Kill Fish Jones

by Caro King

Fish looked around carefully, playing the beam over the floor, walls and ceiling. There were no dirt demons in the hall. It was dusty and some thin cobwebs floated from the ceiling, but there was no rubbish and nothing to decay. The floor was bare boards and the walls were painted straight on to the plaster rather than being papered and heaving with demons, which was a relief. Paint was hardwearing. It got dirty, but it didn’t decay like paper.

  When she had the bags, Alice put them in the middle of the hall, closed the door, took the torch back and went warily up the stairs. The bare boards creaked under her weight, sounding horribly loud in the night silence. After a moment’s hesitation, Fish went after her.

  At the top, Alice headed for the only open door. It led to a small, empty room at the back of the house. It was lighter here as a pair of ancient curtains were pushed half open, letting in the pale light from the night sky.

  ‘Right,’ said Alice, looking at the curtains, ‘I’m betting those rags are crawling with things?’

  Fish nodded. Whatever colour the cloth had been once, it was now a faded grey-brown, and it was heaving with demons. They were small and (unlike the dirt demons in the kitchen) blunt-toothed, with eyes like pale disks in the half-light. Alice grabbed the curtains and pulled. Demons rained to the ground where they thrashed about for a second and then vanished. The material tore, but the curtains stayed in place.

  ‘Bum. I’ll have to get up there somehow. Or do you want to look in the other rooms … I’ll take that face as a no, shall I? You’ll have to give me a lift up then.’

  Fish squatted on the floor to let her climb on his back as if he were a footstool. Alice kicked off her shoes and stood on him, wobbling a little.

  ‘C’n just about reach, right. Difficult with the torch though. Keep still!’ The light bobbed about as she struggled to get the curtains down.

  About two inches from his nose a small, rather faint demon glared at Fish. It eyeballed him angrily and bared its stubby teeth. It looked like an angry frog and made Fish feel like laughing. It was a good feeling.

  ‘Got ’em!’

  A second rain of demons bounced to the floor where they squalled furiously and evaporated. The curtains followed, dropping into a heap on the boards. New demons began to wriggle out of the fabric almost at once. Because they were coming from something so rotten they developed fast, opening their eyes seconds after they formed. They immediately swivelled to stare at Alice, who was throwing the second curtain down on top of them. She climbed down from Fish’s back. Then she screamed.

  Fish uncoiled quickly. Alice grabbed his arm.

  ‘Sorry. Spider. Big. There.’ She aimed the beam of the torch.

  It was toiling diligently along by the skirting. Fish went over to it and cupped it in his hands. It tickled. He carried it to the window, which Alice opened with a hard shove.

  ‘Good,’ said Alice with relief, as he dropped it to the ground below. ‘Right. I’ll deal with these then, shall I?’

  She scooped up the dirty material and headed for the door. Left alone, Fish took a look around the room. It was still and quiet, and with the curtains gone, the bare walls and floor were burnished with silver light. He nodded and felt something inside him unknot.

  A moment later, Alice was back, carrying the bags she had brought. She upended the largest, shaking out a small, thin quilt and a crocheted blanket.

  ‘Mattress topper and a baby blanket. We can make a bed. And two blow-up pillows.’ She dug in the other bag. ‘Lemonade, biscuits and a loo roll. Not that I’m suggesting we look at the bathroom tonight, but there are some nice bushes outside.’ She beamed at him. ‘We’ll be all right.’

  Fish smiled back. ‘You’re fantastic,’ he said.

  At last they curled up on the quilt, still in most of their clothes and with the blanket laid over them. Outside the window, a tree brushed the glass with its leafy fingers and somewhere Fish could hear a soft hooting that he thought must be an owl. It was a lifetime away from Nightingale Row, with its street lights that banished the stars and the purring of engines late into the night. He drew a deep lungful of air and let it out again in a long sigh. Already, Alice was asleep. He could hear her steady breathing and feel the warm centre that was her, resting next to him. And for the first time since yesterday morning, when he and Susan had come back from the shops to find their lives changed forever, he felt peaceful.

  Closing his eyes, Fish slept and the night went on in silence.

