The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny by Simon R. Green
Time stopped.
The mummy was still, and so was Polly, caught reaching out to snatch the wand back from me. The burial chamber was still, caught between one moment and the next. Falling dust hung suspended in mid air. I moved slowly forward, and Time did not move around me. I considered the mummy, the shrivelled face wrapped in yards of decaying gauze, like a mask baked from ancient Egyptian mud. Scary, yes, but take away the supernatural energies that drove him, and the mummy was a small, fragile thing. I considered the elven wand in my hand. Two feet long, carved from the spine of a species that no longer existed in the waking world, it shone with a brilliant light while it did its work. There were all kinds of tricks it could play, with Time. I jabbed the wand at the frozen mummy, and Time accelerated around it. The bandaged body decayed and fell apart and became dust, all in a moment.
I hefted the wand in my hand. Why had it spoken to me and not to Polly? Perhaps because it didn’t trust her. I knew how it felt.
I started Time going again, and Polly yelped loudly as she saw only a pile of dust on the floor where the mummy had been a moment before. She looked at me, glared at the wand in my hand, and gestured for it imperiously.
“No,” I said. “I think I’ll hang on to it for a while. It wants me to.”
“What happened to the mummy?” she said, studying my face intently.
“Time caught up with it,” I said. “Can we get the hell out of here now, before the whole bloody place collapses?”
Polly was a practical soul. She wasted no time with arguments, just hurried over to the entrance wall and studied it through her Looking Glass. Only took her a few moments to work the mechanism again, then we vaulted over the lowering wall and ran back through the shaking stone passages, trying not to listen to the increasingly loud groaning sounds all around us. Dust fell in thick sheets, and we both coughed harshly as we ran, holding our hands over our mouths and noses to keep out the worst of it. I don’t know how long we ran, following the light from the Looking Glass, but it seemed like the journey would never end. For years afterwards I had dreams where I was still there, still running through the dark and the dust, forever.
But finally we came to the side-door again and made our way back out onto the Street of the Gods. We kept running, and didn’t stop until we were safely on the other side of the Street. We looked back just in time to see the tip of the pyramid crumble and decay, and fall in upon itself, until there was nothing left but a great hole in the ground.
“All that gold,” I said.
“All your fault,” said Polly.
“How do you work that out?” I said, honestly curious. “Everything was fine until you grabbed the wand from the mummy.”
“It’s your fault because you hurried me!”
You can’t argue with logic like that. “Sorry,” I said.
“Now, give me the wand. You don’t know what to do with it.”
“It wants me to have it,” I said firmly.
Polly looked at me.
We took a taxi to our next destination. Most people don’t trust taxis, but I find you can always rely on the driver as long as you keep a gun pressed to the back of his neck. Polly had promised the next item on our list would be much easier to acquire, and I relaxed a little as we headed into Uptown, with its many up-market clubs and bars. You meet a much better class of scum in Uptown. We were looking for a pair of chaos dice, simple probability changers, and according to Polly, the very best example of their kind were to be found in Wu Fang’s Garden of Delights.
Everybody knew Wu Fang’s scandalously decadent establishment; one of the most exclusive and expensive gambling dens in the whole of the Nightside. Which took some doing. The Garden of Delights had been around since the early 1930s, and so had Wu Fang. My father knew them both, back in the day, and swore the Oriental Gentleman hadn’t aged a day in all those years. There were many rumours about the man, most of them quite unsavoury, and Wu Fang encouraged them all. Especially the nasty ones.
We had no trouble getting in; Polly showed the tuxedoed bouncers a handful of platinum credit cards, and they all but fought each other for the privilege of opening the door for us. The Garden of Delights always stood ready to welcome anyone with more money than sense. Like many establishments in the Nightside, the interior was far bigger than the exterior. It’s the only way we can fit everything in. Or, as my father likes to say, space expands to accommodate the sin available.
