Use Enough Gun (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 3)

by Joshua Reynolds

  “What’s so scary about a nun anyway?”

  St. Cyprian glanced over his shoulder at his assistant as her words drifted through the quiet of the underground station. “You obviously haven’t met one,” he said.

  “Plenty, in fact,” Ebe Gallowglass said as she rubbed her knuckles absently. St. Cyprian snorted.

  “She’s not-wasn’t-a nun. Not that anyone can say for sure,” he said, shifting his weight.

  “Then what was she?”

  He was silent for a moment. Then, “Sad, I think. Which is why this latest behaviour is worthy of investigation.”

  “The trying to snatch punters bit?” Gallowglass said.

  St. Cyprian sighed. “Yes, the snatching bit. Ghosts, as a rule, do not snatch.”

  “You sound confident,” she said.

  “I do believe that I’m the Royal Occultist, Ms. Gallowglass. Hence, yes, I am quite confident in matters such as this,” he said.

  “Only you didn’t know whether or not silver killed werewolves.”

  St. Cyprian grimaced. “There were conflicting sources on the matter.”

  “No conflicting sources on ghosts then?” she said innocently.

  “No,” St. Cyprian snapped, his voice echoing through the station. He tensed and looked around. “None that I found at any rate,” he added, more quietly.

  “Well, that’s comforting,” Gallowglass said.

  St. Cyprian glared at her, but she ignored him. He sighed and turned away. Formed during the reign of Elizabeth the First, the office of Royal Occultist (or the Queen’s Conjurer, as it had been known) had started with the diligent amateur Dr. John Dee, and passed through a succession of hands since. The list was a long one, weaving in and out of the margins of British history, and culminating, for the moment, in Charles St. Cyprian. In time, the office would pass to Gallowglass, though neither of them had discussed the inevitable as yet.

  Frankly, St. Cyprian found the contemplation of his almost certain demise to be ghoulish at best and depressing at worst, so he was willing to avoid it as long as ethically possible. Gallowglass seemed only too happy to oblige. He looked at her. She was, as usual, dressed like some hybrid of a cinematic street urchin and a Parisian street-apache, with dashes of color in unusual places, and a battered newsboy cap on her head. The whole ensemble contrasted sharply with her quite evident Egyptian heritage. Her slender fingers tapped nervously against the Star of Solomon engraved on the butt of the Webley-Fosberry automatic holstered beneath her arm.

  In contrast, St. Cyprian was dressed in one of the finest sartorial creations to ever leave a Savile Row tailors’ and deign to live in man’s closet. He fiddled with the hang of the coat. Clothes made the man, and vanity was one of the few indulgences he allowed himself. He had been shriven by a Purgatory spent in uniform drab in the trenches of the Continent only five scant years before, after all.

  Like Gallowglass, he was armed. His old army revolver rested snugly in the pocket of his coat, and he patted it fondly as he looked around Bank Station. “Did you know that they found no less than three plague pits in this area when they were constructing the line?” he said.

  “No. Didn’t need to know it either,” Gallowglass said, looking at him.

  “But you did,” St. Cyprian said, tapping the side of his nose. “You need to know everything about London, Ms. Gallowglass, every nook and cranny and street and mewes. The city hides deadly secrets, and not just ghosts.”

  “Worms in the earth and such, I know,” Gallowglass said tersely. She looked around, as if expecting to see simian shapes crouched in the shadows of the station.

  “More than that,” St. Cyprian said insistently. “This city is a living organism, and the sooner you learn to predict its moods-”

  “Mr. St. Cyprian?”

  St. Cyprian turned. “Is everything ship-shape, Mr. Stanhook?”

  The lean man in the boiler suit nodded grimly, the hard hat wobbling on his head. “We’ve set the apparatus up just as you specified. If she does a runner, we’ll have her caught.” The apparatus in question was the electric pentacle. Designed by St. Cyprian’s predecessor, the device had come in handy on any number of occasions.

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Interfering with the dead can have unpleasant consequences,” St. Cyprian said. “Are your men in place?”

