Kill Fish Jones

by Caro King

  Grimshaw shut up. He could claim to be bright, but he certainly couldn’t put his hand up to style. Now Tun, he had style. Even more than the Mighty Curse, who was just the most powerful curse demon ever made. Grimshaw flipped his ears thoughtfully. On reflection, maybe the Mighty Curse won on that point too – the total annihilation of all living things did have a certain flair.

  ‘Anyway, tell me about the knives again. I liked that. Tell me about how they looked falling through the sky, all bright in the sun. And about how whatsisname …’

  ‘Jon Figg.’

  ‘… was right underneath. Tell me about the blood spurting all over the pavement and the bits—’

  ‘They weren’t knives; they were saws, electric saws.’

  ‘Oh, electric.’ Lampwick waved a hand airily. ‘That silly modern invention you’re always going on about. We had gas in my day, that was good enough for us. Nothing like the atmosphere of a couple of turned-down gaslights. Or candles! I suppose they’ve forgotten about candles …’

  Grimshaw listened while Lampwick rambled on. He had heard it all before. Having spent over a century in his Architect’s company, there was nothing that Lampwick could say that was new to Grimshaw.

  Back in the days when he was alive, Lampwick had pretended to be a master magician who could see into the future. Even real master magicians couldn’t do that because no human being could see into the future, they just weren’t built that way. But Lampwick used a crystal ball and some clever lighting to make more than one rich woman believe him. His best trick was to ‘foresee’ his poor victim’s death, but claim that he couldn’t quite make out the details of how it happened. The victims then paid Lampwick a lot of money to keep trying because they wanted to be able to avoid it when the time came. He wasn’t called Lampwick the Robber for nothing.

  ‘The funniest was young Mrs Carroll. Her husband kept a tight rein on the money so she had to find other ways to pay. Did I ever tell you …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘… about the things she could do with a couple of carrots and a boiled potato?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Wonderful cook she was. I remember the time …’

  Grimshaw flicked his ears as the sense reached him that Mrs Jones and the weird boy had stopped moving. He had been going to leave it until morning to take the next step, but that would mean hanging around with Lampwick all night. An idea occurred to him and he almost chuckled out loud.

  ‘Got to stop you there,’ he said quickly, holding up a claw tipped paw.

  Lampwick glared at him. ‘I was telling you about—’

  ‘I gotta go. Mrs Jones has stopped running …’

  ‘I do wish I could do something about that twitch.’

  ‘… so I can go and do the weird boy.’

  ‘Ahh, yes. You never did tell me what makes him so odd.’

  ‘He hardly ever says anything.’ Now Grimshaw came to think about it, that seemed like a really good character trait. He paused for a moment, trying to find the right words to express the boy’s oddness. It was as if he was somehow more linked in to what was going on around him. Take the way he had shouted a warning to Jon Figg almost before the chain of events had begun. As if he had sensed or seen something … Grimshaw hunched his shoulders and gave up.

  ‘And he’s kind of small with thick white hair and hazel eyes,’ he said instead.

  ‘Hmm. Odd colouring, certainly.’

  ‘And he’s called Fish.’

  ‘Fish?’

  ‘Yes! Fish. That swim in the sea.’

  ‘Oh! Fish! That’s a funny name. Why do they call him that? Is it his real one?’

  Grimshaw shrugged. Frankly, he didn’t care. The boy was just a name on his Litany. Unlike his mother, who had turned out to be quite interesting, with her admirable behaviour in the face of disaster.

  ‘Quite a little character! It’s almost a shame … Oh well, the woman disturbed me …’

  ‘Good thing too! You were bored silly.’ Grimshaw wrinkled up his nose disdainfully. ‘Anyway, I gotta go.’

  Lampwick scowled. ‘You can retell it all when you get back then. There’ll be plenty of time.’

  ‘You said it,’ muttered Grimshaw. He twiddled the hands of his watch, hoping that Lampwick wouldn’t see what he was doing and cotton on to the fact that Grimshaw wasn’t going to leave Limbo just yet.

  The only way for a curse demon Avatar to get into Limbo from Real Space was to set all the dials on his chronometer to zero and return to his Architect. In a way, Lampwick was Grimshaw’s gateway into the grey world. But once he had crossed over, he could travel around Limbo by setting the geography hands to a place and leaving all the other hands on zero.