Inside Wu Fang‘s, the Garden of Delights stretched away for as far as I could see; a veritable jungle of Far Eastern trees and vegetation, where huge pulpy flowers blossomed in the perfumed air. Tiny birds of startlingly bright colours fluttered over our heads, or hovered over pouting petals. A river meandered through the jungle, with delightful roofed bridges crossing it at regular intervals. The rich scents hanging on the air buzzed inside my head. It was like breathing in heaven itself.
Polly and I wandered unhurriedly past a tumbling waterfall, enjoying the faint haze of water droplets in the air, and nodded calmly to the celebrities and high-rollers we passed, as though we belonged there just as much as they did. And they nodded politely back, because since we were there, we must belong.
Set out in little clearings were the gambling tables. Every game of chance you could think of, and some Wu Fang had imported specially from other realities. The traditional games predominated, of course, from poker to craps, roulette to vingt-et-un. You could bet money, futures, your life, or your soul on the outcome; and Wu Fang would be right there to cover your bet. You’d find every single way there is of parting a sucker from his money somewhere in Wu Fang’s celebrated Garden of Delights.
Amongst the delicate trees and the glorious foreign growths were statues and works of art, modern sculptures that ranged from the seriously abstract to the disturbingly erotic and displays of weapons from all times and places, including some that didn’t exist yet. Suits of medieval armour stood at regular intervals, pretending to be decorative. Wu Fang’s body-guards and enforcers; ready to step in and get violently physical at a moment’s notice. Sore losers were not tolerated in the Garden of Delight. Curious guests in the know occasionally lifted the gleaming helmet visors and looked inside the armour; but it was always empty.
There were any number of trophies on display, prizes acquired by Wu Fang down the years. A severed hand holding aces and eights; Wild Bill Hickok’s actual hand, stuffed and mounted, holding the cards he was dealt just before being shot in the back. The cards known forever after as the dead man’s hand. Howard Hughes’s death masque, smiling a very unsettling smile. The actual roulette wheel ball that broke the bank at Monte Carlo. And a pair of chaos dice. Two small cubes of night-dark ivory, with the points picked out in tiny blood-red rubies.
I couldn’t see any protections, but I had no doubt they were there.
I spotted my brother Tommy, sitting at one of the main poker tables.
A lot of things about this surprised and horrified me. First, Tommy had always been famously bad at gambling. Lady Luck wouldn’t recognise Tommy if she stumbled over him in the gutter. He could bet on the Nightside staying dark, and the sun would come up just to spite him. Second, Tommy had no card skills whatsoever. Anything more complicated than Snap was beyond him, and he couldn’t count to twenty-one without dropping his trousers. And third, to my utter despair, Tommy was sitting in with some really major card-players. Famous faces from the gambling fraternity, men who made the cards dance and change their spots at will.
I was debating whether or not to rush over and shoot Tommy repeatedly in the head, as a kindness, when Wu Fang himself glided over to greet me. A rare honour indeed. Wu Fang bowed courteously, and I bowed back. Polly sank into a deep curtsey. Wu Fang ignored her, his attention fixed on me. A slight and delicate oriental gentleman, in a suit that undoubtedly cost more than I made in a year, Wu Fang was politeness personified. And for a man who had to be at least a century old, he didn’t appear much older than me. There were lots of stories about Wu Fang,
“Larry Oblivion, son of Dash,” he said, in a quiet and civilised tone that could somehow still be heard clearly over the general clamour of his Garden. “So kind of you to drop in. Avail yourself of my facilities. Deny yourself nothing. And do give my kindest regards to your father. An honourable foe from times past and a most determined pain in the arse.”
Everybody knew my father.
“What’s Tommy doing here?” I said bluntly.
“Winning,” said Wu Fang. “Much to my and everyone else’s surprise. But no matter. The money may move round and round the table, but it always comes back to me, eventually.” Another swift smile. “I do so love to see you white boys lose.”
He glided away like a Chinese ghost in a Chinese garden, and I hurried over to stand beside Tommy. Polly tried to grab my arm, but I avoided her. Family always comes first. I could feel her angry gaze burning into my back as I tapped Tommy briskly on the shoulder. He looked up and smiled happily at me.
