by M. V. Stott
Rita was confused.
‘You’re sure?’ she said. ‘Dark, smoky trails reaching from the sea and into Blackpool?’
Ben nodded. ‘That’s what I saw.’
‘The Angel of Blackpool’s magic,’ said Formby.
‘But Mr. Cotton said him and his brother weren’t working with the Angel. That this was just the two of them.’
‘Maybe they were lying,’ said Ben. ‘I don’t think they’re exactly trustworthy.’
‘Yeah, but why bother? It doesn’t get them anything to pretend the Angel isn’t helping them. It’s not as though, if I found out, I could stop the Angel anyway. It’s way too powerful.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Formby, his long, yellow fingernails scratching at his stubble, ‘Mr. Cotton and Mr. Spike have found a way to use the Angel’s power for themselves.’
‘You think they might have, what? Tapped into the Angel somehow?’
‘Maybe. Could be.’
‘Wait…’ Rita sagged back.
‘What is it?’ asked Ben.
‘The Angel, It sort of came to me. When I was asleep. I think it was the Angel anyway, and not a trick, but either way I did think It was trying to trick me.’
‘Trick you into what?’ asked Formby.
‘Into helping It. Perhaps this is why. It’s being used.’
‘So you think Cotton and Spike really are using Its power for themselves?’ said Ben.
‘If they are,’ replied Formby, ‘then the whole of Blackpool is in very bad doo-doo.’
‘Oh, you absolutely are,’ chimed a new voice.
They looked up to see who it was that had joined them. Only Rita recognised him. ‘No…’
His name was Gavin Dylan, the victim of the first murder case Rita had ever investigated. The one she hadn’t been able to solve. The one whose memory had been a sliver of ice in her heart ever since.
‘Why did you fail me, Rita?’
Gavin Dylan, his neck slashed three times, blood oozing from the wounds, reached out a hand towards her.
16
Liam’s mum was not at all impressed with him.
‘You little monster!’ she yelled, teary-eyed, gripping him so tightly that Liam thought she might crush him to death.
‘Mum…’ he said, just about audibly.
His mother pushed him back, keeping a tight grip on his arms. ‘Your dad is out there right now, driving around looking for you! Why do you do these things, Liam, and why can’t you answer your bloody phone?’
‘Chalk,’ said Carlisle, from inside his head.
‘Just a minute,’ replied Liam.
‘You were not gone for just a minute,’ said his mum, ‘it’s been hours! You’re too young to be galivanting around the place on your own. Ten more minutes and I was calling the police.’
‘I climbed inside you for help, not to bear witness to a tiresome domestic,’ said Carlisle, wishing he had access to his magic so he could push the ranting, blubbering woman into another realm and get on with the task at hand. Namely obtaining chalk and locating his body.
‘Maybe I should go and wait in my room?’ said Liam.
‘Yes! That’s where you can sit until your dad gets back so he can…’ she broke down again and gave Liam another desperate, relieved hug.
‘Sorry, Mum. It was the bad dreams.’
‘Okay. Okay. Go on up, then.’
Liam felt bad, of course he did. No child wants to see their mum cry, and the fact that he was going to make her worried again very soon only made him feel even more guilty as he trudged heavy-footed up the staircase and closed his bedroom door behind him.
‘She’s going to be really angry.’
‘She already appears to be at the very apex of angry,’ replied Carlisle.
‘Do we have to leave again straight away?’
‘Yes, unless you want us to lure my monster-infested body to your home?’
Liam did not want that.
‘That is what I thought. Now hurry, chalk, let us get on with this so I can get out of your extremely cramped body.’
Liam dropped to his knees and dragged a box out from under his bed. He tossed away the lid and dug around inside until he found a box of coloured chalks.
‘There! Knew I had some. Mum bought me them ages back, barely used them, though I’m actually pretty good at art so I don’t know why.’
‘What a thrilling anecdote. Let us away.’
Liam opened his bedroom door. He could hear his mum in the hall downstairs. ‘I’m telling you, he just walked back in, he’s okay, he’s safe.’
She was on the phone to his dad, and also blocking any escape. Liam closed the door again, quietly, then scampered over to his window. He opened the curtains and pushed up the sash window. The tree stood waiting, that one, long branch reaching out towards him.
‘The branch might snap,’ he said, warily eyeing the alarmingly thin limb.
‘Indeed.’
‘I’d fall and hurt myself.’
‘Yes.’
‘I could break my leg, or worse.’
‘You should meet Detective Rita Hobbes, you both have a gift for stating the blindingly obvious. Now get on with it.’
Liam scrambled up to the window ledge and reached out for the branch. He looked down at the ground below. If he fell it would be on to grass, not concrete or paving stones, but it still seemed an awful long way down. Long enough to hurt a lot.
He grabbed the branch in both hands and swung out. The world seemed to go head over heels as the branch bent, his grip slipped, his stomach leapt into his mouth, and then his descent abruptly stopped as his arms wrapped around another branch, jarring them almost out of their sockets.
