#329: Untold Tales of the Ghost Taxis
Thumping headache. Tangled bedsheets. Unfamiliar bedroom.
Bill Reed had been here before.
Well, not here, exactly. The room wasn’t anywhere he recognised. It was a cramped seedy hovel with peeling 70s wallpaper and a threadbare carpet. A few attempts had been made by somebody with a strictly limited budget to brighten the place up, but the attempts were doomed. The morning light was filtered grey through the narrow alley outside the small security-barred window.
“Uh oh,” Bill swallowed. Once before the young hero called Nats had awoken in a strange place beside a girl he’d never expected to take to bed. On that occasion he’d also married her in his drunken haze, and he’d nearly triggered a war of genocide with the Abhuman race.
A wave of panic washed the last sleep from his brain. He didn’t remember getting drunk. Then again, he didn’t remember anything about last night or how he had got here.
The room gave remarkably few clues. There was on old chipped dresser with a cheap new mirror; a wardrobe with a broken lock held shut with a length of string; a pile of female laundry in the corner.
There was an indentation on the mattress beside Bill, a warm spot where somebody had laid until very recently. There was the sound of ancient plumbing as somebody worked the shower in the next room.
Bill did a quick check and found he was fully clothed apart from his boots and flying jacket.
“Uhuna?” Bill called tentatively, hopefully. Maybe the break had been shorter than they’d expected. He knew that Flapjack was keeping a book.
There were a few strands of long pale hair on his denim shirt.
“Regret?”
A girl stalked in through the half-open bedroom door, a towel wrapped around her wet torso, her arms raised as she rubbed her hair with a second cloth. “Loads of them, darling,” she told her guest. “You?”
Nats blinked in surprise. “Ruby?” he recognised. “Ruby Waver?” He hastily glanced round for the hidden camera. Last time he’d encountered Ruby was when she’d published her tell-all biography accusing Nats of seducing and abusing her.
“Yeah. In the flesh,” agreed the woman. “Morning, you bastard.”
Bill swallowed hard. There was no way to fly out of here. A wet woman in only a towel was blocking the only exit. “Ummm…” he managed to say.
“Yeah,” agreed Ruby. “So why now?”
“Er, why now what?” Nats asked cautiously.
“Why now turn up on my doorstep at two in the morning, shivering and incoherent, and collapse at my feet?” the girl demanded. She unwrapped the towel from her head and reached for a hairdryer. Her hair was short-cropped and brown.
“I did that? Only I don’t actually remember.”
“Well that’s convenient. I hear that excuse has worked pretty well for you before.”
“I don’t, Ruby. Last thing I recall was… hunting for an apartment. With Dancer.”
Ruby raised an eyebrow. “Dancer now is it? You really have become a playa, haven’t you Bill?”
“Not like that. I mean Dancer was helping me find a place to live. Away from the Lair Mansion. I’ve been… out of town.”
“You’ve been the accidental ruler of a plane of hell, then you were dropped into Comic-book Limbo having eternal coitus with that Abhuman sex-princess of yours,” Ruby summarised. “I have sources.”
“Well yes, all of that,” agreed Nats. “Some of it was really less fun than you’d imagine. Especially the hell part. But I’m back now, trying to rebuild my life. That’s what I was trying yesterday when… um, what day is it?”
“Monday,” Ruby told him. “All day long. I’ve got to get ready for work.”
“Monday? It can’t be Monday! Yesterday was Saturday!”
“It really wasn’t,” the girl assured him. Since Bill didn’t seem to be taking the I’m-going-to-be-late-for-my-job hints she just dropped the towel round her torso and rummaged in the laundry pile for something not too smelly to wear. It wasn’t like Nats couldn’t have had all areas access to Ruby back in the day if he’d not run off after Uhunalura.
“Urk.”
“Yeah, I’m stunning,” Ruby told him, pulling a jersey over her head. “Your loss, Reed.”
