The Iscariot Sanction by Mark Latham

pulling himself from the faded, frozen tableaux, and stepping from his own body like a moth emerging from its cocoon. He turned back to his own physical form, still and grey, arm outstretched, fist clenched tight around the handkerchief.
    Behind his body stood Molly Goodheart.
    The apparition wore a simple pale dress and worsted shawl. Her eyes were black orbs, cold and dead. She did not really stand there, but floated inches from the ground, feet hidden by the orange mist that covered the flagstones. Arthur looked down at his own feet rather dumbly, and saw the same. He was as incorporeal now as she.
    The ghost of the prostitute drifted past Arthur, passing through his body, through Lillian and onwards along the dark alleyway. It was longer, more twisted, and yet more claustrophobic now than it had been moments earlier. The brick walls seemed to bend inwards, creaking like trees in a forest, forming warped tunnels that branched away in all directions. This was an illusion. Sir Arthur focused again, and the alleyway restored itself to some semblance of normality, albeit a cold, darkened one in this twilight world between worlds. Molly Goodheart’s ghost drifted onwards, shimmering silver in the gloom, twitching and jerking occasionally, no doubt as she struggled to remember that she was no longer flesh and blood.
    Arthur followed the spirit along the narrow passage. He would have to be quick, he knew; too long spent away from his body would dull his senses, and leave him open to attack by the Other. He strained his ears to listen for danger. In this realm, the sounds of lost souls reverberated through every stone, were carried on ice-cold breezes, and were felt in the bones. They sounded like muffled cries travelling through water, indistinct and rumbling. But there were other things, too, in the dark realm that Majestics called the ‘Eternal Night’. Chittering, clawing things, native to the void, that were drawn to intruders as to a candle in the darkness. The Other. When these things came, the wise Majestic must flee back to his body, for no amount of etherium could defeat them. To face the Other was to court disaster; to allow gibbering entities ingress to the real world, where only blood would sate their hellish appetites. And so Arthur stayed alert, his mind concentrated on the mission, and his senses stretched outwards, sensitive to the merest danger.
    Time flowed differently in the Eternal Night, if indeed it flowed at all. No matter how hard he focused, Sir Arthur could not tell how long he had spent following the spirit. The alleyway seemed to stretch into for ever, and though his feet did not really tread the stones, Arthur began to feel exhausted, as though he had drifted on the orange mist for a lifetime. At last, when he had almost forgotten why he had come to the other realm, the spirit stopped. Arthur saw with growing dread that she was changed; her dress was covered in blood, her arms and face dripping with it. She was barely recognisable.
    The spirit stood beside an iron door, and looked towards it with her glassy black eyes. She had showed him the way to the place where she had met her end.
    Arthur was about to say something, some parting word to the ghost of Molly Goodheart, but he was interrupted. A jarring, scraping noise rang through the alleyway, coming from all directions. This was not a muffled wave of sound, a deep resonance somewhere on the fringe of Arthur’s senses; this was something close and sharp and threatening. Long fingernails scratching rough brick, teeth gnawing at bone, night creatures calling each other to the hunt.
    A boot scraped on stone from somewhere ahead. A figure, dark and unreal, many-armed and many-eyed, began to form itself from the orange mist. Arthur backed away. He turned to address the spirit that had led him here, but she was already gone, now little more than motes of pale dust swirling up to a blood-red sky. Molly Goodheart had returned to the realm of the dead,