by M. V. Stott
If only he’d been able to turn around to see who’d stabbed him in the back before he croaked his last. That would be something.
Annoying.
The double doors to the morgue bashed open as two orderlies pushed in a trolley containing an occupied body bag.
‘You seen the state of the bloke in there?’ asked one of them, the taller of the two.
‘Don’t mind me, you two, I’m just a ghost,’ said Waterson, waving at the pair as they stopped by a second slab and heaved the bag on to it.
‘No, why?’ asked the shorter orderly.
‘That in there? Inside that bag? That is some disgusting shit.’
‘How disgusting?’
‘Give you nightmares for months, mate. Disgusting.’
The shorter orderly glanced to the doors, then at the body bag. ‘Okay, I’m peeking.’
‘You’ll be sorry you did.’
‘You’ve built it up. You want me to look, I’m looking.’
‘Okay. But you’ll be sorry,’ said the taller orderly, smirking.
Waterson hopped off his slab and stepped over to stand by the shorter orderly as he gripped hold of the zipper and took a deep breath or two.
‘Months?’ said the short orderly.
‘Oh, at least.’
He nodded and unzipped.
As its contents were revealed, both he and Waterson very much regretted their decisions.
5
If Carlisle hated Blackpool, he positively detested Birmingham.
He looked up at the Gaiman Theatre’s crumbling facade and a grimace spread across his ghost-white face. The theatre had been a popular music hall venue in the first half of the Twentieth Century, playing host to all manor of stars: comedians, dancers, singers, and speciality acts. Arthur Askey, George Formby, Gracie Fields, they’d all faced the entertainment-hungry crowds at the Gaiman.
Carlisle had taken in a show at the Gaiman just once, in the mid-1950s. It had not gone well.
‘Blackpool and now Birmingham,’ Carlisle muttered to himself, ‘I believe it is I and not the Detective who has been unjustly cursed.’
Carlisle shoved the wooden door off its hinges and walked through the dank entrance, sending a group of rats scattering into the gloom with chittering cries of surprise. The theatre smelled like urine and death. Carlisle headed past the mould-spotted ticket office and made his way into the theatre’s auditorium. The Gaiman had last closed its doors in the late 1980s, and had been left to sag and decompose. A corpse turning to mulch.
More than one homeless person had made the building their home after its closure and abandonment, but none had stayed long, and most now knew to steer clear of the place. Better to huddle in a shop doorway than face the whispering dark within the theatre’s damp walls.
The seats had once been a bright red, but as Carlisle walked down the centre aisle towards the stage, he saw now that they had turned varying shades of brown. Those that hadn’t been torn up and tossed aside, that is.
The night Carlisle had spent inside the place, back in the 1950s, he’d sat in the front row, looking up at the turns as they performed their acts. Most had been doing the same thing, the exact same thing, for decades. The same few minutes, over and over for each new audience in each new town.
Most, but not Little Tommy Taylor.
Little Tommy Taylor was called Little Tommy Taylor because he was not in the slightest bit little. He was a mountain of a man, almost as wide as he was tall, with a head so large it was a marvel that his neck was strong enough to support the thing. Little Tommy Taylor was a comedian, but instead of telling the same tired one-liners night after night, his schtick was crowd work. Rather than trotting out pre-prepared gags, he would engage with the front row, mocking the people unlucky enough to be sat there for the amusement of everyone. Everyone except for those in the front row, of course.
Now, if there’s one thing that ought to be known about the Uncanny world—and there are many things, but if there were just one thing to be known, it would be this—Carlisle Ignatius Huxley holds a grudge. He can nurse a grudge for centuries, keeping the embers gently burning should he ever find himself with a spare evening and the inclination to do something about it. He might have long since forgotten why the embers burned, but that mattered not. The fact that they still burned let him know that he was owed something. That a line had been crossed, and perhaps now might be an opportune moment to cut someone off at the knees.
