Night Terrors: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Hexed Detective Book 3)

by Matthew Stott

  Impossible.

  It was impossible.

  Moorsgate burned to the ground when she was just fourteen years old. She’d seen it happen. No, no, she’d made it happen. It was being fumigated and all the kids and the staff were being housed in local bed and breakfasts, and that’s when she’d taken her chance. A box of matches, a couple of cans of paint thinner. She knew which window had the latch and could easily be forced. They never fixed stuff like that at Moorsgate. It wasn’t a place where things got fixed, it was a place things were allowed to break down and degrade.

  In she’d wriggled, falling the metre to the hard, wooden floor below.

  She’d been listening to her Walkman, to a tape she stolen from Woolworth’s a week before. A Madonna best of. As she bopped to Borderline, to Vogue, to Holiday, she splashed the thinner around, singing and laughing and alive.

  You needed a key to get in the front door, but not out. She’d opened the door and stood, looking into the guts of the building she hated, one last time. Then she lit the match and the building went up, the flames as eager as Rita to scrub the place from the face of the Earth. She watched for a few seconds while Madonna implored her to express herself, and then she turned and ran—ran faster than she’d ever thought possible—as though she’d cast off a rucksack full of rocks.

  It was gone.

  Demolished after the firemen had finally put out the flames.

  And now she was stood in its corridors again.

  ‘Nice try, boys, but you have to get up early in the morning to pull the wool over this bitch’s eyes.’

  Rita passed the axe from hand to hand, strolling down the corridor, taking in each bit of the dreamscape recreation.

  ‘I know your dirty tricks, remember? You think I’m gonna what? Fall to my knees and cry or something? Fat chance, big ears.’

  She turned the corridor to find Alison Parks’ dead, naked body stood waiting for her. Alison raised a hand and waved. ‘Hello Rita. Remember when you wet your bed with tears and piss and you felt so alone and wretched and unwanted? It was just in that room there, wasn’t it?’

  Rita did remember. It had happened on more than one occasion. Ms. Winters had heard her muffled sobs as she passed by. She’d poked her head into the room and told her to keep it down. ‘Don’t be such a big baby,’ she’d said. The first few times she’d wet the bed, Ms. Winters had smacked her legs with the back of her hand. After that, it was the belt. She hadn’t let on after that. She would just get up early, strip the bed, and wash it in the sink.

  ‘I had a giant turd of a childhood,’ said Rita, feigning a yawn. ‘You’ve got me. I feel terrible. Can we move on?’

  The door to what had been her bedroom opened and Ms. Winters stepped out. She wore a thick-knitted jumper, a pair of black jeans, her dark hair severely short.

  ‘Hobbes, who said you could go wandering the corridors after lights out?’

  Despite herself, Rita felt her heart rate quicken, her hands shake.

  ‘There it is,’ said Alison Parks, stroking her long, rabbit ears.

  ‘Answer me!’ demanded Ms. Winters. ‘Well, did someone steal your tongue, you wretched little monster?’ Rita saw she was holding a belt. It was doubled over and Ms. Winters’ hands squeezed it, knuckles white.

  ‘Mm,’ said Alison Parks, ‘that really is very moreish.’

  ‘Oh, fuck you to the moon and back,’ replied Rita, then stepped forward and swung the axe, embedding its blade in Ms. Winters’ skull.

  ‘No television for you for a month,’ slurred Ms. Winters, one half of her face hanging slack.

  Rita could feel what Ms. Winters was made of. She wasn’t real, of course. She was a toy, fashioned by a master.

  ‘Piss off,’ said Rita. ‘And by the way, everyone talks about how rank your breath is behind your back.’

  The simulation of Ms. Winters existed just long enough for surprise to register on her face before Rita told the dream magic to turn her into something more pleasing. Ms. Winters broke apart, became a cloud of butterflies, and fluttered off into the dark.

  ‘That all you got, Bugs Bunny?’

  Alison Parks lifted the scalpel and dragged it down her forehead, face, neck, chest, stomach, crotch. She peeled herself open and Mr. Cotton, his old suit and tatty rabbit mask coated with gore, stepped out of her. The remains of Alison Parks crumpled to the floor behind him, a boneless sack of skin.

