Read Drinking Midnight Wine Online
Authors: Simon R. Green
Drinking Midnight Wine (5 page)
Jimmy drank the last of the very hot sweet tea, flicked the cup a few times to empty it and then screwed it back onto the thermos. He’d only half filled the thermos, anyway. Bad idea to drink too much on a stakeout, especially when you didn’t know how long you’d have to hold your ground. He put the thermos down on the roof beside him and leaned back against the chimney stack, which shifted slightly under his great weight. Stretched out before him lay the sleeping town, still and quiet now, just an army of streetlights pushing back the darkness. There was the tower and spire of Trinity Church, and beyond it row upon row of terraced houses and cottages, ascending the steep hills that enclosed the town—ordinary people sleeping in their ordinary town, all’s quiet, all’s well. But that was just in Veritie.
In the magical world, every bit as clear to Jimmy Thunder’s semidivine eyes, the town was never quiet. Bradford-on-Avon was an old, old locality, littered with all the remnants of the past. The very old creature that lived Under the Hill stirred restlessly, as though it could feel the thunder god’s gaze, and deeper still, things and shapes and presences out of times past slept and dreamed down among the bones of the town. On the last day, when the earth gives up its dead for judgment, many of those buried in Bradford-on-Avon’s cemeteries will be surprised to find out who some of their neighbors have been.
Old buildings flickered in and out of sight, ghosts of the town that was. Pale figures sat glumly at the base of the old gallows in the Bull Pit, swapping hard-luck stories and old, old claims of innocence, while in the park next to Westbury House, old soldiers guarded the war memorial and made rude comments about the new pale green Millennium Statue in the gardens opposite. From the River Avon came undine songs of unbearable melancholy, sometimes drowned out by the terrible cry of the Howling Thing, still imprisoned in the chapel on the bridge. Powers and Dominations sat at feast in the ghostly remembrance of what had once been a seventeenth-century eating place, The Three Gables, sharing secrets in loud, carrying voices and deciding men’s fates with a laugh and a shrug and a careless quip. King Mob still held sway in the town center, as men and women long dead rioted over the changing fortunes of the cloth trade. And all across the town there were flaring lights and voices in the earth, and unnatural creatures flying on the night winds.
Business as usual, in Bradford-on-Avon, in Mysterie.
Jimmy Thunder looked up at the full moon and nodded hello. He’d always been on good terms with the Moon, unlike some of his predecessors, though her skittish ways made her difficult to understand and dangerous to know. But you never knew when you might need a friend. The town was jumping tonight, and the Reality Express was fast bearing down on the station. Jimmy let his sight slip out of Mysterie and back into Veritie, as the big black train came roaring in, right on time.
The Waking Beauty had hired Jimmy Thunder to investigate the matter of the Reality Express, and Jimmy had nodded politely and said of course he would, no problem, because no one said no to the Waking Beauty if they knew what was good for them; not even a god. She hadn’t offered to pay, and he’d known better than to ask. He was just building up credit that he might someday need to redeem. The Waking Beauty was older than the town, and the town was very old indeed. She hadn’t volunteered why she was suddenly interested in the Reality Express, or what he was supposed to be looking for. A lot of people disapproved of it, for all kinds of reasons, but as yet no one had actually got around to doing anything about it. The trade in refugees between the two worlds wasn’t exactly illegal, but it did tend to undermine the status quo. And a lot of people had a great deal invested in maintaining the status quo. No one had any idea who owned or operated the Reality Express, and those foolish enough to go looking for answers tended not to come back. So it was just there, a service for those who needed it.
Jimmy didn’t even know who drove the damned train.
It irked him that he was working for nothing. Normally he charged all that the traffic could bear, on the grounds that, after all, even gods had to eat; and because he lived in horror of someday being required to get a proper job. His few remaining worshipers would have been only too happy to provide him with everything he might need or desire, but that was a dangerous road to start down. He didn’t want to become dependent on his worshipers. It would have given them a measure of control over him, and Jimmy Thunder took pride in being his own man. Or god.
