Just Another Judgement Day (3 page)
Read Just Another Judgement Day Online
Authors: Simon R. Green
The show ward turned out to be very impressive, and utterly artificial. Neat patients in neat beds, none of them suffering from anything unsightly or upsetting, attended to by very attractive young nurses in starched white uniforms. There were flowers everywhere, and even the antiseptic in the air had a trace of perfume in it. Lots of light, lots of space, and no-one in any pain at all. A complete dream of a hospital ward. We weren’t actually allowed to talk to any of the patients or nurses, of course. The intern did his best to blind us with statistics about recovery rates, while I looked around for something, anything, out of place. The ward looked absolutely fine, but... something about it disturbed me.
It took me a while to realise that the whole ward was simply too normal for the Nightside. If this was all the rich and powerful patients wanted, they could get it in Harley Street. The clincher was that not one of the patients or the nurses so much as glanced at me, or Suzie. And that was very definitely not normal.
Dr. Dougan broke off from his speech when the doors burst open behind us and half a dozen security men moved quickly forward to surround us. Large men, with large bulges under their jackets where their guns were holstered. Suzie looked at them thoughtfully.
“We’re not here to make any trouble,” I said quickly. “We’re just looking.”
“Visiting hours are over,” said the largest of the security men. “Your presence is disturbing the patients.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They do look disturbed, don’t they? We’ll come back another day, when they’re feeling more talkative.”
He didn’t smile. “I don’t think that would be wise, Mr. Taylor.”
“Is he giving us the bum’s rush, John?” said Suzie. Her voice was calm and lazy and very dangerous. The security men held themselves very still.
“I’m sure the nice gentleman didn’t mean anything of the kind,” I said carefully. “Let’s go, Suzie.”
Suzie fixed the man with her cold blue eye. “He has to say
please
, first.”
please
, first.”
You could feel the tension on the air. Everyone’s hands were only an impulse away from their guns. Suzie was smiling, just a little. The main security man gave her his full attention.
“Please,” he said.
“Let’s get out of this dump,” said Suzie.
The security men escorted us out, maintaining a respectful distance at all times. I was impressed at their professionalism. I’d known Suzie to reduce grown thugs to tears with only a look. Which begged the question—why would a supposedly straightforward operation like the Guaranteed New You Parlour need heavy-duty security like them? What kind of secret were they hiding, that needed this level of protection?
I couldn’t wait to find out.
We gave it a few hours before we went back again. Long enough to make them think we were thinking it over and still planning our next move. We killed the time at a pleasant little tea-shop nearby, where I enjoyed a nice cup of Earl Grey while Suzie wolfed down a whole plate of tea-cakes, and amused herself by practising her menacing glare on the trembling uniformed maids and the steadily decreasing number of fellow customers. The place was pretty much empty by the time we left, and the maids were refusing to come out of the kitchen. I left a generous tip.
“Can’t take you anywhere,” I said to Suzie.
“You love it,” said Suzie.
When we returned to the Guaranteed New You Parlour, the whole place had been locked down tight. Doors were firmly closed, windows were covered with reinforced steel shutters, and a dozen security men were making themselves very visible, politely informing anyone who approached the Parlour that it was currently closed to all visitors and new patients. Some very rich and famous people wanted to get inside very badly, but for once, shouting, bribes, and temper tantrums got them nowhere. The Parlour was closed. I felt quite flattered that I’d made such an impression. Though to be honest, a lot of it was probably due to Suzie. Quite a few places close early when they see her coming, which is why I usually end up doing the shopping.
The security men looked like they knew what they were doing, so Suzie and I wandered casually round the side of the building. Not to the back. That’s an amateur’s mistake. Any security force worth its wages knows enough to guard the back doors as closely as the front. But there’s nearly always a side entrance, used by staff and maintenance, that most people don’t even know exists or think to mention. There were still a few oversized gentlemen keeping an eye on things, but they were so widely spaced it was easy to sneak past them.
The side door was right where I expected it to be. Suzie dealt with the lock in a few seconds, and as easily as that, we were in. (Getting past locked doors is just one of the many skills necessary to the modern bounty hunter. Though it does help if you’ve got a set of skeleton keys made from real human bones. Personally, I’ve always attributed Suzie’s skills with locks to the fact that they’re as scared of her as everyone else is.) We found ourselves in a narrow corridor, whitely tiled and brightly lit, with not a shadow to hide in anywhere. There was no-one about, for the moment. Suzie and I moved quickly down the corridor, trying doors at random along the way, to see what there was to see. A few store-rooms, a few offices, and a toilet that could have used a few more air fresheners. It all seemed normal and innocuous enough.
