A Three-Book Collection

by M. V. Stott

  Alison’s eyes were wide and terrified. Red tracks trailed down from them and across her cheeks; tears of blood. Rita had tried to close Alison’s eyes, but they sprang back open each time. Her jaw hung wide, unhinged in a silent scream. A piece of glass had been used to carve a rabbit into her chest.

  Whenever Rita found herself stood beside a dead body—which, due to her chosen profession, was often—she would flash back to her first. His name was Gavin Dylan. There had been many since him, some murder victims, some suicides, some accidents. As the deaths piled up the names and faces had drifted further and further from reach, but not Gavin Dylan’s. He had been found abandoned in an alleyway.

  He’d been rake thin, mid-length, dark brown hair that stuck slick to his head and face. He wore a pair of faded jeans that were too big for him, a Metallica hoodie swamping his top half. His eyes had been half-open, and he’d almost bitten his own tongue in half. His neck had been slashed three times.

  He was the first murder victim Rita had been assigned to, and she had never found the person responsible. Ever since that day, she made sure she remembered Gavin Dylan and how she’d failed him. It kept the fire in her alive, pushed her on to make sure she would never let any other victim down. Never again.

  ‘How do we find them?’ asked Waterson, a hard edge to his voice. ‘Cotton and Spike.’

  Joan Barnett and now Alison Parks; two deaths in quick succession. Rita knew in her gut that it was just the start. Every day that passed with Cotton and Spike out in the wild would lead to more bodies. They weren’t content with giving people sleepless nights anymore, they wanted to push people until their bodies gave out in fright.

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Rita, trying to push Gavin Dylan aside.

  ‘Perhaps they shall find you,’ said Alison Parks.

  Rita and Waterson lurched back as Alison sat up and turned her head to look at them, her hands toying with the bunny-shaped wound in her chest.

  Rita pulled the axe from her belt and gripped it in both hands. ‘Get out of her!’

  ‘She wanted to scream, you know,’ said Alison. ‘We would not let her. As my brother showed her his true face, she opened her mouth wide and wide and wide, and yet nothing came out. I took each scream when it was still deep in her throat and I claimed them as my own. I placed them between my teeth and chewed and swallowed, and now her screams live in my stomach. Yummy.’

  ‘Use your bloody axe and burn that thing up!’ cried Waterson.

  Rita wanted to, her body was willing her to. She could feel the magic surging into the axe-head, begging to be used, but if she did what she had done at Waterson’s funeral they’d still be no closer to trapping Cotton and Spike. They’d slip away again and she’d have learned nothing.

  ‘Why don’t you stop hiding and face me properly?’ said Rita. ‘Or are you too chicken shit after I kicked your dusty arses last time?’

  The body of Alison Parks stepped off of the autopsy table. She plucked a scalpel from a nearby trolley and slashed at the flesh of her belly. Then again.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Waterson, as blood began to flood from each fresh wound. Each new cut brought a new waterfall of red, an unnatural amount of blood, washing down her body, flooding the tiled floor as she shuffled forwards.

  ‘Are you afraid?’ asked Alison Parks.

  ‘Fuck you,’ replied Rita.

  Waterson wasn’t quite sure what happened next. He certainly did not remember them concluding their business at the morgue. One moment he had been backing away as the possessed, self-harming corpse of a psychiatrist walked towards them, and then…

  ...well…

  ...then what?

  He looked around.

  He was in his mother’s house.

  The one she’d lived in for the last fifteen years, ever since his dad had passed away. They’d had a large, four-bedroom detached place when he was growing up. Two whole spare bedrooms. One his dad used as a study, the other he had been allowed to use as he pleased. He’d been sad when she sold the house.

  ‘It’s just me rattling around in there on my own. It’s too big for me.’

  And there was the unspoken truth. The house was haunted. Not by spirits, but by memories. Every room, every corridor, every nook and cranny held a thousand different memories. A step creaking on the stairs could throw her back to a different time. Some find that sort of thing comforting at that stage of life, he knew it caused his mum nothing put pain. It was just a brick box reminding her of what she had lost and what could never be again.

