by M. V. Stott
Joan had taken to calling the black mog Charlie Boy. She’d wave to it as it passed and call out its new name. Poor thing wouldn’t come near when she was around though. A nervous mite. Clearly, Mr. Wright had not treated him well.
‘Lord alone knows what I’ll find coming though that cat flap next, Mandy.’
Joan sank to her knees on the kitchen floor with difficulty. She dunked a sponge into the bucket of soapy water and scrubbed at the tiled floor. She liked to keep a good household, always had done. Point of pride. Now that Celia was coming back in the morning to stay for a few days, she was making sure every inch glittered.
‘You’ll be able to eat your dinner off the toilet seat by the time I’m through!’ Joan had said to Mandy, hooting with laughter.
It had been so long since Celia had been up for a visit. Going on a year now. Had to cancel her trip earlier in the year, work needed her, so she said. Celia was always so busy, and so very far away. Joan had made the trip a few times over the years, down on the train, but the older she got, the more of a drain it was. So now she sat at home and waited for Celia to find the time. Or a “window”, as Celia liked to call it.
She didn’t blame her daughter—of course not—she had a busy life. She was a success! Built that interior design business up from the ground, now she had a whole host of people who worked under her. Joan bragged to anyone who would listen about her clever daughter down in London with her own business. Joan liked to think that it was something to do with her own flare for keeping a tidy home that had rubbed off on her daughter. Helped cultivate the spark that had flared up into such a wonderful skill. Well, it certainly wasn’t down to Frank. Football, beer, and naps, that’s all he’d been interested in.
Joan grunted as she pushed her way up and on to her feet. She made her way to the counter and put a pot on the stove, then poured some milk into it. She’d always liked a cup of hot milk, ever since she was a little one and her own mum had made it for her. She smiled as she watched the milk begin to bubble.
She glanced out the window. It was pitch black. Mad old woman, staying up all hours cleaning a house she’d already been over twice that day.
Joan went to lift the pan of milk off the stove when a streak of movement caught her attention.
‘Ginger? Jackson? Mr. Tabby? That you, there?’
She turned to look, and as she did, something shot between her legs. Joan shrieked as the creature hit her ankle at speed, causing her to lose balance. She threw out her arms to steady herself, but it was no use. In what seemed to her like slow motion, Joan fell, twisted, to the floor.
She knew as soon as she hit down that something had broken. She felt it go. Heard it, like a rifle shot. She would have screamed out, but the pain was so sharp and sudden that it robbed her of the power to vocalise, and instead her mouth stretched wide in an anguished mute cry.
‘Okay… okay…’ She took a few calming breaths, then tried to move, crying out in pain. She was broken good, she wasn’t going anywhere.
She wasn’t going to be able to make it to the phone. Even if she wasn’t as busted up as she was, she didn’t have the strength to drag herself to the other side of the house for the land line, and she knew her mobile phone was all the way upstairs. No, she was going to have to stay right where she was until her daughter arrived. Maybe… maybe, when Celia found her this way, she’d decide to stay for longer. Look after her. Maybe she’d even want to keep a closer eye on her. Visit more often, or split her time between here and London to take care of her poor old mum who could no longer be trusted on her own.
Perhaps this wasn’t such a terrible thing to have happened. Maybe it would even be a good thing.
Something moved at the other end of the kitchen. Joan lifted her head and squinted. A small, dark shape was sat on the floor a few feet away.
‘Who is that? Ginger?’ Joan knew that it wasn’t. ‘Oh… Charlie Boy? Charlie Boy, that you over there?’ The dark shape shuffled into view, then sat looking directly at Joan.
‘It is… it is you, isn’t it?’ The cat just looked at her, quite still and unconcerned. ‘Not your fault, that’s okay, you weren’t to know.’ Joan was surprised to see her neighbour’s cat actually inside her house, sitting there, calm as you like. He was always so wary and liked to keep his distance usually, but now there he was, fearless.
