‘Wow, you really hold a grudge.’
Rita gripped the axe and closed her eyes, the dreamscape magic around her rushing into it. She crouched and slammed the butt of the axe against the rain slicked ground at her feet and unleashed the magic. She’d told it what she wanted, re-shaped it do one thing: burn away the dreamscape. Destroy the pretence. Return her to the real.
But when Rita opened her eyes she was still in the alley.
‘Oh. Well, that’s not fair.’
‘Nothing is fair, Rita Hobbes. Take poor Gavin Dylan here. Throat cut and tossed away in a dank alleyway. Worthless.’
‘He wasn’t worthless,’ Rita replied through gritted teeth.
She attempted to destroy the dreamscape again, to bust out of it, but the dreamscape refused. She tried to talk to the magic and felt her throat tighten. She struggled to catch her breath. This was much more powerful than any magic she’d felt from Mr. Cotton before. It was overwhelming, heavy, and he controlled it entirely.
‘He was a junkie, Rita. Just another drug-addled nothing taking up space. Is that why you didn’t do him the good turn of bringing his murderer to justice?’
Rita swallowed. Her throat was dry, her arms trembling. She had to try again. She had the axe, she could tell the magic what to do. Had to. She pulled the magic into the axe again and slammed the handle down on the ground. She watched as the spell raged from the axe and burned the alley away like it was made of dry paper, only to reveal an exact copy beneath.
It was the Angel’s power, it must be. The extra strength it afforded Cotton. The lies it created, the terrors, couldn’t be pushed aside. She was nothing, the power of the axe was nothing. Over and over she tried to burn the dream, to scrub it clean, and time and time again it remained.
‘His mother committed suicide, do you remember?’
‘Shut it.’
‘A few months after you arrived at her front door to tell her the bad news. Your words planted the seed, and away she went. Sucking on exhaust, dear, dear, dear.’
‘Show me,’ Rita asked the magic around her. ‘Show me, show me, show me.’
The picture flickered and settled. Rita could see it, the Angel’s power, a smoky tendril coiling around Gavin Dylan, around Mr. Cotton, just as Ben had said it would be.
‘I know you’re leeching from the Angel,’ said Rita.
‘Oh? Did Ben Turner see and go running to teacher, just like the headshrinker?’
Alison Parks.
‘Perhaps he should get the same treatment as her? What say you?’
‘You go anywhere near him…’
Gavin Dylan melted away and Mr. Cotton stepped forward, a large smile stretching across his rabbit mask. He gestured to the ground, a pair of feet were visible, poking out from the dark; was it Gavin Dylan?
‘Shall we take a look?’ said Mr. Cotton.
Something wasn’t right about the feet. Rita remembered every detail about Gavin Dylan. When he’d been found he was wearing a beaten up pair of blue Converse trainers, but the feet she saw were wearing dark brown leather shoes.
‘Ben?’
She darted forward to find the dead body of Ben Turner.
Rita staggered back, hand to her mouth.
‘Poor little doggy,’ said Mr. Cotton sadly, as he looked down at the corpse in the dirt. ‘He trusted you would protect him, too. Another failure, Detective? How do you even live with yourself?’
Rita gripped the handle of her axe so tightly that she thought she might turn it to dust, but she had to hold on to something, it was the only thing stopping her from losing her grip on sanity. From taking what she saw at face value. This was a dreamscape, that’s all it was. Those feet, that body, hadn’t been there when she first arrived.
‘Ben Turner, whose greatest hope in life was to find a woman who would love him, and that he could love in return. Such a simple, ordinary wish. A wish unfulfilled.’
The dreamscape pressed in on her. Too strong, too much to push back. It was endless, endless power and she was nothing.
‘That’s not Ben,’ said Rita.
Mr. Cotton giggled and clapped his white-gloved hands. ‘Oh, you have me, Detective. It’s a fair cop, as I believe the saying goes.’
He clicked his fingers and Ben was replaced by Gavin Dylan, just as she remembered.
