All nightmare long, p.31
All Nightmare Long, page 31
And Jason so wanted to fuck her, there, then, bent over the counter and pressed against the mirrors, bury himself in her and feel her staggering warmth taking him in, and she grinned because she knew exactly what he was thinking.
“I’m Succubus,” she said, “and you’ll remember me. If you value your life, and the lives of those you love, you will remember me. And you will forget Meloy, and his mention of the Gleeful Ones, until the Gleeful Ones come for you.”
“Who are you?” Jason asked.
“I told you my name.”
“But I’ve never seen anyone...like...”
Succubus ran her hands across her chest, the tattoo hazing in and out of focus as though rippled on a pond. Fine tendrils writhed, skin pulsed, Jason’s heart hammered.
“The time to hide ourselves has passed,” she said. He could feel her heat. “Plans are being laid. You, Stylist, will be called.” Her breath smelled of delight, and he so wished to revel in it.
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to.” And then she was gone, slinking her vest back on before pulling the door open and exiting onto the street.
Jason reached quickly into his pocket and found the folded foil slip, but it was too late. He took three steps towards the door, shaken by her presence and what she had said and implied, and eager to know more. But it was too late. He pressed his face to the window beside the “open/closed” sign, and the street was full of people ignorant of the miracles in their midst.
And if those same people had known who he was and what he did, they would likely want him dead.
Extract from Once Were Vigilantes, by Max Gold, London Council Press
While it is true that some people supported the acts carried out by the Vees, the majority of the general public disliked, feared, or loathed them. Before the Gleeful Ones, there were frequent lynchings of those suspected of being Vigilantes. Most readers will remember the infamous Crow Talker incident, when a man—Nigel Wheeler, from Croydon—was caught allegedly guiding crows to attack pick-pockets in Hyde Park. Tied and beaten by a gang of teenagers, onlookers quickly joined in the persecution. Few can forget the images of Mr Wheeler being strung up on a lamp post, hanged in front of crowds of Londoners and tourists, while the minority calling for mercy and justice were shouted down and hounded from the park. And no one will forget the crows that sat on his head and shoulders as he slowly choked to death.
The Gleeful Ones, and what they did, quickly turned public opinion into Council law. A state of emergency was declared. The war was short. The airships sent down their pronouncements, the Vees were rounded up, the prisons began to fill.
No one has yet written an impartial analysis of the effect of this pogrom on Vees’ families.
No one cares.
Jason kept low for the next few days. He remained a barber, a family man, and nothing else. While the thing inside urged him to take his talent out into the night, he resisted. But the urge was beyond his control.
On the sixth day he closed the shop early and went home. He hovered close to the abandoned house, whose garden shed he used as a changing and staging area for his activities. But it was too light to change just yet. And he had his family to think about.
“This thing I do,” he said quietly over dinner, but Janie hushed him up.
“Not in front of the kids!”
“Not in front of the kids!” Holly echoed, and little Sean copied her, the two of them turning Janie’s admonishment into a chant. Jason waved a hand, smiling, feigning embarrassment. But all the while he wanted to drag Janie aside and tell her what was wrong. I think it’s getting dangerous. I think something’s going to happen.
She had never really understood, and had spent a large part of their marriage trying to ignore what her husband was, and what he could do. Whenever he tried talking about it she cut him off, raising a hand or turning away. She had made his power into something that would always come between them, but could never be discussed.
He had tried, so often. But Stylist would always be an invisible barrier, preventing them from ever truly touching.
With dinner finished and the children hustled upstairs to bathe and prepare for bed, Jason prevented Janie from leaving the kitchen.
“Janie—”
‘‘Nope. Don’t want to hear about it.”
“But I’ve got to tell you—”
“No, Jase.” She looked him in the eye and stood firm. “You know what I think about...that.”
“But can’t you change?”
“Why should I?”
“Because I think I might.”
She blinked, frowned, and seemed about to say something when Sean started crying from upstairs. Holly’s raised voice only aggravated him. Water splashed. Someone stomped.
“I’ve got to sort out our children,” Janie said. “I assume tonight you’re...?”
“Just for a couple of hours,” Jason said. He felt the need more than ever, his power burning inside like a pressure valve that needed venting. Sometimes he went a couple of days without going out as Stylist, but it had never been this long. It felt like he was going cold turkey from his soul.
You speak as if it’s a separate conscious thing, Janie had said once, and he had not replied. How could he? He barely knew what it was himself.
“I doubt if I’ll be awake when you come in,” she said. Jason felt a pang of regret, a stab of rejection, before realising that this might be a good thing. What he had to do might take all night.
Stylist, boiler-suited and masked, stalked from shadow to shadow and left worries behind.
Some worries, at least. Not all. Some worries, like those everyday niggles that plague people on a 9-to-5, or parents, or those whose boundaries are too tight to appreciate the good amongst the bad. But tonight there were other worries, and Stylist carried extra foils of his hair dust. And extra scissors.
