Winter Read online

  THE DEMI-MONDE: WINTER

  Rod Rees

  Epigraph

  Demi-Monde (noun):

  1. a subclass of society whose members embrace a decadent lifestyle and evince loose morals;

  2. a shadow world where the norms of civilized behavior have been abandoned;

  3. an MMP simulation platformed on the ABBA quantum computer and utilizing ParaDigm CyberResearch’s Total Reality User Envelopment technology to re-create in a wholly realistic cyber-milieu the threat-ambiance and no-warning aspects of a high-intensity, deep-density, urban Asymmetric Warfare Environment;

  4. hell.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Map of the Demi-Monde

  Prologue

  Part One: Auditioning

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Two: Entrance

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part Three: Warsaw

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Part Four: Spring Eve

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  Glossary of Terms and Slang

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map of the Demi-Monde

  Prologue

  The Demi-Monde: 37th Day of Winter, 1004

  Norma ran. Picked up her skirts and ran as she had never run in her life. Ran as though the hounds of hell were at her heels.

  Fuck it . . . the hounds of hell are at my heels.

  And as she ran she heard a crackle of gunfire behind her, the sound of the shots ricocheting through the night-silent streets of London. The gunfire told her that Mata Hari and her Suffer-O-Gettes had kept their word. They had tried to delay those SS bastards for as long as they could. Suffer-O-Gettes died hard.

  Run, Norma, run! Mata Hari had screamed at her as Clement’s SS–Ordo Templi Aryanis thugs had smashed down the pub’s door. And she had run. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—let the SS catch her.

  Mad, evil bastards.

  But she was running blind.

  Snow-blind.

  The snow was so thick that she could barely see a dozen strides in front of her, snow that the icy wind was whipping into her eyes, making them water with pain.

  Angrily Norma shook her head, ordering herself to ignore the pain, ignore the cold, ignore the frosted numbness crawling along her fingers and her toes, ignore the protests of her mutinous body. Ordered herself to ignore everything but the need to put as much distance between herself and the animals chasing her as was humanly possible.

  She had to forget everything but the need to run. Forget that duplicitous, scheming, treacherous, underhanded, slimy son of a bitch Burlesque Bandstand.

  Bastard.

  She ran until her heart pounded in her chest, until her legs throbbed with pain, until her lungs felt as though they were on fire. She ran hard, keeping, as best she could, to the ruts in the road left by the rubber-covered wheels of a steamer, desperately trying not to leave tracks in the freshly fallen snow. Tracks they could follow.

  The sound of a hunting horn echoed behind her . . . maybe only a few streets behind her. The SS had shaken off the Suffer-O-Gettes. Now the Daemon Hunt was on in earnest.

  Run, Norma, run!

  Yes, now she was sure she could hear them. She could hear the smash of the gang’s hobnailed boots snapping through the tight streets and along the narrow alleys that made up the Rookeries. She could hear the bellowed shouts of that hideous, hideous man—boy, rather—Archie Clement and the screams of his pack of Blood Hounders as he flogged them in pursuit.

  The leather soles of her boots skidded on cobbles patinaed by a slick coating of snow, sending her tumbling into the fetid gutter, sending her sliding on her knees and on her outspread hands. The pain as the stones ripped through her skin was excruciating, but driven by adrenaline and the knowledge of the fate that awaited her if she was captured, without even pausing to inspect the damage to her body she rose to her feet and began to hobble on, sobbing with pain, desperation and terror.

  Get a grip, Norma.

  This was no time for weakness. Not now that she was cut. Cuts seeped blood. The Hounders would just love that. It’d drive them crazy . . . blood-crazy. Now they’d have her spoor for sure.

  As though in reply she heard the mournful howl of a Hounder as it picked up the scent of her blood.

  Run. Don’t give up.

  Maybe the snow would cover her tracks . . . cover her blood trail.

  Please, please, snow harder.

  She slowed at the corner of the street, trying to get her bearings, trying to catch her breath. For a gasping instant she looked around to check the street signs. So near: she was only three blocks away from the Thames . . . from freedom. Just another couple of hundred yards along the backstreets shadowing Regent Street and she’d be out of the Rookeries. Just three more blocks and she’d be able to see the Awful Tower.

  Her breath was shorter now, her body rippling, trembling uncontrollably with cold and exhaustion. There was another eddy of wind and she felt the sleet cut across her face, felt the cold scythe through the thin cotton of her blouse. She had never been so cold in all her life. When she had made her escape from the Prancing Pig there hadn’t been time to search for a coat or a hat or a pair of gloves.

  There had just been time to run.

  If she didn’t get out of the snow soon she’d be finished. Frozen to death.

  Concentrate.

  This wasn’t a computer game. Not anymore. She wasn’t just a player. Not anymore. Now she was one of the Kept. Now she was a Demi-Mondian.

  Damn it all, concentrate, Norma. Die in the Demi-Monde and you die in the Real World.

  Another plaintive howl from a Hounder. They were getting closer.

