Something from the Nightside

ELEVEN — All Masks Thrown Aside

"It's the house," I said. "It's alive. And it's hungry." I could feel the house all around me now, pulsing with alien life, roaring triumphantly at the edges of my mind. Laughing at me, now it didn't have to hide any more. I looked up and there was Suzie, breathing harshly, her knuckles showing white as she clung to her gun, the only thing that had always made sense to her. Her eyes darted wildly round the room, as she searched desperately for something she could hit or shoot. Joanna was standing very still by the doorway, not looking at Cathy. Her pale face was completely without expression, and when her gaze briefly crossed mine, I might as well have been a stranger. I looked back at Cathy.

"Tell me," I said. "Tell me why, Cathy. Why did you come here, to this place, of your own free will?"

"The house called me," she said happily. "It opened up a door, and I stepped through, and found myself in a whole new world. So bright and vivid; so alive. Like a movie going from black and white to colour. The house… needed me. I'd never felt needed before. It felt so good. And so I came here, and gave myself to the house, and now… I don't have to care about anything any more. The house made me happy, for the first time in my life. It loves me. It'll love you too."

I wiped the blood from my nose on the back of my hand, leaving a long crimson smear. "It's eating you, Cathy. The house is swallowing you up."

"I know," she said blissfully. "Isn't it wonderful? It's going to make me a part of it. Make me part of something greater, something more important than I could ever have been on my own. And I'll never have to feel bad again, never feel lost or alone or unhappy. Never have to worry about anything, ever again."

"That's because you'll be dead! It's lying to you, Cathy. Telling you what you want to hear. When the house attacked my mind, I was able to see it clearly at last, see it for what it really is. It's hungry. That's all it ever is. And you're just food, like all the other victims it's absorbed."

Cathy smiled at me, dying by inches and not caring, because the house wouldn't let her care. Suzie moved in beside me and hauled me bodily to my feet. She held me upright by brute strength until my legs stabilised again, and stuck her face right into mine.

"Talk to me, John! What's happening here? What is this house, really?"

I took a deep breath. It didn't steady me nearly as much as I'd hoped, but at least the shakes were starting to wear off now. Like so many times before in the Nightside, I had found the truth at last, and it didn't please or comfort me one bit.

"The house is a predator," I said. "An alien thing, from some alien place, far outside our own space, where life has taken very different forms. It makes itself into what it needs to be, taking on the colour of its surroundings, hiding in plain sight, calling its prey to it with a voice that cannot be resisted. Its prey is the lost and the lonely, the unloved and the uncared for, the discarded flotsam and jetsam of the city that no-one ever misses when it washes up here, on Blaiston Street. The house calls, in a voice that no-one ever disbelieves, because it tells them just what they want to hear. It even sucked in a few supposedly important people, people perhaps a little too susceptible for their own good. Being important doesn't necessarily protect you from the secret despairs of the hidden heart."

"Stick to the point, John," said Suzie, shaking me by the shoulder. "The house lures people into it, and then?"

"And then it feeds on them," I said. "It sucks them dry, absorbing all they are into itself. It grows strong by feeding on their strength, keeping them happy while they last, so they won't try to escape. So they won't even want to."

"Jesus," said Suzie, looking down at Cathy's emaciated body. "From the look of the kid, the house has already taken most of her. Shame. We have to get out of here, John."

"What?" I said, not understanding, or perhaps not wanting to.

"There's nothing we can do," Suzie said flatly. "We got here too late. Even if we could maybe cut the kid free from the floor, odds are she'd bleed to death before we even got her to the street. She's already as good as dead. So we leave her, and get the hell out of here while we still can. Before the house turns on us."

I shook my head slowly. "I can't do that, Suzie. I can't just walk away and leave her here."

"Listen to me, John! I don't do lost causes. This case is over. All that's left to us is to give the kid a quick death, maybe cheat the house out of some of its victory. Then we get out of here, and come back with something heavy in the explosive line. You get Joanna moving. I'll take care of the kid."

