Nightside 08 - The Unnatural Inquirer

Nightside 08 - The Unnatural Inquirer Read Free Page A

Book: Nightside 08 - The Unnatural Inquirer Read Free
Author: Simon R. Green
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us right through the centre of the Nightside, and out the other side, and I had a bad feeling I knew where he was headed. Bad as the Nightside undoubtedly is, even it has its recognised Bad Places, places you simply don’t go if you’ve got any sense. One of these is Fun Faire. It was supposed to be the Nightside’s very first amusement park, for adults. Someone’s Big Idea; but it never caught on. The people who come to the Nightside aren’t interested in artificial thrills; not when there are so many of the real thing available on every street corner. Fun Faire was shut down years ago, and the only reason it’s still taking up valuable space is because the various creditors are still arguing over who owns what. Now, it’s just a collection of huge rusting rides, great hulking structures left to rot in the cold, uncaring night.
    Last I’d heard, they’d run through fourteen major league exorcists, merely trying to keep the place quiet.
    Max had chosen Fun Faire as his bolt-hole precisely because so many bad things had happened there. So much death and suffering, so much cheerful slaughter and infernal malice, had turned the Fun Faire grounds into one big psychic null spot. The genius loci had become so awful, so soaked in blood and terror, that no-one could See into it. Which made it a really good place to hide out, for as long as you could stand it.
    Suzie and I stopped at the amusement park entrance, and stood there, looking in. Max’s ghost image had snapped off the moment he walked through the main archway. I shut down my Sight. The great multi-coloured arch loomed above us, paint peeling and speckled with rust. The old neon letters along the top that had once blazed the words FUN FAIRE! to an unsuspecting public were now cracked and dusty and lifeless. Someone had spray-painted over them ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. Graveyard humour, but I had to admire their nerve. Beyond the archway it was all dark shapes and darker shadows, the metal bones of old rides standing out in stark silhouettes against the night sky. No lights, anywhere in Fun Faire. Only the uneasy shimmering blue-white glare of the full moon, marking out the paths between the rides. A glowing maze, where the monster wasn’t trapped in the centre any more. A slow breeze issued out of the arch, pressing against my face, cold as the grave.
    Bad things had happened here, and perhaps were still happening, on some level. You can’t kill that many people, spill that much blood, delight in that much suffering and slaughter, and not leave a stain on Time itself.
    It all started out so well. The Fun Faire did have its share of unusual, high-risk, high-excitement attractions. Just the thing to tempt the jaded palates of Nightside aesthetes. Or perhaps even the worst of us need to play at being children again, just for a while. So, the Dodgems of Doom could hit Mach 2 and came equipped with mounted machine-guns. The planes on the Tilt-A-Wheel had heat-seeking missiles and ejector seats. The Ghost Train was operated by real ghosts, the Tunnel of Love by a real succubus. The roller coaster guaranteed to rotate you through at last five different spatial dimensions or your money back. And the candy floss came treated with a hundred and one different psychotropic drugs.
    But eventually someone noticed that though an awful lot of people were going into Fun Faire, a significant percentage weren’t coming out again.
    And then it all went to Hell.
    No-one’s too sure what started it. Best guess is someone put a curse on the place, for whatever reason. The first clue that something was severely wrong came when the wooden horses on the Merry-Go-Round became possessed by demons and started eating their riders. The Tilt-A-Wheel speeded itself up and sent its mock planes shooting off into space. They didn’t fly far. The roller coaster disappeared into another dimension, taking its passengers with it, and never returned. Distorted reflections burst out of the

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