  The rabbit mask grinned at Rita, though of course it did not as it was just a mask.

  Waterson had not experienced the nightmare magic of Cotton and Spike first-hand before, but after running from his mum’s house and pulling himself a little more together, he put two and two together and grew very cross indeed.

  How dare they do that to him. To make his mum say those things, even if it had just been an empty, pretend version of her.

  ‘Okay, you tricked me, congratulations. You spooked a ghost.’

  Rasping breath. Waterson whirled round, but he was alone on the street. Houses with their lights outs, curtains closed, pressed in at him. Were they getting closer? The road narrower?

  Rasping, damp, rancid breath in his ear.

  He turned again, but he was still alone.

  ‘Okay, who is that? I know this is just a waking dream thing, so you might as well come out.’

  One of the doors opened and a man in an old suit and a hedgehog mask stepped out. Waterson had seen neither of the men, of the things, he and Rita were after, but he’d heard enough to recognise who had joined him.

  ‘You must be Mr. Spike. The one who doesn’t talk.’

  Another door on another house opened, and a second Mr. Spike stepped out.

  ‘Okay. Nice trick. You should play Vegas.’

  A third door, a third Mr. Spike.

  ‘I might just be off then,’ said Waterson. ‘Places to be.’ He began to hustle his way down the street as more and more doors opened, and Mr. Spike after Mr. Spike stepped out to stare at him with the empty, glass eyes of his mask. It was, to put it mildly, really putting the willies up Detective Dan Waterson.

  He realised he was no longer just walking fast but sprinting. He was desperate to get off that street, but the damn thing seemed to be never-ending. An infinite stretch of opening doors and Mr. Spikes.

  He was dead, what did he have to be afraid of? He couldn’t die again. Or could he? Could the dead die? He didn’t really want to find out.

  He was dead! Why on earth was he running? He could just think of a place he knew and he’d zap right over there and away.

  ‘Big Pins!’ He closed his eyes.

  ‘Yes, the dead can die,’ said Waterson’s mum.

  ‘Shit it!’ replied Waterson as he ran from his mum’s house to find a street full of Mr. Spikes waiting to greet him from an endless expanse of doorways. He turned back and made his way through the house, past Not Mum.

  ‘Such an ugly baby. It was all I could do not to drown you every bath time.’

  Waterson ran through the kitchen and to the back door. He threw it open, raced through the backyard and over the wall to the alleyway that ran on that side of the street.

  As his feet hit down on the cobbles he straightened up to find himself stood not behind, but in front of his mum’s house again, the endless Mr. Spikes looking back at him, waving their white-gloved hands.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ said Dan Waterson, wondering if things could possibly get any worse.

  The endless Mr. Spikes began screaming and sprinting towards him.

  Things could always get worse.

  Rita was sat in the orphanage canteen at one of the long, wooden tables that all the kids had sat at, breakfast, dinner, and tea. She was spooning a bowl of rice pudding into her mouth.

  ‘I always hated rice pudding,’ she said.

  ‘This is a nightmare,’ replied Mr. Cotton, who was sat opposite her, his mask and clothing still dark with Alison Parks’ blood, his stained white-gloved fingers fanned out on the table top before him.

 
‘So, I didn’t finish you and your brother off, then?’ she asked, adding a spoonful of strawberry jam to the pudding and swirling it around.

  ‘Finish us off? That is not possible. You can stomp on us, cut us, burn us, and we shall return, given time. Wherever a child quivers beneath their bed covers, we shall be reborn.’

  ‘Well, bully for you. Where is your brother, by the way? Is that mute little prick going to jump out at me at any moment? Sneak up behind me with a balloon and a pin?’

  ‘Brother mine is currently occupied elsewhere, terrorising a ghost.’

  Rita frowned. So Waters was in a nightmare of his own.

  ‘You can’t have thought this would really fool me,’ she said. ‘I’ve tasted your magic, I’ve used it, made it my own.’

  Mr. Cotton opened his mouth and a spider with legs as thick as pipe cleaners scuttled out.

