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?? they weren’t your everyday muggers. Your death was no accident. Someone paid those three young thugs to kill you.” He smiled again, briefly. “You really should have taken the time to question them before you killed them.”
I stared at him. It had never even occurred to me that there had been anything more to my death than … simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Who?” I said, and my voice sounded more than usually cold, even to me. “Who hired them to kill me?”
“A man called Krauss,” said Walker. “Very big in hired muscle, back in the day. You’ll find him at the Literary Auction House, right now. If you hurry.”
“Why?” I said. “Why would anyone have wanted me dead? I wasn’t anyone back then.”
“If you’re quick, you can ask him,” said Walker.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked him, honestly curious.
He gave me his brief, meaningless smile again. “You can owe me one.”
He tipped his bowler hat to me, turned away, and looked at the mass of heaving, fighting bodies before him, blocking his way to the exit. They were all well into it now, too preoccupied with smiting the enemy to pay attention to Walker. So he raised his Voice and said, “Stop that. Right now.” And they did. The Authorities had given Walker a Voice that could not be denied. There are those who say he once made a corpse sit up on its slab to answer his questions. Everyone stood very still as Walker strolled unhurriedly through them and left. And then they all looked around and tried to remember what it was they’d been fighting about.
I sat at the bar, pondering the nature of my dead existence, and my past. I’ve been dead a lot longer than I’d been alive, and it was getting harder to remember what being alive had been like. To have a future, and a purpose, instead of just going through the motions, filling in the time. Had it really been more than thirty years since anyone had said or even known my real name? Thirty years of being Dead Boy? I’d never made any attempt to contact my family or friends. It wouldn’t have been fair on them. They all thought I was dead and departed; but they were only half-right.
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.