“Oh, hi, Larry. Does Dad know you visit places like this? Ooh, like your new girlfriend. Tasty. Why is she glaring like that?”
He hadn’t adopted his effete existentialist act then.
“What are you doing here, Tommy?”
“Winning,” he said proudly. “I read this book, you see, and it suggested a whole new approach to cards I hadn’t even considered before.”
“You should have asked me,” I said. “I’ve always known what you’re doing wrong. You’re crap at cards.”
Tommy laughed and gestured grandly at the piles of poker chips laid out before him. Some of them were in colours I hadn’t ever seen before. Sitting around the table were Maggot McGuire, Big Alois, and Lucky Lucinda. Card sharks, all of them. Professional card-players, red in tooth and claw. They looked as much mystified as upset, though on the whole I think upset was rapidly coming to the fore. Their piles of chips were noticeably smaller. Tommy fanned out his current hand for me to have a look, and I almost fainted. He had a pair of threes.
Big Alois and Lucinda took one look at my face, misinterpreted what they saw, and folded immediately. That left the Maggot, a man not known for losing gracefully. Tommy grinned at him, and shoved all his chips forward, betting everything he had on his pair of threes. Maggot didn’t have enough chips to match him, so he pulled a magic charm from his pocket and slapped that down on the pile. Tommy considered, nodded, and produced several handfuls of poker chips from his pockets and added them to the pile on the table. Maggot threw down his cards in disgust, pushed back his chair, and rose to his feet with a gun in his hand. But before he could aim it, two empty suits of armour moved quickly in on either side and grabbed him by the arms. One metal hand squeezed hard, until blood ran down Maggot’s fingers, and he had no choice but to drop the gun. Then they dragged him away from the table. Wu Fang’s enforcers were always good at anticipating trouble.
Tommy whooped with joy, and scooped up all the chips on the table, gathering them in with both arms.
Polly was suddenly there beside me, elbowing me discreetly in the ribs. I looked round, and she showed me the chaos dice in her hand, before quickly making them disappear about her person. While everyone’s attention had been fixed on Tommy’s triumph, Polly had got on with the job. Which meant there was now an empty display case on view, and it was well past time Polly and I were leaving. I said as much to Tommy, and he nodded easily.
“Catch you later, brother. I have some serious debauchery to be getting on with.”
I had to smile. “What is this wonderful new card skill, that you learned from a book?”
He grinned cheerfully. “Betting entirely at random, with absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. No thought, no studying; half the time I didn’t even look at my cards. Baffled the hell out of them.”
Polly pulled me away before I could hit him.
I was still trembling and twitching, just a bit, when Polly and I arrived at our next destination: Savage Hettie’s Lost and Found. (We Ask No Questions.) Polly’s list of ingredients for opening her demon gate called for a Hand of Glory made from a monkey’s paw. As if such a thing wasn’t dangerous enough as it is, without meddling. Be like walking around with a tactical nuke in your pocket and the pin half-pulled. Savage Hettie specialised in items that were frequently as dangerous to you as they were to your enemies. Mostly because it amused her.
She sat in her chair by the open door, fanning herself with a paper fan covered in filthy pictures. Hugely fat, overflowing her chair on all sides, in a dark sack of a dress that fitted where it touched. Her red sweaty face was topped with a patently obvious wig of blonde curls. Her huge fingers were tattooed with the words DIE and SCUM. Her front two teeth were missing, and her tongue kept poking through the gap as she sucked the insides out of variously sized eggs that she kept in a sack by her chair. She radiated shifty malevolence but barely looked me over before fixing her piggy eyes on Polly. Savage Hettie sniffed loudly.
“I don’t let just anyone in here, you know,” she said, in her harsh East End accent. “And you look dead sneaky, girl. Hiding something, aren’t you? Ho yes; I know your sort, girl.”
“She’s with me,” I said flatly. “And you know me, Hettie.”