Nats was still trying to catch up on his life. It seemed to be heading off in strange directions without consulting him. “So you and me, we didn’t…?”
“Last night? You just showed up outside. I found you slumped against my door when I got back from my shift at the Laundry. I dragged you in here and put you to bed to sleep it off.”
“And slept with me.”
“Only one bed, darling. I didn’t take advantage.”
“You could have called the Legion.”
“I try to stay away from them these days. They weren’t happy about that tell-all book and I wasn’t happy about their our-member-right-or-wrong attitude. So I just dumped you in bed and warmed my feet on you. You want to tell me now what really happened? Did you want to come and sort things out between us, after all that went sour?”
Nats shook his head. “No. I mean, not no, I didn’t want to. Just I didn’t intend to. Right now. It wasn’t on my mind. Top of my list. I wasn’t thinking about you or us. As far as I can remember.”
Ruby shimmied into a pair of panties. “You won’t forget me any time soon,” she promised.
“I really won’t. But Ruby, I’ve lost thirty-six hours. What did I say to you last night? What was I like?”
“You were really out of it,” admitted the girl. “Shivering and freezing cold. Staring around. You didn’t really speak much.”
“But I did speak? What did I say?”
“You didn’t seem to know who I was,” Ruby reported. “But that’s nothing new, right? And when I first dragged you up here, before you completely passed out, you kept hunting under the furniture and stuff, peering into my wardrobe, dragging open drawers. Pretty rude really. You kept asking ‘where is it?’”
“Where is what? What was I looking for?”
Ruby shrugged and stepped into her shoes. “That’s what I asked, but you wouldn’t say. All you’d tell me was that you wanted to find your stick.”
***
The rain was bouncing down hard enough to wet travellers up to the knees just from the splashes. Snookie continued to cling to her umbrella like a talisman to prevent death by deluge; and also to restrain her from beating her employer to death with it.
“I could have had a future,” she berated Arnie J. Armbruster, sometimes-attorney-at-law. “I could have married a billionaire, or started a dot com, or gone on American Idol.”
“I wish you would,” answered AJA blurrily. The haranguing wasn’t helping his hangover and the downpour had turned the contents of his pockets into sticky wads. “Then I could sell my tell-all story.”
“But I can’t,” Snookie argued. “On account of me following you into this death trap maze of slum backalleys, where I will be robbed and raped and murdered and probably much worse by savage ganglords crazed on illegal amphetamines.”
“We shouldn’t have turned left by the KFC,” Arnie considered. “I had a map but it’s kind of a wet lump now. At least I hope that’s what’s seeping out of my pants. Besides, this isn’t that bad a neighbourhood.”
“It’s called Hell’s Bathroom,” Snookie pointed out. “There was a cop car back there jacked up on bricks.”
“I’m pretty sure we’ll find a taxi rank sometime soon,” her employer assured her, staggering as his foot slipped into the rain-washed gutter, vanishing up to his calf. “I’d call for a phone only my mobile seems to have shorted out and discharged the battery into my crotch. It wasn’t so bad.”
“The one hope we have is that all the muggers might have drowned,” his secretary said hopefully. “We may only be in mortal danger from sub-aqua robber rapist murderers.”
Arnie tried to wring out his sock. “Well, we’ll keep a special look out for them, then,” he promised. “Meanwhile we could…”
“TAXI!” yelled Snookie, bouncing up and down and wildly waving her umbrella. There, appearing through the thick spray, was a familiar grey and yellow shape. “Stop it, Arnie! Stop it!”
“It’s not got a light on,” AJA noted. “It might be off-duty.”
“Stop it!” Snookie demanded, pushing her boss into the road. “Stop it or die trying!”
Arnie waved his arms to stop the cab.
The Ghost Taxi drove straight through him.
“Urp,” he said, looking confused. “Am I dead?”
“Oh you so are,” promised Snookie. “You didn’t stop that cab.”
