A Three-Book Collection

by M. V. Stott

  DCI Alexander Jenner, his robes caked with mud and grime, was sat on the ground, eyes glassy, slowly eating a stick of bright pink candy floss.

  ‘How’s your week been, Guv?’ Rita Hobbes asked her old boss as she strolled towards him, her long, red hair flowing in the breeze.

  They were in the Night Fair, only not the real one. The real Night Fair was a place for Uncanny folk to visit: to play games, to have their palms read, to wander through a hall of mirrors, and more besides. This Night Fair—the pretend, dream one—was a prison built to keep Rita’s old boss trapped; to isolate him from the Angel of Blackpool’s power. It was a dreamscape of Rita’s making, created using the axe that hung from her belt and patted against her thigh as she walked. As the name suggested, it was always night at the Night Fair. The sun never rose. The sky was a blanket of black covered by a light dusting of stars; a brush dipped in white paint and given a flick.

  Jenner carried on chewing at his candy floss, staring through Rita.

  ‘I’m not going to lie,’ she said, hopping up on a stall’s counter, legs swinging, ‘you’re starting to smell a bit ripe. What happened to the new clothes I bought you?’

  ‘I like my robes,’ Jenner replied around a mouth of fluffy pink sugar.

  Rita noticed that the box of supplies she’d delivered to Jenner a week previously was in the same place she’d set it down, unopened, clothes, food, and drink left untouched.

  ‘There’s actual fruit in there, you know, Guv. A man can’t live on sugar alone.’

  ‘What do you care?’

  ‘Oh, we’ve reached the self pity stage have we? That’s not going to wash with me, Guv. And by the way, if I didn’t care, you’d be dead already, so think about that you… you big, murdering freak.’

  Jenner sighed and carried on munching.

  DCI Jenner had been Rita’s superior back when she was on the force – her partner, Dan Waterson’s, too. Of course, at the time, neither of them had known that he was a crazed murderer, sacrificing women so an evil Angel trapped in a prison beneath the sea off the coast of Blackpool could break out and take Its revenge on God. If she’d known that, she’d have brought it up in one of their daily debriefs for sure. At the very least, she’d have raised the issue with H.R.

  Rita smirked, then felt bad. People had died. Waterson had died.

  ‘How much longer do I have to stay in here?’ asked Jenner.

  ‘Dunno to be honest. Most likely forever. What part of, “You murdered a bunch of people, you nutty dickhead,” isn’t getting through to you?’

  ‘I only did what I did for—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah – you only did it for the greater good, or whatever bullshit it was you were planning to babble. Save it. People died. I’ve got two of them trapped in here.’ She patted the axe that contained the souls of the two women Jenner had sacrificed before she’d been able to stop him: Jane Bowan and Ellie Mason.

  Jenner turned his attention to the axe, and Rita saw a spark of life in his eyes for the first time since she’d arrived. ‘Give it to me,’ he said, his voice hoarse.

  ‘Yeah, not happening that, weirdly.’ The spark in Jenner’s eyes reminded her of the way Carlisle would sometimes look when he saw the axe. She wondered if and when the time came for her to give it up, whether the need to wield it again would gnaw at her the same way.

  Carlisle.

  Rita frowned. It had been over a week since she’d seen him. Since he’d said he had something that might be able to kill the Angel. To stop It doing any more harm and free her of the hex that had made her invisible to anyone not touched by the Uncanny. The hex that had erased her life completely and trapped her within the boundry of Blackpool.

  Over a week, and no word. Not a single sighting or message from him. Rita tended to try and look on the positive side of things, to hope for the best until she had evidence of the worst, but she was finding it tricky to believe Carlisle was anything other than a pile of ash on the marble floor of the Angel’s prison.

  ‘So, Guv, you ready to tell me how I get Jane and Ellie out of this axe?’

  Jenner said nothing.

  ‘It’s just that they keep bothering me when I’m trying to get some sleep in. Asking how much longer they’re going to be stuck in limbo. It’s annoying if nothing else.’

  ‘They are trapped. I am trapped. You are trapped. Trapped, trapped, trapped.’

