Free Bad Dreams by Kim Newman

change business, the old and alcoholic would be pushed out of their place in the begging order. The street population was expanding, as more and more people fell through the gaps in the welfare state’s safety net. There were ways to get by, but none of them were pleasant, or safe. Soon, London would be just Tijuana, Bangkok or Casablanca with a lousy climate.
    The Club Des Esseintes was difficult to find, but she guessed that it was supposed to be. There was a nostalgia shop at the address listed in Judi’s diary, with a passport photographer’s and a French model agency upstairs. The plaque was screwed to a wall papered many times over with posters for rock gigs and albums. A group called Faster Pussycat, frozen in mid-scream, dominated the pasted-and-torn collage. She had to look at the wall for a full minute before she found the sign. Someone had scraped a hole in Neneh Cherry’s midriff so the words were still visible. Private Club – Walk Down. And in the corner, in little curlicue letters, Des Esseintes.
    The shop was full of faded magazines displayed in racks, piles of movie posters and boxes of still photographs. The major display was a selection of one-sheets for films about Santa Claus. In one, the cheery old gentleman was brandishing a bloody hatchet over a naked girl. The ad line boasted ‘it’s a ho-ho-ho-horror!’ You better watch out, Anne thought. Someone had driven a dagger smeared with stage blood through a smiling cut-out of Dudley Moore dressed as an elf.
Phil Spector’s Christmas Album
was coming through the shop’s speakers, ‘Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)’ by Darlene Love. At least that was an improvement on Derek Douane. ‘Do you have any material on Caroline Munro,’ a foreign customer was asking a bored attendant, ‘or Rosanna Podesta?’ Anne looked around the shop and found the stairwell behind an impressive array of Japanese warrior robots.
    The spiral staircase was black, and the walls bright scarlet, but the well was lit only by one bare bulb at the top. Anne went down into the darkness. The stairs fed her into a corridor, dimly lit by imitation candles in electric sconces. The walls were blood red, the floor herringbone-tiled and polished. There were unrecognizable portraits of men in periwigs hanging between the candles. The Marquis de Sade, she supposed, and intimate friends.
    A level below the street, she could no longer hear Darlene Love. Instead, there was the tinkle of musak. She recognized the tune and almost laughed. ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’.
    The first serious obstacle stood at the end of the corridor, ominous in a black leather hood. His axe did not look like a prop, and there was a coiled bullwhip in his belt. He was wearing polished boots and lumpy tights, with his chest – muscle just running to meat – bare. Anne thought he was unlikely to be impressed by her NUJ card.
    She wanted to go home and forget about the whole thing.
    Suddenly, she was one of a crowd. Six or seven people had come down behind her, and she walked down the corridor with them, trying to seem at ease. They looked like an ordinary lunchtime group, office workers out for a Christmas drink. The executioner bowed and opened a pair of double doors, admitting them into a cellar bar. Evidently, he recognized some of the club’s regular patrons. Anne was swept inside with them. She noticed one young businessman buckling a studded dog collar around his neck.
    There had been a sign above the doors. The Inferno Lounge. She had expected a vaulted torture chamber in Hammer Films style, but, at first sight, the room was more impressive. Three walls and the ceiling were covered with a fairly expert mural in imitation of Hieronymus Bosch. Damned souls wriggled, turned in on themselves in the corners, pierced by water pipes near the ceiling.
    The furnishings were black, with occasional silver and scarlet highlights. The only light came from a rank of glowing bar heaters and from the many