***
Twenty-five minutes through heavy Gothametropolis traffic from Ruby’s seedy Hogan apartment was the old settlement of Sixways. Row upon row of cramped century-old townhouses lined narrow steep roads. The area might have been prestigious once, but property values had long since slipped into the gutters that hung precariously from the houses.
It took Bill Reed less than two minutes to make the journey, soaring over the rooftops, looking down at the traffic snarled below. Gothametropolis was laid out long before the invention of the automobile, and its traffic system wasn’t designed in the sober grid-pattern of its neighbour across the river Paradopolis. The snarl was ferocious and had been going on for five decades.
Where the half-dozen main thoroughfares that gave Sixways its name converged there was an old firehouse. The redbrick building dated back to a different age and had long since been decommissioned. Now the graffiti-covered edifice housed Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises, an advanced science research unit – some said weird science. Nats alighted on the pavement before his former workplace.
The door was answered by Amy Aston, EEE’s senior and only engineer. As usual she was clad in greasy overalls and wore nothing else but a truculent glower. She stepped back without a word to allow Bill entry through the small hatch in the larger folding door.
“Are people looking for me?” Nats checked. He needed to call off an LL search.
“Not that I know of,” Amy responded with a shrug. “Why would they?”
“Because I’ve been missing for two days?”
Amy shrugged again. She’d been on benders longer than that. She returned to her work stripping down one of the interstitial separation modules that had burned out during the recent Saving the Future resolution.
“Bill,” called Miss Framlicker from the station gallery she used as an office. “You want a coffee?”
“Um, sure,” agreed the flying phenomenon. “It’s nice of you to…”
“Make me one too,” Miss F ordered him. “Black, three sugars.”
The world began to resume a familiar pattern. “I’m not here to look for my old job back,” Nats told his former boss. He still poured the coffee.
“Are you sure?” Miss Framlicker checked. “Because Ham-Boy was useless and ManMan was worse. Imagine the levels of incompetence it takes to make you look good.”
Bill levitated up to the gallery and handed Miss Framlicker her mug. “I’m not looking for work. Well, not this work.”
“The Interdimensional Transportation Corporation haven’t set up again after the Parody War,” Miss F warned him. “They’re not hiring. Nobody knows what they’re intending, or even who’s in charge now.”
“I’m really not job hunting. I’m, kind of, er, me-hunting. I need to know where I was yesterday.”
While Miss Framlicker reacted to that, Dr Al B. Harper sauntered onto the gallery, unreeling a strange trans-spectrum fibreoptic cable from a heavy reel as he went. “I tend to lose days as well,” he offered sympathetically. “I mean quite apart from the time anomalies that mean you slip months or years, I just get carried away with some equation or formula, start to sketch plans…”
“A sharp stab with some office equipment usually solves that,” Miss Framlicker consoled him. “Staplers are good, too.”
“I mean that I literally don’t know what happened to me since Saturday evening when I left Dancer, about eight p.m.,” Bill clarified. “It’s like my mind’s been wiped. I showed up last night at Ruby Waver’s place, shivering and incoherent, with no memory of where I’d been.”
Miss F sighed. Bill Reed was back.
“Interesting,” noted Al B. He absently passed the fibreoptic array to Miss F and reached for a diagnostic helmet. “Would you mind if I took the top joint off one of your fingers for test purposes?”
“Kind of, yes,” objected Nats. “Al, I was looking for a stick.”
“ Looking for a stick? Is that some kind of 21st century euphemism for something rude?” wondered a teenage girl that Nats didn’t recognise. Kara Harper and her brother Cody staggered into the room carrying the other burned out components to be junked or salvaged after recent dimensional excitement.
Cody had the gift of translating all languages. “It seemed to be a literal statement,” he judged, looking at Nats. “The dude really was hunting down a bit of wood.”
“He’s Nats, right?” Kara noted. “Mother always taught me to know my potential enemies so I researched him. At one stage he was symbiotically linked to an ancient alien artefact called the Psychostave, which was basically a big stick that held enough psychic energy to punch holes in timespace.”
