A Three-Book Collection

by M. V. Stott

  And then there was Dan Waterson.

  Her friend, Detective Dan Waterson, her partner in the force for years, a man who’d always had her back.

  And he was dead.

  Murdered after he made the mistake of stepping into Rita’s new world.

  It had happened just hours ago. Rita had gone back to sit with his body after trapping DCI Jenner—her old boss, and Dan Waterson’s killer—in a prison of her own creation. She’d sat alone with Waterson’s corpse, crying as his blood soaked into the sand. She couldn’t call for an ambulance thanks to the hex, and so she sat with her friend until a taxi driver waddled across the beach to take a piss, only to find himself distracted by a dead body at his feet.

  After the ambulance had taken him away, Rita had headed to Big Pins, the bowling alley and drinking hole of the Uncanny of Blackpool. There she had drunk herself silly, trying to hide from what had just happened.

  Just happened.

  Rita rubbed her watery eyes with the heels of her hands and traipsed to the front door of her house. She let herself inside, slammed the door behind her, and made a wonky beeline for the stairs. She needed to sleep. To curl up in bed, pull the covers over her head, and shut out the world for a while.

  But the world had other ideas.

  Someone had redecorated Rita’s house. Redecorated in a big way. Not one thing remained the same: not the wallpaper, not the furniture, and definitely not the pictures on the wall, which depicted a beaming young family; a mum, a dad, and a little boy with a bowl cut and missing front teeth.

  All was different, all was new. The kitchen had even been knocked through to the living area to make a single, larger space. For a moment Rita wondered if she’d miscalculated and wandered into her other neighbour’s house, but no, the key fit. This was her place.

  She stumbled up the stairs, which had now been stripped back to the wood and laid with a fancy runner carpet. She pushed open a door and looked inside the main bedroom. Her room. There, curled up in bed, were the man and the woman from the pictures, under the covers and sleeping soundly.

  ‘Hey, arseholes, you’re in my bed.’ She shook the pair, but neither stirred. ‘I said, hey, arseholes!’

  She marched out of the room and went to the spare bedroom. There she found the gap-toothed boy, laid on his back snoring, covers corkscrewed around his legs.

  Rita picked up the boy’s teddy bear and pulled off its head. ‘Oops.’

  She staggered to the bathroom, had a pee—didn’t flush—then made her way back downstairs and stepped out into the street, closing the front door behind her. She looked down at the keys in her hand. Yup, definitely hers. She sunk to her haunches. Apparently, the joys of the hex were going to keep on coming. It hadn’t just made people forget about her, it had changed the whole fabric of reality. Made it as though she were never truly alive. And so long as she’d never existed, how could she have lived in that house?

  She couldn’t. Someone else had. Someone else did.

  She wondered if she’d ever get it back. If the hex was broken, what would happen to that house? To the family asleep upstairs? It made Rita’s head ache; the mind-bending paradox of it, along with the realisation that her life—a life she’d never much cared for but had grown accustomed to nonetheless—was really over. Or maybe the ache was just the first tickle of a hangover before it reached in and dug its thumbs into her brain.

  She looked down at the house keys in the palm of her hand.

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Detective Rita Hobbes, as she hurled her keys down a drain and walked away from the house she’d never lived in.

  Blackpool had known many strange visitors in its long existence.

  There was the Angel, of course, trapped there, off its shore, long before people had settled upon its land. Since then there had been so many more. All kinds of Uncanny had decided to call the place their home; far more than should have, considering its relatively small size. Some said it was the influence of the Angel that drew so many. Its darkness radiating. A magnet for the bizarre.

  Most dismissed that, as, of course, the Angel of Blackpool was just a story. A myth. A fantasy.

  The Angel of Blackpool did not exist.

  Of course.

  Of course.

  On that night, as Rita Hobbes found the place she once called home now belonged to someone else, Blackpool found itself welcoming a strange, new person into its embrace. She entered on foot, her weathered walking boots kicking up dirt as she walked forward. From her shoulder hung a backpack containing her humble belongings, a hand with long, delicate fingers holding its strap. Her hair was as black as the sky above, wound tight and pinned back, clear of her face.