‘I wonder where the real Ben Turner is?’ he said. ‘My, my, and my again, I do hope nothing tragic becomes of him. Would that not be awful, Rita Hobbes?’
‘Get out of here, go!’ Rita yelled at Ben Turner.
He ran to the basement door, half relieved to be getting out of the firing line, half ashamed to be doing so.
But what, exactly, could he have done? He was just Ben Turner, ex-accountant, ex-werewolf. He didn’t have any power to deal with this sort of thing. No magic axe, no magic anything. The best thing he could do was whatever Rita told him to do.
So he bolted across Big Pins and into the basement, locking the door behind him. The door that had kept him in when he’d still been affected by the lycanthropy curse. The one that had prevented the beast he turned into from getting out and causing bloody havoc.
Breathing heavily, Ben slowly backed down the stairs, straining to hear what was going on beyond the door, but he couldn’t hear anything. There should have been a giant fight going on, magic exploding, people screaming, that sort of thing, but there was only silence.
Confused, he made his way back up the basement stairs and pressed his ear to the door.
What was going on out there? Were Rita and the walking corpse having a polite chat? A gentle whisper in a far corner over a pint and a packet of crisps?
Ben frowned and moved his head from the door. Maybe it was over already? Rita had smacked the corpse with her axe, and that was that.
He placed his hand on the door’s lock, ready to open it, when he realised he could actually hear something. It wasn’t coming from the other side of the door though, it was coming from inside the basement.
It was someone’s breath, rasping.
Ben turned around to see.
Dan Waterson was in a park.
‘Okay…’
This time he was not surprised to find himself transported somewhere. This is what they did, Cotton and Spike, picked you up and dropped you in some nightmare construct.
‘Right then, what is it this time?’
At first he didn’t recognise the park at all, then he turned to see a set of swings. The metal frame was rusted and the two swings had metal chains and a simple wooden slat to sit upon. That’s when he realised where he was.
‘Grafton Park.’
He’d been six and angry and ran out of his mum’s car in an area he didn’t live in. He’d been full of fury and had found himself in a park. In this park. He’d sat on the swings, hoping his mum would be frantic with worry. With terror. That’d teach her for shouting at him just because he’d spilled his can of pop across the back seat.
‘Oh,’ said Waterson, ‘right.’
A man had approached him that day as he sat on the swing, his skinny legs dangling, bottom lip pouting. A man with matted hair and missing teeth. He’d run his dirty fingers across Waterson’s face and laughed like a lunatic. Little Waterson had tried to run, only for the man to grab hold of the scruff of his jumper. Waterson had struggled and screamed and kicked and the man had laughed and laughed. Eventually, he’d wriggled out of his jumper and sprinted blindly across the park and out on to the road, only to bump into his mum, who was halfway between fury and relief. For a moment it looked like anger would win out, but it only to took one look at her boy’s face for that to melt away. Waterson had experienced nightmares of the laughing man for years after that.
And there he was, that same man, shuffling towards him now.
‘You know, you’re smaller than I remember,’ said Waterson.
The man opened his toothless mouth and began to laugh, only for his form to ripple and warp.
‘Um. Okay,’ said Waterson.
<
br /> The Laughing Man rippled once more and was replaced by the flickering, not quite there form of a new person. Only it wasn’t a person, not really.
It was an Angel.
‘...leas… enn…’ said the Angel of Blackpool, Its voice broken into pieces.
‘What? You want me to lease something?’
‘..se… ner.’
Waterson wondered what the purpose of this was. He’d been terrified on a deep, awful level by the Laughing Man as a child, but he’d never been scared of the Angel. Not like that. Why were Cotton and Spike swapping out that old, primal feeling fear with this?
‘...if… stop them… release… have to release Jenner…’
And then the Angel was gone.
Liam was on his hands and knees sketching with a piece of chalk on a paving stone.
‘What are these?’ he asked.
‘They are shapes that hold power,’ replied Carlisle.
