Nightside 10 - The Good the Bad and the Uncanny

could still remember when the Wide-Eyed Boy had been the best and bravest.
    “What do you want, Carnaby?” I asked politely.
    He sniggered loudly. “No time for old friends, John? Nothing to say to the old friend you abandoned and left behind? The one who brought you here, and taught you the ropes, and introduced you to pleasures you never knew existed?”
    “I forgave you for that long ago,” I said. “We’re both different people now. Is that a tinge of purple I see in your eye-balls, Carnaby? Been injecting through the tear ducts because you’ve run out of veins? How could you have fallen so far?”
    “Practice,” he said, his grin widening to show rotten teeth. “You’re looking good, John. Really. Very ... healthy. What made you think you could just walk back in here and stroll amongst us with your nose in the air? You owe me, John. You know you do.”
    “You want me to take you out of here, I’ll do it,” I said. “You want help, I’ll get you the best there is.”
    “I don’t want anything from you! Except to see you pay for what you did.”
    “What did I do, Carnaby?” I said patiently. “You broke the rules, John! You got out! No-one’s supposed to get out of here. That’s the point.”
    “I had help,” I said. “Take my hand, Carnaby. Really. I mean it. The only one keeping you here is you.”
    He looked at me sideways, still smiling his unpleasant smile. “You got out, and now you’re a big man in the Nightside. Oh yes, the news trickles down, even to places like this. Word is you’re a rich man, too. So how about a little something, for an old friend? How about a hand-out, how about the shirt off your back, how about everything you’ve got!”
    He was spitting the words out now, his whole wrecked body shaking with years of pent-up, carefully rehearsed spite and hatred. I sensed old Mother Connell stirring behind her table, and raised one hand to stop her. Because once upon a time the Wide-Eyed Boy really had been a friend of mine, had really had it in him to be the very best of us. Drugs don’t just destroy who you are; they destroy all the people you might have been.
    So I stepped forward, grabbed his bony head firmly with both hands, and held his gaze with my own. He tried to break away, but there was no strength left in him. He tried to look away, but I had him. I concentrated, and he cried out miserably as all the old scabs on his forearms broke open, and dark liquids oozed out and trickled down his arms. Everything he’d ever taken, every last nasty drop of it, ran out of him, and he cried like a baby at the loss of it. When I was finished I let him go, and he fell in a heap before me.
    “There,” I said. “You’re clean. Free as a bird. So you can leave, or you can stay; it’s all up to you. And don’t say I never did anything for you.”
    I left him there and headed for the elf.

    He was sitting alone at a small table, smoking opium through a hollowed-out human thigh-bone. Just because he could. There was a circle of open space around him, despite the crowded conditions of the Dragon’s Mouth, because even the kind of people who habituated a place like this didn’t want anything to do with an elf.
    Long and long ago, humans and elves lived together on the Earth, sharing its wonders and resources. But we never got on. There were battles and wars and horrible slaughters, and in the end we won by cheating; we outbred the pointy eared bastards. They gave up and left our world, walking sideways from the sun, moving their whole race to another world, another reality. The Sundered Lands. The few elves you see walking the world today are rogues, outlaws, remittance men. They live to screw us over because that’s all they’ve got.
    This particular elf watched me approach and lazily blew a perfect smoke ring at me. Followed by half a dozen increasingly complex smoke shapes, culminating in a great ship perched on a rising wave, complete with billowing sails and shaking rigging. But he was only showing off, so I ignored it. I pulled up a chair and sat down opposite him, careful to keep the whole of the table between us.
    “So,” said the elf, in a voice like a cat drowning in cream and loving every minute of it, “here you are. Lilith’s son.”
    “Actually,” I said, “I take more after my father. I’m John Taylor.”
    “Of course. And you can address me as Lord Screech, Pale Prince of Owls.”
    “But that’s not your real name.”
    “Of course not. To