Read Online Tales of the Hidden World by Simon R. Green - Free Book Online
Authors: Simon R. Green
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real trouble: someone from the Jewish Defense League has unleashed a Golem on a march by British Nazi skinheads. The Golem is picking them up and throwing them about, and the ones who aren’t busy bleeding or crying or wetting themselves are legging it for the horizon. I feel like standing back and applauding, but I can’t let this go on. Someone might notice. So I wade in, ducking under the Golem’s flailing arms, until I can wipe the activating word off its forehead. It goes still then, nothing more than lifeless clay, and I put in a call for it to be towed away. Someone higher up will have words with someone else, and hopefully I won’t have to do this again. For a while.
I take some hard knocks and a bloody nose, before I can shut the Golem down, so I take time out to lean against a stone wall and feel sorry for myself. My healing spells only work on other people. The few skinheads picking themselves up off the pavement aren’t sympathetic. They know where my sympathies lie. Some of them make aggressive noises, until I give them a hard look, and then they remember they’re needed somewhere else.
I could always turn the Golem back on, and they know it.
I head off on my beat again, picking them up and slapping them down, aching quietly here and there. Demons and pixies and golems, oh my. Just another night, in Soho.
Keep walking, keep walking. Protect the ones you can, and try not to dwell on the ones you can’t. Sweep up the mess, drive off the predators, and keep the world from ever finding out. That’s the job. Lots of responsibility, hardly any authority, and the pay sucks. I say as much to Red when we bump into each other at the end of our shifts. She clucks over my bruises and offers me a nip from her hip flask. It’s surprisingly good stuff.
“Why do you do it, Charlie boy? Hard work and harder luck, with nothing to show but bruises and bad language from the very people you’re here to help? It can’t be the money; I probably make more than you do.”
“No,” I say. “It’s not the money.”
I think of all the things I See every night, that most of the world never knows exists. The marvelous and the fantastic, the strange creatures and stranger people: gods and monsters and all the wonders of the hidden world. I walk in magic and work miracles, and the night is full of glory. How could I ever turn my back on all that?
“Why don’t you just walk away?” says Red.
“What?” I say. “And leave show business?”
I’ve never made any secret of the fact that the Nightside is based on London’s Soho, or at least Soho as I knew it back in the day, when history was already turning into legend—when the bad old days were mostly over, but there was still plenty of sin to go around if you knew where to look. With this story, I wanted to show an ordinary working stiff, cleaning up the supernatural messes other people leave behind. The people and the setting are probably the closest I’ve ever come to describing the Soho I knew.
Death Is a Lady
I once had a near-death experience. This was back in 1972, before they became fashionable and everyone was having them. Which is probably why mine bears little or no resemblance to latter descriptions. Or perhaps I just need to be different in everything.
I was on a walking holiday in the Lake District. Seventeen years old, bright and bushy-tailed, hair halfway down my back. Well, it was 1972. I walked fifteen miles a day and spent every evening in the pub. I couldn’t do that now; it would kill me.
Halfway through the week, I took a nasty fall, split my head open, and woke up in hospital. But while I was out, I had a dream that was not a dream. It did not feel anything like a dream, but it was some years, before I was able to put a name to it.
There was darkness, and then I was sitting in a stuffed leather chair before a crackling open fire in an old Victorian study. Books on the walls, gas lamps, blocky old Victorian furniture. Slow ticking clock.
I take some hard knocks and a bloody nose, before I can shut the Golem down, so I take time out to lean against a stone wall and feel sorry for myself. My healing spells only work on other people. The few skinheads picking themselves up off the pavement aren’t sympathetic. They know where my sympathies lie. Some of them make aggressive noises, until I give them a hard look, and then they remember they’re needed somewhere else.
I could always turn the Golem back on, and they know it.
I head off on my beat again, picking them up and slapping them down, aching quietly here and there. Demons and pixies and golems, oh my. Just another night, in Soho.
Keep walking, keep walking. Protect the ones you can, and try not to dwell on the ones you can’t. Sweep up the mess, drive off the predators, and keep the world from ever finding out. That’s the job. Lots of responsibility, hardly any authority, and the pay sucks. I say as much to Red when we bump into each other at the end of our shifts. She clucks over my bruises and offers me a nip from her hip flask. It’s surprisingly good stuff.
“Why do you do it, Charlie boy? Hard work and harder luck, with nothing to show but bruises and bad language from the very people you’re here to help? It can’t be the money; I probably make more than you do.”
“No,” I say. “It’s not the money.”
I think of all the things I See every night, that most of the world never knows exists. The marvelous and the fantastic, the strange creatures and stranger people: gods and monsters and all the wonders of the hidden world. I walk in magic and work miracles, and the night is full of glory. How could I ever turn my back on all that?
“Why don’t you just walk away?” says Red.
“What?” I say. “And leave show business?”
I’ve never made any secret of the fact that the Nightside is based on London’s Soho, or at least Soho as I knew it back in the day, when history was already turning into legend—when the bad old days were mostly over, but there was still plenty of sin to go around if you knew where to look. With this story, I wanted to show an ordinary working stiff, cleaning up the supernatural messes other people leave behind. The people and the setting are probably the closest I’ve ever come to describing the Soho I knew.
Death Is a Lady
I once had a near-death experience. This was back in 1972, before they became fashionable and everyone was having them. Which is probably why mine bears little or no resemblance to latter descriptions. Or perhaps I just need to be different in everything.
I was on a walking holiday in the Lake District. Seventeen years old, bright and bushy-tailed, hair halfway down my back. Well, it was 1972. I walked fifteen miles a day and spent every evening in the pub. I couldn’t do that now; it would kill me.
Halfway through the week, I took a nasty fall, split my head open, and woke up in hospital. But while I was out, I had a dream that was not a dream. It did not feel anything like a dream, but it was some years, before I was able to put a name to it.
There was darkness, and then I was sitting in a stuffed leather chair before a crackling open fire in an old Victorian study. Books on the walls, gas lamps, blocky old Victorian furniture. Slow ticking clock.
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