  23

  NOTHING LEFT

  Grimshaw was standing in the middle of the town, seething. By now the ambulances, the police cars and the fire engines had left the scene. Everyone had gone, even the sightseers, and a sort of calm had been restored to the village centre. The wreckage was still there, of course, surrounded by police tape, but the fires were out and the body of the poor man in the van had been taken away. Everything was quiet. Stars came out overhead.

  But Grimshaw still seethed.

  After Destiny’s interference in the deaths he had set in place, Grimshaw had been forced to improvise, showing himself to the truck driver and causing the vehicle to smash into the petrol pump. For a single glorious moment, when he saw the boy flying through the air like a kicked ball, he thought he had won. But all demons know instinctively when they have made a kill, and he soon realised that against the odds the wretched boy was still alive.

  Not long ago he would have revelled in the cataclysm, but that marvellous feeling of BOOM had been lost in his desire to win. Grimshaw had scarcely noticed the boiling clouds overhead or heard the screams of the people. It hardly registered that he had killed an Innocent Bystander. All he could think about was that Fish Jones had got away again.

  At last the silence and the emptiness got through. There was nothing left to see, and nothing left to do but face Lampwick.

  The knowledge that the only way into Limbo was through zero, which automatically took him to his Architect, only increased the fury in Grimshaw’s heart. Typical of flaming Limbo that every stupid Rule was designed to make half-life worse.

  Still, he wouldn’t stay in the crypt any longer than he could help. Standing here, stewing in his anger, it dawned on Grimshaw that there was something he should have done before he even thought about attacking the Jones boy again. He should have asked Hanhut about the strange case of his third Sufferer. He should have made Hanhut tell him how to cheat Destiny.

  Savagely, Grimshaw spun the dials of his watch back to zero, hit send and vanished.

  Lampwick brightened up as Grimshaw snapped into being in the middle of the crypt floor.

  ‘Aha! There you are! I was waiting for you to come crawling back.’

  Grimshaw snarled at him. Before Lampwick could get going, he turned his back and began rearrange the dials on his chronometer. He hesitated for a second, wondering where Hanhut was most likely to be – the British Museum or the desert.

  ‘… so pathetic …’ Lampwick was saying in his most scornful voice, ‘… you really thought you’d done it that time, eh? But the kid just walked away without a scratch …’

  It was just too much. Grimshaw stiffened.

  ‘He. Has. A. DESTINY!’ he screamed, spinning around to face his maker. ‘Don’t you get it? It’s nothing to do with me, the boy’s protected …’

  ‘Oh, that’s right,’ sneered Lampwick, gearing up to do the whole ‘any excuse’ rant again. ‘I remember, it’s not poor little Grimshaw’s fault, it’s all down to Higher Beings …’

  His voice was cut off as Grimshaw twisted the dials and hit send as fast as he could.

  Lampwick watched him go, sniggering quietly to himself. He considered summoning the creature back, but decided against it. It was always more satisfying to have the useless thing come slinking in of its own accord. In the meantime, he could wait. It would give him an opportunity to think up some juicy insults.

  After all, there was plenty of time. All the time in the world, in fact.

  Far away, on top of the Limbo mountain, Tun was
also thinking about time.

  He had gazed over the grey panorama below him so often that although it would look like a dust-coloured nothing to anybody else, Tun could see that the grey was etched and swirled with the faint outlines of countries and kingdoms stretching to the horizon in all directions. It was the world and it lay at his feet, reminding him of days when he had held the lives of men in his hands. He stood, motionless, understanding that this was all he had left to him. Forever.

  Of course, in Tun’s case forever meant until the tomb of the House of Ombre ceased to exist.

  Tun bowed his head, shuddering. A curse, and its Avatar, could only end when it was either completed or became meaningless. Tired of the endless round of still-beating hearts and so on, he had thought that the death of the last family member would be enough to end his curse and bring him freedom. But the dying words of Rudolphus Ombre hadn’t specified that it had to be the family who must carve his name alongside those of his ancestors, only that they were the ones to be persecuted for so long as the job wasn’t done. Technically, anyone could do it, but with the family gone, who would even think to? With the passing of centuries, no living human even remembered the name of Ombre, let alone where the ancestral vault was!