She sniffed again. “I knows your father, you mean. Ho yes. I knew him very well, back in the day.”
“Who didn’t?” I said, resignedly.
She cackled loudly. “But I knew him intimately, as you might say. I didn’t always look like this, you know.”
I moved quickly past her, pushing Polly ahead of me, and Hettie’s cackling laughter followed me into the dark interior of her shop. There are some mental images you really don’t want to dwell on.
Hettie’s place was always a mess, on a grand scale. All gloom and shadow and heaps of things, set out apparently at random. No order, no rationale, and absolutely no presentation. Handwritten price tags for everything; and no haggling. Pay Hettie’s price or go somewhere else; except if you could have found it anywhere else, you wouldn’t have ventured into Savage Hettie’s appalling lair. There were shelves and boxes and tottering piles, and you had to dig for what you needed. At your own risk, of course. Touch the wrong thing in the wrong way, and it would have your hand off. Or turn you into a frog, or steal your soul. Browser very much beware; and watch your back at all times. Some of the items in Savage Hettie’s Lost and Found had a way of sneaking up on you from behind.
Hettie didn’t give a damn. Except to laugh loudly when something really horrible happened.
Polly and I moved gingerly between stacks of magic boxes, enchanted dancing-shoes, and nasty old magazines, careful not to touch anything. There was fabulous and seriously valuable stuff to be found, if a person was not too fussy over little things like provenance, or guarantees. Savage Hettie was a fence as well as a dealer, and didn’t care who knew it.
We passed by glass jars labelled Manticore musk, Vampire’s teeth (which clattered and ground against the glass if you got too close), and a wine bottle covered in cobwebs marked simply Drink Me You Bastard. I was briefly distracted by a pile of old magazines that I couldn’t resist leafing through (once I’d put some gloves on). The private schoolgirls’ issue of Oz, International Times with a naked Paul and Linda on the front cover, and a battered copy of Playbeing, with something utterly revolting on the front cover. Polly, though, was not one for distractions. She stalked up and down the narrow aisles, seemingly following her nose, until finally she stopped abruptly before a sealed glass jam-jar. I joined her, and peered over her shoulder. In the jar was a small, withered thing, with half the hair fallen out, the stiff fingers made into candles with delicate little wicks. The stump was blackened, from where it had been sealed shut with a naked flame. I reached for the jar, and the fingers stirred slowly, like spider’s legs. I snatched my hand back instinctively. Polly snorted dismissively and picked up the jar without hesitating in the least.
We too
“I know your kind, missie, ho yes I do. Don’t want no dealings with you and yours, and I ain’t going to risk being beholden to you. Take the nasty thing. Glad to be rid of it.” She sniffed loudly, then looked at me. “Surprised to see an Oblivion boy with one of her lot, but I suppose you knows what you’re doing. Blinded by a pretty face and bemused by the smell of pussy. Just like your dad.”
Polly and I walked quickly away.
“Do you know what she was talking about?” she said, after a while.
“Haven’t a clue,” I said determinedly.
“Probably just as well,” said Polly.
The last two items were easy. Deconsecrated host soaked in virgin’s urine and a fine powder made from the crushed wings of wee flower faeries. Women use the strangest things as cosmetics. We found both items at the Mammon Emporium, the Nightside’s premiere mall, and Polly made me shoplift them from their shelves while she kept a lookout. We then stalked imperiously out of the mall, and no-one challenged us. I think I was less scared in the mummy’s burial chamber.
“You know,” I said afterwards, “we could have paid for these.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” said Polly, and I was honestly lost for an answer.
Not entirely to my surprise, we ended up back on the Street of the Gods, standing before a quiet little church in the Street’s equivalent of a backwater. A simple stone structure, with no fancy trimmings and no obvious name. People passed it by without looking, but it must have had something, or some other church or Being would have taken over its location long ago. The door was closed, the windows were dark, and there was no sign of life anywhere.
“Not very inviting,” I said, after a while, because you have to say something.