  Mrs Jones had stopped running, which meant that Grimshaw could go and do the boy. But Lampwick wasn’t to know that Grimshaw wasn’t going to do the boy right now. Instead, Grimshaw was going to visit his friend Tun. He wanted to tell Tun all about the wonderful moment of BOOM! and how it had made him feel.

  So he pressed the send button and disappeared from the crypt.

  10

  HORSEMEN

  Tun was rarely with his Architect these days. This was because his Architect thought that Tun was creepy and said that he would rather be on his own than be stared at by a mad bathrobe who’d make Death look like Santa Claus. Secretly, Grimshaw thought the description was a good one.

  As a result, Tun had a habit of roving around Limbo more than curse demons usually did. This meant that it could take Grimshaw a little while to find him, and sometimes he failed to track his friend down at all. To his dismay, this was turning out to be one of those occasions. When he had nearly exhausted all the usual places, he tried the Lock-Out Club in London, Limbo. Tun didn’t often go to the Lock-Out Club because he wasn’t very keen on company, but it was worth a try.

  Heads swivelled in his direction as Grimshaw popped into existence in the middle of a group of second-rate demons who were hanging out in the club lounge. If there had been any conversation, it died on the spot.

  ‘It’s that odd little creature again,’ said one in a voice like broken glass. ‘The one that’s always in the books.’

  Books in Grey Space might look dull on their outsides, but even Limbo couldn’t control their insides, which had a half-life all of their own. The Lock-Out had a library, which was one of the reasons that Grimshaw liked the club best of all the curse demons’ meeting places. Well, the only reason really. The Lock-Out Club chairs were like slippery rocks, having left all their squashy comfort back in Real Space, and there was never a fire in the fireplace because fire didn’t work in Limbo. But the library, though small, was chock-full of adventure stories, and Grimshaw had experienced all of them at least twice.

  Grimshaw sent a quick glance around the room, looking for Tun. It was always easy to pick him out because, although the Avatars who hung out in the club tended to be the sort with dark robes, cowled faces and a stare that could turn hot coals into ice cubes, Tun was bigger and more terrifying than any of them.

  ‘Hmm,’ said another, with a voice like hissing snakes, ‘let’s take him into the library. We could throw him into an encyclopaedia and see if his head explodes!’

  Under the combined gaze of five Avatars, Grimshaw swallowed nervously.

  ‘You’ve already done that,’ he said. ‘You know it does.’

  As the demons began to drift towards him in a menacing kind of way, he spun the dials on his chronometer and hit send. Clearly, Tun wasn’t at the Lock-Out Club, which left only one place to look. The Limbo desert.

  Tun hardly ever went to the desert, because he didn’t get on with Hanhut, the leader of the Ancient Egyptian Avatars, who usually hung out there. At least, a lot of them actually lived in the Limbo version of the British Museum, where all the Architects had been moved to as exhibits. But it was so crowded in there these days that most of the Architects took it in turns to banish their Avatars to the desert so as to make a little space.

 
Many of the Ancient Egyptian demons were mere second-raters, but Hanhut was the Avatar of a first-rate curse and every bit as famous as Tun. He had been created for an Ancient Egyptian queen with the impressive words ‘Death shall come on swift wings to him that toucheth the exalted one’. As a result, Hanhut was a study in terror, tall, jackal-headed, with massive wings and eyes that struck fear into any heart. Including Grimshaw’s.

  When Grimshaw landed with a thunk on the sand that was sand-coloured but with a kind of grey quality about it, Hanhut turned his fearsome head and stared. Some of the other Ancient Egyptian curse demons were there too, sitting amid the dunes that rose against the grey sky like blocks of powdery concrete. In the distance Grimshaw could see the pyramids, their grey, triangular shapes jutting against the grey sky.

  ‘It’s that odd little creature again,’ said Hanhut in his low voice that seemed to have a lot of snarl in it. He knew Grimshaw’s name perfectly well, but pretended not to because he thought he was too important to address a third-rater by name.

  Three over-tall figures in slightly unravelled bandages turned to peer at Grimshaw with the dark holes that served them for eyes. For some reason, second-rate Ancient Egyptian Avatars often came out looking like old horror-movie versions of revenge-crazed mummies.

  ‘The third-raters are all odd,’ said one in a bored voice.