"I didn't come all this way, just to abandon her! She's coming back with us!"

"No-one's leaving," said Cathy. "No-one's going anywhere."

Behind us, the door groaned loudly in its frame. Suzie and I looked round sharply, just in time to see the door slam shut and then vanish, its edges absorbed into the surrounding wall. The door's colours faded out, and within moments there was only an unmarked, unbroken expanse of wall, with no sign to show there'd ever been a door there. And all around us, the four walls of the enclosed room rippled suddenly, expanding and contracting in slow sluggish movements; becoming steadily more organic in appearance, soft and puffy and malleable. Thick purple traceries of veins spread across the walls, pulsing rhythmically. And a great inhuman eye opened in the ceiling above us, cold and alien, staring unblinkingly down at its new victims like some ancient and unsympathetic god. A sickly phosphorescent glow blazed from the walls, and I finally knew where the light had been coming from all along. There was a new smell on the air, thick and heavy, of blood and iron and caustic chemicals.

"No-one's going anywhere," said Cathy. "There's nowhere to go." There was another voice under hers now, harsh and deliberate and utterly inhuman.

Suzie stalked over to where the door had been, reversed her gun and slammed the butt of the shotgun against the wall. The awful pulsing surface gave a little under the blow, but it didn't break or even crack. Suzie hit it again and again, grunting with the effort she put into it, to no avail. She glared at the wall, breathing hard, and then kicked it in frustration. The leather toe of her boot clung stickily to the wall, and she had to use all her strength to pull it free. Part of the leather toe was missing, already absorbed. Drops of dark liquid fell from the ceiling, and more slid slowly down the walls and oozed up out of the floor. Suzie hissed suddenly, in surprise as much as pain, as a drop fell on her bare hand, and steam rose up from the scorched flesh.

"John, what the hell is this? What's going on?"

"Digestive juices," I said. "We're in a stomach. The house has decided we're too dangerous to absorb slowly, like Cathy. It doesn't want to savour us. We're going to be soup. Suzie, make us an exit. Blast a hole right through that wall."

Suzie grinned fiercely. "I thought you'd never ask. Stand back. This could splatter."

She trained her shotgun on the wall where the door had been, and let fly. The wall absorbed the blast, the point-blank impact producing only ripples spreading slowly outwards, like when you throw a stone into a pond. Suzie swore briefly and tried again, reloading and firing repeatedly till the close air stank of cordite, and the sound was overwhelming. But even as the roar of the gun died away, the ripples were already disappearing from the unmarked wall. Suzie looked back at me.

"We are in serious trouble, John. And don't look now, but your shoes are steaming."

"Of course," I said. "The house isn't fussy about what it eats."

Suzie looked at me steadily, waiting. Without an enemy she could hit or shoot, she was pretty much lost for another option; but she trusted me to find a way out of this mess. She'd always been too ready to trust me. That was one of the reasons why I'd left the Nightside in the first place. I got tired of letting my friends down. I thought hard. There had to be a way out of this. I hadn't come back after all these years, fought my way through all the madness, just to die in an oversized stomach. I hadn't come back to fail again. I looked at Cathy, and then I looked at Joanna, still standing very still by the living wall. She hadn't said a word or moved an inch since the house revealed itself. Her face was eerily calm, her eyes unfocused. She hadn't even flinched when Suzie opened fire right next to her. Shock, I supposed, then.

"Joanna!" I said loudly. "Come over here and talk to your daughter. See if you can focus her mind on you, separate her from the house. I think I've got an idea on how to break her and us free, but I don't know what effect it might have on her… Joanna! Listen to me!"

She turned her head slowly to look at me, and there was a slow horror forming in her eyes that made me want to look away.

"Why are you talking to her about me?" said Cathy.

"Because I need your mother's help in this," I said.

"But that's not my mother," said Cathy.

The words seemed to resonate endlessly in the quiet room, their sudden awful significance driving all other thoughts out of my head. It never even occurred to me to doubt Cathy's word. I could hear the truth in her voice, even if I didn't want to. So many little things that hadn't made sense suddenly came together, in one terrible moment of insight. Joanna looked at me, and there was nothing in her eyes but a calm, resigned sadness. All the vitality had gone out of her. As though she didn't have to pretend any more.