  ‘Gross, stop that,’ said Rita.

  Mr. Cotton picked the spider from his mask and crushed it in one hand before swiping the small, squished thing aside. ‘Please, continue,’ he said.

  ‘What’s your game then? What do you and the Angel have in mind?’

  ‘Angel? We are not Its worker bees. We do as we please, and fear is what we please.’

  Okay, so the Angel wasn’t involved. Cotton and Spike were flying solo. Was that true? Should she trust the word of a nightmare monster?

  ‘Do you know where Carlisle is?’

  Mr. Cotton nodded once.

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Hard to say. Perhaps, perhaps not, you things of bone and meat do die so easily. So deliciously.’

  ‘Are you going to try and kill me?’

  Mr. Cotton’s mask smiled. ‘All good things come to those who wait.’

  Rita finished the rice pudding and dropped the spoon into the bowl as she stood. ‘Okay, I’m bored now. Time to kick seven shades of shit out of you.’

  She raised the axe and swung it at Mr. Cotton’s head. He did not attempt to get out of the way. Instead, he let the axe pass through him, his head drifting apart like smoke before reforming into that same masked face.

  ‘Strike one,’ he said, and the rabbit mask wriggled its nose.

  ‘This one is going to sting,’ she replied, kneeling and slamming the butt of the axe against the floorboards. She could feel the dream magic, the nightmare magic, all around her. She willed it into the axe and it obeyed. The colours, dark, corrosive, washed around her mind, scraping their nails across her thoughts as she reshaped it, unleashed it with a war cry.

  Flames erupted out of her at all angles, swamping the orphanage, devouring Mr. Cotton. He sat calmly and waved as the dream construct surrounding him was reduced to ash. ‘You cannot harm us anymore, Rita Hobbes. But the damage we shall do to you…’

  When the spell was finished, Rita stood and looked around at what she had done. ‘That’s the second time I’ve burned this shit hole down. I’m not going to lie, it felt just as good as the first.’

  Waterson was running in circles. Through his mum’s house, through the backyard, over the wall and then emerging impossibly at the front of the house again. Round and round again, the endless, screaming Mr. Spikes so close at his heels that he could feel their noisy, damp breath caressing the hairs on the back of his neck.

  He tried again and again to jump anywhere but the street he found himself running loops through, but it seemed as though the parameters of the nightmare he’d been shoved into wouldn’t let him free of it.

  ‘You got your ugly dad’s fat face, too.’

  ‘Fuck off, Mum!’ he cried as he rushed by once again.

  As he burst into the backyard for what must have been the fiftieth time, he became aware that he no longer heard the pack of Mr. Spikes in pursuit. He stopped at the yard’s wall and turned. A single Mr. Spike peered at him through the kitchen window.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Waterson. ‘Tired out from all the running? I ran three different marathons when I wasn’t dead, you were always on to a loser, mate.’

  Mr. Spike reached up and began to remove his hedgehog mask. Waterson was pretty certain that the last thing he should do was see what lurked beneath that rotting mask.

  He turned back to the wall, only now the wall was a hundred Mr. Spikes’, all slowly removing their masks.

  ‘Shit. Shit!’

  Everything was that same mask. The world was the sound of Mr. Spike’s rasping breath. Wherever he turned, the mask’s glass eyes looked back, his own horrified face reflected back at him. A pair of white gloves inched it up and up and—

  An axe erupted out of one of Mr. Spike’s masks, cleaving it in two.

  ‘What?’ said Waterson, more or less reaching the end of his tether. He crouched and looked through the gap that had been created, to see a familiar face looking back.

  ‘Come on then, idiot,’ said Rita, waving Waterson forward from beyond the split in Mr. Spike.

  ‘You know that looks really, really weird.’

  ‘Shift it!’

  Waterson ran forward and jumped through the gap in reality as Mr. Spike’s teeth chattered in frustration.

  12

  Ben Turner sat on his bed in Big Pin’s basement and tried not to think about what he’d seen in the toilets.

  Tried not to think about Magda, the woman who’d bitten him, turned him monstrous, appearing there and speaking to him.

  He clenched his hands together to try and stop them shaking.