First Liam had drawn a large, unbroken circle. Within that circle he had then been asked to draw tiny symbol after tiny symbol in an exact pattern. A pattern that began skirting the inside radius of the chalk circle, then spiralled closer and closer to the circle’s centre.
Liam could see the shapes he had to draw in his mind’s eye. He would close his actual eyes and there they were, one after the other, and he could recreate them easy as pie.
‘What sort of power?’ he asked.
‘There are creatures. Almost things. Creatures without physical form who hunger for one. One of these bodiless bastards stole my body while I was in my astral form, and is no doubt taking it for a joyride, hell bent on causing chaos and murder with the thing.’
The magic that had been used to bind Carlisle to the prison didn’t work with the almost thing inside of him. Magic was a contract, and with a different person inside, the contract was broken. The binding spell useless. And so his hijacked body ran free.
‘Why does it want to murder?’
‘Why? You might as well ask why a spider catches a fly. Because they do. Because they must. And now that one of these things has my body, it can do so with reckless abandon.’
‘Unless you get your body back and stop it.’
‘Precisely.’
Liam closed his eyes and saw the final shape that he was required to draw.
‘What will this circle do to it?’ he asked as he drew a triangle with all sorts of weird squiggles within it that looked like they might be letters of some sort, but Liam had never seen letters like them before.
‘Two things. Firstly, if the thing in my body is within reach, it will attract it.’
‘How?’
‘We will place bait into the circle. The words and symbols will make the bait the tastiest thing for miles around. It will radiate, like an angler fish’s lure in the dark depths of the ocean. Irresistible.’
‘What’s the bait?’ replied Liam, sitting back on his knees to take in his completed handiwork.
‘You are the bait.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do not worry, it is quite safe.’
Liam was not absolutely sure that he believed Carlisle. ‘What if your body is too far away for the bait to work?’
‘Then I shall do my best to push you out and take over your body.’
‘Oh. Can you do that?’
‘Let’s hope we do not need to find out, I would not wish to be so small a second time.’
‘What’s the other thing it can do? You said two things.’
‘It will trap the thing. My body. The circle is meant for it and it alone. Once it steps within it, it will not be able to step out again unless the circle is broken. Now come along, get into the circle and wriggle around like the tasty bait you are.’
Liam looked at the circle, unsure that this was the best course of action. ‘What if I don’t?’
‘I did mention pushing you out and taking over your body, did I not? You would be dead, which most people are not altogether keen on.’
Liam stepped into the circle. He looked down at his feet to see the chalk words and symbols he had sketched had begun to glow a pure, brilliant white.
‘The trap is activated,’ said Carlisle. ‘Now we wait.’
‘You know you said you left your body to go looking for help because you couldn’t leave where you were?’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe you should have just stepped out your body, waited for one of these things to come get you, then followed it out and grabbed your body back. Been easier, probably.
Silence.
‘Carlisle?’
‘Shut up.’
Rita whirled around, axe at the ready. The alleyway and Mr. Cotton were gone. She was back in Big Pins.
She shuddered, her chest untightening. Cotton and Spike had been terrible before, but with the Angel’s power too, she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to stop them. She could still feel the power of them. Mr. Cotton had been showing off, flooding the dreamscape with this fresh power and showing her just how puny she was. How useless and scared she should be. She’d swatted away at it with her axe and hadn’t even left a scratch.
‘Rita.’
She turned to see Formby and Waterson.
‘Are you two okay?’
‘Fine,’ said Waterson. ‘Still dead, but otherwise in top condition.’
Rita slumped down on a bar stool. ‘We’re in such deep, deep shit here.’
‘What is it?’ asked Waterson.
‘Their power. The Angel’s power. It’s just… it’s too much.’
‘Hedgehog!’ said Formby.
‘What?’ replied Rita, looking to the wide-eyed Formby who was pointing past her.
‘Oh crap,’ said Waterson.
