Something Rotten: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (The Ghosted Series Book 2)

by David Bussell

  A sudden thought crossed Fergal’s mind. ‘Do my mum and dad know that I'm… you know...?’

  ‘I’ll make sure the police pass on the message,’ I told him, and he nodded grimly.

  That could be Stronge's job – payback for giving me this shitty little number.

  Before I left, I asked Fergal if he knew anything else. Anything at all about how he wound up a suspect in a murder case. Did he have any enemies? Anyone looking to do him harm? Anyone he wanted to do harm to? All my questions met with a big, fat nothing.

  I was going to have to look for clues elsewhere.

  I had planned on going to the hospital to ask some questions about those two paramedics, but DCI Stronge had other ideas. I was told to meet her at St. Pancras Mortuary and to come alone, which was code for, “Leave the meat suit at home.”

  Not a problem. Mark was about to reject me anyway, so the sooner I cut him loose the better. I can stay inside a living body for a while, but I always get the boot in the end. A body isn’t made for two souls, that’s just the way it is. I can squat in one for a time, but sooner or later I get my eviction notice and have to toddle on. After that it’s hours, sometimes days before I can set up shop again. Don’t ask me why it works that way, I don’t write the rules.

  I dropped Mark off at his apartment, an upscale bachelor pad near Regent’s Park with a dedicated beer cooler in the kitchen and a lounge decked out with a speaker system powerful enough to loosen bowels. I sat Mark down on his oversized sofa and went to work scrubbing the events of the last few hours from his mind.

  Mark’s never been too strong between the ears, to the extent that I’m now able to not only format his memories, but to replace them with new ones. It's a skill I’ve developed to make my possessions a bit kinder on the lad. I’d been getting a fair bit of use out of him lately, and the recurring gaps in his memory were making him anxious. He’d gone to his therapist about it and been referred to a doctor, but the PET scans they gave him showed nothing abnormal. Still, Mark was convinced he had something wrong with him. He was worrying so much about a non-existent brain tumour that he was going to give himself a very real stomach ulcer. So, being the very milk of human kindness, I figured out a way to fill the potholes I’d been leaving in the poor bugger’s head.

  Thanks to my jiggery pokery, when Mark replays the events of the last few hours, instead of seeing himself getting into a fight with a derelict’s attack dog, he’ll remain convinced that he stayed in and binge-watched three seasons of Entourage (I wanted to go with something classy like The Wire, but the memories I create have to be halfway realistic for them to stick). Oh, and as for the bandaged wound on his wrist, he got that when he was slicing a block of artisanal Parmesan and the grater slipped. Not a great deception I realise, but the best I could come up with in a hurry.

  It’s ironic, Mark ending up with a wounded wrist, seeing as he once gave me one of my own. It was a long time ago, back when we were in Year Nine. He’d managed to lay his hands on a pair of handcuffs and used them to manacle me to a classroom radiator. It was a shitty thing to do, but the humiliation was only half of it. While the teacher was out of the room, Mark and his dickhead friends stood around laughing as the handcuffs heated up, until they finally got so hot that the one attached to my wrist cooked me. Even though I don’t have a working nose, I can still smell the burnt hair. The sizzling meat.

  Any other kid would have been expelled for doing something like that, but Mark's dad was a big deal round our way—a lawyer with a lot of money and a lot of clout—and he made sure the Headteacher saw things his way. Whether he paid him off or threatened him legally I don’t know, but it was decided that a stain on his son’s record at such an early age could wreck a promising future career, so Mark was allowed to carry on at the school unpunished.

  I want you to remember that any time you question the ethics of me borrowing another man’s body. Since I died I’ve done everything in my power to walk the path of the righteous, but Mark Ryan… Mark Ryan deserves all that he has coming to him and then some.

  Anyway, enough of the boo-hoo, and back to the job at hand. As instructed, I met Stronge at the mortuary, where an examination of the cadavers found on Hampstead Heath was taking place. The two bodies had been laid out side-by-side. The slab on the left bore the weight of the rhino-necked victim with the cratered head and the dangling eyeball, while the other was draped by Fergal’s gaunt, pockmarked frame. Each of the bodies had a small piece of printed card tied to its toe by a bit of string, which made them look like morbid Christmas tree presents, gift tagged to God.