Carlisle hopped up on to the warped stage and was almost surprised to find it was still able to take a person’s weight. It creaked and complained, but the boards held.
‘Where are you?’ he cried, his voice echoing around the open space. There was no reply.
Little Tommy Taylor, a gap between his two front teeth you could shove your fist through, had spotted Carlisle early into his set and had zeroed in on him, on his paler than pale face, much to the amusement of the inebriated audience. Carlisle had sat there sour-faced, arms crossed, as Tommy stood at the edge of the stage, microphone in hand, an evil glint in his eye.
‘What’s the matter here, then? Eh? I’ve heard about sunburn, but this fella’s got moon-burn! He’s white! Ooh, he’s white. How white is he? Is that what you rabble up in the birds want to know? How white is he? I’ll tell you how white! Listen now, I saw ‘im on the way in and thought he were a pint of milk! I did! Missus, you’re looking at me funny over there, but it’s the truth! I tell no lies. Don’t ask the wife, but I tell no lies. It were only when I tipped him back and his wig got caught in me teeth that I realised! Oh, he’s white! He is, isn’t he? He’s like someone drew a face on a stick of chalk. Hey, just how many ghosts have you seen there, my friend? All of ‘em? Eh?’
If Carlisle hadn’t had pressing business elsewhere after the show, he’d have dealt with the matter there and then. Instead, he had added the gap-toothed comic to his list of grudges and gone on his way. Unfortunately, Little Tommy Taylor had died less than fifteen years after Carlisle’s roasting. Humans had a nasty habit of doing that. Dying before they could be murdered.
Now for most people, if the person they’d a grudge against died, that would be the end of that. You can’t get revenge on the deceased, or at least that’s the theory. For Carlisle, death was only a minor inconvenience.
The formerly grand orange curtain lay piled in a heap at the back of the stage as Carlisle prodded at it with the toe of his boot.
‘I know you know I am here, comedian,’ said Carlisle. ‘You cannot hide from me, not even in death.’
Carlisle knew the real reason he was there, in the Gaiman Theatre, in dreadful Birmingham, and it wasn’t to torment a long-dead vaudevillian. He was there because of her. Detective Rita Hobbes. She had his artefact—his axe—and refused to hand it over, despite everything he’d done for her. Despite the fact that he’d willingly, if briefly, died in her service. The sheer gall of the woman. It was his property. He needed it. Wanted it. Craved it. He’d done as agreed and still the axe remained at her side.
And so here he was, letting off a little steam as he pondered his next move.
Carlisle opened his purple coat, the lining flashing with stars and galaxies in the dark, and reached into an inside pocket to retrieve a stick of chalk. He looked at the chalk and recalled one of the dead comic’s wisecracks. He sneered and sank to one knee, drawing a circle on the floorboards beneath him.
‘If the phantom insists on hiding, then I shall just pull you from your hidey-hole,’ he said, sketching arcane symbols around the perimeter of the circle.
Part of him wanted to snap the Detective’s neck for her rudeness. To grip her narrow throat in his hand and squeeze until her eyes bulged out of her face and her tongue lolled from her mouth. He smiled as he worked on the chalk circle and pictured Rita’s face as the veins in her temples throbbed and she slapped at him; crimson, ineffectual.
But no.
Sadly, that was not an option.
If he were to kill her, it was very lik
ely that the axe would not return to him. It would choose its new wielder at random, and that might take years. Decades, even, and who was to say he would be able to take it from whoever found the thing in their possession next?
No.
He would have to find another way.
His work finished, Carlisle stood and slid the stick of chalk back into his pocket.
‘Little Tommy Taylor, I command that you appear before me.’
Carlisle clapped his hands together and purple flames danced around the chalk lines of the magic circle.
‘Now, if you would,’ ordered Carlisle, and within the circle a figure materialised.
