Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives

The Spirit of the Thing: A Nightside Story by Simon R. Green

In the Nightside, that secret hidden heart of London, where it’s always the darkest part of the night and the dawn never comes, you can find some of the best and worst bars in the world. There are places that will serve you liquid moonlight in a tall glass, or angel’s tears, or a wine that was old when Rome was young.

And then there’s the Jolly Cripple. You get to one of the worst bars in the world by walking down the kind of alley you’d normally have the sense to stay out of. The Cripple is tucked away behind more respectable establishments, and light from the street doesn’t penetrate far. It’s always half full of junk and garbage, and the only reason there aren’t any bodies to step over is because the rats have eaten them all. You have to watch out for rats in the Nightside; some people say they’re evolving. In fact, some people claim to have seen the damn things using knives and forks.

I wouldn’t normally be seen dead in a dive like the Jolly Cripple, but I was working. At the time, I was in between clients and in need of some fast walking around money, so when the bar’s owner got word to me that there was quick and easy money to be made, I swallowed my pride. I’m John Taylor, private investigator. I have a gift for finding things, and people. I always find the truth for my clients; even if it means having to walk into places where even angels would wince and turn their heads aside.

The Jolly Cripple was a drinker’s bar. Not a place for conversation, or companionship. More the kind of place you go when the world has kicked you out, your credit’s no good, and your stomach couldn’t handle the good stuff any more, even if you could afford it. In the Jolly Cripple the floor was sticky, the air was thick with half a dozen kinds of smoke, and the only thing you could be sure of was vomit in the corners and piss and blood in the toilets. The owner kept the lights down low, partly so you couldn’t see how bad the place really was, but mostly because the patrons preferred it that way.

The owner and bartender was one Maxie Eliopoulos. A sleazy soul in an unwashed body, dark and hairy, always smiling. Maxie wore a grimy T shirt with the legend IT’S ALL GREEK TO ME, and showed off its various bloodstains like badges of honour. No one ever gave Maxie any trouble in his bar. Or at least, not twice. He was short and squat with broad shoulders, and a square brutal face under a shock of black hair. More dark hair covered his bare arms, hands, and knuckles. He never stopped smiling, but it never once reached his eyes. Maxie was always ready to sell you anything you could afford. Especially if it was bad for you.

Some people said he only served people drink so he could watch them die by inches.

Maxie had hired me to find out who’d been diluting his drinks and driving his customers away. (And that’s about the only thing that could.) Didn’t take me long to find out who. I sat down at the bar, raised my gift, and concentrated on the sample bottle of what should have been gin; but was now so watered down you could have kept goldfish in it. My mind leapt up and out, following the connection between the water and its source, right back to where it came from. My Sight shot down through the barroom floor, down and down, into the sewers below.

Long stone tunnels with curving walls, illuminated by phosphorescent moss and fungi, channeling thick dark water with things floating in it. All kinds of things. In the Nightside’s sewers even trained workers tread carefully, and often carry flame-throwers, just in case. I looked around me, my Sight searching for the presence I’d felt; and something looked back. Something knew I was there, even if only in spirit. The murky waters churned and heaved, and then a great head rose up out of the dark water, followed by a body. It only took me a moment to realize both head and body were made up of water, and nothing else.

The face was broad and unlovely, the body obscenely female, like one of those ancient fertility goddess statues. Thick rivulets of water ran down her face like slow tears, and ripples bulged constantly around her body. A water elemental. I’d heard the Nightside had been using them to clean up the sewers; taking in all the bad stuff and purifying it inside themselves. The Nightside always finds cheap and practical ways to solve its problems, even if they aren’t always very nice solutions.

“Who disturbs me?” said the sewer elemental, in a thick, glutinous voice.

“John Taylor,” I said. Back in the bar my lips were moving, but my words could only be heard down in the sewer. “You’ve been interfering with one of the bars above. Using your power to infuse the bottles with your water. You know you’re not supposed to get involved with the world above.”

“I am old,” said the elemental of the sewers. “So old, even I don’t remember how old I am. I was worshipped, once. But the world changed and I could not, so even the once worshipped and adored must work for a living. I have fallen very far from what I was; but then, that’s the Nightside for you. Now I deal in shit and piss and other things, and make them pure again. Because someone has to. It’s a living. But, fallen as I am … no one insults me, defies me, cheats me! I serve all the bars in this area, and the owners and I have come to an understanding … all but Maxie Eliopoulos! He refuses my reasonable demands!”

