Let me tell you about Nightside:

They call London the Smoke, but we all know there is no smoke without fire. The Nightside is a square mile of narrow streets and Back Alleys in the center of the city, linking slums and tenements that where old when the last century was new.

That’s if you believe the Official Map.

The Nightside is much bigger than that, as though space itself has reluctantly expanded to fit all the darkness and evil and generally strange stuff that has set up home there. They say Nightside is bigger than the city that surrounds it, these days. Which says something very disturbing about human nature and appetite. The Nightside has always been a cosmopolitan kind of place.

It’s always night in Nightside. It’s always three o’clock in the morning, the hour of the werewolf, when most people die and most people are born, and dawn never comes. People are always coming and going drawn by needs that dare not speak their name, searching for pleasure and services unforgivable in the sane daylight world.

You can buy or sell anything in the Nightside, and no-one ask questions. No-one cares. There’s a club where you can pay to see a fallen angel forever burning inside of a pentacle drawn in baby’s blood. Or a decapitated Goat’s head that can tell a the future in enigmatic verses of perfect iambic pentameter. There’s a room where silence is caged and colors are forbidden, and another where a dead nun will show you her stigmata for the right price. She didn’t rise again, after all, but she’ll let you stick your fingers in blood-caked holes, if you want to.

Everything you have ever feared or dreamed of is running loose somewhere in the shifting streets of Nightside, or waiting patiently for you in expensive private rooms of Patron-only clubs. You can find anything in the Nightside, if it doesn’t find you first. It’s a sick, magical, dangerous place.

Do you still want to go there?


(Taken from Something in the Nightside; By Simon R Green)