‘Decided to come inside at last, Charlie Boy? After a little attention, I’ll bet.’
Charlie Boy stood, eyes unblinking, and padded across the floor towards her, stopping by Joan’s head.
‘Hey there, Charlie.’ Joan didn’t like the cat’s eyes. Something was wrong with them. Something that made her heart flutter. ‘Okay… okay… now you just go over there, Charlie. You just—’
Charlie Boy bit Joan’s face.
She screamed and flapped at the hissing cat, causing it to back off, but not to run away entirely. Instead, it took back its position at the other end of the kitchen and sat staring at her with its amber eyes.
Joan touched the wound on her face, her breath quick, and felt the blood smear between her fingertips and cheek.
‘Scat…! You scat, you hear me? You get out of my house!’ Charlie Boy ignored her. ‘This is my house, you get out of here!’
Squeak.
Three more cats entered through the cat flap. ‘Ginger, Jackson, Mr. Tabby, you be careful of that bad cat! Be careful now!’
Joan’s three cats sat beside Charlie Boy. Their eyes didn’t look real. It looked as though someone had removed them and sewn on glass ones. Joan began to feel very frightened. She used what little strength she had to push herself as far back from the cats as she could, until she was pressed up against the larder door.
The cats stood.
‘Please don’t.’
As one, the cats made their unhurried approach, their glass eyes never leaving her.
‘Please.’
The cats hissed as they swarmed her, needle teeth and claws flashing as they attacked again and again. Joan lifted her arms to try and protect her face from the worst of it, but they were too many.
Not my cats, not my cats, oh no! I’ve brought them up from newborns to act in a respectable manner.
As quickly as it had started, the attack stopped.
Joan lowered her lacerated arms, a sharp pain in her chest. The cats had their backs to her. They were looking towards the cat flap.
‘Well… oh my…oh dear…’
Joan gulped down air and tried to ignore all the blood.
Squeak.
The cat flap was pushed open by a tiny hand.
‘Please,’ Joan begged. ‘Please, I need help.’
The hand was joined by a second, then two arms slid inside, followed by a head. It was a small child, no more than two years old. Joan recognized the child; it was Ashton, her neighbour’s little boy.
‘Oh, Ashton! Be careful! Go get your mummy! Ashton, don’t come in here! Don’t!’
But the boy didn’t listen. He wriggled and squirmed and breathed in hard as he struggled to make it in through the cat flap. Finally, he twisted just right, something in his body cracked, and he slithered in like a snake.
‘No, Ashton! Run! Can’t you see the…’
Joan stopped. Something was wrong with Ashton. She could see it in the way he held himself. Like something else was wearing an Ashton disguise. Something frightening. There was a cracking sound and two rabbit ears forced their way up and out of the child’s skull.
The boy wandered over to Joan, his gait strange, disjointed. As he reached her, he crouched low on his haunches and looked into her eyes.
‘Please don’t, Ashton.’
The boy stood and made his way over to the cutlery drawer. He pulled it open and retrieved a large carving knife. It looked so large in his tiny hand that it was almost comical.
The cats shuffled closer to watch.
‘Please don’t.’
Ashton placed a small, cold hand on Joan’s right arm, holding it tight.
/> That’s the thing with cat flaps, you see. It helps my cats get out and about, but it lets other things get inside.
Joan tried to go elsewhere as Ashton and his knife went about their business. She was dancing with Frank the night he asked her to marry him. She was holding Celia for the first time, her eyes so large and full of trusting wonder. She was in that hotel room with her old boss, just that one time, just that one mistake.
‘It’s okay, Ashton. It’s okay. Don’t you worry none. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.’
As her head fell to one side, she saw two men in old-fashioned suits and animal masks watching. They raised their white-gloved hands and began to applaud.
9
Formby liked to think he heard all of Blackpool’s stories. All of its secrets. One way or another, anything worth knowing, and a whole lot not worth knowing, found its way into his ears. Sometimes, amongst all the endless babble, one clear story rang out. This was one of those times.
