Free Bad Dreams by Kim Newman Page A

television monitors, which were perched on high shelves above the bar and around the walls, or set into the tables like video games. Under the musak was the muted sound of whipping and slapping and yelping. There was also the rumble of something that sounded like vast underground machinery, grinding away behind the walls.
    Anne climbed onto a stool at the bar, and looked around at the customers. There were a few young women in already-dated punk outfits, including one girl with green hair cat-napping upright a few stools down, but most of the people in the Inferno Lounge were conservatively-dressed men. Young to middle-aged white collar types, with briefcases and newspapers. The
Mail
and the
Telegraph.
Mostly, they sat alone, watching the televisions and ignoring their drinks.
    Anne wondered which, if any, of these people, was N? She did not know whether Judi was meeting a friend, or a… she gulped mentally… or a customer. N could have been anyone, including someone on the staff rather than among the clientele.
    Up on the monitors, Anne saw an array of sharp video images. An over-aged schoolgirl, complete with braids and ankle socks, taking her knickers down for a cane-brandishing headmaster. A WPC masturbating furiously with a truncheon. Two bored naked women ineptly flogging a tethered third party. An academic explaining the precise uses of a set of antique nipple clamps.
    Anne tried to imagine Judi here, to imagine her talking with the other girls, or with the men. She had specialized in receiving pain, Anne knew, not in giving it. She would have had to determine which was any given client’s preference. Looking at a thin blond young man in a business suit, while trying not to seem as if she was looking, she wondered whether he liked to hurt or be hurt. He had almost colourless eyes, and was ghost-pale in the videolight. He reminded her of Constable Barry Erskine, the Batterer. She imagined him making fists, and using them on a girl’s face. On Judi’s face. Again, Anne wanted to leave, but knew she had taken it too far to just go home…
    ‘You can’t just sit here, you know,’ someone said, ‘you’ll have to buy a drink.’
    The barman looked like a functionary of the Spanish Inquisition, in black robes, picked out with an assorted batch of mystical symbols. Otherwise, he could have been serving in any other unfriendly pub in town.
    ‘Oh,’ said Anne, ‘Perrier.’
    The barman exhumed a green bottle. When he unscrewed the cap, there was the faintest ghost of a carbonated fizz. He poured into a tall glass.
    ‘Ice and lemon?’
    ‘Please.’
    He picked up the fruit slice and single lump with a wicked-looking pair of hooked tongs, and dropped them in her drink.
    ‘Four pounds fifty,’ he said. She hesitated. ‘Remember, no one comes here to drink.’
    She handed over a five, and received no change. She let the matter drop. She wished she had given the money to the wino out on the street. At least, he would be able to get drunk out of it.
    Shit, what a hole.
    Some of the young women were approaching the newcomers, pouting and trying to seem masterful. Even to Anne, it was obvious that the working girls were unable to take all this seriously. The thin blond dropped to his knees and licked a girl’s creaking boot, his tongue probing the cracks in the leather. She had guessed wrong about him: he was into M, not S. When he looked up, the girl’s face was set like a school pantomime version of the Wicked Stepmother, but otherwise she just looked ordinary and tired. The would-be slave kept dropping pound coins into her boot-tops. That must get uncomfortable.
    Casually, Anne began her Nancy Drew act. ‘Has Judi been in recently?’
    ‘What’s all this Judi stuff today?’ asked the barman. ‘Has she just won the Miss Popularity award?’
    Anne pounced, a little too quickly.
    ‘Has anyone else been looking for her?’
    ‘Nina,’ the barman said, looking around. It was difficult in the gloom to make anyone