  ‘Some are odder than others, though,’ said another. ‘Have you seen that weird one like a lopsided pig?’

  ‘His name is Wimble,’ muttered Grimshaw, a little crossly. If the Mighty Curse was top of the curse-demon tree, then Wimble was the bottom – so lowly that even a demon of Grimshaw’s standing could look down on him. Grimshaw was so relieved it wasn’t him at the bottom, that he tried to stand up for Wimble whenever he could.

  Hanhut took a step forward and put on a reassuring look that nearly made Grimshaw throw up with fright.

  ‘Tell me, O cat creature with no fur, how does it feel to be so … mediocre?’

  Grimshaw didn’t know what mediocre meant, but he could take a pretty good guess. He flipped his ears and swished his tail, making ripples in the sand.

  ‘Um … kind of … depressing.’

  Hanhut nodded his jackal’s head and ruffled his wings in a sympathetic way that made Grimshaw think he was about to be ripped apart. He swallowed hard, but managed to say, ‘What does it feel like to be so … amazing?’

  The other demons burst into laughter that sounded like somebody choking horribly to death.

  Hanhut raised a hand and they fell silent. ‘No, no. I will answer. Let the creature hear me.’ He took another step forward.

  Grimshaw shuffled back, getting slightly caught up in his tail. The other demons had stirred jerkily into life and were moving in different directions. Grimshaw had a nasty feeling they were positioning themselves around him. It didn’t bode well. He twitched, then flattened his ears nervously and crouched a little closer to the sand.

  His eyes glowing like yellow fires, Hanhut stepped closer. He raised a hand heavy with shining claws and reached out slowly towards the cowering Grimshaw.

  ‘Now, let’s see. How does it feel to plunge your hand into a man’s body and pull out his entrails? To see the life go out in his eyes and know you have ended all that he was and all that he might have been? To fly on wings of flame and see men pale and sink to their knees before you?’ Hanhut shook his head thoughtfully. Then he bared his long teeth in a smile that was more snarl. ‘It feels … POWERFUL. That’s how it feels.’

  Hanhut smiled. Grimshaw wished he hadn’t.

  ‘But if such a lowly creature as you,’ Hanhut continued, ‘can never know how it feels to wield great power, I can at least show you how it feels to be … the victim.’

  Grimshaw gulped as the others closed in. He could feel them looking down their bandaged noses at him. Now he was keeping one eye on Hanhut and one on a darkening of the sky over to the right. There was only one thing in Limbo that could spread shadows in that way. The Horsemen. Hanhut and his friends hadn’t noticed yet because they were all focused on Grimshaw.

  ‘I was just … erm … looking for Tun,’ Grimshaw gasped, ‘but he’s not here so …’

  Quickly, he spun dials at random and reached for the send button. He didn’t care where the chronometer was set for, pretty much anywhere in Limbo had to be better than the desert right now. Grimshaw had never met the Horsemen and didn’t want to. One look at their terrible shapes moving across Limbo, surrounded by darkness and the sound of screaming, was enough to tell him all he wanted to know.

  ‘No, you don’t!’ A heavily bandaged hand took hold of Grimshaw’s arm and plucked him from the ground, dangling him in mid-air so that he couldn’t reach his chronometer without dislocating something.

  ‘Look!’ said Grimshaw urgently. With his free hand, he pointed at the Horsemen heading towards them. In Real Space their arrival would blot out the light, casting shadow across the land. But in Grey Space the light just stayed, well, grey.

  ‘You won’t catch us like that!’ Hanhut didn’t even turn his head to follow Grimshaw’s pointing finger, he just laughed. It sounded like the baying of a terrible hound. The other Avatars joined in, making a hideous clamour that hid the distant sounds of the approaching Horsemen.

  The darkness arrowed down, swooping out of the sky. It was close enough now for Grimshaw to make out the huge shapes of the four Horsemen within it, wielding great fiery swords and clad in chain mail over bloody rags. He could see the night-black gloss of the horses too, their eyes full of flames and their lips rolled back to show teeth like tombstones.

  Grimshaw shut his eyes and whimpered.

  ‘Look, he knows what’s going to happen to him,’ sniggered the most unravelled-looking Avatar in a voice thick with the dust of death.

  ‘Yes,’ mumbled Grimshaw, ‘but I don’t think you do!’