  No, the tomb was the key to the curse, the tomb waiting for all time for that one last name to be added to those on its dark walls. And as the tomb in question was the size of a marble mansion and was built where wind, fire, flood and earthquake were extremely unlikely to damage it, that pretty much meant forever. Until the Earth fell into the sun, if that was how planets died.

  Hidden deep within his cowl, Tun’s terrible eyes closed as he struggled with the knowledge that he had condemned himself to forever in Limbo. Now, he would do anything to be able once again to travel to Real Space and feel men’s hearts beating their last in his clenched fist. But there was no undoing what he had done.

  Over the last few centuries since he’d driven his last-ever Sufferer insane, goading him to horribly murder his young wife and daughter, and then terrifying him to death afterwards, Tun had been over and over the problem of how to escape the nightmare that his half-life had become. He could think of only one possible way to end it all and it was a fearful way indeed. But he was unable to put it into action because to do so would mean travelling to Real Space, which he couldn’t do without Sufferers. At times he was almost glad, because the idea was so terrifying he wasn’t certain that even he had the nerve to do it.

  But then, standing there on the mountain, contemplating his long and deathly future, Tun had a revelation!

  The demon’s eyes sprang open again, and if this had been Real Space the expression in them would have turned a summer’s day into a winter’s night. Maybe there was a way after all! Grimshaw.

  With Sufferers still to kill, Grimshaw could travel to Real Space. More than that – inside Grimshaw burned the desire to redeem himself, to claw his way back from the pit of shame he had been cast into by the loss of his chronometer and the survival of Fish Jones. The small demon was angry, but was he angry enough to carry out Tun’s fearful plan for him? Strangely enough, Tun didn’t think to question Grimshaw’s courage. Anyone who could hand themselves over to the Sisters of Gladness and their like had to have courage in spades. It might be enough, or it might not. That was the gamble.

  So, maybe, if Tun played his cards carefully, if the idea was explained to Grimshaw in the right way at the right time …

  The demon smiled a terrible smile. Fortunately, no one was there to see it. He stood for a while longer, designing a plan so twisted that it warmed his cold heart. Then he went to find his friend.

  Grimshaw popped into existence in the middle of the Limbo version of the British Museum. It was bedlam, as usual. Even though the Architects took it in turns to banish their Avatars to make a little space, the two large rooms that housed the museum’s collection of mummies teemed with the half-alive and the half-dead. Here, the Avatars were outnumbered by the Architects. Often there was more than one Architect for every demon, as that role belonged not only to the Kings or high-born persons whose body was protected by the curse, but also to the priests who had set the curse in place. For the most terrible demons, like Hanhut, a whole team of priests had been employed in their creation.

  ‘’Scuse me,’ Grimshaw mumbled to a demon so ancient it looked like a heap of crumpled bandages. He had materialised on its foot.

  ‘No problem,’ it said politely in Ancient Egyptian. ‘We’re used to it in here.’

  Fortunately, language wasn’t an issue in Grey Space, so Grimshaw thanked him equally politely in Victorian English and glanced over at the demon’s Architect, an Egyptian king so wizened he was barely recognisable as once-human. He eyed him coldly. Grimshaw ignored him and set about looking for Hanhut.

  Everywhere he looked were demons in bandages, demons with heads like predatory birds, or demons like sleek and hungry cats. Demons with hides and teeth like crocodiles, or in priestly garb with eyes like black pits and carrying some very nasty-looking hooks and knives. Of the Architects, many were still in their bandages and almost indistinguishable from their demons. Others were unwrapped, revealing their dried-out, shrivelled bodies, and some of them (the really powerful ones) looked as impressively jewelled and garbed in death as they had in life. It seemed to Grimshaw that they were all arguing, and the racket was tremendous.

  He reached out and carefully tweaked the bandaged arm of the Ancient One whose foot he was trying not to stand on again.

  ‘Excuse me, but I’m looking for Hanhut?’

