A Three-Book Collection

by M. V. Stott

  ‘Gemma, come on, stay awake, stay with me, love!’

  It was no use. It had been hard enough moving her around when she was only half with it, now she was practically unconscious, and the dead weight was too much.

  ‘Help! Give us some help here!’ Rita screamed at a man as he approached, bunch of flowers in hand, exiting through the hospital’s automatic doors. The man didn’t even glance at her.

  ‘Bastard!’ Rita spun back to Gemma. ‘One second, I’ll be right back.’

  She ran into the hospital. ‘Hey, I need help, I’ve got an unconscious woman in my car.’ The doctors and nurses gathered in reception area ignored her. ‘Oi!’ Rita pulled out her I.D. ‘Police, DS Rita Hobbes, I need help with a…’

  Rita stopped. No one paid her the slightest bit of attention. In fact, a few of the nurses who had been huddled around a chart, turned and walked away.

  ‘What is wrong with you idiots?’ Rita cried.

  She spied an empty wheelchair and grabbed it, pushing it through the automatic doors and back to her car. Through brute force, and a bit of colourful language, she managed to haul Gemma into the wheelchair.

  ‘Right, you’re okay Gemma, here we go.’

  She wheeled her into the hospital’s reception.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said the large, female receptionist upon seeing Gemma, slumped in the wheelchair.

  ‘Nurse Baxter, I need help!’

  The receptionist and Nurse Baxter rushed over to Gemma, the nurse taking a knee and opening one of Gemma’s eyes, shining a pen torch into it.

  ‘Hello, can you hear me? Can you hear me?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘Well, at bloody last,’ said Rita. ‘You’re a bit oblivious in here, aren’t you?’

  ‘Who brought her in?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Rita.

  ‘I didn’t see anyone,’ replied the receptionist. ‘I looked up and she was just there.’

  ‘Hello?’ said Rita, waving her arms around, ‘have you two gone completely mental? I brought her in!’

  ‘I think she’s okay, but we’d better get her through and do some checks,’ said Nurse Baxter, continuing to ignore Rita, who watched with confused astonishment as the receptionist grabbed the wheelchair and began to follow Nurse Baxter out of the waiting area.

  ‘What, in the fuck, was that?’ asked Rita, shaking her head as she pulled out her phone again and dialled Waterson’s mobile.

  ‘Hello?’ said Waterson, picking up on the third ring.

  ‘Waterson! I found her, I found Gemma Wheeler! She’s alive, I’ve got her over at the hospital and there’s some really weird shit going—’

  ‘Hello? Can you hear me?’

  Rita swore, shook her phone, and walked outside, hoping the reception would pick up better.

  ‘Waterson, it’s Rita, can you hear me now?’

  ‘Sorry, I can’t hear you, I think we’ve got a bad connection.’

  The line cut off.

  Rita looked down at her phone, then back over her shoulder into reception.

  She was beginning to get a really bad feeling.

  Carlisle stood in the stockroom of Archer’s Old Arcade, looking through the doorway into the stone corridor beyond. He ran a chalk-white finger along the stone surrounding the ancient wood of the door, then sniffed his fingertip.

  ‘Impressive,’ he said, then stepped into the stone corridor beyond.

  This kind of magic was beyond your common, lowly magical practitioner. They’d managed to sandwich two different places, in two different times, right next to each other. Carlisle couldn’t even see the join. Now, an eaves could do something similar, but not with different times, too. This was far beyond the ability of those wretched creatures.

  Carlisle made his way down the old stone corridor, stooping low to prevent his head connecting with the arched ceiling. As he walked, he projected an aura of calm assurance, but inside he could not deny that he was concerned. He had hoped whoever had his property was some low-level fool—that retrieving it would be like taking candy from a baby—but this corridor told him that his quest would not be so simple.

  Why did things always have to be so complicated?

  He paused at the chamber’s entrance and poked the toe of a boot at the chalk drawn on the flagstones in front of him.

  It was a hex.