  So she sold it, downsized, enjoyed the extra money she made in the sale. Even started going on little holidays by herself, something he never thought she’d have the nerve to do.

  Wait, wasn’t he just in the morgue? He’d got lost in memories there for a moment, forgotten that something was up. Something was wrong.

  ‘Hello, Daniel.’

  He turned to see his mother. She was dressed like she had been at his funeral: black dress, red heels.

  ‘Mum, you can see me?’ Waterson’s heart beat hard in his chest, but he was dead and had no heart to beat. What was going on?

  ‘Thought I’d seen the last of you,’ she said, dismissively.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘All I ever wanted was to be alone. I was glad of it, when your dad finally popped his clogs. I’d been fattening him up for years, praying for that pig’s heart to finally give up the ghost.’

  ‘You loved Dad.’

  ‘Puh. Then there was you. You were his idea, you know. Never forgave the pig for that. I never wanted no brat.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Every moment you were inside me, growing. A tumour I couldn’t get ripped out. Every time you moved in my womb I thought I was going to be sick.’

  Had his mum always had rabbit ears?

  ‘Shut up. Just shut up, that’s not true!’

  ‘Listen to you, wailing and stamping your feet. Just like when you were little. Needy little waste of skin. Well, you’re dead now, too, thank the Lord. Look, I bought new shoes specially, do you like them? Red, like the blood that magician made you spill when he stuck you like a pig. You’re a pig, your dad a pig; a pair of piggy bastards.’

  Waterson couldn’t take it anymore. He ran from his mum, from the house.

  Rita wasn’t sure what had happened.

  She was in a corridor and it was dark, too dark to make out much in the way of detail, but detail wasn’t needed. She knew where she was. She felt it on her skin, she smelled it in the air.

  Moorsgate Children’s Home.

  The building she’d called home as a kid.

  ‘But that’s..’

  Impossible.

  It was impossible.

  Moorsgate burned to the ground when she was just fourteen years old. She’d seen it happen. No, no, she’d made it happen. It was being fumigated and all the kids and the staff were being housed in local bed and breakfasts, and that’s when she’d taken her chance. A box of matches, a couple of cans of paint thinner. She knew which window had the latch and could easily be forced. They never fixed stuff like that at Moorsgate. It wasn’t a place where things got fixed, it was a place things were allowed to break down and degrade.

  In she’d wriggled, falling the metre to the hard, wooden floor below.

  She’d been listening to her Walkman, to a tape she stole from Woolworth’s a week before. A Madonna best of. As she bopped to Borderline, to Vogue, to Holiday, she splashed the thinner around, singing and laughing and alive.

  You needed a key to get in the front door, but not out. She’d opened the door and stood, looking into the guts of the building she hated, one last time. Then she lit the match and the building went up, the flames as eager as Rita to scrub the place from the face of the Earth. She watched for a few seconds while Madonna implored her to express herself, and then she turned and ran—ran faster than she’d ever thought possible—as though she’d cast off a rucksack full of rocks.

  It wa
s gone.

  Demolished after the firemen had finally put out the flames.

  And now she was stood in its corridors again.

  ‘Nice try, boys, but you have to get up early in the morning to pull the wool over this bitch’s eyes.’

  Rita passed the axe from hand to hand, strolling down the corridor, taking in each bit of the dreamscape recreation.

  ‘I know your dirty tricks, remember? You think I’m gonna what? Fall to my knees and cry or something? Fat chance, big ears.’

  She turned the corridor to find Alison Parks’ dead, naked body stood waiting for her. Alison raised a hand and waved. ‘Hello Rita. Remember when you wet your bed with tears and piss and you felt so alone and wretched and unwanted? It was just in that room there, wasn’t it?’

  Rita did remember. It had happened on more than one occasion. Ms. Winters had heard her muffled sobs as she passed by. She’d poked her head into the room and told her to keep it down. ‘Don’t be such a big baby,’ she’d said. The first few times she’d wet the bed, Ms. Winters had smacked her legs with the back of her hand. After that, it was the belt. She hadn’t let on after that. She would just get up early, strip the bed, and wash it in the sink.

