I turned my head slowly, and looked at Cathy. What was left of her. "No," I said finally. "None of this is her fault. And I never let a client down. Take my hand, Suzie."
"What." This is no time to be getting sentimental, John."
I looked back at her. "You have to trust me on this, Suzie. Trust me to know what I'm doing. We can't fight our way out, so that just leaves me, and my gift."
Suzie looked at me for a long moment, reassuring herself that I was back in control again, and then nodded briskly. She slid her shotgun into the holster behind her shoulder and took my hand in hers. I could feel the calluses on her palm, but her grip was firm and steady. She had faith in me. Which made one of us. I sighed, tiredly, getting ready to fight the
good fight one more time, because that was all I had left.
"We need to find the heart of the house," I said. "Kill the heart, and kill the house. But the heart won't be anywhere here. The house will have hidden it somewhere else, for protection. Somewhere... no-one would be able to reach it, normally. But then, I'm not normal. I can find it. I can find anything."
Except what matters most. I reached inside myself and summoned up my gift, opening my mind again. And the house pounced.
For a long time I was nowhere, and it felt good. Good not to have to worry about bills that needed paying, cases that couldn't be solved, clients who couldn't be helped. Good not to have to worry about all the mysteries of my life, and the endless pain they brought to me and those I cared for. When I started out I had a dream, a dream of helping people who had nowhere else to turn; but dreams don't last. They can't compete with reality. The reality of struggling to find money for food and rent, and the way your feet hurt from pounding the streets looking for people who don't want to be found.
The harsh, unyielding reality of having to compromise your ideals bit by bit, day by day, just to achieve a few little victories in the face of the world's malice, or indifference. Until sometimes you wonder
if there's nothing left of you but the shell of the man you intended to be, just going through the motions because you've nothing better to do.
But somehow the dream doesn't quite die. Because in the Nightside, sometimes dreams are all that can keep you going. Give them up, and you're dead.
Growing up in the Nightside, I saw a lot of dead men walking about. They could walk and talk and go through the motions, drifting from bar to bar and from drink to drink, but there was nothing left behind their eyes. Nothing that mattered. My father was a dead man for years, long before his heart finally, mercifully, gave out, and they nailed the coffin lid down. I couldn't help him. I was only a kid.
My gift didn't kick in until much later. A gift I could use, to make a difference. For other people, if not myself.
In the safe nowhere nothing that surrounded and comforted me, gentle waves of love and affection lapped against my mind, wanting me to forget all that. To forget everything but an eternal now of love and happiness, an end to all wanting and needing, and a rest that would never end. A quiet murmuring voice promised me I could have everything I ever wanted; all I had to do was lie back and accept, and give up the fight. But I didn't believe the voice. Because the only thing I really wanted had already been taken from me, when the house took Joanna back into itself. The voice spoke more urgently, and I
sneered at it. Because underneath the voice I could still hear the endless, insatiable hunger.
My dreams. My reality. I clung to them like a drowning man, and would not give them up. They made me what I am. Not the father who ignored me, or the mother who abandoned me. Not the mysterious inheritance I never wanted, and not even the faceless hordes who'd hounded me all my life. So many influences trying to shape me, and I disowned them all. I chose to help people, because there'd been no-one there to help me when I needed it. I knew even then that I couldn't trust the Authorities to save me. My father had been one of them, and they still hadn't been able to protect him, or comfort him. I shaped my own life, determined my own destiny; and to hell with everyone and everything else.
My anger was rising now, hot and fierce and strong, and it pushed back the false promises of love and happiness, perhaps because deep down I'd never believed in such things. Not for me, anyway. The empty nothingness was fragmenting, falling apart. I could sense other people around me. Suzie Shooter, a ghost hand in mine, quietly confident in me. Cathy Barrett, understanding for the first time just how much she'd been lied to, manipulated and abused, almost as angry as I was. And somewhere close at hand ... a faint presence, a quiet voice, like the last echoes of someone who had briefly believed them-
selves to be a woman called Joanna. And I swear I felt another ghostly hand in mine.
I reached out and embraced them, binding them to me with my gift; and together we were stronger than any damned house.
I don't just find things with my gift. It can do other things too. Like identify an enemy's weak spot and attack it. I lashed out with my gift, and the house screamed, in shock and rage, pain and horror. I think it had been a very long time since anyone had been able to hurt it.
The nothing was replaced by something. An in-between place. I was standing on a bare plain that stretched out to infinity in all directions. It was a grey place, soft and hazy and indistinct. Not a real place, but real enough. A place to make a stand. Suzie and Cathy were there with me. Suzie was wearing silver armour, studded with vicious spikes. Cathy looked like she had in her old photo, only mad as hell now. I didn't look down to see how I appeared. It didn't matter. Not too far away there was another presence, too faint to be clearly seen, but I knew who it was. Who it had to be. We were all shining brightly now, luminous beings in a grey world. Together we formed a wide circle around a column of swirling darkness, shot with vivid blood-red traces, that towered endlessly up into the featureless sky. From it came the voice of the house, beating against us like hammer-blows, harsh and inhuman.
"Mine! Mine! Mine!"
But the gift was strong in me, and I just laughed at the voice. All it really had on its side was stealth and lies, and neither could serve the house here. I stepped forward, and Suzie and Cathy moved with me. The dark column actually shrank back from our light, shrinking and contracting away from us. We closed in, and the column became narrower. And all around us, on that wide and endless plain; hundreds and hundreds of insubstantial figures, standing silently, watching and hoping. All the house's victims. It hadn't just eaten their bodies; the damned thing had consumed their souls too, holding them within itself to power its unnatural existence. What was left of a woman called Joanna came forward, holding herself together despite everything the house could do to tear her apart and assimilate her, and again I felt her hand in mine. Through her I reached out to the other captive shades, silently offering them a chance for revenge, and the only freedom they could ever know now ... and they reached out to me.
Power surged through me, igniting my gift, and I blazed so very brightly as I advanced on the dark column before me. Suzie and Cathy and all the other victims advanced with me, and the house screamed and screamed. The column shrank and compacted, growing thinner and thinner, until finally I was able to join my shining hands with the trusting Suzie, the furious and betrayed Cathy, and the ghost of a
woman I could have loved. We were all shining like suns now. I gathered together all our rage and hate and need, channeling all the many victims through my gift, and struck out at the dark heart of the thing that pretended to be a house. It howled once, with impotent horror, and then the dark swirling column was suddenly gone, and the voice of the house was stilled forever.