  I stood to one side and observed while the resident mortician, Dr Anand, inspected the corpses and related her findings to Stronge. It always felt strange, the three of us being together in that room. It wasn’t so long that I was there with them looking down at my own body, scattered across a ceramic slab in four big chunks. It wasn’t an experience I’d recommend, in case you were wondering.

  Dr Anand was excellent at what she did, a total pro with a talent well beyond her thirty odd years. Nothing slipped by her. She was smart, capable and dependable; as true blue as the ultramarine apron she wore to keep blood spatter from her hospital whites. Which is not to say she was all sweetness and light. Anand enjoyed a gallows humour considered distasteful even by her peers. I once heard a story about her time as a medical resident working the graveyard shift at the Royal London Hospital. The story went that her and a group of fellow residents had ordered a 2am pizza, only for the delivery boy to wind up delivered himself, on a gurney. He’d been involved in a serious collision on the way to the hospital, a real axle-plaiter. When the surgeons failed to revive the boy, she was reported to have shrugged and asked, “So, what happened to our pizza?”

  As Doctor Anand went about her work, entirely unaware of my presence, I examined the toe tags on the bodies. Neither had a name on it, just case numbers, which meant the police were still chasing an ID on the big feller. Stronge must have thought she was quids in when she pulled the licence from his wallet, but I guess it had turned out to be bogus.

  ‘TBI,’ said Anand, suddenly.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Stronge, who’d spaced out after another fifteen-hour shift.

  ‘Popeye here,’ replied Anand, aiming a finger at the corpse with the dislodged eyeball. ‘Cause of death: Traumatic Brain Injury. Lethal blunt force injury to the parietal lobe.’

  ‘I see,’ said Stronge. ‘And is the injury consistent with the rock that came in with the other body?’

  ‘I can’t say for certain without further examination,’ Anand replied, ‘but I’ll bet you a bag of chips it is.’

  Stronge nodded. ‘And what about the other one?’

  Anand made a whistling sound like a car mechanic about to deliver a devastating repair fee. ‘Again, I’ll need a bit more time to get into the hows of it, but I can give you my cursory findings. There are three things that stand out right away. First of all, the genitals have been mutilated, but that’s really just a side note.’

  I stole a look. I hadn’t been checking hard enough the first time, but now I inspected Fergal’s body properly, I could see that his old chap had taken a bit of a blow, and not in a good way. From the looks of things, the tip had been removed, leaving him with little more than a stump. It was an old wound though, and well-healed.

  ‘As you can see,’ Anand went on, ‘the mutilation occurred some time ago and has already been treated surgically.’

  Stronge nodded. ‘I can see that. So, what’s the second of all?’

  ‘I found heavy post-mortem bruising on the cadaver’s right hand. Most likely caused by the murder weapon as it ricocheted off the victim’s skull.’

  If the bruising really had happened after Fergal died, which all signs pointed to, someone had gone to some major lengths to frame him.

  ‘You mentioned a third thing,’ said Stronge.

  ‘I did,’ replied Anand, ‘And I saved the best till last.’ She paused for effect. ‘Fr
om what I can tell, the body’s been exsanguinated.’

  Stronge sighed. ‘Let's pretend for a second like I don't know what that word means.’

  But I knew what it meant.

  It meant sucked dry of blood.

  It meant vampires.

  6

  Here's what vampires aren't:

  Adolescent dreamboats with devastating cheekbones and pallid skin that sparkles in the sunlight.

  Sophisticated gentlemen dressed in top hats and tails who sup delicately on lusty young virgins.

  Brooding teenage girls with dairy heifer eyes and needle sharp fangs who leave their victims with nothing more challenging than a light headache.

  So what are they really?

  Parasites.

  Killers.

  Bloodsucking freaks with an unquenchable thirst for the old Type O.