  A booby-trap triggered by an unwanted visitor.

  It was a chalk circle with all kinds of arcane symbols expertly drawn within. Carlisle crouched and peered at each symbol, each rune, each magical oath. If someone had walked over this, it should have killed them. Would have turned them to ash in an instant. The hairs on the back of Carlisle’s neck told him that the hex had most certainly been triggered, but he saw no evidence of ash. No little pile of dusty grey to indicate the trespasser’s final resting place.

  The hex hadn’t worked.

  Or at least, not in the way it was intended to work.

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser…’

  Carlisle stood and stepped over the now useless hex, not that such a trap would have worked on him these days anyway. He had so many protections and totems sewn into the lining of his coat that it would take a magician of L’Merrier’s heft to fashion a hex that would even cause him a tickle.

  The chamber was stone, circular, with a small altar stood a few yards from a large block of stone. A place of sacrifice then. A sacrifice disturbed?

  Carlisle sniffed at the air. Magic had been deployed within the space, and recently. A battle of some sort? Short, swift, and over in moments?

  There was dried blood on the large, central stone. The sacrificial stone. More than one person’s blood. He thought about the man he’d visited, what had been his name again? It didn’t matter. The one he waited for was clearly long since dead. Murdered in the name of something.

  Carlisle wondered just what that something could be.

  But that wasn’t why he was here. This was none of his business. He’d sacrificed more than one animal, more than one person, in his many, many years of life. Who was he to judge?

  No.

  His property, that’s all he craved. It had been here. It had been used. He could feel it. Someone had removed it.

  Something that didn’t belong caught his eye, and he strode to one side of the chamber, crouching to pick up an item that had been left behind during the chamber’s intrusion.

  It was a black, standard issue, extendable police baton.

  Carlisle lifted the baton and sniffed it.

  ‘DS Rita Hobbes, I presume,’ he said, with a smile.

  The magician did not know where he was.

  The world around him was indistinct shapes and colours and noises that he couldn’t understand.

  He tried to pull off the goat mask that encased his head, only to find he had no hands with which to achieve the task, nor a head to remove the mask from.

  ‘Help me,’ he pleaded. Or thought, or felt, or something else altogether.

  How had this happened?

  Where had he been?

  The chamber!

  She’d been in there. How had she found the entrance? No one should be able to find that door, that corridor, that chamber. But even if she had…

  ….had…

  had….

  ….

  His thoughts drifted apart like blown smoke. Was that all he was now? A scatter of thoughts? Smoke on the wind?

  How had she survived the hex?

  ‘I’m frightened!’ he screamed, but how do you scream without a throat, a mouth, a tongue, an anything?

  His own magic had been launched back in his direction.

  Impossible and impossible and impossible, and…

  The axe.

  The tool of sacrifice.

  She had it!

  He was just a young boy, digging in the sand, when his plastic trowel had…

  Taken it.

  Hidden it.

  ‘I am here,’ said the Angel.

  ‘I failed,
’ he replied.

  ‘We cannot fail,’ replied the Angel, its voice light and high, yet deep also, which was impossible and yet true and it filled the magician to the brim.

  ‘Can you see it?’ the Angel asked.

  ‘See what? Everything is chaos and nothing…’

  ‘Can you see it?’

  The magician did see it.

  The beach.

  Blackpool beach.

  And suddenly he was not nothing, he had arms to move, legs and feet to kick, and he was swimming, the sea water splashing cold against his face, the beach inching ever closer.

  ‘I am here for you,’ said the Angel, and finally the magician crawled out of the sea. The sand gripped between his fingers as he fell forward, the heavy sea water soaking the crimson robes that clung to his body.

  ‘Alive,’ he said.

  The Angel had pulled him back from wherever his own magic had thrown him.

  Limbs trembling, he slowly stood and gulped great gasps of crisp sea air. ‘Thank you,’ he said, through blue, cracked lips.

  ‘The work will continue,’ said the Angel. ‘Must continue. So close, now.’