  “Stationed at either end of the tunnel and along the line,” Stanhook said. “If she comes from either direction, we’ll know.” He looked momentarily uncomfortable. Ghosts weren’t something the London Tunnel Authority normally dealt with. They were concerned with more tangible threats. The spirit world was not their remit, a fact that Stanhook was obviously well aware of. “Theoretically, I mean.”

  “It’s all theoretical in this business,” St. Cyprian said, clapping him on the arm.

  “Now you tell me,” Gallowglass groused.

  “Quiet you,” St. Cyprian said. He looked back at Stanhook. “With the platform enclosed in the pentacle, we should be set. Few entities can defy the signs of the Saaamaaa Ritual, writ in the language of Edison and Tesla.”

  “We’ve never had a problem with her before,” Stanhook said, scratching his head beneath the brim of his hard hat. “There are plenty of ghosts down here, but we pay them no mind and they do the same to us. Why is she causing a scene now?”

  ‘The scene’ as Stanhook described it, was the attempted taking of commuters on the Bank Station Line; five in five days and all of them grabbed by what they described as a ‘woman in black’ or a ‘black nun’. Five men and women, assaulted by an entity which had heretofore, done little save sweep mournfully along the platform in the quiet hours between dusk and dawn.

  She was in mourning for her brother, wrongfully hanged at Tyburn, some said. Others said that hers was one of the graves that had supposedly been disturbed to make way for the Bank. Either way, the Black Woman of Bank Station was a London fixture, one of the ever-present spectral throng like Boudicca’s horses or the Flying Patterer. Every great city attracted its share of forgotten spirits, layer upon layer of ectoplasmic matter, building and growing as the centuries progressed. Carnacki had recorded encounters with many of them. Those records were why St. Cyprian was sure that the proposed course of action was the best.

  If they could capture the ghost, they might find those it had taken. At the very least, they could prevent anyone else from disappearing into the dark of the Underground.

  “You can ask her yourself, if you like, when she shows up,” St. Cyprian said.

  Stanhook blanched. He had faced down hairy crawlers in abandoned tunnels and worse, more monstrous denizens of the quiet reaches, but the idea of speaking to the dead offended his strict Anglican soul. Gallowglass chuckled. “Don’t you mean if she shows up?” she said.

  “Ghosts are like trains, Ms. Gallowglass. They have their lines and they run on them, regardless,” St. Cyprian said primly. In truth he had no idea. His career to this point had been one gamble after the next, as Gallowglass was not shy about reminding him. He wondered, idly, if Carnacki had ever felt the same…it was hard to imagine stiff, jovial Thomas Carnacki not knowing something.

  He sighed, and then immediately tensed as he watched the frosted threads of his breath pulse through the air. “Ms. Gallowglass…”

  “Temperature’s dropping,” Gallowglass said, looking at him.

  “I’ll get back to my position. Give us a yell,” Stanhook said, sidling back towards the generators that they’d set up earlier. The squat machines extruded a dozen lines of filament coil, stretching like a drunken spider’s web across the flat surface of the platform. Each line ended in a vacuum tube mounted in a cradle that would ensure that no stray vibrations would cause them to tumble. The tubes were specially crafted by a glass-blower in Florence, who used the remnants of stained glass windows to craft them. Carnacki had had many tubes, of many colors, but St. Cyprian, nothing if not efficient, had only one set of tubes crafted of every color. When the light of the filaments wit
hin struck the interior of the tube just right, the proper color would blaze to life.

  It was Stanhook’s task to set the generators humming at the proper moment. It was St. Cyprian and Gallowglass’ task to ensure that their prey stayed still long enough for the pentacle to trap her. Gallowglass stood and drew her pistol. She checked the ammunition cylinder with brisk efficiency and looked at St. Cyprian. “Shall we?” she asked.

  “Let’s shall,” he said, rising to his feet with a grunt. He refrained from fiddling with the Bulldog where it nestled in his coat pocket. The temperature of the platform had fallen drastically. In a crowd, it wouldn’t have been noticeable, but standing exposed like this, he felt the urge to pull his coat tighter about himself.

  The lights on the platform flickered teasingly. St. Cyprian glanced at them. Messages passed through strange hands when it came to the dark trails of the spirit world. The flicker of lights or the currents of strange odors could all hint as to the problem.

  “I smell something,” Gallowglass said.