The story was fear.
He was waiting in the car park behind the offices that contained, among other things, the psychiatry practice of Alison Parks. Formby knew a lot about Alison Parks. He knew she was forty-five years old and carried more weight than she was happy about. That she had grown up in Burnley, but moved to Blackpool when she was fifteen, when her parents relocated for work. He knew that she had never been married, and had no desire ever to be, although she did wish someone would actually ask her, just so she could turn them down. That way everyone else would know it was her own choice, rather than through a lack of opportunity. He knew she liked eating apples, and hated the taste of butter.
He knew all of these things and more, as he’d spent quite a bit of time over the years in her company.
He knew she was a good psychiatrist, and also a very, very bad psychiatrist.
She was a good psychiatrist because she was excellent at her job. She knew how to listen, how to make people feel heard, how to help them unburden, accept, challenge, move on. Patients would recommend Doctor Parks to their friends.
She was a very bad psychiatrist because she broke her clients’ trust once a week in return for a taste of magic.
Formby looked up as the fire escape door slammed closed, and Alison Parks, in a grey pencil skirt and pink blouse, her dark blonde hair back and pinned into a bun, scurried across the car park and joined him on the wall he was sat upon.
‘Morning,’ said the eaves.
‘Morning. Absolutely dying for a fag,’ replied Alison, pulling out a pack of cigarettes, lighting one, and placing it between her red-painted lips. ‘Christ, that’s better,’ she said, head tilted back, eyes closed, as smoke seeped lazily from her mouth and nose.
She was in the grip of more than one vice, Alison. She went through at least one pack of cigarettes a day, often more, depending on how stressed she was. She liked a drink too, usually starting with two large glasses of wine with lunch, and she kept a hip flask in her purse for the occasional pick-me-up nip between clients. More nights than she’d care to admit she would find herself falling asleep in front of the TV, having slipped into an alcohol-assisted stupor.
Then there were the painkillers. And the gambling, mostly on football. Yeah, Alison Parks had a taste for a lot of things that were bad for her, and magic was just another on the list. One that she happily ignored her hippocratic oath for.
Formby, as an eaves, liked to gather all the secrets he could, and who hears more secrets than a psychiatrist? It hadn’t taken him long to sniff out Alison Parks and her compulsive bad habits. A free taste or two and she was on the hook. No, it wasn’t entirely ethical on Formby’s part, but since when had an eaves ever worried about ethics?
Alison Parks had her addictions and he had his: information.
‘Have you stories for me?’ he asked.
Alison opened her eyes and nodded her head eagerly. ‘And have you got a little something-something for me?’
Eaves used magic for nourishment, and to build impossible mazes to conceal their dens, to keep themselves and their clan safe from reprisals. They do not, as a rule, hand over their hard-earned magic to others, but this was a special case. Alison was so juicy with secrets that it was worth giving away a weekly taste for all that she provided.
‘I do,’ replied Formby. ‘Secrets for main course, magic for pudding,’
Alison licked her lips and began telling him anything and everything she remembered from the sessions since last she’d met Formby.
She told him of the man who would fish his own poo out of the toilet, seal it into little plastic bags, and then store it in a giant chest freezer in his basement.
She told him of the woman who was abused by a relative when she was young, and how, now that the relative was dead, she wished she’d been the one to send him to his early grave.
She told him of the six-year-old girl whose parents had found her more than once holding a pillow over their newborn child.
Most of all, she told him about the nightmares.
Over the last week, more and more of her patients had been enduring terrible nightmares, and some of them claimed they had not been asleep when they were experiencing them. That they had been suffering a sort of waking nightmare, their unconscious mind bleeding into their waking hours.
There was the woman who claimed, after a date, to have seen her dead little sister. Actually, to have seen numerous copies of her dead sister, floating out at sea.
There was the little boy who believed that a ghost pretending to be his dad, only with a headful of birds, was visiting him at night.