“That was a long time ago,” Nats argued. “I’m past the Stave. Cold turkey. Besides, it got broke.”
“Broken,” corrected Miss Framlicker. “And you absorbed the psychic backwash, which is how you were able to stumble into ownership of a chunk of infernal real estate, with all the consequences thereof.”
“More interesting still,” mused Al B. “The Psychostave was sometimes used by the Makluans as a psychic prison, and before that it had an affinity for spirits of the dead.”
“Yeah, we resolved all those subplots years back,” Nats assured him. “So about Saturday night…”
“He also had to leave this plane once he’d bonded with his hell-estate to prevent the boundaries between worlds being destroyed,” Miss F remembered.
“Did I ever thank you and Xander for sending me on that particular delivery mission?” Bill Reed demanded. “Look, I just want to know what happened to me yesterday. Was I attacked? Am I still cursed? Did Ruby slip me a Mickey Finn? Where’s my jacket gone?”
“Excellent,” enthused Al B. “Don’t worry Bill, we’ll get to the bottom of this. Strip off and lay down on the diagnostic rack…”
***
“No, honestly. In nothing but a pair of Argyle golf socks, carrying nothing but his chequebook.”
“Really? No pen?”
“I didn’t really notice,” admitted Jenny Wooster. “I was too busy dry-heaving. I mean in this day and age there’s no excuse for that amount of cellulite, especially not if you’re as rich as he is.”
“I always carry a pen,” Trudi Wooster noted practically. “Just in case it’s needed to write cheques.”
“I just had my mobile phone,” Jenny responded. “Do you know how much Paradopolis Today will pay for a picture like that?”
“Ooh, good point. And no need to handle the cellulite.”
Their vehicle came to a halt at the gates of their Pierce Heights family home. Trudi handed a couple of twenty dollar bills to the driver of their cab. “Thank – you – very – much,” she shouted slowly and clearly, since the driver was wearing a turban. “Welcome to our country.”
The Ghost Taxi driver accepted the tip and nodded. He watched as the Wooster twins tottered up their drive on six inch heels.
“I had that Dark Thugos in my cab last week,” he said, quite randomly.
***
Nats had never been good at talking to girls he didn’t know very well. He was even less good at talking to girls he didn’t know very well that he’d eloped with in an other life.
“Hello, Mr Reed,” Marie Murcheson told him with a little curtsey and a flush of the cheeks.
“Um, hello.” Bill’s previous experiences had left him with the ability to see spirits. He could plainly see that the pretty girl in the Victorian dress was a phantom, her being twisted together from ectoplasm and threads of faerie, glued by cosmic power drawn from the depths of the Lair Mansion itself. Marie Murcheson was the house’s resident guardian angel.
“Hi,” agreed to other ghost beside the Lair Banshee. This one wore black goth-gear and her T-shirt read ,Once you’ve tried death you’ll never go back’. “We’ve not met. I’m a manifestation of Dream’s left-brain consciousness, filtered through an Impossibilitium haze. Or I’m a refugee from Ghostbusters. Your pick. Call me Izzy.”
“Miss Shapiro is helping me to adjust to my incorporeal state,” Marie explained. “She is… what was it again?”
“Undead lifestyle counsellor,” Izzy supplied. “I dropped dead of a congenital heart problem, but my boyfriend-at-the-time has issues about letting go of his cast of wonder-pals and when he became CrazySugarFreakBoy! I kind of got pulled back.”
“Of course,” agreed Nats faintly. It was CSFB! they were talking about, after all.
Marie took up the explanations. “As Mr Foxglove’s attentions and amour have drifted elsewhere, Miss Shapiro has found she can manifest far and wide, not only in her former lover’s presence. We are hoping to discern how this is done, because since me recent second demise I am confined to the boundaries of Parody Island and cannot pass beyond.”