  “Like old rot or water-logged stones,” St. Cyprian murmured. He gestured, tracing a sacred shape from the Third Ritual of Hloh in the air with two fingers. He was tempted to open his third eye, but he knew that that was simply inviting trouble. The spirit-eye, Carnacki had called it. St. Cyprian had learned how to open it from a Tibetan lama of his acquaintance. Aside from having what St. Cyprian considered an unhealthy fascination for the color green, the lama had been a good teacher.

  They moved to the center of the platform and stood back to back. Earlier, they had drawn three circles as required by the Saaamaaa Ritual in chalk, and they stood in the innermost circle, like goats tethered in a glade…which, in a sense, they were. “I hate this bit, have I ever mentioned that?” Gallowglass murmured.

  “Several times, at length,” St. Cyprian said. “No help for it, I’m afraid.”

  “Never is,” Gallowglass muttered. She tightened her grip on her pistol. The air seemed to have frozen solid around them. The happy faces on the advertising posters that were stuck to the walls of the station had become grotesque in the weirdly flickering light, leering rather than laughing. St. Cyprian crooked his fingers and cut the rhetoric of the Yimghaz Test into the frosty air.

  As he finished, a light burst, showering the platform with glass. Another soon followed. The platform beneath his feet seemed to vibrate, as if a train were approaching down the tracks. Steam rose from the chalk circles, and the outermost circle began to run as if hit by a high-pressure hose. “What the devil…” St. Cyprian murmured.

  “That’s never happened before,” Gallowglass said.

  “No,” St. Cyprian said. Sometimes tormented spirits developed a malignant potency over the years, but the Black Nun had never displayed tendencies such as these. Another light burst, causing a flare of brightness to zigzag across his retinas and in that moment, he saw it.

  The shape moved slowly across the platform. It had come from nowhere, as if it had seeped up from the stones of the platform. It squirmed and shuffled in a distorted fashion, moving too fast and then too slowly. It moved across the wires of the pentacle without noticing them, every footfall causing the platform to ripple. Gallowglass raised her pistol, but St. Cyprian pushed her arm down. “No. Stanhook?” he called out as the thing moved past them, towards the other side of the platform. “Turn it on, please. Our guest has arrived.”

  At the sound of his voice, it stopped, head cocked. There was a sound, like a dog snuffling at the bottom of a door. And then it turned around.

  It wasn’t a nun.

  Neither, he realized, was it a ghost.

  But it was very, very fast.

  “Move,” St. Cyprian shouted, grabbing Gallowglass by the shoulders and tossing her off the platform. Gallowglass hit the hard-packed soil even as the black thing crashed into St. Cyprian and carried him backwards. Tiles cracked and burst at the impact. It was like being trapped in the center of a flock of terrified birds as sharp things tore at him; fingers, perhaps, or teeth. He couldn’t tell.

  St. Cyprian staggered to his feet, and the thing clung to him like a lover. Waves of noise, like voices looping over and over in an auditory noose, flayed his eardrums even as it tore at him with impossible limbs. He was pulled and twisted and clawed by what felt like a multitude of hands. He could see nothing save flashes of semi-solid limbs and strips of faces, slashes of eyes and snarling mouths that shifted and moved within a stinking shroud. It spat words at him like bullets.

  The words that he could make out were Old English, Chaucer’s English, words and phrases from another England, and he could understand only two in ten. He saw shattered glass image-shards of lives that were not his, ragged flapping memories tainted by the dark of death. Fingers bit into his flesh, digging into him, as if it were looking for something. “The pentacle!” he shouted. “Turn on the pentacle!”

  The generators set up a snarl as someone obeyed his shouted order and the vacuum tubes flared to life as the thing screamed. The sound echoed strangely through the underground station, as if it had been thrown from numerous directions. As the sound bounded and rebounded from wall to arch, the generators whined and a burst of black smoke presaged the sudden silence as each one shut down. The vacuum tubes went dark.

  Abruptly, the creature flung him aside. St. Cyprian struck the platform hard and lay still, trying to catch his breath and reorient himself. Fragments of the Dhol chant rattled through his head, but he knew they would do no good. His skin was stripped with blood and his clothing was torn. The pentacle hadn’t worked. Why hadn’t it worked? It wasn’t foolproof, but it had never failed so spectacularly.