  ‘I had a giant turd of a childhood,’ said Rita, feigning a yawn. ‘You’ve got me. I feel terrible. Can we move on?’

  The door to what had been her bedroom opened and Ms. Winters stepped out. She wore a thick-knitted jumper, a pair of black jeans, her dark hair severely short.

  ‘Hobbes, who said you could go wandering the corridors after lights out?’

  Despite herself, Rita felt her heart rate quicken, her hands shake.

  ‘There it is,’ said Alison Parks, stroking her long, rabbit ears.

  ‘Answer me!’ demanded Ms. Winters. ‘Well, did someone steal your tongue, you wretched little monster?’ Rita saw she was holding a belt. It was doubled over and Ms. Winters’ hands squeezed it, knuckles white.

  ‘Mm,’ said Alison Parks, ‘that really is very moreish.’

  ‘Oh, fuck you to the moon and back,’ replied Rita, then stepped forward and swung the axe, embedding its blade in Ms. Winters’ skull.

  ‘No television for you for a month,’ slurred Ms. Winters, one half of her face hanging slack.

  Rita could feel what Ms. Winters was made of. She wasn’t real, of course. She was a toy, fashioned by a master.

  ‘Piss off,’ said Rita. ‘And by the way, everyone talks about how rank your breath is behind your back.’

  The simulation of Ms. Winters existed just long enough for surprise to register on her face before Rita told the dream magic to turn her into something more pleasing. Ms. Winters broke apart, became a cloud of butterflies, and fluttered off into the dark.

  ‘That all you got, Bugs Bunny?’

  Alison Parks lifted the scalpel and dragged it down her forehead, face, neck, chest, stomach, crotch. She peeled herself open and Mr. Cotton, his old suit and tatty rabbit mask coated with gore, stepped out of her. The remains of Alison Parks crumpled to the floor behind him, a boneless sack of skin.

  The rabbit mask grinned at Rita, though of course it did not as it was just a mask.

  Waterson had not experienced the nightmare magic of Cotton and Spike first-hand before, but after running from his mum’s house and pulling himself a little more together, he put two and two together and grew very cross indeed.

  How dare they do that to him? To make his mum say those things, even if it had just been an empty, pretend version of her.

  ‘Okay, you tricked me, congratulations. You spooked a ghost.’

  Rasping breath. Waterson whirled round, but he was alone on the street. Houses with their lights outs, curtains closed, pressed in at him. Were they getting closer? The road narrower?

  Rasping, damp, rancid breath in his ear.

  He turned again, but he was still alone.

  ‘Okay, who is that? I know this is just a waking dream thing, so you might as well come out.’

  One of the doors opened and a man in an old suit and a hedgehog mask stepped out. Waterson had seen neither of the men, of the things, he and Rita were after, but he’d heard enough to recognise who had joined him.

  ‘You must be Mr. Spike. The one who doesn’t talk.’

  Another door on another house opened, and a second Mr. Spike stepped out.

  ‘Okay. Nice trick. You should play Vegas.’

  A third door, a third Mr. Spike.

  ‘I might just be off then,’ said Waterson. ‘Places to be.’ He began to hustle his way down the street as more and more doors opened, and Mr. Spike after Mr. Spike stepped out to stare at him with the empty, glass eyes of his mask. It was, to put it mildly, really putting the willies up Detective Dan Waterson.

  He realised he was no longer just walking fast but sprinting. He was desperate to get off that street, but the damn thing seemed to be never-ending. An infinite stretch of opening doors and Mr. Spikes.

  He was dead, what did he have to be afraid of? He couldn’t die again. Or could he? Could the dead die? He didn’t really want to find out.

  He was dead! Why on earth was he running? He could just think of a place he knew and he’d zap right over there and away.

  ‘Big Pins!’ He closed his eyes.

  ‘Yes, the dead can die,’ said Waterson’s mum.

  ‘Shit it!’ replied Waterson as he ran from his mum’s house to find a street full of Mr. Spikes waiting to greet him from an endless expanse of doorways. He turned back and made his way through the house, past Not Mum.

  ‘Such an ugly baby. It was all I could do not to drown you every bath time.’

