of the fair?”
“Why not?” said Suzie.
We strode through the archway, shoulder to shoulder, into the face of the gusting breeze. It was bitterly cold inside the Faire, and the silence had a flat, oppressive presence. Our footsteps didn’t echo at all. The rides and attractions loomed up around us, dark skeletal structures, and the rounded, almost organic shapes of the tattered tents and concession stands. We stuck to the middle of the moonlit paths. The shimmering light couldn’t seem to penetrate the shadows. Here and there, things moved, always on the edge of my vision. Perhaps moved by the gusting wind, which seemed to be growing in strength. Suzie glared about her, shotgun at the ready. It might have been the oppressive nature of the place getting to her, or it might not. Suzie always believed in getting her retaliation in first.
We passed an old-fashioned I-Speak-Your-Weight machine, and I stopped and regarded it thoughtfully.
“I know a guy who collects these,” I said, deliberately casual. “He’s trying to teach them to sing the ‘Halleluiah Chorus.’”
“Why?” said Suzie.
“I’m not sure he’s thought that far ahead,” I admitted.
And then we broke off, as the machine stirred slowly into life before us. Parts moved inside it, grinding against each other, even though neither of us had stepped on it; and the voice-box made a low, groaning sound, as though it was in pain. The flat painted face lit up, sparking fitfully. And in a voice utterly devoid of humanity, or any human feeling, the machine spoke to us.
“John Taylor. No father, no mother. No family, no friends, no future. Hated and feared, never loved, or even appreciated. Why don’t you just die and get it over with?”
“Not even close,” I said calmly. “You’d probably get my weight wrong, too.”
“Susan Shooter,” said the voice. “Always the celibate, never the bride. No-one to touch you, ever. Not your breast, or your heart. You miss your brother, even though he sexually abused you as a child. Sometimes you dream of how it felt, when he touched you. No love for you, Susan. Not any kind of love, now or ever.”
Suzie raised her shotgun and blew the painted face apart. The machine screamed once, and then was still. Suzie pumped another shell into the magazine. “Machines should know their place,” she said.
“You can’t trust anything you hear in Fun Faire,” I said carefully. “The Devil always lies.”
“Except when a truth can hurt you more.”
“He doesn’t know you like I do,” I said. “I love you, Suzie.”
“Why?”
“Somebody has to. There’s a man for every woman, and a woman for every man. Just be glad we found each other.”
“I am,” said Suzie. And that was as far as she would go.
She spun round suddenly, her gun trained on one particular shadow. “Come out. Come out into the light where I can see you.”
Max Maxwell emerged slowly and cautiously, even bigger in life than his ghost image had suggested. He held his huge hands up to show us they were empty, and then he smiled slowly, grey lips pulling back to show grey teeth.
“You’re good, Suzie,” he said, in a low, deep voice like stones grinding together. “No-one else would have known I was there.”
“No-one sneaks up on me,” said Suzie, her shotgun trained unwaveringly on his barrel chest. His cream suit looked somehow off in the moonlight, as though it had gone sour.
“I might have known they’d send you two,” he said, apparently unmoved by the threat of the shotgun. “But I’m afraid you got here just a little too late. I didn’t come here to hide; this whole place is a sink of other-dimensional energies, and the Aquarius Key has been soaking them up for hours. Soon the Key will be strong enough to open a door into the world of the loa; and then I will go through into that world…and the power stored in the Key will make me their master. A god of gods, lord of the loa.”
“Really bad idea, Max,” I said. “Messing with gods on their own territory. They’ll eat your soul, one little bit at a time. What did you think you were doing, bringing them here and humiliating them?”
“It’s wrong that we should be at their beck and call,” said Max Maxwell, the Voodoo Apostate. “My people have worshipped them for centuries, and still the most we can hope for is that they will deign to ride us as their mounts. This is the Nightside. We have a Street full of gods,