  She pushed herself forward, slipped on the icy cobbles and caromed painfully against a wall, tearing the shoulder of her blouse and scraping skin from her arm.

  Ignore it.

  But she couldn’t. The pain and the cold and the tiredness overcame her desperation. She did her best to keep moving but she was spent.

  Now all she had the strength to do was limp as fast as she was able toward the sanctuary of the French Sector. Just get to the Pons Fabricius . . . once across the Thames she’d be in Paris, only minutes away from the Portal.

  Please, God . . .

  She could smell the river, that sweet, sickly stew of ships, slaves and sewage. So close. And it was snowing even harder now. Wonderful, glorious snow, snow that would cover her tracks.

  Still the thought nagged at her that this was all nonsense. This couldn’t—shouldn’t—be happening. It seemed impossible for her to have been caught up in such a terrifying surreality . . . in such a terrifying reality. Yeah, the Demi-Monde was real all right. Too fucking real. The pain she was feeling was real. The cold was real. The fear was real.

  As she stumbled along she threw a glance over her shoulder, peering into the dark, snow-shrouded streets of the R
ookeries. She couldn’t hear her pursuers anymore. Maybe she’d lost them? Maybe they’d abandoned the chase? Maybe her young legs had outrun theirs?

  Fat chance.

  They never gave up. No one wanted to go back to Crowley and tell him they’d failed. Even Clement was scared of Crowley. No, they would hunt her down like the pack of rabid dogs they were. And she knew she wouldn’t be able to go much further. She was finished, defeated by the cold. She had to find somewhere to hide.

  Looking around she saw, ten feet on from where she was standing, the entrance to a narrow alleyway, an alleyway without streetlights, its darkness so complete that no one, not even Clement, would be able to find her in there. Maybe he wouldn’t even want to follow her in there. No one knew what was hidden in the shadows of the Demi-Monde, the shadows hiding the horrible things that crept out of the Hub.

  Terrific.

  Norma limped painfully toward the beckoning darkness and dodged down the black, rancid alley. Skirting along the twisted tenement walls that crowded in on her—trying to ignore the unspeakable things that scuttled about in the shadows—Norma found a dark doorway that offered a semblance of safety.

  Hidden there, she stood for a moment bent over, hands on knees, trying to catch her breath, trying to pant new energy into her cold, aching body, all the time trying to still her sobbing, trying to stay quiet. She had to remain quiet.

  Please don’t let them hear me.

  Norma shook her head, trying to clear it. This was wrong . . . what she was feeling . . . what she was enduring . . . wrong. She was an eighteen-year-old girl and this, she kept reminding herself, was just a computer simulation. Eighteen-year-old girls didn’t get hurt or feel pain and panic in make-believe worlds. Even make-believe worlds as made-believable as the Demi-Monde.

  You didn’t feel fear playing a computer game, not horrible gut-wrenching, stomach-churning fear like this. It was wrong. Totally, totally wrong. If what they—they?—were putting her through was deliberate, it was sadistic.

  Bastards.

  She looked around. It was pitch-dark, the only illumination provided by the light seeping out from behind a half-open door at the end of the cobbled alley, the light spilling onto the facing wall to show the graffiti crawling over the scarred brickwork.

  The only Good nuJu is a Dead nuJu

  Welcome to the Demi-Monde.

  She tried to relax. The alley was a good place to hide. Except . . . except that it was a dead end. She was trapped. She felt the bilious taste of panic rising up in her throat. Her head swam and she thought she would faint from cold, exhaustion and sheer unadulterated terror. Maybe she was ill. What did the prof call it . . . ill-ucinating?

  Ill-ucinating.

  A condition caused by the confusion of Realities, often experienced by inveterate players of hyper-realistic computer simulations such as the Demi-Monde. The prof had a lot to answer for.

  Bastard.

  When she told her father what she’d been through there’d be hell to pay. He’d go ballistic. The cyber-torturing of his daughter wasn’t something the president of the United States would be big on. The things she’d tell her father when she got back.

  If she got back.

  She heard the scrape of boot heels on cobbles. She pressed back into the darkness, hardly daring to breathe, motionless apart from the shivers of cold rippling over her flesh. She clenched her jaw tight shut, trying to stop her teeth chattering.

  A shout, the voice hard and merciless but at the same time childish . . . Clement’s voice. She should have known Clement would be the one leading the hunt. Lunatic he might be but he was smarter than all of them. It would be his Hounders who had followed the bloody tracks she’d left in her wake.

  Hounders: horrible, horrible things.

  She could hear orders being shouted, could hear the snapped replies from Clement’s SS troopers. She hated the SS. The SS were the most fanatical of the fanatical. They never questioned orders. They were the true believers. They were the ones charged with the protection of the ForthRight’s black soul and with enforcing the perverted creed of UnFunDaMentalism. They were the ones responsible for safeguarding the Demi-Monde from Daemons . . . Daemons like Norma.