More and more patients pushing aside their normal litany of worries and fears to talk about nightmares—daymares—and, more often than not, about a pair of men in old dusty suits and tatty animal masks.
There was a lot to take in, and Formby took it all.
Rita grabbed a packet of crisps from behind the bar at Big Pins then poured herself an orange juice. Yawning, she shambled her way across the room to the table where Waterson was sat.
‘Morning, Waters, still dead?’
‘Afternoon, Rita, still an annoying old tart?’
‘You know it, brother.’
Waterson smiled and watched as Rita began her cheese and onion crisp breakfast-slash-lunch. He really, really wanted to taste food again. Taste anything, really. He’d contemplated trying the trick the Angel had made him do. Jumping into living people’s bodies and trying to control them, just so he could pop down to a cafe and gorge on a giant, greasy full English Breakfast, washed down with numerous cups of tea. His sense of right and wrong wouldn’t let him do it though. It didn’t matter that, if it worked, he wouldn’t be hurting the person he briefly inhabited, he was still making them do something against their will. Taking ownership of their body, their life.
Maybe if he found someone willing to let him hop inside for a while, though…
He wondered if he could find someone who might agree to that. Then that would be all fine, right?
‘What’s with the face?’ asked Rita, noticing the ruminative expression weighing heavy upon Waterson.
‘Just, you know, thinking.’
‘Right. It’ll give you wrinkles, that.’
‘I think I might be a little past wrinkles, but thanks for the concern.’
‘Good point, one of the perks of being dead.’
‘Oh, one of many.’
‘So what did you get up to last night?’ Rita asked.
‘Just a little bit of slowly going insane, wandering the streets on my own for hours, wishing I could go to sleep for even a quick half hour to numb the relentless horror of constant awareness.’
‘Oh, nice. As long as you’re keeping yourself busy.’
Waterson sighed, then laughed, and shook his head.
‘The Angel of Blackpool paid me a visit last night,’ said Rita, matter-of-factly.
‘What?’ replied Waterson. ‘Is It out? How did It get out of the prison?’
‘It didn’t, I don’t th
ink. Not properly. It just came to speak to me in a dream.’
‘...Okay.’
Rita gave Waterson the same middle finger she’d offered up to the Angel.
‘Classy,’ said Waterson.
‘Look, I dunno how It did it, or how, or, you know, whatever. But It did.’
‘Fine. Why then?’
‘It wanted me to release Jenner.’
‘Well, sure.’ Waterson frowned and sat back, shaking his head. ‘So it just came to you and asked?’
‘Yup,’ replied Rita, taking a sip from her orange juice.
‘So this bastard, evil Angel just popped into your dream to politely request that you release the crazy person who is in Its control, murdering women, and who, by the way, also murdered me?’
‘That’s the long and short of it, yeah. Weird, right?’
‘Very weird, yes. Did It think you were just going to say, “Oh, all right then, if you like,” and that would be that?’
‘They do say God moves in mysterious ways. Maybe Angels do, too.’
‘Most of what you do has always mystified me, and you claim to be part angel, so that sounds about right.’
Rita laughed and waved at Ben Turner, emerging bleary eyed from the steps that lead down to the basement where he slept. He ignored her.
‘What’s up with wolf boy?’ asked Waterson.
‘Hey! Don’t call him that.’
‘All right, you touchy bitch.’
The entrance to Big Pins opened and Formby shuffled in.
‘It’s like that man has a radar for when people are eating,’ said Rita.
Formby hustled over and sat at the table, hands fretting, not once attempting to grab any of Rita’s crisps.
‘Spill it, Formby,’ said Rita. ‘What have you got?’
‘Death. Bad dreams and death.’
Rita and Waterson looked down at the kitchen floor where Joan Barnett had been found dead. There was blood where the body had been removed, and forensics officers were slowly going about their hunt for clues, unaware of the ghostly man and the hexed woman who had joined them.