He knew where to find Florist. Her shop was a front, and her real home was in a place that no one would ever suspect. Deep in the Docklands, high in a tower of exclusive apartments that were now mostly locked shut and slowly going to rot, Florist hid in clear sight. Hers was one of a dozen apartments lit through the night by soft lighting, and marked as inhabited during the day with open windows and billowing curtains. She had once claimed to Stylist that she believed herself and her abilities to be things of beauty, and to hide them away was a crime. Secrecy was different. Secrecy preserved beauty and gave it the space it needed. Florist was in constant bloom, and now Stylist needed to ask her some questions.
He slipped through the streets without being seen. If he heard voices, he would hide. A shadow was his friend. Once he saw Spite—a once-handsome man who had sliced off his own nose, and who now punished criminals by mutilating them—but Stylist pressed himself into a darkened doorway and watched the angry madman drift by. Beneath his coat would be a dozen knives, razors and machetes, and Stylist had never trusted him.
Madness haunted the Vees. As Jason Hamm, he did not consider himself madder than any average person nowadays, struggling to make ends meet and fight against economic depression, oppression, and the unfair demands of the rich people in power. But to become Stylist—and for any of them to manifest as someone more incredible, and powerful—insanity had to be at work somewhere.
“I don’t think about it,” he whispered as he watched Spite pass by, and in trying to convince himself, he lied.
And what of Succubus? The time to hide ourselves has passed. To exist in her altered state permanently must be . . .
Fascinating. Terrifying.
“Fuck it,” Stylist said, and he moved on. The streets were quiet at this time of night, but he kept watch on the places where people might be watching him. Being seen was not a problem, but being attacked was a constant threat.
The door to Florist’s apartment block was electronically shut, and he took several seconds to open it. No alarms sounded, at least none that he could hear. Either way, though, he should assume that she knew he was on his way.
Before today, that would have not upset him too much. Never exactly friendly, Florist had however welcomed his occasional visits, counting him as someone she could call a friend. Though private lives were always kept that way, he was convinced that she had no family or lover. She was very much alone.
There was an atrium inside, stairs climbing around its edges. A long, fine filament hung from the clear roof framing twelve storeys up, and its ceramic pendulum hung six inches above the atrium’s floor. It moved, ever so slightly. Nothing was ever still.
Stylist took the stairs. He hid his strong core and knotted muscles beneath a camouflage of easily-gained fat, just one small aspect of needing to fit into normality. Most people who saw him assumed he was a middle-aged, slightly out-of-shape barber. His work-outs were hidden even from his family, and twenty-four flights of stairs would suffice for today. To begin with, at least. He had a feeling there would be more.
Outside Florist’s penthouse apartment door, he raised one hand to knock. Paused. Pressed his ear to the wood, listening, exhaling slightly to clear his hearing. There was nothing at all from inside, but he had a startling image of Florist standing two inches from him doing exactly the same thing. There was no peephole in the door. No cameras hidden in the hallway’s ceiling corners.
He raised his hand again, and the door opened.
“The fuck do you want?” Florist asked.
“Nice to see you, too.”
“What is this, a social call? Come to do my hair?”
Stylist glanced at Florist’s head. Everyone’s hair fascinated him, and he wondered what he would feel were he to run his fingers through her golden locks; what pollens he might release and breathe in; what terrible, wonderful memories each strand might contain.
“No,” he said. “It’s a...working call.”
She raised an eyebrow, and glanced around the hallway behind him. But he guessed she already knew they were alone.
“Come in.” She turned and walked into her apartment, leaving the door open for him to follow her inside.
Her apartment smelled of roses. He breathed deeply as he stepped inside and closed the door, then caught his breath and felt a momentary panic. Pressing his hand across his mouth and nose, he reached for scissors with his other hand.
Florist glanced back at him from the large, open plan room, and smiled.
“Do you really think I would be so obvious?”
“Only if you had need,” Stylist said. He glanced around her home. “I didn’t peg you for a minimalist.” The room was sparse in the extreme. Wide, tall-ceilinged, it was home to three lonely armchairs and a low glass table. In one wall he saw the telltale lines of a hidden cupboard, within which he guessed were housed entertainment systems.
“It’s my clean place,” she said, voice softening. “My retreat. Away from all those flowers and plants, and the uneven blooms, the chaos. The air here is filtered and conditioned five times per hour. Almost pure.”
“The rose smell?”
Florist half-smiled, shrugged. “I can never let go completely.”
“So are you gleeful, Florist?” he asked. Her face dropped. He saw no fear there, and very little surprise. Only regret.
“Oh, Jason.” She had never called him by his real name, ever. He didn’t even know hers, and for the years they had known each other—a distant friendship, if a friendship at all—he’d believed that they were as much a mystery to each other as to those around them.
“What’s going on?” he asked, trying to keep his voice level. He still had not removed his mask. It was his identity out here, his shield. But her use of his name was unpicking it thread by thread. “What’s happening? Is something going to change?” He thought of Succubus with her squirming tattoos, and things he had never before seen, or imagined.
“Something?” Florist asked. “No. Everything is going to change.” She vanished quickly through an invisible door in the wall, and Stylist followed. She left the way open for him. There were stairs and darkened corridors, and then he smelled something stiflingly familiar—the tang of London. Exhaust fumes and food, refuse and roses. All the smells were London’s, but for the last. That was always hers.