  As he spoke, Hanhut turned his head, hearing at last the sound of tortured screams that followed the Horsemen wherever they went. He gave a hoarse cry of rage and fear. The others caught on and tattered hands everywhere flew to dig out their chronometers.

  They were too late. The Horsemen were upon them, flooding the air with the stench of blood and hot steel. It filled Grimshaw’s nostrils, making him gag and splutter. Now, hooves were thundering on the desert sand and Grimshaw could feel the power of the horses’ huge bodies as they surrounded the Avatars.

  Still in the grip of Hanhut’s crony, Grimshaw fought hard, desperate to break free. But he felt the sharp pull and the whoosh of air as the lead Horseman bent down, scooping up his Ancient Egyptian prey by its bandages and Grimshaw along with it. There was a moment of jerking chaos and noise as they dangled by the horse’s side and Grimshaw caught a jumbled glimpse of a night-black flank, a steel-clad leg and some unravelling bandages. Suddenly the thundering grew less as the horses left the ground, their hooves now pounding on air rather than solid sand. The jolting eased too as they rose higher and higher into the sky.

  There was a horrible scream from over his head and a lurch and the grip on his arm let go as Hanhut’s struggling crony was hauled up and flung over the horse’s back. Unnerved by the sudden release, Grimshaw made an instinctive grab and got hold of something firm, silky and horribly hot. A huge fiery eye rolled to look at him – he was wrapped around the horse’s head!

  With a horrified shriek, Grimshaw let go again. Feeling the wind and the chaos whirl around him, he shut his eyes, knowing it would be a long way down. But he’d be free too, which was the main thing. And then, just as he began to fall in earnest, a blackened fist closed around his backpack and held on. Now Grimshaw really screamed. The Horseman had got him!

  Almost faint with terror, Grimshaw felt his captor lift him by the backpack and turn him. He caught a terrifying glimpse of the Horsemen flanking his and shut his eyes. He braced himself, waiting for the limb-rending to begin.

  Hmm, said a voice heavy with the sound of grating steel, did we mean to bring you along?

 
; Grimshaw knew that the Horsemen were angel Avatars, but anything less angelic than that voice he couldn’t imagine. They were levelling out and speeding up now, the wind whipping about them, the air filled with the horrible screaming of the other demons as they pleaded for mercy. But Grimshaw could hear the voice perfectly, as if it didn’t need to go through his ears to get into his head.

  Daring to open his eyes again, he saw that he was dangling eyeball to horrible eyeball with his captor. He could see its skull face, barely covered with blackened flesh and with holes for eyes that glowed like furnaces. Flames flickered over its whole body, burning even in the gale that howled around them.

  The furnaces were looking at Grimshaw with curiosity.

  Answer, said the Horseman. He shook Grimshaw and then set him down carefully, placing him between the horse’s ears.

  Grimshaw grabbed hold of a chunk of mane, wrapping his tail around the horse’s neck for added safety. Even in the air, the galloping motion was enough to make his whole body bounce with every swift stride. ‘I’m an … an accident!’ he stuttered, seeing an opportunity. He stared earnestly into the Horseman’s glowing eyes. ‘I was j-just looking for T-Tun. You know? The Curse of the H-House of Ombre?’ He had to shout above all the wind and screaming, and what with the galloping motion his voice came out in bursts. He bit his tongue twice and tasted blood.

  Indeed we do. And you? You are rather a small curse, aren’t you?

  ‘G-Grimshaw, Curse of Lampwick the Robber. Very unimportant. M-my Architect is a stupid thief. No class.’

  Grimshaw was trying hard not to see what was happening to his fellow demons, though he could make out Hanhut in the background, shrieking wildly as one of the Horsemen turned his insides into his outsides piece by piece. Grimshaw’s Horseman seemed to have forgotten the Egyptian demon slung carelessly in front of him, still struggling wildly as it tried to pull itself off the horse. It wasn’t going to succeed as the Horseman had one hand placed firmly in the small of its back. Grimshaw was ready to bet it was a grip of iron.

  ‘And you?’ asked Grimshaw politely. ‘Do you have a name?’ This time he didn’t shout and though his voice was lost in the gale, the Horseman heard him anyway. Grimshaw was picking up the horse’s rhythm by now, enough to ease up a little on his tight grip.