  The magician nodded. ‘She’ll have taken her to the hospital. I can go in after dark, some simple perception magic to hide myself. Steal into her room, kill her.’

  ‘No. The axe. You must use the axe, you know this.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, the axe.’

  ‘Find the woman, reclaim the axe, complete the sacrifice.’

  The magician nodded as he took off his robes and folded them over one arm. This was just a momentary setback. The world would continue to spin. For now.

  Rita had gone mad, that was the only explanation for it.

  This time, as she drove towards the police station, she was very aware of the looks that were thrown in her direction. The shocked faces, the wide-eyed children tapping their dads on the shoulder.

  For the thousandth time she looked at herself in the rear-view mirror.

  There she was; wide green eyes, red hair. She was there.

  She was there.

  It was that knock-out punch, it must have been, things had gone all weird ever since then. Brain damage of some sort; temporary, hopefully. That could be the only explanation, because the other answer was impossible, and Rita Hobbes might be open to a little weird, but she did not mess with the impossible.

  She screeched to a halt and burst into the station, rushing over to the duty sergeant at the reception desk.

  ‘Arthurs, Arthurs, it’s me, can you see me?’

  Arthurs was stood with a polystyrene cup of tea in one hand and a newspaper in the other, perusing the football results.

  ‘Arthurs!’

  She gave him a shove and Arthurs swore as the hot tea spilled over his fingers.

  ‘Bastard!’ he said. ‘Bastard, bastard hot.’

  Another officer, Matthews, looked up and sniggered. ‘Daft git,’ she said.

  ‘This is… this is…’ Impossible, was the word Rita did not want to say. He hadn’t seen her. Hadn’t heard her. Even when she’d physically shoved him, he hadn’t realised, hadn’t noticed what had happened.

  Rita turned and headed further into the station, passing people she saw every day. Not one of them acknowledged her. Not a “Hello”, not an “All right, Rita?”, not even a nod of the head. On any other day, not having to run a gauntlet of pointless greetings would have put a spring in Rita’s step, but right then it felt like she was wading through treacle.

  She made it up the stairs to the open-plan office she worked out of.

  ‘Hey, I saved Gemma Wheeler,’ she said. ‘Found her, she was gonna be murdered, but I saved her. Rita Hobbes, super cop.’

  She wandered over to the desk of DI Collins’, the toilet blocker. He was exploring the grimy insides of his left ear with the blunt end of a pen, periodically pulling it out and sniffing the end.

  ‘Oi, Collins, we all know it’s you that makes a mess of the bogs, you know?’

  DI Collins raised his eyebrows in an appreciative manner at his latest pen sniff, then slid the poor thing back into his ear canal.

  ‘Hello! Hello!’

  She swiped at Collins’ hand, sending the pen flying across the room.

  ‘Shit it,’ mumbled Collins, before selecting a fresh pen from his desk and continuing his disgusting excavation.

  Rita sighed and walked to her own desk, slumping in her chair as Waterson entered and sat behind his own desk.

  ‘Hey there Waters, it’s me, your best buddy and partner, fancy indicating that I exist at all? You’d really be doing me a favour.’

  Waterson opened the drawer of a filing cabinet and started sifting papers, ignoring her.

  ‘Be like that then. See if I care.’

  Rita started as something clattered on the floor at her feet.

  It was a police baton.

  ‘Feeling sorry for yourself, Detective?’

  Rita stood up sharply and turned to the voice addressing her. She saw Carlisle sat cross-legged atop a vacant desk, eyes fixed on her, sipping a cup full of vending machine coffee.

  ‘You!’

  ‘Correct, what a sharp deductive mind you possess, Rita Hobbes.’

  ‘You can see me?’

  ‘Another hit! The mean streets of Blackpool are in safe hands.’

  Rita looked around at the rest of the office, all ignoring her, ignoring him, just carrying on with their day-to-day work, oblivious. She reached down and grabbed the baton, brandishing it angrily at Carlisle.