  From the looks of things, these vamps were smarter than the average though. They were posing as night shift paramedics, rolling around town after sunset, picking up donors and carting them off in their mobile blood bank. They were careful enough to only prey on people who wouldn’t be missed too, which told me they definitely had a couple of brain cells to rub together. No, these weren’t your regular sun-dodgers. If I was going to go at these two, I’d need to go prepared.

  While Stronge followed some leads on Popeye the Bludgeoned Man, I continued to work the dead junkie angle. Since I’d recently stepped up my caseload from regular homicides to things of a more supernatural nature, vampire paramedics were right in my wheelhouse. I had to be careful though. When it came to bloodsuckers I only knew the basics. I needed to discuss the matter with someone a little more knowledgeable on the subject, which is how I ended up paying a visit to my old friend, Jazz Hands.

  Jazz owns a dilapidated magic shop tucked down a King’s Cross back street. The shop’s called Legerdomain, a clever little pun that she must have dreamed up back when she had a sense of humour. As I entered—still in my ghost form—a bell tinkled; an early warning system Jazz had installed to alert her of any uninvited paranormal visitors. The shop was full, as ever, of alluring little objects: things that vanished, things that appeared from nowhere, things that floated in thin air. All of them stage tricks. The real magic was kept strictly behind locked doors, away from prying eyes.

  ‘What is it now?’ asked Jazz Hands, peering at me across the counter through a pair of violet-lensed glasses.

  She’d fashioned the specs herself to be able to see phantoms, or more accurately, to see me. As far as I knew, I was the only ghost who ever dropped by. The only person who visited the shop at all according to the thick layer of dust that blanketed the place.

  ‘I came to pick your brains,’ I told her. A bad turn of phrase, now I thought about it, remembering the smashed-up skull back at the morgue.

  ‘I see,’ Jazz Hands replied, fussing at a loose thread on her sleeve. Today, like most days, she wore a grungy, moth-eaten jumper and a folksy scarf that tethered her cloud of frizzy auburn hair to the rest of her head. ‘And which denizens of the underworld do you plan on doing battle with this week?’ she asked. ‘Werewolves? Abominable snowmen? Creatures from the Black Lagoon?’

  Jazz wasn’t too thrilled about what I did for a living, but I had her over a barrel on the matter. On one hand, it filled her with maternal dread whenever I pitted myself against the supernatural and risked what little life I had. On the other, she didn’t want me going to the Bad Place when I inevitably did end up answering to the Big Man, and the only way I was buying my way out of that was by playing boy scout. Pure thoughts and good deeds, those were my tickets to paradise, and Jazz Hands knew it. Didn’t mean she had to like it though, and I could understand the dirty feeling it gave her. In many ways, she was as much an enabler to me as I was to old Frosty.

  I explained the situation with the vampires and how I was trying to chase them down. ‘Before they can bleed anyone else dry,’ I added for effect.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she replied. ‘You say the victim was drained in an ambulance, but that his body was found on Hampstead Heath next to another corpse?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing the vamps bashed the big guy’s head in and dumped Fergal’s body to cover up their part in the murder.’

  ‘Hm. Why would vampires clever enough to employ a mobile blood bank think the police too stupid to determine a body’s actual time of death? And besides, so long as the vampires were draining one corpse dry, why leave a second one full of blood?’

  She was right, something didn’t fit. My brain tied up in a knot thinking about it. I’d just gotten going on this case but it was already starting to look like a 500 piece puzzle. ‘You’ve got a point,’ I admitted, ‘I don’t have all the answers. I reckon I know where I can get them though...’

  ‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking—’

  ‘It’s gotta be done, Jazzer. I’ve gotta Van Helsing this shit.’

  ‘You can’t be serious? Taking on two vampires? Vampires are undead, Fletcher, which means they can hurt other undead, including ghosts.’

  ‘It’s the only way Fergal gets his wings. Otherwise he’s stuck here forever.’

  ‘You have no idea how powerful these creatures can be.’

  ‘Then tell me. Help me know what I’m going up against.’

  Jazz Hands’ eyes betrayed a complicated cocktail of emotions: pity, dread, devotion, but mostly just plain aggravation. Eventually, she reached under the shop counter and came back with a loosely-stitched tome stamped with the words “Codexul Vampir.”