"I'm sorry, John," she said slowly. "But I think it's all over now. My purpose is over, now you're here. I think I did care for you… but I don't think I'm who I thought I was…" Her voice changed, and under it I heard the harsh alien voice that had briefly spoken through Cathy. "I'm just a Judas Goat, the perfect bait, designed and programmed specifically to lure you back into the Nightside, so that you could be… dealt with."

"Why?" I said, and my voice was little more than a whisper.

"The house was provided with all the necessary details — the exact kind of client, the exact kind of case, the exact kind of woman who would most appeal to you. Someone who would slip past all your defences, make you disregard all your instincts, and lead you unresisting to your doom. There never was a Joanna Barrett — only a role to play, a function to perform. But they made me too well, John; and for a time I actually forgot what I was. I thought I was a real woman, with real feelings. There's enough left of me to be sorry about what's going to happen to you… but not enough for me to stop it."

"Was none of what we had real?" I said.

"Only you were real, John. Only you."

"And all… this?" I said. "Was all this set up just for me? Was the house invited into the Nightside, allowed to hunt and feed and kill, just to get me? Why? I'd left the Nightside! I was no threat to anyone any more! Why bring me back now?"

"Ask your mother," said the thing with Joanna's voice. "It seems she's coming back. And you… are a loose thread that could unravel everything."

"Who did this?" I said. "Who's behind this?"

"Can't you guess?" said Joanna. And her face slowly melted away, leaving behind only the perfect blank mask of the Harrowing.

I think I cried out then; the sound of some small animal as the steel trap finally closes on it. Joanna leaned back into the living wall, and sank into it, the soft pulsing surface closing over her as the house re-absorbed the thing it had created, or birthed. In a moment she was gone, leaving only slow ripples behind, and soon they were gone too. I should have known. I should have remembered. You can't trust anyone, or anything, in the Nightside, to be what it appears to be. Walker had tried to warn me, but I didn't listen. I'd forgotten that here, love is just another weapon they can use to hurt you, and that the past never goes away. I felt the tears running down my cheek long before I knew I was crying.

"Damn," said Suzie, glowering at the wall Joanna had disappeared into. "Guess I'm not going to get paid for this one after all."

She looked at me, and sighed when I didn't react. The digestive juices were falling from the ceiling in a steady rain now, stinging and burning my bare face and hands, and I didn't care at all. Someone, or something, had just punched my heart out, and I didn't care about anything. Suzie came over and put a hand on my shoulder, staring right into my face. She wasn't very good with emotions, but she did her best.

"John, you have to listen to me. You can mourn her later. Whatever she was, or might have been. You can't fall apart now. We have to get out of here."

"Why?" I said. "Everyone wants me dead; and maybe I do too."

She slapped me across the face, more professionally than angrily. "What about me, John?"

"What about you?"

"All right, maybe I deserved that. I never should have let you go running off to hide in London. And I wasn't always the best of friends to you; I don't seem to have the knack. But what about the kid, John? Cathy? Remember her? The one you came back into the Nightside to save? Are you going to let her down now? Are you going to let her die, just because you're feeling sorry for yourself?"

I turned my head slowly, and looked at Cathy. What was left of her. "No," I said finally. "None of this is her fault. And I never let a client down. Take my hand, Suzie."

"What? This is no time to be getting sentimental, John."

I looked back at her. "You have to trust me on this, Suzie. Trust me to know what I'm doing. We can't fight our way out, so that just leaves me, and my gift."

Suzie looked at me for a long moment, reassuring herself that I was back in control again, and then nodded briskly. She slid her shotgun into the holster behind her shoulder and took my hand in hers. I could feel the calluses on her palm, but her grip was firm and steady. She had faith in me. Which made one of us. I sighed, tiredly, getting ready to fight the good fight one more time, because that was all I had left.