He was older than the man Carlisle recalled, but then he had perished a good fifteen years after that dreadful first meeting, and people were wont to wrinkle and bloat as the years pressed on.
‘Here, what’s this then?’ asked the ghost in the chalk circle.
‘This, you gap-toothed irritant, is your end.’
The ghost of Little Tommy Taylor scratched his chin, befuddled. ‘What you talking about, mate? I’m already brown bread. Have been for donkey’s years now. Pushing up the daisies, me. Stretched out for a long kip in me coffin.’
Little Tommy Taylor had been murdered by the husband of a woman he was having sex with in the dressing room of the Gaiman. He was almost finished when the dressing room door had opened and a surprised, then rather enraged, man entered. As Tommy shuffled around, his trousers around his ankles, the husband had beaten him to death with his rather sturdy walking cane. The murder had never been solved, and his spirit had remained within the confines of the crumbling Gaiman Theatre.
If he’d died of old age, or disease, or an accident, Carlisle would have had to scratch him off his grudge list. Lucky for him, Tommy’s end had been a violent one. And yet there was more violence to come.
‘Here, son, don’t I know you?’
‘You have a sharp memory, my friend,’ Carlisle replied.
‘Strike me pink, it’s you! The pint of milk!’
Carlisle frowned. ‘Indeed.’
‘Well, what’s this all about, then?’
Carlisle didn’t answer. Instead, he began to make patterns in the air around him with his hands. His fingers left coloured trails behind them as he traced. As he conjured. As he persuaded the magic to do the thing he wanted. And the thing he wanted was to shred the late Tommy Taylor’s very soul. To obliterate him entirely. And painfully.
Little Tommy Taylor screamed and grabbed at his transparent stomach, flopping down on to his knees.
‘Please, don’t.’
Carlisle laughed at that and continued on until the spell was complete and the moment was ready.
‘I can take a joke, Mr. Taylor, but I do believe you overstepped the mark somewhat. Goodbye.’
‘No, Guv, wait—’
But Carlisle didn’t wait to hear the end of the ghost’s sentence. Instead, he grasped the spell that hung before him and thrust it into the phantom’s chest. The ghost warped and rippled and twisted and tore, his screams shaking the dust from the stage gantry above, causing it to fall like grey snow.
Within a few short seconds, the soul of music hall comedian and ladies’ man, Little Tommy Taylor, was no more.
Carlisle sighed, content for a scant second or two, before the absence of his artefact weighed upon him once more.
‘Shit,’ he said to himself.
It was time to go and see a man about a spell.
6
April 19th, 1943, Berlin
They felt safest at night.
During the day, Magda and her brother, Andras, would stay indoors, in the basement flat they’d called home for the past six months. The owner didn’t ask any questions, just took the rent and left them alone.
Magda and her brother were now adults, though they looked much younger than their age. That’s how it went with their kind. They aged naturally for the first twenty years or so, and then the aging process slowed dramatically, allowing them to live for centuries. Unless they were found, of course. By the wizards who hunted them and their kind mercilessly.
‘Soon,’ Magda told her brother, who peered impatiently through the tiny window into the city outside.
‘It’s almost dark, why not just go now?’
Magda thought about her mother’s corpse, bloodied and twisted. It was always there, whenever she blinked.
‘You know why. Better to be safe.’
Andras snarled, his teeth growing long and monstrous.
‘Stop that,’ said Magda, and Andras crossed his arms, sulking.
Soon enough, night fell and the two emerged from their hiding place. In a city like Berlin, there were two advantages to only coming out at night: one, it was dark, and easier to move around unnoticed, and two, this was Berlin during the war. During the evenings, the allies flew overhead, dropping bombs, devastating the city piece by piece, which meant most hid in shelters from sundown to sunup. And while they huddled underground, Magda and Andras would roam the city unseen, scavenging.
They stalked through the remains of grand buildings, Magda imagining they were walking through the bones of a once-giant beast, poking through the creature’s enormous rib cage for tasty, unpicked morsels.