  ‘A vampire’s power is determined by a variety of factors,’ she explained, ‘but mainly their age and bloodline.’ She consulted an index, then carefully peeled back the book’s pages to arrive at a fragile sheet of parchment that looked as though it were made of animal skin. ‘Here,’ she went on, pointing to some chicken scratch written in a language I didn’t comprehend. ‘A list of powers that have been attributed to nosferatu over the centuries…’

  She ran through a menu of potential traits—immortality, night vision, superhuman strength, hypnotism, bites that caused paralysis, the ability to turn into a cloud of gas—the list went on and on. A much shorter list described their known weaknesses, which amounted to little more than an allergy to silver, an intolerance to sunlight, and, for reasons quite beyond my grasp, a tremendous fear of antique clocks.

  ‘What about wooden stakes through the heart?’ I asked.

  Jazz looked me up and down, judging me by a set of standards I could only guess at. ‘Show me one creature that does respond favourably to having a stake hammered through its heart.’

  Fair point.

  ‘In any case,’ she went on, ‘given a vampire’s vulnerability to the light of day, you’d be much better off armed with one of these…’

  Making a rare trip from her stool, she went to the framed picture of paranormal debunker James Randi that hung behind the shop counter. Unfastening a hidden catch, she swung the picture aside on an invisible hinge to access the wall safe beyond. Turning her back on me to conceal the strong box’s combination—as well as its contents—she delved inside and removed a ceramic sphere about the size of a tennis ball. She set it down gently on the shop counter and I squatted to get a look at it. It reminded me of a Christmas bauble.

  ‘Go on then, what is it?’ I asked.

  Her eyes took on a smug twinkle. ‘In laymen’s terms, bottled sunlight,’ she said, folding her arms like a genie granting a wish.

  ‘Is that all?’ I replied, feigning disregard. Jazz Hands was an easy wind-up, and it always tickled me to tweak her foibles.

  She placed her palms on the counter and leaned across to me. ‘Do you have any idea of the skill and patience required to produce a magical grenade capable of emitting enough UV light to destroy a vampire?’ she asked.

  ‘I dunno,’ I said with a shrug, ‘not that much I’m guessing.’<
br />
  ‘“Not that much”?’ she screeched. ‘You ungrateful little shit! When I think of all the work I put in on your behalf! The hours! The back-breaking toil!’

  I held up my hands. ‘Whoa, Jazz, you are easier to play than a wind-up music box.’

  She gave me the evil eyes over her glasses. ‘Let us return to the matter at hand. These vampires of yours… I expect you’d like to know where to find them?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I replied demurely.

  ‘I see. Well, when it comes to setting up a den, vampires tend to look for somewhere secure from light. Somewhere underground usually, most likely a cellar. They tend to cluster as well, so if it’s two vampires working together, chances are they're cohabiting.’

  ‘Okay, that narrows it down some. So, what should I do to find them?’ I asked, thinking out loud. ‘Check property listings within a set perimeter of their feeding territory, zoning in on homes with basements? Go to The Beehive and ruffle some feathers? Find another vampire in their clan and put the squeeze on them?’

  ‘You could do those things,’ she replied. ‘Or you could go to the hospital they work at and get an address from their records.’

  ‘Right. Or that. I mean, if you want to go the obvious route.’

  Jazz smirked.

  ‘Wait, they're not just going to hand that information out, are they? What about data protection?’

  ‘What about it?’ she replied. ‘Is obtaining private records going to be any more difficult than knocking on every house in Camden that has a basement and hoping a vampire answers the door?’

  Fair point.

  I took the UV grenade from the counter and placed it carefully in the pocket of my jacket.

  ‘Take two,’ she said, removing another from the wall safe. ‘Just promise me one thing.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I promise my arse is every bit as tight and toned as you’ve heard.’

  ‘Find the vampire den,’ she said, ignoring me, ‘but don’t go walking in there alone. If you absolutely have to go inside, make sure Stella Familiar goes in with you. This is what the London Coven built her for. Don’t be a hero.’