  He was babbling, but at least he was talking. The way Rita saw it, Jenner had seemed a little more reachable each time she’d visited. Less desperate, less foaming-at-the-mouth loony. Perhaps, like a junkie, the longer he was away from his drug—from the Angel feeding him power, whispering in his ear, controlling him—the cleaner he would get. The healthier and more open to reason.

  Rita hoped so.

  Despite everything, she still hoped her old boss could be made to understand what he’d done. Would come to regret it, and perhaps be able to help the women he’d killed, and Rita herself, in some way. One day, he’d change. One day he’d come to terms with reality, as weird as that reality was.

  ‘One day I’m going to step out of this prison and stab you in the throat,’ said Jenner.

  Okay, so rehabilitation was a little way off yet. Rita shook her head, hopped off the stall counter and headed for the exit.

  ‘See you soon, Guv. There’s some nice cheese in the box. Go on and live a little.’

  As Rita stepped through the Night Fair’s ornate, wrought iron gates, the flaming torches on top of each gate post flickered. The world around her shimmered, and the next thing she knew she was walking through the gates of the real Night Fair, the one on Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

  A grumpy looking ghost was waiting for her, arms crossed.

  ‘Hello, Waters. Looking pretty fly for a dead guy.’

  ‘Enjoy your little chat with my murderer, did you?’ asked Dan Waterson. His hair was short and neat, and he was dressed like a Geography teacher on the first day of term.

  ‘He was a riot, as always. He’s starting to smell a bit, though.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You ever sniff between your toes in the summer after wearing trainers all day?’

  ‘Rita, even though I’m dead, you still find new ways to disgust me.’

  Rita grinned, happy that she still had her best friend at her side. Even if he was dead.

  ‘So, why are you waiting for me?’ asked Rita.

  ‘I knew it. I bloody knew it.’

  ‘What?’ Rita wracked her brain, trying to remember what she had clearly forgotten.

  ‘You said you’d put a reminder in your phone!’

  ‘I did! For, uh, what… exactly?’

  Waterson kicked at a discarded Coke can in exasperation, but his foot passed through the thing, and the follow-through almost sent him sprawling. His eyes darted to Rita as she tried, and failed, to strangle a smirk.

  ‘Just come on,’ he said, ‘we’re going to be late.’

  Rita followed, remembering how Waterson had always complained about her timekeeping.

  ‘You’ll be late to your own funeral,’ he’d say.

  ‘Oh…’ Rita stopped as she remembered the forgotten thing. ‘Balls.’

  3

  The sky was bright blue with barely a wisp of cloud to break it up. This, to dead detective Dan Waterson, felt disrespectful. Funerals were meant to be sombre affairs. Grey skies, heavy rain, black umbrellas. Not this. This was holiday weather. Sunbathing weather.

  Dan had mentioned his funeral to Rita about eighty times, and forced her to add it to her phone so she wouldn’t forget. And yet still—somehow—she had failed to do so, and now the pair had arrived as the service was already underway.

  ‘Made it,’ said Rita, gasping for breath outside the entrance to the church, its large wooden double doors open, a picture of Waterson propped up on an easel in the foyer.

  ‘Made it?’ replied Waterson. ‘We’re ten minutes late.’

  ‘Po-tay-to, pa-tah-to,’ she replied, brush
ing his annoyance aside.

  Leaving the bright day behind, they stepped inside the church. Rita felt the temperature inside, cool and crisp upon her skin.

  ‘You look like a right twat in that picture,’ she said.

  Waterson frowned. It was a blown-up picture of the one his mum kept in a frame on her mantelpiece. It had been taken years back, when he’d first been accepted into the force. Back then he’d thought a moustache suited him. He had been mistaken.

  They joined the other mourners, who were sat before a vicar with desperate hair fastidiously teased over his bald head. Waterson’s coffin sat off to one side.

  His coffin.

  That was weird.

  Yes, he’d seen his dead body after his murder—in fact he’d spent several miserable hours with it at the morgue—but since he’d last seen it, he’d come to think of his ghostly form as him. Whatever that was—that length of flesh and bones and hair and teeth—that wasn’t him. How could it be? That thing was dead.