Izzy grinned. “Although actually I put it down to Dream’s worldview that the whole of creation is his personal space. Anyhow, I decided to be here for Marie when she met up with you. She was a little uncertain of the protocol.”
“The… protocol?” echoed Nats.
Marie blushed even deeper. “In my first life, back in the year of our Lord eighteen-hundred and sixty, I was betrothed to be married to Mr Leyland Reed, from your family line,” she reminded the flying phenomenon. “But then I shamefully ran away, breaking my word, and sought to… abscond… with Leyland’s brother, William.”
“Um, yeah,” agreed Nats. “I was there for that bit, wasn’t I? Various of the LL got thrown back into the bodies of our ancestors, and I got William.”
“Did you abscond like rabbits?” wondered Izzy curiously.
“There was no impropriety!” Marie squeaked hastily. “I was kidnapped and sacrificed to an elder god instead.”
“See, I always get into these kinds of conversations,” Bill realised. “It’s like I’m cursed.”
Marie looked up sharply. “Oh, that’s not your curse,” she told him, quite seriously. “Your curse is very different from that.”
“I am cursed?” Bill almost yelped. “I knew it! That explains so much about my life!”
“Newly cursed,” Izzy clarified. “Some kind of geas, maybe, that you have to do something or dire consequences will befall you?”
“Al B. said there was something weird about my biofield. That’s why he sent me to look you up, Marie. It was you or the Shoggoth.” Nats shuddered. “So I have that geas thingie?”
“Oh, definitely that,” agreed Marie. “That and your soul is missing, of course.”
***
“It’s a standard enough agreement,” the undertaker noted. “You option property against future performance. If you succeed you buy back your security.”
David Cardighan, the businessman who stood in the centre of the abandoned warehouse, looked about uncertainly. This place could be renovated, could become a major production centre, if only he could put the investment in place. But the terms…
“I’m not property,” objected Linda Cardighan, his teenaged daughter. “But… times are hard. If it helps daddy… and besides, it’s not really…”
“I can’t sell you my daughter’s soul,” David objected to the sales representative of the Westminster Necropolis Company. “It’s not…” But he really needed the money.
“I’m sure that if your plans succeed as you hope you’ll soon be able to redeem your deposit,” Mr Turnover noted. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime.” He didn’t say whose opportunity or what kind; or whose lifetime.
David glanced at his daughter. “Well, I suppose…”
“It doesn’t mean anything anyway,” Linda suggested. “It’s only a stupid bit of paper.”
They stood in the cold dark warehouse while Mr Turnover prepared the contract. “There is one slightly painful provision,” the undertaker admitted. “A matter of what ink the signature has to be in.”
That was the moment that Ebony of Nubilia chose to intervene. “I have a purple felt tip,” she offered. “And a few ideas where to put it.”
Mr Turnover somehow swivelled round without moving his feet. “How…?” he began. The warehouse had been warded, after all, to prevent interruptions. Then he recovered and said, “This is a private meeting. None of your affair or your master’s.”
Ebony was priestess of the Shoggoth cult, a job that mainly consisted of buying manga and DVDs for a loathsome elder being and smiting down high priests of the wavy-dagger-wielding variety. “I thought you might say that,” she replied, “so I brought reinforcements.”
Such was Ebony’s presence that the man walking beside her hadn’t really drawn Mr Turnwise’s attention. He was a tall, fit-looking man with close-cropped hair. “Demonic pacts are a bit middle ages, don’t you think?” chided Reverend Mac Fleetwood of the Zero Street Mission, “but they very much are the business of my master.”
“What’s going on?” demanded Linda Cardhigan. “Who are these people?”
“This is a private business deal,” her father objected, a little bit weakly. Mr Turnwise and his proposal really hadn’t made him comfortable.
Ebony sighed. “Look, I’ve had a busy day trying to chase down some bloody Tenchi marquette on e-bay that involved me slipping back three weeks to get a Paypal account then going to the fourteenth century to prevent the vendor’s ancestor being burned by the Church of Conformity before he had kids. I don’t have time for major discussion. So I’ll just strip off the illusion hiding Turnwise’s true appearance and we’ll cut to the screaming.”