  He knew she hadn’t really been there. Of course he knew that, she was dead. Very, very dead. Thanks to meeting Dan Waterson, he’d been made aware that ghosts were a thing, but that hadn’t been Magda’s ghost. For one thing, her soul had been claimed by a demon (and it was vaguely worrying how readily he accepted that. Souls, demons, no big deal. His entire world had expanded in an instant).

  So Magda was gone. Properly gone, soul and all. He knew it hadn’t really been her, back to turn him once again. Back to make him her hungry, faithful hound. No, this was nothing but a waking nightmare. Part of Rita’s investigation, something to do with those masked dream monsters. A nasty trick meant to terrify him.

  Well, it had bloody well worked. A-Plus results to the mask-wearing bastards.

  Okay, it was nothing but a trick. Cool. He understood that. The thing was, Ben really needed to go to the toilet, and was now afraid to go by himself. Which was crazy. He’d been alternatively sat on his bed and pacing his room for the last hour, trying to work up the courage to just walk upstairs, cross the bar, and head into the toilets.

  He eyed the empty plastic bottle on the floor again.

  No, he wasn’t going to pee in a bottle, that was daft.

  Before he could talk himself out of it, he stood and left the basement, feet heavy and unwilling. Upstairs, Linton was giving a man with horns a pair of bowling shoes.

  Ben’s heart was beating way too fast.

  ‘Get it together, you tit,’ he mumbled to himself.

  He placed his hand against the door to the Gents, took a breath or two, then pushed his way inside.

  The toilets were empty: a urinal, a couple of sit-down stalls, the sinks. He didn’t like the way he looked in the mirror, wide-eyed and pale-faced. Ben hustled over to the urinal, unzipped, pulled out, and sighed in relief as he had one of the longest pees of his life.

  Satisfaction washed over him, the fear that the nightmare might repeat itself fading now as the pain in his bladder abated.

  So of course, after washing his hands, he passed the stalls on his way to the exit to see Magda standing inside one, waving.

  Carlisle was struggling to find his way home. To find his way back to his body.

  Who knew how much damage had been suffered, to his muscles, to his mind. Not to mention the things that hunted for empty bodies. Had the almost things sniffed him out yet? He hadn’t meant to be apart from himself for so long, but it was difficult to judge the passing of time when in an astral form. All he knew was, he felt deeply that he’d been away for longer t
han he should have.

  It had been a waste of time. He’d found no one who could help. His only option now was to get back into his body, to try and regain a little strength, then jump out and have another go. That was if Cotton and Spike didn’t murder him before he was able to try for a second time.

  ‘Find me,’ he said. A mantra. A rope to hold on to as the raging waves and winds of sights and sounds battered against him. Tried to send him tumbling into the jaws of nothingness.

  ‘Find me.’

  The rope tugged him forward ever so slightly. He was a horse sinking into quicksand, his rider vainly attempting to pull him to safety.

  ‘Find me.’

  The only place he’d found potential help was with the Yellow Man, but the price was too high. He also did not like the idea of the dark claiming him as one of its own. He thought of himself as a rogue, a bastard, a swindler, a killer, but since when did all that make a person evil? Very presumptuous.

  ‘Find me.’

  Was that salt water? The sea? Waves crashed overhead; real waves this time.

  ‘Find me, find me, find me.’

  The water was gone. An Angel was on Its knees inside a glass box.

  ‘Haha!’ said Carlisle, relief coursing through his astral form. Now to slip back into his body, catch his breath, restart any of his organs that might have failed in his absence, and then he’d try again. Then he really would find his way to L’Merrier and offer him a fistful of promises if that’s what it took. This would not be the end of Carlisle. A couple of mask-wearing freaks weren’t going to put a full stop upon his existence. He was Carlisle, and he would hear their masks crack beneath the heel of his boot.

  He soon found one small problem standing in the way of his continued existence and thirst for revenge.

  His body was gone.

  ‘Well, fuck,’ said Carlisle, and his muffled words echoed around the marble walls of the Angel of Blackpool’s prison.

  Ben Turner was breaking the number one rule Rita Hobbes had given him.