  ‘...a respected officer, who always put others before himself,’ droned the vicar, as though he had known Waterson in life.

  Okay, so he was dead. Sure. No getting around that. He was dead and his rotting body was packed into a box that was about to be trundled through a sheet of flames and burned to a handful of ash. And yet here he was, still talking and thinking. It was all a bit weird, and he wasn’t sure he’d ever quite get used to it.

  ‘Your mum looks good,’ said Rita, pointing out the woman with tight, white hair, dressed in a form-fitting black dress and red high heels.

  ‘She always did like a funeral,’ replied Waterson, trying not to let his mind slip into thoughts of how she must be feeling. How she must have felt when she got the news of his death. Things were bad enough without picturing that.

  ‘You know, I never thought your mum liked me much,’ said Rita.

  ‘That’s because she didn’t.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘She once referred to you as, “That flame-haired, mouthy trollop who bounces from man to man like a shameless hussy”. So.’

  Rita laughed. ‘She says that like it’s a bad thing.’

  The two spoke at normal speaking volume as, of course, no one else at the funeral could see or hear them.

  ‘Pretty decent turnout,’ said Rita, nodding appreciatively.

  It was true, there were more people there than Waterson had expected. Family, friends, work colleagues. Waterson almost found himself welling up a little. Almost.

  Waterson didn’t like being a ghost.

  He couldn’t touch, couldn’t taste, and worst of all, he couldn’t sleep. He had no idea how slowly time moved until he was unable to miss large chunks of it by sleeping. Whilst Rita, and Ben Turner, and his mum, and everyone else snoozed away for hours on end, Waterson wandered and paced and grew increasingly agitated at the relentlessness of consciousness.

  At first he thought he’d give anything to taste a cold pint of beer again. Now all he wanted to do was sleep. Just for a few minutes. Just close his eyes and not be there. Not be anywhere.

  He wondered if souls got to sleep when they found heaven. Somehow, he’d missed his opportunity to ascend after dying. Formby, the mole-man looking eaves who Rita was now friends with, said it was because he’d been murdered, but eventually his time would come.

  Waterson was already tired of waiting.

  ‘You’re thinking about leaving me again, aren’t you?’ said Rita, reading his expression.

  ‘Oh, always.’

  ‘You bastard.’

  Waterson smiled despite himself. ‘It’s not easy, you know. Being this.’ He passed his hand through the wooden pew in front of them. ‘Being nothing. Just fog with a memory.’

  ‘Oh, very poetic.’

  ‘Shut your face.’

  Waterson noticed a little girl with hair so blonde it was almost white, sat a few rows in front of them. She was wearing a hairband with bunny ears attached to the top. He couldn’t for the life of him think who she was, nor why someone would take a child to a funeral wearing bunny ears. Who did that?

  ‘Okay, so you’re dead,’ said Rita, ‘but would you really rather be dead-dead? Just nothing and gone?’

  ‘No, of course not, but… you wouldn’t understand. You don’t know how this feels. I just... I want to know my options, that’s all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How long is this going to last? Me wandering around and not going to Heaven? Is there a way for me to speed things up so I can get there quicker?’ He wiped a hand down his face. ‘Christ, I don’t even believe in God, let alone an afterlife. This is completely ridiculous.’

  Rita reached out a hand to place over Waterson’s, which did not go well, what with it passed right through him.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Waterson, sarcastically.

  ‘Waters, there’s something I really want you to know,’ said Rita, her eyes wide.

  ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘You looked really, really shit with that child-molester moustache.’

  Waterson blinked, frowned, went to say something mean back, then burst into giggles. Rita joined him, and after almost a full minute, they just about managed to regain control of themselves. That was the moment Rita realised someone was watching them.

  ‘Uh, who is that?’ she asked, pointing to a small boy on the front row with a mass of curly blonde hair. The boy was looking back over his shoulder in their direction.

  ‘That’s Liam, my cousin Carol’s kid.’

  ‘Right. Am I crazy or is he looking right at us?’

