Just Another Judgement Day Read Free

basis.
     
    “But that’s all stopped! They don’t need the clinics any more, just this Parlour. And they all look like teenagers! It’s not fair!”
     
    “Well,” I said reasonably, “If this Parlour is doing such a good job, why don’t you go there, too?”
     
    “Because they won’t have me!” Percy slumped in his chair, and suddenly looked ten years older, as though he could only maintain his air of glamour through sheer effort of will these days. “I have offered to pay anything they want. Double, even triple the going rate. I begged and pleaded, Mr. Taylor! And they turned me away, as though I were nobody. Me! Percy D’Arcy! And now my friends don’t want me around any more. They say I don’t . . . fit in.
     
    “Please, Mr. Taylor, I need you to find out what’s going on. Find out why the Parlour won’t let me in. Find out what they’re really doing behind those closed doors . . . and if they are cheating, shut them down! So I won’t be left out any more.”
     
    “It’s not really my usual kind of case,” I said.
     
    “I’ll pay you half a million pounds.”
     
    “But clearly this is something that needs to be investigated. Leave it with me, Percy.”
     
    He stood up abruptly, pulling his dignity back about him. “Here’s my card. Please inform me when you know something.” He tossed a very expensive piece of engraved paste-board on to the table before me, then stalked off back through the crowd with his head held high. A smattering of applause followed him. I picked up the card, tapped it thoughtfully against my chin a few times, and looked at Suzie.
     
    “It’s something to do,” I said. “You interested?”
     
    “I’ll come along,” said Suzie. “Just to keep you company. Will I get to kill anybody?”
     
    “Probably not.”
     
    Suzie shrugged. “The things I do for love.”
     
     
     
    In the sane and normal world outside the Nightside, if you’re getting older and starting to look your age, there’s always cosmetic surgery and associated treatments. In the Nightside, the rich and the famous and the powerful have access to other options, some of them quite spectacularly nasty and extreme.
     
    The Guaranteed New You Parlour was situated in Uptown, the very best part of the Nightside, offering only the very best services for the very best people. Suzie and I went there anyway. The rent-a-cops in their colourful private uniforms took one look at us and decided they were needed urgently somewhere else. The neon there was just as hot, but perhaps a little more restrained, and the clubs and restaurants and discreet establishments glowed in the night like burning jewels. And the lost souls filling the streets and squares were all pounding the pavements in search of a better class of damnation.
     
    In Uptown, even the Devil wears a tie.
     
    The Guaranteed New You Parlour occupied the site of what used to be a rather tacky place called The Cutting Edge, an S&M joint for people with a surgery fetish. It got closed down for cutting corners on the after-care services, and for being too damned tacky even for the Nightside. The new owner had pulled the old place down and started over, so the Parlour was a gleaming new edifice of steel and glass, style and class, with pale-veined marble for the entrance lobby. Someone had spent a lot of money pushing the place up-market, and it showed. But then, money attracts money.
     
    Suzie and I studied the Parlour from the other side of the street. Very rich people came and went, in stretch limousines and private ambulances, but though a great many old people went in, only young people came out. Which was . . . odd. There are ways of turning back the clock to be found in the Nightside, but the price nearly always involves your soul, or someone else’s. And there are any number of places that will sell you false youth, but nothing that lasts. What did the Guaranteed New You Parlour have that no-one else could provide?
     
    I headed for