Rita turned to see a figure stood in the open doorway to the basement. He wore a hedgehog mask and was holding up a white-gloved fist stained red with blood.
Rita jumped up, wielding her axe.
‘Get out of here, you spiky prick!’
Mr. Spike opened his fist and what he had been holding clattered to the floor.
‘Are those… I think those are teeth,’ said Waterson.
Rita remembered Ben Turner, dead behind the bins.
‘My, my, and my again, I do hope nothing tragic becomes of him. Would that not be awful, Rita Hobbes?’
‘No…’
Mr. Spike was giggling.
‘What is it?’ asked Waterson, but Rita wasn’t listening.
She ran at the giggling Spike, who was busy smearing the blood over his mask. She screamed and swung her axe, but it didn’t stick into Spike, into his body. Instead, it tore through him, causing his 2D image to rip in two and disappear.
‘Ben!’ She ran down the basement steps, almost tripping over her own feet in the process, and burst into the basement.
Ben Turner was curled up on the floor.
‘It’s not real. That’s not him.’
She took a step towards him. A pair of bunny ears on a hairband had been slipped on his head.
Waterson stepped past her and went to Ben, kneeling down next to his body, Formby following.
‘It’s a trick. It’s just a trick, right?’ said Rita, but she knew the truth.
Formby looked up to Rita. ‘He’s gone.’
Rita sat down on the basement steps, wrapping her arms around herself. It was cold down there.
17
Bob the exorcist woke in his ratty chair, the only stick of furniture in his rundown excuse for a front room.
‘Still alive,’ he said, not quite certain if he said it with surprise, sadness, or relief.
Bob had been chosen by the Vatican to serve as an exorcist when he was just six years old. Bob was originally from London, so it might come as a surprise that he was pulled in by the Vatican, but their Uncanny arm had people everywhere, searching for new soldiers in their fight against the dark.
Bob’s parents, devout, fearful, had been delighted. He had shown a natural affinity with the dark and the things that dwelled there. It c
ame as easily to him as breathing.
‘That’s the power of our Lord and Saviour, Robert,’ his handler, his trainer, had told him.
He had developed into one of their frontline people. The first to be sent to the worst places imaginable, saving innocent people from the machinations of demons, and worse.
But there is always a price to pay for playing with the dark arts.
Most in his line of work did not live very long. Toiling with dark magic took a toll on a man’s body. Ate it up. Turned it against itself. The mind, too. There were many ways an exorcist for the Vatican could go. Perhaps something they fought would fight back. Or the dark magic would infect a body with cancers, or push a person to suicide.
And the things in the black, the creatures from the pit, they were always waiting. As soon as you stepped into battle against them, announced yourself as their opposition, you were added to a list. It was not a good list to be on. Sooner or later, if the dark magic didn’t eat you up, something would slither out of a corner to scratch you off that list. That was the price paid for doing the Lord’s good work, and Bob had accepted that.
Eventually, sickened by the hypocrisy he saw in his own world—a world he had always believed to be on the side of the light—he had walked away. That’s how he found himself sat in a basement flat in Blackpool of all places, waiting for the end to come.
He meant to go down fighting. To bloody a few noses. But the waiting was torture. He’d been there for years now, and he could feel the eyes upon him. All day, all night, they were watching.
Drink and junk food and pretending he didn’t give a fuck helped. He lived that way for long enough that it fooled his own mind into not caring, into shrugging off any fear, any anticipation.
Apart from when he woke up. He’d remember then.
He struggled up out of his chair, a half-empty can of lager clattering from his lap and on to the floor, the remains of the drink gurgling out.
‘Shit.’ He bent down and grabbed the can, saving about an inch of liquid. ‘Waste not want not.’ He drank the warm remains before tossing the empty can into a darkened corner.
He thought he saw something flinch out of the way. A patch of dark in the darkness. Bob ignored it, reached into a plastic bag on the floor by his chair, and pulled out a fresh can of beer, foam exploding as he opened it.
Night Terrors: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Hexed Detective Book 3) Page 12