With a roar and a cry and a blast of escaping steam, the great black train finally slowed to a halt beside the opposite platform. Jimmy stood very still in the deepest of the shadows, but his eyes missed nothing. Steam billowed out onto the narrow platform like low fog, as doors began opening down the length of the carriages, their slamming back sounding loudly on the night like a long roll of applause. People stepped slowly down onto the platform, looking confusedly about them, unsettled to be suddenly only human. They clung together in little groups, all wide eyes and chattering mouths, finding what comfort they could in the familiar proximity of old friends or enemies.
The magical world is like an overlay on the real world, and though the real cannot see the magical, it can sometimes still be affected by it. But there has always been traffic between the two, mostly from Mysterie to Veritie, as beings of various kinds exchange the gaudier joys of magic for the more secure bedrock of reality. And there have always been those with a foot in both worlds, like Jimmy Thunder and the Waking Beauty. Many apparently ordinary people and things cast powerful shadows in Mysterie, and, of course, vice versa.
There are always those willing to leave magic behind so that they might live out normal, finite lives in Veritie. Some come to be free of their responsibilities, some to escape the obligations of their particular natures. But just lately there had been whispers that Something Bad was coming to Mysterie. Something awful and unstoppable, that would put an end to the old familiar dance of magic and reality. Jimmy had heard the rumors, and mostly discounted them. There were always rumors. But still people packed the carriages of the Reality Express and paid their fare with gold and gems, magical artifacts and personal power. They all had their reasons: vampires and werewolves who wanted to be freed from the demands of their curses, or undead who craved to know the sensual pleasures of the living, or just to know the simple joy of daylight. In Veritie, they could be mortal men and women, free from fate or duty or geas. The price was always more than they expected. Some of the newcomers were already shaking and shuddering on the platform, shocked at how much smaller they seemed here, how much more diminished and vulnerable the human condition really was.
Some of them had never even been cold before.
Two figures appeared suddenly out of nowhere to welcome the newcomers, and Jimmy leaned forward just a little for a better look. He was surprised, bordering on astonished, that they’d actually been able to arrive at the station without his noticing. And then he saw who the two were, and understood much. The man in charge of this small welcoming committee, speaking so calmly and graciously and comfortingly to the uncertain refugees, was Nicholas Hob, the Serpent’s Son. Very old, very powerful, and irredeemably evil. Jimmy hadn’t known Hob was back in town. To the best of his knowledge, no one had. It had been a hundred years and more since Nicholas Hob had gifted the town with his poisonous presence.
As always, he looked utterly perfect, in style and manners and everything that counted. He was handsome, elegant, apparently in his late twenties, in great shape and dashing with it. Blond, blue-eyed, and almost overpoweringly masculine, Hitler would have loved him on sight. (And probably had, if some of the rumors were true. There were a lot of rumors about Hob.) His suit was of the very latest cut, and quite clearly the most expensive money could buy. Gold and silver gleamed all over his person, and he was charm personified as he welcomed one and all to their new lives in Veritie. He might have been a politician, a successful businessman or a film star, and had been all of those and more, in his time. But they were only the faces he hid behind, the masks he wore for other people. He was the Serpent’s Son, cunning and vicious, potent and foul, who walked through lives and destroyed them, just for the hell of it. No one had ever been known to stand against him and live. He was his father’s son, and he could shine like the sun when he chose.
(It was said that flowers and women withered when he smiled on them, and that he left a trail of blood and suffering wherever he walked. Jimmy Thunder was quite prepared to believe it.)
Hob’s companion looked like a woman, but was actually Angel. In her own disturbing way, she was just as powerful and terrifying as Hob. Incredibly tall, impossibly pale and slender, she dressed in black tatters held together with safety pins and lengths of barbed wire. The pins pierced her flesh, and the wire broke it, but she didn’t seem to care. She wore her jet-black hair cropped brutally close to her skull, and her face was coarsely good-looking, sensual rather than beautiful. Her skin was as pale as death, and her mouth and eyes were the same deep, vivid red. She smiled meaninglessly at the new arrivals, and her hands curled impatiently at her sides, as though impatient to be hurting or breaking things. At her belt hung a rosary made from human fingerbones, and a clutch of supernaturally white feathers that came from no material wings. The newcomers avoided her gaze, as though the very sight of her was painful to them. They all knew her name was more than just a name.