Before the undertaker could object he was revealed in all his corpse-rotten maggot-faced glory. There was screaming.
“Now,” Ebony prompted Mac.
“Right,” nodded the minister, and thumped Turnwise right in his insect-eaten nose. There was more screaming as the undertaker’s head fell off.
“You were supposed to throw holy water at him,” Ebony pointed out.
“I’m more of a punching baddies kind of clergyman,” Mac apologised. “I’m an ex-marines chaplain. It’s more me.”
“I suppose it is,” sighed the priestess. “Right, you two idiots with me. I’ll fix you up a loan so you don’t have to walk into stupid Westminster Necropolis Company traps, but if you give me any more trouble I swear I’ll have you eaten by a gigantic ball of mucus.”
Mr Turnwise groped for his head but wisely didn’t get up. “How did you break the wardings?” he moaned painfully.
He didn’t get his answer until the Ghost Taxi that Ebony and Mac had arrived in drove over him on the way out.
***
“So why exactly didn’t you call in straight away when you knew you’d lost a day of your memory?” demanded Hatman, frowning at Nats, his arms folded over his chest as he chewed out the newly-returned Legionnaire.
“I’m out of practice, okay?” Bill Reed protested. “You’d be a bit surprised if you suddenly woke up in Ruby Waver’s bed, too.”
“I think he was supposed to have done that,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! grinned, dangling from the ceiling and tearing unsatisfactory pages out of a recent Spider-man comic. “According to Ruby’s candid exposé biography, anyway. He was there for the Lair Orgy in chapter nine.”
“We’ve fought enough psionic villains in our time that this could be prelude to an attack,” Hatman continued. “Psychic Mastermind, Lord Resolution, Marvellous Marv, that Charon character, even Mad Wendy…”
“Of course, I had to e-mail Ruby a ton of corrections and suggestions on that chapter,” CSFB! continued. “My tongue can reach much father than that.”
“There’s also the strategic implications,” Yuki Shiro chipped in. “If Bill’s mind has been scoured then someone could have all our security codes and over-rides. It wouldn’t take them long to suck out everything Nats knows.”
“Hey!” objected the flying phenomenon.
“The soul stealing suggests some kind of supernatural rather than psionic attack,” the Shoggoth noted, eating the pages of Spidey that CSFB! was discarding. “Hmm. This food needs more excelsior.”
“I’d go ask Xander,” Nats offered, “but when I flew to his shop it wasn’t there.”
“He vanished after the Parody War,” Hatman supplied. “We expect when he gets back and reappears it’ll be something very bad indeed.”
“Even the Carnifex was worried about him,” Yuki added. “He’s searched for the sorcerer supreme personally.”
“I couldn’t have called in anyway,” Nats remembered suddenly. “I’ve lost my jacket, and my comm-card was in it.”
“That was a good jacket,” sympathised the Shoggoth. “It certainly had excelsior. And epaulettes.”
“You’ve lost your comm-card?” Yuki checked. “Then we do have another lead! We can track your jacket. Hallie?”
The Lair Legion’s resident artificial intelligence manifested in her hologram form. “Yes? I was just rehearsing Visionary for his inauguration speech, as a way of calibrating my sense-of-humour subroutines. What is it?”
“We need a trace on Nats’ comm-card, please,” Hatman asked. “Put it on the big screen.”
Hallie concentrated. The wall lit up with a map of Paradopolis and Gothametropolis, the twin urban sprawls across the Clement River. A yellow flashing light indicated the comm-card trace.
“Heading south down Busiek Street, just passing the Emporium,” noted Yuki. “Moving about twenty miles per hour.”
Suddenly the light blinked out and reappeared near Millionaire’s Row at the northern end of Gothametropolis York.
“What?” objected Nats. “Teleportation?”
