Simon Green - Just Another Judgement Day

“Look at this,” said Suzie. She’d found a printout listing all the patients in the ward. No details, no instructions, only basic identities. Suzie and I flicked through the pages, and a whole bunch of familiar names jumped out at us. Not just Percy’s friends, the beautiful people from the colour supplements; but the rich and the powerful, the real movers and shakers of the Nightside. I went back into the ward, moving quickly down the rows of beds, staring into faces. I recognised quite a few, but none of them recognised me. Even with their eyes open, they saw nothing, nothing at all.

At least they were breathing . . .

The next big clue was that they all looked so much older than they should—all wrinkled faces, sagging flesh, and shrivelled limbs. I’d seen many of them recently, and they’d all looked in their prime, as usual. Now their faces and bodies showed the clear ravages of time and much hard living, along with any number of destructive antisocial diseases. There were also clear signs of elective surgery, some of it quite extensive, on faces and body parts. Some of the patients were so heavily wrapped in blood-stained bandages they were practically mummified. It was like touring a hospital in a war zone, and many of the patients looked like they’d been through hell. Some were clearly barely hanging on, only kept alive by invasive medical technology.

It took me a while to get it. A very new twist on a very old practice. The voodoo book was the key. These patients on their beds of pain weren’t the real rich and famous faces of the Nightside; they were living duplicates. The techniques in the book had been used to turn them into the equivalent of voodoo dolls, but in reverse. Instead of whatever happening to the doll happening to the victim, what happened to the original happened to the duplicate. Like Dorian Gray’s painting, these poor bastards soaked up the excesses of the real people’s lives, so they could go on being young and beautiful and untouched . . . The patients aged and suffered and underwent the elective surgeries, while the rich and powerful reaped all the benefits.

No wonder poor Percy D’Arcy couldn’t compete.

I ran it through for Suzie, and she wrinkled her nose. “Now that...is tacky. Where are they getting all these duplicates from? I mean, they’d have to be exact doubles for this to work.”

“Any number of options,” I said. “Clones, homunculi, doppelgängers . . . It doesn’t matter. The point is, I very much doubt any of these people are here by choice. The heavy restraints are a bit of a give-away there. This isn’t a hospital ward; it’s a torture chamber.”

In the end, we found the answer behind a very ordinary-looking door. The sophisticated electronic lock aroused our suspicions, and Suzie opened it easily with her skeleton keys. (Magic still trumps science, usually by two falls and a submission.) She pulled the door open, and we both stepped quickly back. There was nothing behind the door. Lots and lots of nothing. Space that wasn’t space, filled with squirming, shimmering lights you could only see with your mind, or your soul. There was a terrible appeal to it, an attraction, that made you want to throw yourself into it and fall forever . . . I carefully pushed the door shut again.

“A Timeslip,” I said. “Someone’s stabilised a Timeslip and held it in neutral; a ready-made door into another reality.” That would take time and serious money. Timeslips are inherently unstable. The universe is self-correcting, and it hates anomalies. “The only people I know to have worked successfully with Timeslips are Mammon Emporium, that mall that specialises in providing goods and services from alternate time-lines. And they’ve never shared that knowledge with anyone.”

“Could they be behind this?” said Suzie.

“No. I don’t think so. They’ve already made themselves rich beyond the dreams of tax accountants by legitimate means. Why risk all that, for this? Still, at least now we know where the duplicates come from. Whoever owns this place goes fishing in some other world, for that place’s equivalent of our important people. Exact physical duplicates . . . forcibly abducted and brought here, to suffer every conceivable illness, surgery, and self-inflicted injury, so their other selves don’t have to and can remain young and pretty forever . . .”

We both looked round sharply. Someone was coming. A lot of people were coming. Suzie and I moved quickly to stand shoulder to shoulder, facing the main doors. There was something odd about the sound, though; the pounding feet sounded muffled, flat . . . And it took me a moment to realise that the sound was approaching from below, not above. Coming up the stairs, from some further, lower level. The main doors finally burst open, and a small army of heavily armed nurses stormed into the ward in perfect lock-step. Suzie and I stood very still. The guns were no surprise, but the nature of the nurses was.

They weren’t alive. They were constructs, their bodies made entirely from bamboo woven and twisted into a human form. Their faces were blank bamboo ovals with neither mouths nor eyes, but every one of them orientated on Suzie and me. They all wore the same starched white nurse’s uniform, right down to the little white cap on the backs of their bamboo heads. Not living, not even aware, as such, but quite capable of following orders. And their guns were real enough. The nurses scurried forward with inhuman speed, their bamboo feet scuffing across the floor, spreading out into a perfect semicircle to cover us. Suzie swept her shotgun back and forth, looking for a useful target, knowing she was outnumbered and outgunned, but refusing to be intimidated. I was intimidated, but I made a point of striking a defiantly casual pose, while waiting for the puppet master to show himself.

Whoever ran the nurses wouldn’t miss an opportunity to gloat over the capture of two such famous faces as Suzie Shooter and John Taylor. If he’d been sensible, he’d have had the nurses shoot on sight, but the bigger the ego, the bigger the need to show off.

And sure enough, the crowd of bamboo nurses suddenly broke apart, silently opening a central aisle for their lord and master to make his entrance. Surprisingly, it was no-one I knew. Not one of the Major Players, not even one of the more ambitious up-and-comers. The man striding quite casually through his army of bamboo nurses was entirely unknown to me, and that doesn’t happen often in the Nightside.

He was tall, well made, well dressed, in a rich cream suit; the kind usually favoured by remittance men banished by their families to hot and far-away places. At first I thought he was a young man, but the closer he got the more the little tell-tale details gave him away. The skin of his face was too tight, too taut, and his eyes were very old. Old and cold. His smile was a dead, mirthless thing, meant to frighten. This was a man who had seen the world, found it wanting, and taken his revenge. His movements had the surety and control that only comes from age and experience, and he walked like a wolf in a world of sheep. He had large, powerful hands, with long, slender fingers—surgeons’ hands. And for all his grace, there was no mistaking the sheer brute power of his wide shoulders and barrel chest. He finally came to a halt, a respectful distance away, nodded to me and smiled at Suzie, ignoring the shotgun she was levelling on his chest.

“The famous John Taylor and the infamous Shotgun Suzie,” he said, in a rich, deep voice with just a hint of an unfamiliar accent. “Well. I am honoured. I should have known that if anyone would find me out, it would be you.” He laughed briefly, as though at some private joke. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Frankenstein. Baron Viktor von Frankenstein.”