  Her name was Magda, and she hadn’t come to Blackpool as a tourist. Hadn’t come to walk on the beach, nor to enjoy the sea, nor to indulge in the many gaudy attractions that stretched out along the seafront. She hadn’t come to idle on the piers, or ride the rollercoaster at the Pleasure Beach. She hadn’t even come to take in the sight of Blackpool Tower—inspired over a century before by the Eiffel Tower—to rise up to its summit and take in the view of the town.

  No.

  Magda had come to Blackpool for entirely different reasons. She was hunting, and she was eager to begin.

  3

  January 1st, 1900, Hungary

  Magda was seven years old when the Wizard paid her family a visit.

  She was small for her age, skinny too, with a thick, unruly mop of jet black hair and eyes of ice blue. She was excited, as it was the first day of a new year. The first day of a new century.

  ‘Don't go too far from the house,’ said Magda’s mother, as she skipped out of the back door, the forest opening up invitingly before her.

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t go far,’ Magda replied, unsure as to whether she was telling the truth or not.

  Magda lived with her family in a large farmhouse, a few miles south of Budapest. The forest hugged the left flank of the farm, the rest was acres of fields, full of wheat, of potatoes, of sugar beets. Her family was small and happy. There was her mother, a round woman who laughed easily and often, her eyes lined, evidence of a happy life. Then there was her father, a bear of a man who Magda believed to be the strongest person who had ever lived. He had once told her that he could pull a fully-grown tree out of the soil with nothing but his bare hands, and she had believed him with the certainty of innocence. And finally, her young brother, the most recent addition to the family, delivered by her mother just six months previously.

  Magda ran into the forest, her heavy winter coat and scarf keeping her warm as the frigid winter air nipped as her exposed skin. The large trees of the forest had dropped their leaves months before, but this was how Magda liked them best. Their gnarled, twisting branches naked, reaching out like broken arms.

  Magda and her family had lived on the farm for the past four years. Her mother said that before then they had lived in another country entirely. Not Hungary, but some other place. Some place Magda had never heard of, and she had heard of six or seven countries already. They’d had to leave that place. Magda had never got to the bottom of why, as her mother would always change the subject. Not that Magda cared. What did it matter? Hungary was home. The farm was home. The forest was home. Wherever she and her family were was home.

  In many ways, they were a normal, happy, loving family. But there was, in fact, more to them than that. Much more.

  Magda had been running around the forest for some time, and had stopped to catch her breath, the cold air burning her throat. She wrinkled her nose and realised her mother had not stepped out of the house to shout after her, to tell her to come back home to do her morning chores. That made Magda’s stomach feel a little strange, like a hand was in her belly, wiggling its fingers. She’d always go out, running and skipping and climbing trees, and her mother would always, always call her back in far too quickly, commanding her to come inside and do her chores.

  But not that day.

  She ran back to the
farmhouse, her imagination inventing all sorts of terrible things as she rushed to be back with her family. She had a sense for this sort of thing. They all did. People like her. A sense that would tickle at them when the worst was about to happen. Often this tickle had kept the likes of Magda and her family alive. Not that Magda knew that at this point. She had been too young to have the full talk. Her mother had wanted to, but her father had argued it could scare her, confuse her, too. Let her have some amount of innocence, he’d said. Let her have a real childhood, before the dark reality of what her life would be was thrust upon her.

  He believed they had time.

  Nobody knew where they were, what they were.

  He believed they were safe for at least a decade or so, so what was the rush?

  As soon as Magda stepped into the kitchen of the farmhouse, she knew for sure that something was very, very wrong. She could taste it on the air. That coppery tang of blood. Somehow she knew it would be a bad idea if she were to call out to her parents. If she were to ask where they were, whether they were okay.