  ‘Oh, are you? Grimshaw, isn’t it? The Curse of Lampwick the Robber? Shame about the chronometer, but damned good effort even so. I particularly enjoyed the sheep. Plus, the explosion at the gas station was a corker – showing yourself to that driver was a stroke of genius, though I’m not sure you weren’t breaking the Rules just a little!’

  ‘I didn’t reveal myself to a Sufferer,’ Grimshaw pointed out. ‘The Rules only say that I can’t reveal myself to a Sufferer. Don’t say anything about humans generally.’

  The Ancient One nodded. ‘Well, it certainly made up a little for … you know.’

  Grimshaw sighed inwardly. He knew all right. Everyone would be on about the curse demon who lost his chronometer.

  ‘I’m surprised,’ he said a touch irritably. ‘I didn’t think anything would make up for that.’

  ‘You’ve a long way to go yet, true. But it was a good start. Anyway, it’s made a nice change, talking to you.’ The Ancient One pointed with a ragged arm. ‘If you want Hanhut, head for the middle of the room. Try not to tread on anyone or there’ll be an awful row.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Grimshaw again, and set off, weaving his way through the crowd of irritable demons and hoping he was too small to be noticed.

  As soon as he had rounded a sarcophagus or two, he spotted Hanhut. The tall jackal-headed shape, its dark wings neatly folded, was standing at the side of its young owner-Architect, who in turn was surrounded by a gaggle of her priests. The Egyptian queen who owned Hanhut’s curse had once been beautiful as well as powerful. Even dead, her kohl-ringed eyes were lovely, and her slim body was decked with ropes of precious gems. She was sitting on top of her sarcophagus, kicking her heels in a bored way. Because Limbo didn’t do glass, the displays of coffins were not enclosed as they would be in Real Space, so Grimshaw was able to squeeze through the surrounding throng until he was close enough to stand at the queen’s feet.

  She spotted him at once and immediately brightened up.

  ‘Oh, look, Han,’ she said. ‘There’s that funny little third-rater! The one who lost his chronometer.’

  A pair of burning eyes swivelled to look at the new arrival. Grimshaw tried not to faint with fright. He squared his shoulders and did his best to meet Hanhut’s gaze head on.

  ‘I need to know,’ he said as firmly as he could manage, ‘about your third Sufferer, the one it took you three years to kill.’

  He had to raise
his voice a little to be heard over the argument that had just broken out between a couple of nearby crocodile-like demons who had trodden on each other’s tails.

  Hanhut’s glare intensified. His snout wrinkled back in a snarl that showed his long, pointed teeth. Grimshaw could feel him tensing, getting ready to deal out punishment to this miserable scraping of an Avatar that dared to ask him questions.

  ‘Oh, Han, wasn’t that the weird one who didn’t die first go? You know, the one with the hunched back and the limp?’ The Queen clapped her hands and giggled. ‘You made a right hash out of that – the way his pet pig ran out and tripped you up just as you materialised made me hoot!’

  Hanhut winced. Grimshaw could hardly believe it, but there it was. A wince.

  ‘You got him in the end though!’ Hanhut’s Architect giggled again. ‘I did like the way you skinned him first – really fun that was! I think you should do that more often. When … if we get another Litany, of course.’ She sighed and stuck out her lip in a pout.

  The two demons, big and small, exchanged a long look and for once it was a look of total understanding. By way of direction, Hanhut made a small triangle in the air with a claw, then, as one, they reached for their chronometers.

  ‘Remember when you had to go all the way to Paris to get that one on top of the metal tower thing with the holes …’

  Again as one, the two demons pressed send and vanished from the museum …

  … to reappear in the Limbo desert at the foot of a pyramid and right in front of Tun.

  24

  TUN′S DESIGN

  ‘Oh, there you are, small one,’ said Tun, ignoring Hanhut as openly as possible. ‘I’ve been looking all over the desert for you – I was going to try the museum next. Thought you might want to find out more about the odd affair of the third Sufferer.’

  Grimshaw nodded eagerly. ‘You spotted that too?’

  Hanhut sighed loudly. It sounded like knives scraping against stone, probably being sharpened. Tun did a mock start and said, ‘Oh, you’re here, are you? Didn’t see you against all that sand! You do kind of blend in.’