She really had been an angel once, descended now from the immaterial to the material world, and though she was much diminished from what she had once been, she was still a force almost beyond reckoning. No one knew what kind of angel she’d been, from Above or from Below, and whether she fell or was pushed, or what terrible, unforgivable thing she’d done, to be sentenced to the mortal miseries of flesh and blood and bone. No one asked; no one dared. She was Angel, and that was all anyone needed to know.
Jimmy hadn’t known she’d allied herself with the Serpent’s Son. And he hadn’t known that either of them were involved in running the Reality Express. It couldn’t help but make him wonder what else was going on, on his own doorstep, that he didn’t know about.
Hob’s calm voice and presence was finally having a soothing effect on the uneasy crowd of the newly human, as long as they didn’t look at Angel, and he was soon bustling among them, smiling and shaking hands and checking names and numbers against a list on his laptop. He’d clearly done this before. At his murmured suggestion, Angel had moved away to lean against the station-house wall, and was idly digging out long curls of mortar from between the stones with a bored fingernail, clearly uninterested in the proceedings. Presumably she was just there to ride shotgun. Jimmy realized with a start that Hob and Angel were the reasons why he was there. The Waking Beauty had wanted their presence confirmed. The train and its passengers were largely irrelevant.
Jimmy studied Angel from the darkest and most concealing shadows he could find on the waiting-room roof.
A line from an old song ran through his head, subtly altered:
Did you ever see a nightmare walking? I did . . .
Just standing there, with her pale arms now crossed over her small high breasts, she looked as dangerous and malignant as all hell. She hadn’t been in town long, and everyone had been wondering which way she would jump. When God wanted a city leveled, or all the firstborn slaughtered in one night, he sent an angel. They were Heaven’s stormtroopers. Angel’s very presence in Bradford-on-Avon was enough to unsettle any sensible person, man or god.
Did you ever see a nightmare walking? I did . . .
Just standing there, with her pale arms now crossed over her small high breasts, she looked as dangerous and malignant as all hell. She hadn’t been in town long, and everyone had been wondering which way she would jump. When God wanted a city leveled, or all the firstborn slaughtered in one night, he sent an angel. They were Heaven’s stormtroopers. Angel’s very presence in Bradford-on-Avon was enough to unsettle any sensible person, man or god.
(Only one other angel had been reduced from the immaterial to the material in present times, and that had been voluntary—supposedly. But the old city of Maggedon was no more, and the angel was still chained to his rock in the cold dark heart of the earth, with nails through his wings. A little humanity can be a dangerous thing.)
Jimmy Thunder let his hand fall to the great hammer at his side. It had been a long time since he had been genuinely frightened.
Perhaps he made a noise, or he’d moved too suddenly; either way, Angel’s head snapped round, and she looked up and glared right at him with her bloodred eyes, seeing him clearly through the concealing shadows of the chimney stack. She shouted a warning to Hob and ran forward, the crowd scattering before her. She jumped from the platform, across the tracks and up onto the waiting-room roof in one impossible bound, as though borne aloft on invisible wings. Roof slates cracked and exploded under her bare feet as she landed, her long legs barely flexing as they absorbed the impact. She held her hands like claws, and her wide smile could just as easily have been a snarl. Jimmy Thunder drew his hammer from its holster and moved reluctantly forward to face her.
Down below, on the far platform, the newly arrived refugees were panicking. Everyone was shouting and milling about, and trying to get back into the carriages, but the doors wouldn’t open for them. There was pushing and shoving, and some fell to the ground and were trampled underfoot. Hob moved quickly among them, trying to calm them with his voice and his presence, but no one was listening. Newly human, no longer protected by their old natures or powers, the refugees were naked and vulnerable and they knew it. This was a perfect time for old enemies to strike, and pay off old scores and blood feuds. The crowd suddenly seized on the notion of escape, and headed en masse for the only exit, the black iron gate beside the station house. Hob was yelling now at the top of his voice, but no one gave a damn.
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