  The entity turned away, and it was glaring at Stanhook’s men as they moved onto the platform. Stanhook had pulled Gallowglass to her feet, and she followed him. His men took aim with their weapons. In the deep dark, hesitation meant death, but even so, the men from the Tunnel Authority looked to their leader to give the order. “Stay back!” St. Cyprian croaked, gesturing.

  “Are you insane?” Gallowglass said. “We need to kill this thing!”

  “It’s already dead,” he said.

  “Then what’s the problem?” Gallowglass snapped.

  “It’s not a ghost,” St. Cyprian said, pulling himself to his feet. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a ghost. Everyone stay back!”

  The entity shuffled awkwardly, its form blurring and twisting like a puff of smoke. Its head swung back and forth, looking at Stanhook’s men. A mouth split in a snarl that exposed overlapping rows of teeth.

  He glanced at the pentacle generator, and grimaced. “Ms. Gallowglass…can you get to the pentacle?” he called out.

  “It’s buggered,” she said.

  “Yes, but it can be fixed. Stanhook, one of your men has experience with generators, surely,” St. Cyprian said insistently. The creature snarled again, and its form rippled in a sickening fashion. Why was it still here, St. Cyprian wondered? In the other incidents, it had vanished not long after the attack. He had to find out more.

  It sniffed the air and then lurched towards Stanhook and Gallowglass. “In for a penny,” St. Cyprian rasped. He reached for the pistol in his pocket and drew and fired awkwardly, his ears ringing with the Bulldog’s bark. The thing whirled, its attention back on him, and it lunged like a serpent, jaws chattering. Hands with far too many fingers and palms closed on his gun-hand.

  “Mr. St. Cyprian!” Stanhook shouted.

  “The generator,” St. Cyprian yelped, moments before he was smashed back against the wall of the platform, again and again, and red-hot rivers of pain splashed through him, spreading outwards from the point of impact. The Webley tumbled from his hand and he was hurled to the floor; the thing hunched over him, slavering like a hound.

  He had to keep its attention, by any means necessary. Scrambling to his feet, he dove for it. For what he was contemplating, he needed physical contact, as hideous as that prospect was. As he grabbed for its ragged frame, St. Cyprian closed his ph
ysical eyes and let his third spring open.

  Humans were, by and large, as sensitive to the paranormal as animals were to earthquakes. But they put on blinders instinctively, blocking out everything but what was ahead of them. The inability of the human mind to correlate all of its perceptions was one of humanity’s built-in defences against predatory malignancies from the outer void. But, in the trade, you had to shuck those blinders first thing.

  The world became soft at the edges and more vibrant as his senses expanded to fill the void left by his thoughts. The dark colors of the platform blended and flowed into one another like watercolors. His mouth opened to expel a tendril of his ectoplasmic ka, which slid between his lips like cigarette smoke, curling and coiling out from him to dart into the cloud of malevolence that was the creature.

  The first thing he saw was the writhing mass of ectoplasmic tendrils that connected his captor to the platform. The shuffling, twitching thing was little more than hand-puppet, he realized and a cold sense of dread flooded him. Indeed, with the clarity provided by his third eye, he saw that the thing resembled nothing so much as a man-sized Mr. Punch, all grinning moon face, champing teeth and tattered clothes. Mr. Punch grappled with him, eyes rolling in its sockets.

  Beyond it, he could see the shifting colors that he knew were his companions. Bright and vibrant, they scattered like frightened birds as he and Mr. Punch stumbled back and forth in a grotesque gavotte. He felt as if he were caught in the paw of some titan entity. As they moved, the platform seemed to ripple and melt beneath his feet, as if the stone and steel were naught but empty air, revealing the darkness beneath, where a soft susurrus like that made by running water prickled at the edges of his hearing. The stink of ages assaulted him, and he saw movement in the darkness.

  Hands composed of mist and foul odors, suddenly reached out of the darkness, almost pleadingly. The susurrus grew louder, becoming a shattering babble. Voices washed over him, battering at his senses. Hands grabbed at him, not just Mr. Punch’s, but others, hundreds, pinching and pulling, dragging him down.