The Legion tracked the card for half an hour. It jumped six times in that period.
“Okay,” Hallie announced, “I’ve got the location on LairSat camera now. Let’s see.”
A grainy image of overhead Paradopolis focussed down, zooming past the Twin Parody Tower and its crowded plaza, sweeping past City Hall up towards the glass and chrome frontage of the Croque D’Or casino hotel. Traffic was still heavy on the city’s busiest street. The only thing moving was a yellow and black vehicle that flitted through the other cars and trucks clogging the three-lane road.
“A ghost taxi!” recognised Yuki. “Is that what we’re tracking?”
Suddenly the cab melted away like mist. Now the comm-card signal was emanating from Carrington, not far from the Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital.
“How do we hunt down a ghost taxi?” complained Nats. “Aw man, I’m never getting that jacket back!”
“We do have a couple of resources we could call on for help,” admitted Hatman. He rummaged in his card index. “If you don’t want to call in Con Johnstantine there’s this guy who helped us out recently. De Soth.”
“Nats may not wish to pursue this matter further,” interjected the Shoggoth suddenly. The loathsome elder being coughed almost nervously, regurgitating a manga edition of Super Spidey Stories in Japanese. “Perhaps we should just consider purchasing him a new jacket. Or Samantha Bonnington could create him one. She has been waiting in Hatman’s office for some time eager to intern and wishing to serve him in a range of capacities.”
“Yes,” breathed Hatty with a shudder. “But there’s a mystery to solve here.”
“Some mysteries are good,” the Shoggoth argued. Then he sighed. “But tell humans not to go poking into something and they’re bound to investigate why. Go ahead. See Vincent De Soth. Chase down the taxis. Just don’t blame me when the world ends. Again.”
***
Sidney Fletcher was a hunter. He was a man with a mission. He stalked the mean streets of the urban jungle and his prey never escaped him. Well, not often.
He had the enemy in his sights right now. It lay unsuspecting washed in the flickering light of a failing streetlamp. It was helpless.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his ticket pad. The vehicle was blocking a hydrant, too near to the street corner to be safely parked.
“Got you at last,” whispered Sidney Fletcher. Finally, the traffic cop would bag the ultimate prey.
The Ghost Taxi allowed him to get within three feet before disappearing. Again.
Sidney’s anguished screams echoed out across the urban jungle.
***
“The Ghost Taxi phenomenon is an urban legend first recorded in the Paradopolis Trombone in 1924,” the Librarian lectured as he accompanied Nats to Alto Tumour’s Second Hand Occult Bookshop. “The pattern of the story is usually the same. A traveller, often but not always at night, often but not always on a deserted street in poor weather conditions, flags down a cab. Some early stories refer to a horse and carriage. The traveller is glad to find transport, and gives and address where he or she wishes to go.”
“This is where we wish to go,” Bill interrupted. “Are we sure this is the place? Only it seems kind of seedy. And I’m comparing here to Xander’s plumbing shop.”
“The journey is alternately described as very fast or very slow,” the Librarian continued. Lee Bookman liked to have the facts laid out straight and orderly. “Sometimes immense distances are covered in no time at all. On other occasions a two-block trip can take two days. Sometimes the cab takes the passenger to a destination they never wanted to visit. Payment is made, and then the vehicle and its driver just melt away.”
“With my jacket, evidently,” Nats contributed. “Yeah, it’s part of the random background weirdness of the Big Banana. Some people can see the taxis, others can’t. Some believe. Some don’t. That’s why we’ve called on this De Soth guy. He’s supposed to be an expert. Try to stay with the programme, L-guy!”
“Don’t call me L-guy,” Lee Bookman objected, blocking the way into the second hand bookstore. He could tell already that there was nothing on the shelves inside that wasn’t already in the Moon Public Library catalogue. “And don’t worry about me being with the programme.”
“Then maybe we could, you know, go in?” suggested Bill.