  ‘Please, Detective, I give you back your property and you threaten me? What kind of a thank you is that?’

  ‘What is going on? Suddenly no one here can see me, or hear me. What did you do? Did you drug me? On the beach? Is that it?’

  Carlisle raised an eyebrow and smiled a horrible smile. ‘I’m rather afraid that, as far as the dreadfully ordinary world is concerned, you no longer exist.’ He raised a second cup, ‘Coffee?’

  12

  There was a small boy.

  He was on his knees on Blackpool beach, blue plastic spade in hand, wearing only shorts as the summer sun beat down, warming his skin.

  This was the magician.

  Would be the magician.

  But for now, all those years ago, he was just a boy, digging a hole in the sand.

  It felt good to dig, to concentrate on something physical. To dig and dig and dig and think only of the hole. Of deepening it. Widening it. To no end other than the pleasure of the work. To no end other than to stop himself thinking about the bad things.

  The boy felt sweat prickle on his brow as his slender arms continued to power the spade. She was crying louder now but he didn’t have time to pay attention to that. Couldn’t pay attention. If he stopped to comfort his mother then the hole would never get dug. So she whimpered and sniffled and pulled out tissue after tissue and the boy kept his eyes off her and on the hole in the sand.

  He blamed her. He shouldn’t blame her, he knew that, but then who else was there to blame? She used to shout at his dad. Call him names. Make fun of him. Even at his age, he knew it was wrong to do that in front of him, but they’d argue anyway as he tried to concentrate on the TV.

  He shouldn’t blame her.

  It wasn’t her fault.

  He realised he’d stopped digging.

  Shit.

  He looked up at his mum, sat on a towel with her legs folded beneath her, staring out to sea with red, raw eyes as if the answer to everything lay out there in the deep.

  ‘Are you okay, honey?’ she asked, without looking away from the waves.

  He didn’t answer, instead he went back to the task at hand. The hole. The ignoring her.

  But it wasn’t working anymore.

  He dug harder, faster, but his cheeks were wet and his vision blurry.

  Why did his dad have to go and kill himself? Why would he do something like that? Something so sinful? Bobby at school says it meant he’d have gone to Hell. Sinners went to Hel
l and there was no bigger sin than suicide, that’s what Bobby’s dad had told him. Bobby’s still-alive dad.

  His hands gripped the small shovel so hard it hurt. Hurt good.

  His mum was crying louder now. He wished she’d stop. Wish she’d just shut up.

  He dug, and his stomach hurt more and more as his anger grew, and he suddenly realised exactly who was to blame. Who he should be angry with. It wasn’t his mum, or even his dad, who’d prepared the noose and placed his head through the thing.

  It was God.

  God should save. God should protect. His dad had been a God-fearing man. He went to Church every Sunday without fail. He’d read passages from the Bible aloud every day before the evening meal. And yet despair had gripped him so tightly that it had caused him to resort to the ultimate sin.

  Where had God been?

  Did all the praying, all the years of being good and holy and right count for nothing?

  Did anything mean anything to God at all, or was his dad just an ant? Were they all just ants? Ants that God would one day burn away with a magnifying glass, just for His own amusement?

  God had abandoned his dad when he’d needed Him most.

  God had killed his dad.

  The shovel hit something solid and the boy was pulled out of his thoughts. What had he uncovered? Treasure? Probably just a rock.

  He scraped away the rest of the compacted sand. What he found was not treasure, nor was it a rock.

  It was an axe.

  It wasn’t a big axe, like you might see someone on TV using to chop a tree down with. No, it was small, small enough for even a boy like him to use. He smiled and reached down, wrapping his fingers around the wooden handle.

  ‘I hear you.’

  The voice made the boy lunge back, and set his heart jumping. He looked around but there was no one else on the beach. Just him and his mum, and it hadn’t been his mum’s voice. Besides, she was still too busy crying to herself, not paying him any attention at all.

  He shuffled forward towards the axe, then reached out, hand trembling, and picked it up.