Tales From the Nightside by Simon R. Green

Author:Simon R. Green [Green, Simon R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Contemporary, Collections & Anthologies, Paranormal, Literary
ISBN: 9780425270752
Google: qf_IoAEACAAJ
Amazon: B00KWG61JG
Barnesnoble: B00KWG61JG
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 2015-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

HOW DO YOU FEEL?

It’s not easy having a sex life when you’re dead.

• • •

I was sitting at the bar in Strangefellows, the oldest pub, night-club, and supernatural drinking hole in the world, smoking and drinking and popping my special pills . . . Trying to feel something, anything at all. I don’t need to drink or eat, any more than I need to breathe, but I like to pretend. It makes being dead easier to bear. Without my special pills and potions, I don’t feel much of anything. And even with the pills, only the most extreme sensations can affect me.

So I drank the most expensive Napoleonic brandy, and smoked a thick Turkish cigar threaded with opium, and still all I felt was the barest shadows of sensation, pinpoints of pleasure flaring briefly in my mouth, like stars going out. I was on the last of my pills, and my body was shutting down again.

I looked at myself in the long mirror behind the bar; and Dead Boy looked back at me. Tall and adolescent thin, wrapped in a heavy, deep purple greatcoat with a black rose at the lapel, over black leather trousers and calf-skin boots; the coat hung open to show a pale grey torso, pock-marked with bullet-holes and other wounds, old scar tissue and accumulated damage. Including the Y-shaped autopsy scar. Stitches, staples, superglue, and the odd length of black duct tape, held everything together. A large, floppy hat, crushed down over thick, curly black hair. A pale face, dark, fever-bright eyes, and a colourless mouth set in a flat, grim line.

Dead Boy.

I toasted myself with the brandy bottle. I like brandy. It doesn’t mess about, and it gets the job done. With the pills to push it along, I can almost get drunk; and, of course, I never have to worry about hangovers. I indulge my senses as much as I can, for fear of losing them. I sometimes wonder whether my human emotions might start to fade, too, if I didn’t remember to exercise them frequently. I may be dead; but there’s life in the old carcass yet.

I put my back to the unpolished wooden bar and looked around me. The place was packed, and the crowd was jumping. All the flotsam and jetsam of the Nightside, that dark and magical hidden heart of London, where the night people come out to play. Lost souls and abandoned dreamers, gods and monsters, golden boys and red-lipped girls, all of them hot in pursuit of pleasures that might not have a name but most certainly have a price.

It seemed like there were lovers everywhere that night, and I looked on them all with simple envy, jealous of the everyday joys I could never experience. A young man sat smiling happily while a female vampire chewed hungrily on the mess she’d made of his neck. If he could see past her glamour, and see her as I saw her, he wouldn’t be smiling so easily. Any vampire is just a corpse that’s dug its way up out of its grave to feast on the living.

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