“Oh hell,” I said. “It’s a labour dispute. What are you asking for, better working conditions?”

“I just want him to clean up his act,” said the elemental of the sewers. “And if he won’t, I’ll do it for him. I can do a lot worse to him than just dilute his filthy drinks…”

“That is between you and him,” I said firmly. “I don’t do arbitration.” And then I got the hell out of there.

Back in the bar and in my body, I confronted Maxie. “You didn’t tell me this was a dispute between contractors, Maxie.”

He laughed, and slapped one great palm hard against his grimy bartop. “I knew it! I knew it was that water bitch, down in her sewers! I just needed you to confirm it, Taylor.”

“So why’s she mad at you? Apart from the fact that you’re a loathsome, disgusting individual.”

He laughed again, and poured me a drink of what, in his bar, passed for the good stuff. “She wants me to serve better booze; says the impurities in the stuff I sell is polluting her system, and leaving a nasty taste in her mouth. I could leave a nasty taste in her mouth, heh heh heh… She pressured all the other bars and they gave in, but not me. Not me! No one tells Maxie Eliopoulos what to do in his own bar! Silly cow… Cheap and nasty is what my customers want, so cheap and nasty is what they get.”

“So … for a while there, your patrons were drinking booze mixed with sewer water,” I said. “I’m surprised so many stayed.”

“I’m surprised so many of them noticed,” said Maxie. “Good thing I never drink the tap water… All right, Taylor, you’ve confirmed what I needed to know. I’ll take it from here. I can handle her. Thinks I can’t get to her, down in the sewers, but I’ll show that bitch. No one messes with me and gets away with it. Now — here’s what we agreed on.”

He pushed a thin stack of grubby bank notes across the bar, and I counted them quickly before making them disappear about my person. You don’t want to attract attention in a bar like the Jolly Cripple, and nothing will do that faster than a display of cash, grubby or not. Maxie grinned at me in what he thought was an ingratiating way.

“No need to rush away, Taylor. Have another drink. Drinks are on the house for you; make yourself at home.”

I should have left. I should have known better … but it was one of the few places my creditors wouldn’t look for me, and besides … the drinks were on the house.

I sat at a table in the corner, working my way through a bottle of the kind of tequila that doesn’t have a worm in it, because the tequila’s strong enough to dissolve the worm. A woman in a long white dress walked up to my table. I didn’t pay her much attention at first, except to wonder what someone so normal-looking was doing in a dive like this … and then she walked right through the table next to me, and the people sitting around it. She drifted through them as though they weren’t even there, and each of them in turn shuddered briefly, and paid closer attention to their drinks. Their attitude said it all; they’d seen the woman in white before, and they didn’t want to know. She stopped before me, looking at me with cool, quiet, desperate eyes.

“You have to help me. I’ve been murdered. I need you to find out who killed me.”

That’s what comes from hanging around in strange bars. I gestured for her to sit down opposite me, and she did so perfectly easily. She still remembered what it felt like to have a body, which meant she hadn’t been dead long. I looked her over carefully. I couldn’t see any obvious death wounds, not even a ligature round her neck. Most murdered ghosts appear the way they did when they died. The trauma overrides everything else.

“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 watch dog 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 under-stated 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 grey-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 ice-pick 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 standing out in his grey 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 favour, 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 bartop 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 has worked as a shop assistant, bicycle repair mechanic, actor, journalist, and mail order bride. And every day he’s glad he doesn’t have to do any of that any more. His best known series are the “Deathstalker” books, (like “Star Wars,” only with a plot that makes sense,) the “Nightside” books, and the “Secret Histories,” featuring Shaman Bond, the world’s most secret agent. Although he does not have a website as such, there is a tribute site, to which he sometimes contributes information, at www.bluemoonrising.nl

John Taylor is a private eye who operates in the Twilight Zone, solving cases of the weird and uncanny. His beat is the Nightside, that sour secret heart of London, where the sun has never shone and it’s always three o’clock in the morning, the hour that tries men’s souls. Gods and monsters can be found there, often attending the same self-help groups. John Taylor is your last chance for justice, the truth, and other disturbing things.