"We need to find the heart of the house," I said. "Kill the heart, and kill the house. But the heart won't be anywhere here. The house will have hidden it somewhere else, for protection. Somewhere… no-one would be able to reach it, normally. But then, I'm not normal. I can find it. I can find anything."

Except what matters most. I reached inside myself and summoned up my gift, opening my mind again. And the house pounced.

For a long time I was nowhere, and it felt good. Good not to have to worry about bills that needed paying, cases that couldn't be solved, clients who couldn't be helped. Good not to have to worry about all the mysteries of my life, and the endless pain they brought to me and those I cared for. When I started out I had a dream, a dream of helping people who had nowhere else to turn; but dreams don't last. They can't compete with reality. The reality of struggling to find money for food and rent, and the way your feet hurt from pounding the streets looking for people who don't want to be found.

The harsh, unyielding reality of having to compromise your ideals bit by bit, day by day, just to achieve a few little victories in the face of the world's malice, or indifference. Until sometimes you wonder if there's nothing left of you but the shell of the man you intended to be, just going through the motions because you've nothing better to do.

But somehow the dream doesn't quite die. Because in the Nightside, sometimes dreams are all that can keep you going. Give them up, and you're dead.

Growing up in the Nightside, I saw a lot of dead men walking about. They could walk and talk and go through the motions, drifting from bar to bar and from drink to drink, but there was nothing left behind their eyes. Nothing that mattered. My father was a dead man for years, long before his heart finally, mercifully, gave out, and they nailed the coffin lid down. I couldn't help him. I was only a kid.

My gift didn't kick in until much later. A gift I could use, to make a difference. For other people, if not myself.

In the safe nowhere nothing that surrounded and comforted me, gentle waves of love and affection lapped against my mind, wanting me to forget all that. To forget everything but an eternal now of love and happiness, an end to all wanting and needing, and a rest that would never end. A quiet murmuring voice promised me I could have everything I ever wanted; all I had to do was lie back and accept, and give up the fight. But I didn't believe the voice. Because the only thing I really wanted had already been taken from me, when the house took Joanna back into itself. The voice spoke more urgently, and I sneered at it. Because underneath the voice I could still hear the endless, insatiable hunger.

My dreams. My reality. I clung to them like a drowning man, and would not give them up. They made me what I am. Not the father who ignored me, or the mother who abandoned me. Not the mysterious inheritance I never wanted, and not even the faceless hordes who'd hounded me all my life. So many influences trying to shape me, and I disowned them all. I chose to help people, because there'd been no-one there to help me when I needed it. I knew even then that I couldn't trust the Authorities to save me. My father had been one of them, and they still hadn't been able to protect him, or comfort him. I shaped my own life, determined my own destiny; and to hell with everyone and everything else.

My anger was rising now, hot and fierce and strong, and it pushed back the false promises of love and happiness, perhaps because deep down I'd never believed in such things. Not for me, anyway. The empty nothingness was fragmenting, falling apart. I could sense other people around me. Suzie Shooter, a ghost hand in mine, quietly confident in me. Cathy Barrett, understanding for the first time just how much she'd been lied to, manipulated and abused, almost as angry as I was. And somewhere close at hand… a faint presence, a quiet voice, like the last echoes of someone who had briefly believed themselves to be a woman called Joanna. And I swear I felt another ghostly hand in mine.

I reached out and embraced them, binding them to me with my gift; and together we were stronger than any damned house.

I don't just find things with my gift. It can do other things too. Like identify an enemy's weak spot and attack it. I lashed out with my gift, and the house screamed, in shock and rage, pain and horror. I think it had been a very long time since anyone had been able to hurt it.

