You knew,” I said. “You knew all along! You made her kill herself!”
“I had no choice!” said Maxie, still smiling. “It was self-defense! She was going to shut me down. And yeah, I knew all along. That’s why I hired you! I knew you’d solve the elemental business right away, and then stick around for the free drinks. I knew the ghost would approach you, and you’d get involved. I needed someone to get rid of her; and you always were a soft touch, Taylor.”
I let him go. I didn’t want to touch him any more. He backed cautiously away, and sneered at me from a safe distance.
“You feel sorry for the bitch, help her on her way to the great Hereafter! You’ll be doing her a favor, and me too. I told you she was bad for business.”
I turned my back on him, and went back to the drinkers who’d known him best. And before any of them could even say anything, I focused my gift through them, through their memories of Craig, and reached out to him in a direction I knew but could not name. A door opened, that hadn’t been there before, and a great light spilled out into the bar. A fierce and unrelenting light, too bright for the living to look at directly. The drinkers in the bar should have winced away from it, used as they were to the permanent gloom, but something in the light touched them despite themselves, waking old memories, of what might have been.
And out of that light came Craig de Lint, walking free and easy. He reached out a hand, smiling kindly, and out of the gloom came the ghost of Holly de Lint, also walking free and easy. She took his hand, and they smiled at each other, and then Craig led her through the doorway and into the light; and the door shut behind them and was gone.
In the renewed gloom of the bar, Maxie hooted and howled with glee, slapping his heavy hand on the bar top in triumph.
“Finally, free of the bitch! Free at last! Knew you had it in you, Taylor! Drinks on the house, people! On the house!” And they all came stumbling up to the bar, already forgetting what they might have seen in the light. Maxie busied himself serving them, and I considered him thoughtfully, from a distance. Maxie had murdered Holly, and got away with it, and used me to clean up after him, removing the only part of the business that still haunted him. So I raised my gift one last time, and made contact with the elemental of the sewers, deep under the bar.
“Maxie will never agree to the deal you want,” I said. “He likes things just the way they are. But you might have better luck with a new owner. You put your sewer water into Maxie’s bottles. There are other places you could put it.”
“I take your meaning, John Taylor,” said the elemental.
“You’re everything they say you are.”
Maxie lurched suddenly behind his bar, flailing desperately about him as his lungs filled up with water. I turned my back on the drowning man, and walked away. Though, being me, I couldn’t resist having the last word.
“Have one on me, Maxie.”
Simon R. Green is a New York Times bestselling author of the Deathstalker, Nightside, Secret Histories, and (most recently) Ghost Finders series, among others. He lives in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, England.
Babylon, Tennessee is located in a Lovecraftian (and otherwise strange) alternate universe. Magic abounds and the streets lead to some very odd locations—like Electric Squidland.
A Night in Electric Squidland
Sarah Monette
Some days, Mick Sharpton was almost normal.
Those were the good days, the days when he did his job and went dancing after work, days when he enjoyed eating and slept well and sang in the shower. Days when flirting with a good-looking man was fun, even if it didn’t lead to sex, and he didn’t lose his temper with anyone unless they deserved it. Those were the days when he liked himself and liked his life, and some months there were more of them than others.
The bad days were when the world wouldn’t stay out of his head, when everyone he looked at wore a swirling crown of color, and everything he touched carried the charge of someone else’s life. Those days were all about maintaining his increasingly precarious control, snarling and snapping to keep anyone from getting too close. Trying not to drown. Sometimes he succeeded; sometimes he didn’t.
Today was a good day. He could almost pretend he wasn’t clairvoyant. His head was clear, and he felt light, balanced. He had not remembered his dreams when he woke up, and that was always a positive sign.
Mick and his partner were wading through a backlog of paperwork that afternoon. The sheer monumental bureaucracy was the downside of working for a government agency like the Bureau of Paranormal Investigations; left to his own devices, Mick would have let it slide, as he had always done with schoolwork, but Jamie had a stern, Puritan attitude toward unfinished reports, and it was useless to argue with him.
It was always useless to argue with Jamie Keller.
But the perpetually renewed struggle to find the right words—where “right” was a peculiar combination of “accurate” and “decorous” as applied to descriptions of interrupted Black Masses and the remains left on the subway lines by ghoul packs—was both tedious and frustrating, and Mick was positively grateful when the phone rang, summoning them to Jesperson’s office. Jesperson would have something
for them to do.
“It’ll just be more paperwork later,” Jamie warned.
“Oh, bite me, Keller.”
“Not my thing,” Jamie said placidly.
When they came into his office, Jesperson was leaning over a ley line map, spread out on the big table and weighted down with a fist-sized chunk of the Tunguska meteorite, two volumes of the Directory of American Magic-Users, and a lumpish pottery bowl with a deep green glaze, made for him by his daughter Ada and used for keeping paperclips and sticks of red chalk in. Ada lived with her mother in Seattle; Jesperson saw her for one week each year, at the Winter Solstice, and nothing was more sacred in the office than Jesperson’s annual week of vacation, even if most of his employees politely pretended they had no idea why.
Jesperson looked up and said, “There you are,” as if they should have known to be somewhere else, and waved at them impatiently to sit down.
They sat; Jesperson stalked over to stand between them and glowered at them both impartially. “What do you know about Electric Squidland?”
“It’s a nightclub,” Mick offered. “Goth scene. Lots of slumming yuppies.”
“And?” Jesperson said, looking from one to the other of them.
Mick had told him all he knew—Electric Squidland had always been too trendy for his taste—and it was Jamie who finally said, reluctantly, “They get into some heavy shit on the lower levels.”
“You’ve been to Electric Squidland?” Mick said.
“Used to work there,” Jamie said and became unaccountably interested in the backs of his own hands.
“You worked at—”
“Sharpton.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Jamie said, not looking up, “This is about Shawna Lafayette, ain’t it?”
“It might be.”
“Who’s Shawna Lafayette?”
“A young woman from Murfreesboro. Three years ago—just after the Carolyn Witt scandal, if you remember it—she disappeared off the face of the Earth.”