‘What was mother like?’ asked Andras.
Magda smiled. He always asked that. Every night he wanted to know, and every night she would try to think of something new. Not only did it satisfy her brother, help him build a picture of the mother he had no memory of, it helped Magda keep hold of every piece of her. Helped the images, the sounds, the smells stay fresh and alive. As long as she could remember her mother so clearly, remember her father, too, they could never truly be gone.
‘Well?’ said Andras, down on his haunches, picking through a pile of rubble.
‘She had these red cheeks,’ said Magda.
‘How red?’
‘Like a fresh, rosy apple that has just been polished on your thigh.’
Andras nodded.
‘It’s the first thing I would notice, as I entered a room and she smiled, her cheeks full and shining so very red. Or when she would pick you up out of your crib and cradle you in her arms, gently singing you to sleep.’
It was a cold night. It was about to get colder.
It was Andras who first sensed something. ‘Sister,’ was all he said, but the tone of his voice told Magda all she needed to know. They darted, feet dancing silently over unstable ground, until they found a half-fallen wall to duck behind.
Someone was following them.
‘Police?’ said Andras. ‘Army?’
Magda tilted her head back and sniffed at the air. At first there was nothing, but then the wind changed direction, and there it was. That scent. That taste in the back of her throat. The same one she’d noticed mixed with her mother’s blood.
The stranger’s sour blood.
Magic.
‘We need to leave,’ she said. ‘We need to leave Berlin right now.’
What remained of a doorway behind them erupted, showering them with shards of wood and brick. But this was no air raid. No bomb falling from the sky.
‘There is no point in carrying on this game of hide-and-seek, wolf,’ came a voice from the dark.
Magda peered over the edge of the wall they cowered behind and saw a figure drift out of the gloom. It was a man.
No.
Not a man.
More than a man.
A Wizard.
‘I see you, girl,’ he said, chuckling to himself.
The Wizard seemed like a giant. His head was entirely bald, the moonlight glinting off his bald pate, and he had eyes the size of fists. His crimson robes fluttered around his heavy frame in the wind, and the very air around him seemed to warp and crackle, boiling as it came into contact with him.
‘Run,’ said Magda, and she and Andras bolted from behind the wall, scampering like rats across the rubble, swift, sure-footed, desperate.
That was him.
T
he man who had murdered their parents, and now, after all these years, he’d tracked them down, too.
‘You can run, but eventually you will hit a dead end, children,’ gloated the Wizard, amused by their desire to live.
The air around Magda shook, and before she knew what was happening, she was upside-down and hurtling through the air. She came to a painful stop into a pile of shattered furniture that had once held pride of place in a family home; a family home that was now little more than the suggestion of a few walls.
No time for pain or discomfort, Magda flipped up on to her haunches, looking for any sign of her brother. He pulled to a stop a little way ahead of her, waiting for her to follow.
‘Run!’ she yelled, but Andras dithered. He wasn’t going to leave his sister behind.
‘Come on, sister!’
‘Run, I will follow you, I promise!’
Their eyes met one last time, then Andras erupted in flames.
‘No!’ Magda fell back as her brother staggered to and fro, a roaring inferno of unnatural fire, a blaze of lashing tongues, black and purple. Finally, mercifully, he fell to his knees and flopped on to his front. The magical flames puttered out, leaving nothing but a shadow of ash where her brother had once stood.
‘Vermin must be dealt with, even during times of war,’ said the Wizard, who seemed not so much to step over the uneven ground, but glide.
Magda snarled, her eyes turning yellow, her mouth filling with large, sharp teeth as her hands transformed into wicked sets of claws. ‘Kill you!’
The Wizard smiled indulgently.
It was suicide. Magda knew that, but she did not care. Her whole family now, gone, and the thing that did it was stood in front of her, a patronising smile spread across his wide face.