The nothing was replaced by something. An in-between place. I was standing on a bare plain that stretched out to infinity in all directions. It was a grey place, soft and hazy and indistinct. Not a real place, but real enough. A place to make a stand. Suzie and Cathy were there with me. Suzie was wearing silver armour, studded with vicious spikes. Cathy looked like she had in her old photo, only mad as hell now. I didn't look down to see how I appeared. It didn't matter. Not too far away there was another presence, too faint to be clearly seen, but I knew who it was. Who it had to be. We were all shining brightly now, luminous beings in a grey world. Together we formed a wide circle around a column of swirling darkness, shot with vivid blood-red traces, that towered endlessly up into the featureless sky. From it came the voice of the house, beating against us like hammer-blows, harsh and inhuman.

"Mine! Mine! Mine!"

But the gift was strong in me, and I just laughed at the voice. All it really had on its side was stealth and lies, and neither could serve the house here. I stepped forward, and Suzie and Cathy moved with me. The dark column actually shrank back from our light, shrinking and contracting away from us. We closed in, and the column became narrower. And all around us, on that wide and endless plain; hundreds and hundreds of insubstantial figures, standing silently, watching and hoping. All the house's victims. It hadn't just eaten their bodies; the damned thing had consumed their souls too, holding them within itself to power its unnatural existence. What was left of a woman called Joanna came forward, holding herself together despite everything the house could do to tear her apart and assimilate her, and again I felt her hand in mine. Through her I reached out to the other captive shades, silently offering them a chance for revenge, and the only freedom they could ever know now… and they reached out to me.

Power surged through me, igniting my gift, and I blazed so very brightly as I advanced on the dark column before me. Suzie and Cathy and all the other victims advanced with me, and the house screamed and screamed. The column shrank and compacted, growing thinner and thinner, until finally I was able to join my shining hands with the trusting Suzie, the furious and betrayed Cathy, and the ghost of a woman I could have loved. We were all shining like suns now. I gathered together all our rage and hate and need, channeling all the many victims through my gift, and struck out at the dark heart of the thing that pretended to be a house. It howled once, with impotent horror, and then the dark swirling column was suddenly gone, and the voice of the house was stilled forever.

The other side of my gift. To find another's death.

I've never carried a gun. I don't need one.

I looked around the endless plain, that grey and empty place, and all the hundreds of victims were gone, their souls released at last to find the only peace left to them. And gone with them, a designed and programmed piece of bait that had briefly learned what it was to be human, and would not give it up.

You have to believe in dreams, because sometimes they believe in you.

I fell back into my body and glared wildly about me. All my strength was back, restored by the departed souls of the house's victims. I was still trapped in an enclosed room, with no way out, but the house was dead now. Already the air was thick with the sweet cloying stench of decay. The eye in the ceiling was closed and gone, and the phosphorescent glow from the walls was slowly fading. Ragged cracks spread slowly across the walls, tearing them apart like rotting flesh. And there, on the floor, what was left of Cathy Barrett. Gaunt, desiccated and half-dead, but finally separate from the consuming floor, ejected by the house's dying spasms, as I'd hoped. She was struggling to sit up, her face mad as hell. I helped her sit up, and wrapped the long coat around her. She held it closed with hands that were little more than bone and skin, and managed a brief, but real, smile for me.

"It lied to me," she said. "It told me everything I secretly wanted to hear, so I believed it. And when it finally had me, it made me happy; but inside I was screaming all the time. You saved me."

"It's what I do," I said. "It's my job."

She studied me for a while. "If my mother had known I was here, and in trouble, I like to think she would have sent someone like you. Someone… reliable."

"Look, this is all touching as hell," Suzie said briskly, "but I'd really like to get out of here."

"Good point," I said. "I've only just had this trench coat cleaned."

Together, we got Cathy onto her feet and helped support her. It wasn't difficult. She couldn't have weighed more than seventy pounds.

"Where were we?" she said abruptly. "The grey place. What was that?"

"The house was only vulnerable through its heart," I said, urging her towards the place in the wall where the door had been. "So, the house hid its heart in another place. Another dimension of reality, if you like. It's an old magical trick. But I can find anything."

"Are you sure it's dead?" said Suzie. "All the way, not coming back in the last reel, dead? I mean, it's still here, and we're still trapped inside it."