  Waterson ran through the kitchen and to the back door. He threw it open, raced through the backyard and over the wall to the alleyway that ran on that side of the street.

  As his feet hit down on the cobbles he straightened up to find himself stood not behind, but in front of his mum’s house again, the endless Mr. Spikes looking back at him, waving their white-gloved hands.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ said Dan Waterson, wondering if things could possibly get any worse.

  The endless Mr. Spikes began screaming and sprinting towards him.

  Things could always get worse.

  Rita was sat in the orphanage canteen at one of the long, wooden tables that all the kids had sat at, breakfast, dinner, and tea. She was spooning a bowl of rice pudding into her mouth.

  ‘I always hated rice pudding,’ she said.

  ‘This is a nightmare,’ replied Mr. Cotton, who was sat opposite her, his mask and clothing still dark with Alison Parks’ blood, his stained white-gloved fingers fanned out on the table top before him.

  ‘So, I didn’t finish you and your brother off, then?’ she asked, adding a spoonful of strawberry jam to the pudding and swirling it around.

  ‘Finish us off? That is not possible. You can stomp on us, cut us, burn us, and we shall return, given time. Wherever a child quivers beneath their bed covers, we shall be reborn.’

  ‘Well, bully for you. Where is your brother, by the way? Is that mute little prick going to jump out at me at any moment? Sneak up behind me with a balloon and a pin?’

  ‘Brother mine is currently occupied elsewhere, terrorising a ghost.’

  Rita frowned. So Waters was in a nightmare of his own.

  ‘You can’t have thought this would really fool me,’ she said. ‘I’ve tasted your magic, I’ve used it, made it my own.’

  Mr. Cotton opened his mouth and a spider with legs as thick as pipe cleaners scuttled out.

  ‘Gross, stop that,’ said Rita.

  Mr. Cotton picked the spider from his mask and crushed it in one hand before swiping the small, squished thing aside. ‘Please, continue,’ he said.

  ‘What’s your game then? What do you and the Angel have in mind?’

  ‘Angel? We are not Its worker bees. We do as we please, and fear is what we please.’

  Okay, so the Angel wasn’t involved. Cotton and Spike were flying solo. Was that true?
Should she trust the word of a nightmare monster?

  ‘Do you know where Carlisle is?’

  Mr. Cotton nodded once.

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Hard to say. Perhaps, perhaps not, you things of bone and meat do die so easily. So deliciously.’

  ‘Are you going to try and kill me?’

  Mr. Cotton’s mask smiled. ‘All good things come to those who wait.’

  Rita finished the rice pudding and dropped the spoon into the bowl as she stood. ‘Okay, I’m bored now. Time to kick seven shades of shit out of you.’

  She raised the axe and swung it at Mr. Cotton’s head. He did not attempt to get out of the way. Instead, he let the axe pass through him, his head drifting apart like smoke before reforming into that same masked face.

  ‘Strike one,’ he said, and the rabbit mask wriggled its nose.

  ‘This one is going to sting,’ she replied, kneeling and slamming the butt of the axe against the floorboards. She could feel the dream magic, the nightmare magic, all around her. She willed it into the axe and it obeyed. The colours, dark, corrosive, washed around her mind, scraping their nails across her thoughts as she reshaped it, unleashed it with a war cry.

  Flames erupted out of her at all angles, swamping the orphanage, devouring Mr. Cotton. He sat calmly and waved as the dream construct surrounding him was reduced to ash. ‘You cannot harm us anymore, Rita Hobbes. But the damage we shall do to you…’

  When the spell was finished, Rita stood and looked around at what she had done. ‘That’s the second time I’ve burned this shit hole down. I’m not going to lie, it felt just as good as the first.’

  Waterson was running in circles. Through his mum’s house, through the backyard, over the wall and then emerging impossibly at the front of the house again. Round and round again, the endless, screaming Mr. Spikes so close at his heels that he could feel their noisy, damp breath caressing the hairs on the back of his neck.

  He tried again and again to jump anywhere but the street he found himself running loops through, but it seemed as though the parameters of the nightmare he’d been shoved into wouldn’t let him free of it.