  She stepped quietly through the kitchen and into the corridor beyond. There was blood on the carpet. A big, wet, dark pool of the stuff. She fell to her knees and sniffed it. The blood was her mother’s.

  There was more on the stairs.

  Stealthily, her heart fit to burst, she made her way up the staircase, keeping close to the wall so that a creaking step would not betray her presence.

  She found her mother’s dead body in the bathroom.

  She was covered in blood. Some her own from her many injuries, some from another person. Not her father, or her baby brother, but a person she’d never met before. There was magic in the strange blood and it tasted sour to Magda.

  There was no time to cry, or to fall to her knees and hug her dead mother’s corpse. Instead, she made her way quickly to her baby brother’s bedroom. He was asleep in his crib. Perhaps that is what had saved him. Had saved him from being discovered by whoever had slaughtered their mother.

  She bundled her brother, Andras, up in his sheets and lifted him out of the crib. He snuffled and complained in his sleep.

  ‘Shh, shh,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘Please, stay asleep, don’t open your eyes.’

  She carried him through to her own bedroom and laid him on the bed, quickly filling a bag with clothes and the small amount of money her father had always insisted she kept there. With that done, she hugged the bag and her brother to her chest and poked her head out of her bedroom, listening.

  It was strange, like instinct was taking over. Like she’d been preparing for this her whole, short life. Perhaps it was just a part of her. Part of them. Part of the type of people that she and her family were.

  Animal instinct.

  She carried her brother and her meagre belongings downstairs and headed back the way she’d come, trying not to look at her mother’s blood on the stairs, or on the carpet at the bottom.

  She wondered where her father was. He would have drawn the attacker away from the house, away from her and Andras so that they might have a chance to escape. He would fight to the last to protect her, but it hadn’t been enough to save her mother.

  He was dead.

  She knew it.

  Was sure of it.

  Somewhere, his eyes were shut, his body crumpled on the ground, bloodied, maimed, dead dead dead.

  She wondered who had done this to them. Who, with sour magic in their blood, had stepped into their perfect life and torn it apart so viciously. So terminally. She would not get her answer for many years, and at that moment it did not matter. All that mattered was running. Was getting her brother away from that place. Getting them both somewhere safe.

  But if your own home wasn’t safe, where was?

  Without looking back, Magda ran into the forest.

  She would run for a very long time.

  4

  Detective Sergeant Dan Waterson was dead, and he wasn’t enjoying it one bit.

  He remembered dying. The actual, baffling moments that put an end to his life. Walking on Blackpool beach, going to meet his best friend, his partner in the force, who he and everyone else had somehow forgotten all about. She'd been scrubbed from his memory, from existence; Rita Hobbes, that funny, red-headed pain in the bloody arse. One second she hadn't existed, and then, just like that, it had all come flooding back to him. Her face, her voice, getting drunk together and talking rubbish, getting bored on stakeouts at three a.m. in the middle of a bitter Northern winter. Back it had all come, and with it the knowledge that the world was not quite as cut and dried as he'd always thought it to be.

  He'd been stabbed.

  That's how it had happened.

  Stabbed with a big bloody sword. He knew it was a sword as he’d seen the business end of it thrusting out of his chest. A sword with a gold-coloured blade and his dark red blood running down its curiously-patterned metal.

  He hadn’t had a chance to do or say anything much after that, as death had come quickly, eager to claim him.

  And then he’d sat up and found himself all alone.

  A ghost.

  Not that Dan Waterson believed in ghosts. Rita probably did, that was something he now remembered about the friend he’d briefly forgotten about. She was always willing to lean into the strange, to consider the impossible, so this malarky would have been right up her street.

  Waterson knew he was a ghost, because after standing up and wondering where Rita and the strange, pale man in the long, purple coat had disappeared to, he’d looked down to find his corpse laid out at his feet.

  He’d had a little bit of a panic attack after that, had DS Dan Waterson.

  He’d done a bit of staggering, a bit of running in circles, a bit of screaming and wailing, before finally pulling himself together and acting like a detective. Put the pieces together, Waterson, he’d told himself. He’d gone to meet his friend, been stabbed from behind, died, and now he was a ghost.