The Librarian pointed over Nats’ shoulder. Vinnie de Soth was climbing out of a cab, handing a folded bill through the window.
“Ah,” Nats said sheepishly. “That’s De Soth, right?”
“Right,” agreed the Librarian. “And that’s a Ghost Taxi.”
***
Vinnie sat uncomfortably on the threadbare back seat of the cab between the Librarian and Nats. “So I’m getting taken for a ride?” he wondered. “Am I being rubbed out?”
“We’re hiring you,” Nats told him. “The meter’s running. We’re investigating Ghost Taxis, my missing jacket, and a bit of a gap in my memory.”
“Well, this is a Ghost Taxi,” Vinnie told him.
“We know that,” Lee admitted.
“Well, you would,” agreed Vinnie. “I mean, Nats here is a major occult event, isn’t he? Former hell-lord infused with the nature of the spirit-binding Psychostave. He’s almost as big an arcane accident-waiting-to-happen as that Tom Black guy.”
“I’m a what?” Bill objected. “I’m so over my hell-lord phase. How come I’m still getting karmic feedback or whatever?” He paused for a moment then added, “Who’s Tom Black?”
“So Nats is still impacting negatively on this level of reality just by existing,” the Librarian noted. “I’m not really surprised.”
“Hey, I’m here!” objected Bill Reed.
Vinnie shifted, leaning forward. “We’re all here,” he pointed out. “This is where you asked to go. The Ghost Taxi Rank. Ghost Taxi HQ. The Terminus.”
Through the fogged-up windows Bill and Lee could see a darkened bulk of a brick building. The Ghost Taxi pulled through a garage doorway into the dim interior.
“Interesting,” noticed the Librarian. “I’m no longer in contact with my Library. But there’s a room full of legers in filing cabinets over in that corner where the glass windows are.”
The cab glided to a stop near a booth with metal mesh grilles over the windows. The doors of the vehicle unlocked.
“End of the line,” Bill couldn’t help saying.
Vinnie and Lee followed him out onto the silent garage floor. Half a dozen cabs waited to be called. Nobody spoke.
And then a frizzled ginger head peered round the doorway of the caller’s booth and went, “Ooh!” The girl dodged back inside the cabin and grabbed the microphone.
“Um…?” puzzled Nats.
“Hey, listen up everybody!” came the excited call from the ginger girl behind the security screens. “Bill Reed’s arrived! Everybody come and see the new boss!”
Bill Reed said a very bad word.
***
Next Time: More mysteries, a girl with ginger hair, the world’s deadliest business plan, a formal complaint from the Westminster Necropolis Company, and another attempt to bring the general Nats-tormenting quota back up to par. That’s in More Untold Tales of the Ghost Taxis: Road To Nowhere.
***
Footnotes By Rank:
This story takes place after “The Moderator Saga” and “Saving the Future”.
Bill Reed, aka Nats aka the flying phenomenon, previously awoke in an unfamiliar bed with an attractive companion, Princess Uhunalura Amalandriana Excelsior of the Abhumans, in UT#154: Chats With Mumphrey, or Leadership Issues. He woke up with demonic temptress Regret of the Damned in UT#226: Nats Must Die. Ruby Waver’s tell-all exposé was uncovered in UT#152: Nats Ate My Gerbil. Bill received the Psychostave somewhere just before UT#97: Somewhere Over the Rainbow or When Villains Picnic and absorbed its power into himself in UT#115: Head Games (Version One) or The Microchip Revolution.
Izzy Shapiro first debuted in CrazySugarFreakBoy! in Hell by CSFB!. Marie Murcheson’s first death and Nats’ involvement were chronicled in UT#60-63, and particularly UT#61: The Birth of a City First Requires Impregnation.
The Westminster Necropolis Company, a firm of sinister rather-more-than-morticians first appeared in UT#99: Fragments..
Visionary’s forthcoming inauguration will be chronicled by his writer. Heh.
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Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2007 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2007 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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