Because they were on the apartment’s roof now, where Florist’s huge greenhouses captured what goodness the sun could force through the clouds of pollution and apathy that hung forever above the city. She was weaving between planting beds, reaching out to stroke leaves and stems and tendrils and flowers with her supple hands, arms shifting as fluidly as kelp in a gentle current.
Stylist followed, a pair of scissors in his right hand, a foil fold of hair dust in his left. I could be breathing in anything right now, he thought, and somewhere a fungus head popped with a gentle sigh. Spores and pollen drifted on breezes that had no source.
“Florist!” he called.
“Ellen.” She was standing behind him. She had dropped her clothing and stood naked, exposing the fine tracework of stem filaments up her legs and torso, and the intricately veined wonders of her arms and hands. Her head was a bloom waiting to happen. Her eyes were purple. Bees buzzed at her hair, and they drifted away with legs heavy with pollen.
“How did you...?” Stylist asked, but to question this was pointless. She came closer and reached for him, and he lashed out. Whether she believed herself beyond his touch, or never thought he would dare touch her at all, the scissor blade slicing through her hand brought a gasp of shock, and a spray of green blood across the air.
“I’m sorry,” Stylist said. But he held up the scissors. “Stay back. Stay away!” He thought she would come at him then, and in her domain he wondered what chance he would have. He raised the foil fold and blew, but Florist closed her eyes and a surge of air passed through the large greenhouse dome. Leaves and flowers and shrubs shivered, and Stylist sensed a thousand dreams and memories carried away on the breeze.
“You’ll give my beauties nightmares,” she said, and her concern for the plants growing here was palpable. “Please, Jason, don’t try anything like that again. You’re in deep waters here. Deeper than you know, and if you try and fight against the current . . .”She shrugged, sad.
“What, you care about me?”
“Of course I care. As I would for any child.”
“I’m no child.”
“But you don’t revel in what you have,” she said. She came forward again and this time he let her. She touched his shoulders, and her hands felt suddenly very human again.
“I don’t want to know,” he said, suspecting that she was manipulating him even now. How could she not, when he was in her domain?
“You think it’s a curse, not a gift. You carry it like a weight, deep down inside you, and you think of it as something separate. Something unknown and alien that drives you. An invader.”
“Because it is,” Stylist said, and he probed deep down for the darkness that had always haunted him. It gave him breath when he needed it to touch the hair dust with dreams, and it edged forward through his hands, into the tools he used to style new lives for the bastards he chose to work upon. He felt it, watching and listening with a silent smirk. It was the deepest part of him, and yet so distant he could never hope to understand.
“No,” Florist said. “It’s more you than this human front you give yourself. Jason Hamm with his wife and children. Jason Hamm with his barber shop, for fuck’s sake. You make yourself false, because you can’t accept the real truth.”
“I can,” Stylist said. He gripped his scissors tightly. “I do. I’m a husband and a father, and sometimes...sometimes, I have to give this thing free rein.”
“And that’s when you’re truly yourself! I found that out years ago. I had a husband and a baby girl, and they were simply a shield. They were as false to me as that mask you choose to wear is to you. I gave them up, and I’ve revelled in it ever since.” She moved away and regarded him kindly, knowingly. “Stylist, we’re pretty fucking far from human.”
No, he thought. I love Janie, and Holly, and Sean. They’re my centre. My focus. But Florist was looking at him now, and in her eyes he saw a point of no return. She saw a choice for him to make, but she did not know him quite well enough.
“And the Gleeful Ones revel in inhumanity?” Stylist asked. “Is that it?”
“You make it sound like such a bad thing.”
“And now they’re going to expose themselves,” he said. “Try and make things different.”
“Things have always been different,” Florist said. “The Gleeful Ones are simply bringing that difference to the masses.”
In the distance, a thumping explosion.
“What was that?” he asked. Somewhere, a flare of light filtered through the dome, reflected from shiny leaf surfaces, direction confused.
“The beginning.” Florist came forward, naked and alien, and she thought she had him. He had always felt a sense of mockery from her when she addressed him, and perhaps she had always underestimated him. A man who cut hair to change lives. She reached for him, and Stylist snorted and blew.
A million fine particles trapped on his nostril hairs flew towards Florist. Never quite immune to the countless memories and nightmares his hair dust brought, Stylist had at least come to accept them, able to tone them down so that they were little more than echoes. Now, those same dreams and memories screamed.
Florist’s eyes went wide. Stylist smiled. And then Florist laughed, and her hand swung around on an arm that seemed to be extending, growing, like a bloom searching for the sun.
The impact sent him sprawling across the ground, skidding into a planting bed where his hands sank in soft, warm soil. It felt almost alive, the touch sickeningly intimate. Plants stroked across the back of his neck and face, and in a panic he batted them away, slashing with his scissors because he thought they were reaching for him. One stem parted, one leaf fell in half. Stylist felt a moment of regret.
“Fucking idiot,” Florist muttered from behind him then, and he worked his hands and feet to power himself between plants, dodging between stems until he emerged onto a deserted path.