  Simple as that.

  He didn’t like the conclusion he’d arrived at, but he was at a loss to explain it any other way. That was definitely his corpse on the beach. He’d even tried to check for ID, just to be on the double-safe side, only to find he couldn’t get to grips with the body. Couldn’t hold it. Couldn’t even touch it. The moment his hand met something solid, it was as though it turned to jelly and passed right through.

  While Detective Waterson was busy getting to grips with this—or not, as it turned out—Rita Hobbes returned to the scene. She was alone this time, minus the strange, pale man with the untrustworthy face.

  Waterson tried to catch her attention as she sat with his body. Spoke to her and yelled and waved his hands in front of her face. And then through her face. But it was no use, she could neither see nor hear him. It was all very frustrating.

  ‘I’m sorry, Waters,’ Rita told his corpse.

  ‘Yeah, you and me both,’ Waterson replied. ‘Also, you know I hate it when you call me Waters, right? Maybe I should be over that now I’m a ghost, but nope, it still annoys me.’ Waterson laughed. A laugh which turned hysterical and caused him to curl up on the sand in a giggling, shuddering, foetal position.

  Shouldn’t he be off to Heaven then?

  Or an afterlife of some description?

  He’d never actually believed in any of that stuff, though his mum was a devout Catholic and often loudly disappointed by her only son’s failure to share her faith. Maybe this was all the afterlife was. No Heaven or Hell. Or purgatory even. Just this; wandering around, unseen, forever.

  Bit depressing.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Waterson, sitting up from his giggle-curl. ‘Mum.’ His old mum—all alone since his dad had died seven years previous—and now she’d lost her only son. She’d hear about it soon enough. Her boy, dead. What would that do to her?

  No chance of any more hysterical laughter now.

  Waterson stood and walked over to Rita, who was still holding vigil over his body. ‘You could’ve told me how
shit my haircut was,’ he said, seeing his head in a way he hadn’t been able to in life. ‘Some friend you were.’

  An overweight man made them both jump as he let out a cry of surprise behind them. Waterson and Hobbes turned to find the man—who had stepped out of his cab to have a pee—looking past them, looking through them, down at Waterson’s corpse lying on the bloody sand. Twenty minutes after he’d made a shaky phone call, the ambulance arrived, and they stretchered his body into the back.

  Rita walked away then. Guard duty over.

  ‘Well, what now?’ asked Waterson, yelling after her as she wandered off into the night. ‘Right. Great. Right.’ He’d dithered a moment longer, wondering whether to follow Rita or, well, follow himself. Decision made, he hopped into the back of the ambulance to catch a ride with his corpse.

  Sitting in the morgue for several hours while his dead body chilled in a cold drawer didn’t do much to improve Waterson’s mood.

  It was weird. He didn’t feel dead. Not as such. Not that he knew what death was supposed to feel like. But apart from being invisible, and not being able to properly touch anything, he still felt, more or less, like himself.

  Waterson laid back on an empty mortuary slab and found himself giggling. Christ. Rita had always been the one to believe in strange things. She once told him about a UFO she’d seen, buzzing across the night sky over the Opera House. Swore up and down it was real. Waterson had poured some cold water on that and no mistake. And now here he was. A phantom. She’d bloody love that.

  Good job she hadn’t been able to see him, the smug look that would have spread across her face might have done him in for a second time.

  The giggles turned to full throated laughter again, until his vision blurred with tears and he curled up on his side on the slab and slowly calmed down.

  No long Mulder & Scully, now just a pair of Mulders, neck-deep in crazy.

  It occurred to Waterson in that moment that he had no idea who it was that had murdered him. Or why. That was irksome. He sat back up, his legs dangling off the slab, and considered the possible hows and whys and maybes. It had to be connected to Rita’s own weird predicament, that much was obvious. And as her predicament was connected to the spate of women going missing in Blackpool, it had to be linked with that, too.