A set of swing doors let us into the main building. The lights were bright, every surface had been polished and waxed to within an inch of its life, but still there was no-one about. It was as though the whole place had been evacuated in a hurry. The silence was absolute, not even the hum of an air-conditioner. I looked at Suzie. She shrugged. I’d seen that shrug before. It meant
You’re the brains; I’m the muscle. Get on with it.
So I chose a corridor at random and started down it. Several corridors later, we still hadn’t encountered anyone, not even a guard doing his rounds. Surely they couldn’t have shut the whole place down just because Suzie and I had expressed an interest? Unless . . . there never had been anything going on there, and the whole place was only a front for something else . . .
You’re the brains; I’m the muscle. Get on with it.
So I chose a corridor at random and started down it. Several corridors later, we still hadn’t encountered anyone, not even a guard doing his rounds. Surely they couldn’t have shut the whole place down just because Suzie and I had expressed an interest? Unless . . . there never had been anything going on there, and the whole place was only a front for something else . . .
I was starting to get a really bad feeling about this. When hospitals go bad, they go really bad.
It didn’t take long to find the ward we’d been shown earlier. It was as still and silent as everywhere else. I quietly pushed the door open, and Suzie and I slipped inside. The lights had been turned down low, and the patients were shadowy shapes in their beds. There were half a dozen nurses, but they were all standing very still, in the central aisle between the two rows of beds. They didn’t move a muscle as Suzie and I slowly advanced on them.
It was so quiet I could hear Suzie’s steady breathing beside me.
Up close, the nurses seemed more like mannequins than people. Their faces were utterly empty, they didn’t breathe, and their fixed eyes didn’t blink. Suzie produced a penlight and briefly shined it in a nurse’s face, but the eyes didn’t react at all. Suzie put the light away, then punched the nurse in the shoulder; but she only rocked slightly on her feet. We checked the beds. The patients lay flat on their backs, staring sightlessly upwards. They weren’t dead. It was more like they’d never really been alive. A show ward, with show nurses and show patients, not a bit of it real. I murmured as much to Suzie, and she nodded quickly.
“Window dressing. But if this is just a show for the visitors, where’s the real deal? Where are the real wards and the real patients? Percy D’Arcy’s celebrity chums?”
“Not here,” I said. “I think we need to dip below the surface, see what’s underneath all this.”
“Underneath,” said Suzie. “The real deal’s always going on underneath, in the Nightside.”
We made our way quickly through the ward, heading for the far doors. I kept expecting the nurses and patients to come suddenly alive, and raise the alarm, or even attack us. Instead, the nurses stood very still, and the patients lay unmoving in their beds, like toys that weren’t currently being played with. A horrible suspicion came over me, that perhaps the whole world was like this, whenever I turned my back . . . By the time we got to the far doors, I was practically running.
We found a stairwell easily enough and descended a set of rough concrete steps to the next level. There were no signs on the walls, nothing to indicate where the stairs might lead. Clearly either you knew where you were going, or you weren’t supposed to be there. The air was very still, and there wasn’t a sound to be heard except for our feet on the rough concrete. The steps fell away before us for quite a while, taking us deep down into the bedrock under the streets. At the bottom of the steps we found another set of swing doors, perfectly ordinary, with no lock or alarm. Suzie and I pushed cautiously through them, and found ourselves in an entirely different kind of ward.
It was huge, with rows and rows of beds stretching away into the distance. And in these beds were hundreds and hundreds of very real patients served by more high-tech medical equipment than I’d ever seen in one place. Suzie and I moved slowly forward. There were no doctors, no nurses, just naked men and women lying flat on their backs, hooked up to intravenous drips, and respirators, and heart and lung and kidney monitors. Breathing tubes and catheters and more than one set of heavy leather restraints . . .
I found my first clue in the nurse’s cubicle. There was a large book lying open on a table, next to a row of monitor screens. The old-fashioned printed pages were written in English, French, and Creole, and I understood enough of it to know what it was about. Voodoo. The gods of the loa, their powers and practices, and all the things you could do with their help.
“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.
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