  ‘Don’t be daft, he can’t be.’

  Rita waved a hand at Liam, and he waved back.

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Waterson. ‘Well, that’s… weird.’

  But that was not the weirdest thing that was going to happen at Dan Waterson’s funeral.

  The sound of someone knocking on wood caught everyone’s attention. The knocking was loud, insistent. The vicar stopped talking and turned to look.

  ‘Is that…?’ started Waterson.

  ‘...coming from your coffin,’ finished Rita.

  Knock-knock-knock.

  The sound was indeed coming from the coffin. Someone inside was rapping their knuckles against the wood, and as the only person in there was the late Dan Waterson, it was more than a little disconcerting for all present.

  Knock-knock-knock.

  ‘Maybe I’m not dead,’ said Waterson.

  ‘Or you’re a zombie, that can happen.’

  ‘Can it?’

  ‘I dunno, you’re a ghost and I’ve got a magic axe, so I reckon it’s open season for weird shit.’

  The knocking stopped.

  The vicar turned from the coffin and back to the mourners, eyes darting wildly. ‘Well, I… well…’

  The coffin lurched forward and toppled to the stone floor with an almighty crash of splintering wood. As the church echoed with cries of surprise, the coffin lid flipped open and Waterson’s corpse was vomited from within, dressed in a suit that Rita recognised. It had once been his date suit.

  ‘Fuck me,’ said Waterson.

  Rita darted forward as everyone else instinctively backed away.

  ‘Uh, Rita,’ said Waterson, pointing at his dead body.

  The body was twitching and writhing as though something was alive inside.

  ‘What the Hell is goi—’ started Rita, but she hadn’t finished her sentence before the corpse sat up as though jerked into the air on invisible strings.

  There were screams as mourners shot from their pews and charged for the exit. Rita pulled the axe from her belt, fingers flexing around its wooden haft. It tingled against her skin, connecting to the magic that surrounded them, ready to do as she asked.

  ‘Dead, uh, Waterson?’ she said, trying to get the corpse’s attention.

  The corpse—its skin bubbling now—turned its head to her and smiled. ‘Ms. Winters says hello,’ he said, in a voice that scuttled out of his mouth like a spider across a
basement floor.

  Rita blinked, lowering the axe. ‘What did you say?’

  Dead Waterson laughed.

  And then exploded.

  Millions of maggots erupted from inside the corpse, smothering Rita.

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘Jesus!’ said Waterson, as Rita fell back, thrashing wildly at the maggots that seemed to be increasing in size with each heartbeat. Seemed to be growing vicious teeth that bit and bit as they attempted to burrow their way inside of her. They wanted to bite and wiggle their way in. To lay their eggs that would hatch and make Rita explode, too.

  The desire to descend into panic was almost overwhelming, but Rita pushed past it. Pushed past the maggots and their insistent teeth. She levered her way up into a kneeling position and gripped the axe in both hands. The axe, when it made contact with someone’s magic, allowed her to use it as her own. But Carlisle had told her that it could do more than that, because magic was all around her. All around everyone, every second of every day, just waiting to be called upon. If she concentrated, she wouldn’t need to steal someone else’s magic, she could make the axe aware of the magic in the air and draw upon that instead.

  She closed her eyes.

  She could feel it.

  Not the maggots nipping at her flesh.

  No.

  She could feel the magic, old magic, ancient magic, that rolled around the church in great waves.

  ‘You see it too?’ she asked, and the axe twitched in her grip.

  She told the axe to feast, to open wide. It throbbed in her hands as the magic swarmed towards it. The axe was a black hole swallowing all the light in the room.

  The magic asked her what she wanted of it.

  ‘Burn them. Utterly. Completely. Now.’

  The magic wagged its tail.

  Rita opened her eyes, grunted, and slammed the handle of the axe against the stone flagstone in front of her. Magic—great washes of purple and red and yellow—burst from the axe blade. A tsunami that raged around the church, turning every maggot it came in contact with to ash.

  It lasted all of two seconds before the church was maggot-free.

  ‘Well,’ said Waterson, ‘that was… well.....’