Nightingale's lament - By Simon R. Green Page 0,55

shrugged. "Whatever you choose to do with her, it all costs the same. Cash only, of course."

"Go on up, John," said Dead Boy. "I'll have a nice little chat with Grey."

He moved forward, and Grey fell back, because people do when Dead Boy comes walking right at them. Grey quickly recovered himself and put out a hand to stop Dead Boy. Magic sparkled briefly on the air between them, then sputtered and went out. Grey backed up against a wall, his eyes very large.

"Who . . . what are you?"

"I'm Dead Boy. And that's all you need to know. Get a move on, John. I don't want to be here all night."

I pulled the door shut behind me, strode past Dead Boy and Grey, and started up the narrow stairs. Sylvia was on the next floor. I could feel it. The house was cold and grim, and the shadows were very dark and very deep. The stairs were bare wood, without carpeting, but still my feet made hardly any sound as I climbed. It was like moving through one of those houses we find in nightmares. Familiar and yet horribly alien, where every door and every window is a threat, every sight heavy with terrible significance. Distances seemed to stretch and contract, and it took forever to get to the top of the stairs.

There was a door right in front of me. A terrible door, holding awful secrets behind it. I stood there, breathing hard, but whether from fear or anticipation I couldn't tell. It was Sylvia's door. I didn't need to be told that. I could feel her presence, like the pressure of a coming storm on the evening air. I pushed the door with the fingertips of one hand, and it swung smoothly open before me, inviting me in. I smelled something that made my nostrils flare, and I walked in.

In the room, in the red room, in the room of rose-petal light and shifting shadows, it was like walking into a woman's body. It was warm and humid, and the still air was heavy with sweat and musk and perfumed hair. There was no obvious source for the light, but there were shadows everywhere, as though the delights the room offered were too subtle to be exposed by bright light. I felt welcomed and desired, and I never wanted to leave.

It was like walking into an antechamber of Hell. And I loved it.

The woman lying at her ease on the oversized bed, naked and smiling and unashamed, was entirely horrible and horribly attractive, like a taste for rotting meat or Russian roulette. She squirmed slowly on the crimson covers like a single maggot in a pool of blood. The details of her face and shape were always moving, changing, shifting subtly from one moment to the next, and even her height and weight were never constant. She could have been one woman or a hundred, or a hundred women in one. Her movements were slow and languorous, and her skin was as white as the white of an eye. Her face was a hundred kinds of beautiful, even when it was unbearably ugly. Her bone structures rose and fell like the turning of the tide, her mouth pursed and widened and changed colour, and her dark, dark eyes promised the kind of pleasures that would make a man cry out in self-disgust as much as passion. I wanted her like I'd never wanted anyone. Her presence filled the room, overpoweringly sexual, awfully female.

And I wanted her the way you always want things you know are bad for you.

"John Taylor," said the woman on the bed. Her voice was soft and caressing, every woman's voice in one. "They thought you might come here. The Cavendishes. I've been so looking forward to having you. They're the ones who made me what I am, even if the result wasn't exactly what they intended. I was just a singer in those days, and a good singer, too, but that wasn't enough for the Cavendishes. They wanted a star who would appeal to absolutely everyone. And this is what they got, this is what their money bought. A woman transformed, a chimera of sex, everything anyone ever desired, and a joy forever."

She laughed, but there was little humour and less humanity in the sound. Her flesh pulsed and shifted in slow rolling movements, never the same twice. My skin crawled, and I couldn't look away to save my life. I had an