"It's dead," I said. "And from the smell and general state of things, I'd say its body is already starting to decay. It never really belonged in our world. Only its augmented will allowed it to survive here. Suzie, make us a door."

She looked at me. "You might remember, my gun didn't work too well, last time."

"I think you'll find it will now."

Suzie grinned like a child who's just been presented with an unexpected present, and drew her shotgun while I supported Cathy. Suzie opened fire on the wall at point-blank range again, and this time the blast punched a hole right through the wall, blowing it apart like rotten meat. Suzie loaded and fired again and again, laughing aloud as she widened the hole, and finally stepped forward to tear at the edges of the hole with her bare hands, widening it still further. She looked at the filth dripping from her hands, and grimaced.

"Damn stuff is falling apart."

"The whole house will fall apart soon," I said. "And lose what's left of its precarious hold on our reality. I really don't think we should be here when that happens; do you? Give me a hand here, Suzie."

We took a firm hold on Cathy's frail body and forced our way through the ragged gap in the wall, half-falling out onto the trembling corridor beyond. We'd barely got our feet under us before the edges of the hole in the wall behind us ran together like melting wax. Strange lights glowed everywhere, like the dim unhealthy glows of corpsefires, and the sickly-sweet stench of corruption was fast becoming overwhelming. I hurried us along the corridor towards the stairs, and the walls we passed were already developing black, diseased patches. The ceiling was bowing down towards our heads, as though it could no longer support itself. The whole floor was shuddering now, and the jagged cracks in the walls were lengthening in sudden spurts. By the time we got to the top of the stairs, the floor was sagging dangerously under our feet.

"Let's move like we have a purpose, people," I said. "I don't think this house is long for this world. And I really don't think we'd like being trapped in the kind of world that could produce a creature such as this."

"Right," said Suzie. "I'd have to kill everything in it, just on general principles. And I didn't bring enough ammunition with me."

We hurried down the swaying stairs, Cathy helping as best she could, which wasn't much. The house had eaten most of her muscles. She was still game as hell, though. The wall beside the stairs was melting slowly, like wax running down a candle. The steps clung to our feet like sticky toffee, until we had to drag them free by brute force. I grabbed at the banister for support, and a whole chunk of it came away in my hand, rotting and purulent. I pulled a face, and threw the stuff away.

We hit the wide hallway running, mostly carrying Cathy now, while the swaying walls bulged forwards on all sides, and the ceiling fell on us in thick muddy drops. Where the front door had been there was only a slumping, rotting hole, dark and purple, its edges dripping like a diseased wound. It was slowly irising shut, collapsing in on itself. Already it was far too small for any of us to get through.

"Oh God," said Cathy. "We're never going to get out of here. It's never going to let us go."

"It's dead," said Suzie. "It doesn't have a say in the matter. And we are leaving, whatever it takes. Right, Taylor?"

"Right," I said.

Beyond the collapsing hole that had once pretended to be a door, I could see a glimpse of the outside world, clear and calm and relatively sane. I glared at the closing hole, bludgeoning it with my gift, and it winced open, reluctantly widening again. Suzie and I took firm hold of Cathy and charged the hole, hitting it at a dead run. The decaying tissues grabbed at us, but we crashed through and out in a moment. We burst onto Blaiston Street, back into the world of men, and the newly falling rain washed us clean.

We staggered to a halt in the middle of the street, whooping like crazy in celebration, and lowered Cathy to the ground. She ran her hands over the solid street, that might have been filthy dirty but never pretended to be anything other than what it was, and started to cry. I looked back at the dead house. It was slowly sagging and falling in on itself, the windows drooping shut like so many tired eyes. What was left of the hole we'd crashed through looked like nothing more than a bruised, pouting mouth.

"Rot in hell," I said.

I hit the dead thing with my gift one last time, pushing it over the edge, and what was left of the creature that had pretended to be a house dropped out of the Nightside and was gone, back to whatever awful place it had come from, leaving behind only a few decaying chunks and a stench of corruption already slowly dissipating in the rain. By the time Walker arrived with his people, there wasn't even anything left to bury.