  She heard an urgent and heated conversation coming to her from around the corner of the alleyway. Maybe they’d lost her? Maybe the snow had come in the nick of time? She edged her head out of her doorway, trying to make out what was being said. The conversation stopped, only the whimpering of a Hounder signaling that Clement’s hunting party was still nearby. The silence seemed oppressive . . . threatening. Her body was taut with panic: she was ready to run again. Run for her life.

  Run where?

  The pain as the cane lashed across her knee was indescribable; it smashed up through her body, paralyzing her in shock.

  Norma had never imagined that the human body could have so much suffering inflicted upon it. The pain was so bad that she didn’t even scream or cry out: she was stunned into a gagging silence, her eyes bleeding tears of agony, her right leg twitching in numbed torment. Her ruined knee buckled and she sank to the cobbles.

  She must have blacked out. When she came to, she found herself lying in a pool of icy water. A dozen or so men moved to circle her, their shadowed faces peering down. She felt all hope drain out of her: even in the Demi-Monde the two men who stood at the front of the pack were known as the hardest and the cruelest of them all.

  Singularities.

  They were men without pity, without conscience and without remorse. Men who could laugh even as they slaughtered the innocent and the helpless: psychopaths.

  Bastards.

  Evil, evil bastards.

  Norma knew the two men who stood over her. Su Xiaoxiao had warned her about them when she had first entered the Demi-Monde. Told her to avoid them. Told her they represented the more dangerous of the Dupes that populated this cyber-world, warned her that Matthew Hopkins was Clement’s creature and Clement was, in turn, the unthinking disciple of His Holiness Comrade Crowley.

  Automatically, instinctively, the would-be politician cowering inside Norma’s bruised and bloodied body studied the two men. She’d always been fascinated by psychopaths, the most fatally flawed of men, whose souls were blistered and hardened by hatred and wickedness, and it was this fascination that Crowley had used as bait to lure her into the Demi-Monde. But it was one thing to read textbooks and write papers on the genesis, on the diagnosis and on the treatment of psychotics; it was quite another to look such evil full in the face. Their eyes were empty, crystal-cold and shark-black. They were eyes that contained no humanity and no forgiveness.

  Doll’s eyes.

  Suddenly one of the Blood Hounders sprang at Norma, the beast obviously incensed by the smell of blood coming from her tattered knees. Clement beat at the creature with the leather switch he carried. “Back, damn your eyes, you spawn of Loki,” he snarled, thrashing the Hounder until the pain of the whipping exceeded the creature’s bloodlust and it cowered back. “You,” he growled at the Hounder’s handler, “hold the thing fast or by ABBA ah’ll knout you to ribbons and rip out your eyes.”

  Terrified by the venom in the boy’s voice, the handler hauled on the rope tethered to the Hounder’s collar and pulled the hideous creature away from Norma. She hated Hounders. Half-man, half-animal, they were the obscene creation of Archie Clement, who had abducted perfumiers from the Quartier Chaud, and by blinding and deafening them, by ripping out their tongues and chopping off their fingers, he had removed all their senses but one: their sense of smell. Then he had stoked their bloodlust to a frenzy. The result was that these monsters could smell a single drop of blood at a hundred yards. Clement used Hounders to track Daemons. Daemons like Norma.

  Clement stepped forward to stand over her as she lay shivering on the cobbles.

  Little Archie Clement, who in the Real World had ridden for the Confederacy under Bloody Bill Anderson, who had fallen into the habit of scalping all the men, women and children he murde
red as he rampaged through the South, and who was friend and partner in crime to Jesse James.

  Even if she hadn’t been forewarned by Su Xiaoxiao that his boyishness and his wide-eyed innocence masked a spirit so twisted and bent that he could hardly be called human, she would have known to avoid him. Yes . . . though small, almost frail-looking, Clement had such a hateful aura about him that even the ferocious Beria was careful in his presence.

  Clement took off his peaked cap and wiped his brow with his sleeve. It still shocked Norma how real Demi-Mondians were, how flawlessly these Dupes had been rendered. No, that wasn’t right: it was the very fact that they weren’t flawless that made them so perfect. Little things . . . like the mud-flecked slush that splattered the black of the boy’s uniform; how down-at-heel his boots were; how spittle sprayed from his mouth whenever he spoke; and how wonderfully contrived was his sweet, noxious body odor that perfumed the still air of the Demi-Monde, an odor that reeked of Solution, tobacco and a negligent attitude to washing.

  The perverted genius of the Demi-Monde was in the detail. Loki was in the detail. ABBA was in the detail.

  And ABBA was God in the Demi-Monde.

  Clement smiled down at Norma, a smile that displayed his tobacco-blackened teeth and sucked all the hope out of her soul. He gave her an exploratory prod with the toe of his boot. “You best examine the wench real careful, Witchfinder,” he ordered in his piping, adolescent voice. “Ah need to be certain sure that she is who we think she is. Far as ah can see she ain’t sporting horns or a tail, like ah’m told Daemons are wont to do. So test her close, Witchfinder; ah’ll have no mistakes on mah watch.”