Body shaking, Liam descended, dropping down the final few feet to the grass, his heart a thrash metal kick drum.
‘Well, you made rather a meal of that,’ said Carlisle.
‘I did it!’ Liam cried, exhilarated.
‘Hurry along, we have a trap to set.’
Liam ran for the garden fence, tumbled over, and sprinted away.
At some point between witnessing the dead Gavin Dylan and standing up, Rita had realised she was no longer inside Big Pins, and was instead in a dirty alleyway.
‘Really?’ said Rita, axe in her hand, ready. ‘Didn’t we just do this?’
Gavin Dylan stepped into view at the other end of the alley, a pair of rabbit ears sprouting from the top of his skull. ‘Rita Hobbes, the defective detective.’
‘I’m starting to think you have a personal issue with me, cottontail.’
‘You did attempt to murder my brother and I.’
‘Wow, you really hold a grudge.’
Rita gripped the axe and closed her eyes, the dreamscape magic around her rushing into it. She crouched and slammed the butt of the axe against the rain-slicked ground at her feet and unleashed the magic. She’d told it what she wanted, re-shaped it to do one thing: burn away the dreamscape. Destroy the pretence. Return her to the real.
But when Rita opened her eyes she was still in the alley.
‘Oh. Well, that’s not fair.’
‘Nothing is fair, Rita Hobbes. Take poor Gavin Dylan here. Throat cut and tossed away in a dank alleyway. Worthless.’
‘He wasn’t worthless,’ Rita replied through gritted teeth.
She attempted to destroy the dreamscape again, to bust out of it, but the dreamscape refused. She tried to talk to the magic and felt her throat tighten. She struggled to catch her breath. This was much more powerful than any magic she’d felt from Mr. Cotton before. It was overwhelming, heavy, and he controlled it entirely.
‘He was a junkie, Rita. Just another drug-addled nothing taking up space. Is that why you didn’t do him the good turn of bringing his murderer to justice?’
Rita swallowed. Her throat was dry, her arms trembling. She had to try again. She had the axe, she could tell the magic what to do. Had to. She pulled the magic into the axe again and slammed the handle down on the ground. She watched a
s the spell raged from the axe and burned the alley away like it was made of dry paper, only to reveal an exact copy beneath.
It was the Angel’s power, it must be. The extra strength it afforded Cotton. The lies it created, the terrors, couldn’t be pushed aside. She was nothing, the power of the axe was nothing. Over and over she tried to burn the dream, to scrub it clean, and time and time again it remained.
‘His mother committed suicide, do you remember?’
‘Shut it.’
‘A few months after you arrived at her front door to tell her the bad news. Your words planted the seed, and away she went. Sucking on exhaust, dear, dear, dear.’
‘Show me,’ Rita asked the magic around her. ‘Show me, show me, show me.’
The picture flickered and settled. Rita could see it, the Angel’s power, a smoky tendril coiling around Gavin Dylan, around Mr. Cotton, just as Ben had said it would be.
‘I know you’re leeching from the Angel,’ said Rita.
‘Oh? Did Ben Turner see and go running to teacher, just like the headshrinker?’
Alison Parks.
‘Perhaps he should get the same treatment as her? What say you?’
‘You go anywhere near him…’
Gavin Dylan melted away and Mr. Cotton stepped forward, a large smile stretching across his rabbit mask. He gestured to the ground, a pair of feet were visible, poking out from the dark; was it Gavin Dylan?
‘Shall we take a look?’ said Mr. Cotton.
Something wasn’t right about the feet. Rita remembered every detail about Gavin Dylan. When he’d been found he was wearing a beaten up pair of blue Converse trainers, but the feet she saw were wearing dark brown leather shoes.
‘Ben?’
She darted forward to find the dead body of Ben Turner.
Rita staggered back, hand to her mouth.
‘Poor little doggy,’ said Mr. Cotton sadly, as he looked down at the corpse in the dirt. ‘He trusted you would protect him, too. Another failure, Detective? How do you even live with yourself?’
Rita gripped the handle of her axe so tightly that she thought she might turn it to dust, but she had to hold on to something, it was the only thing stopping her from losing her grip on sanity. From taking what she saw at face value. This was a dreamscape, that’s all it was. Those feet, that body, hadn’t been there when she first arrived.
‘Ben Turner, whose greatest hope in life was to find a woman who would love him, and that he could love in return. Such a simple, ordinary wish. A wish unfulfilled.’
The dreamscape pressed in on her. Too strong, too much to push back. It was endless, endless power and she was nothing.
‘That’s not Ben,’ said Rita.
Mr. Cotton giggled and clapped his white-gloved hands. ‘Oh, you have me, Detective. It’s a fair cop, as I believe the saying goes.’
He clicked his fingers and Ben was replaced by Gavin Dylan, just as she remembered.
‘I wonder where the real Ben Turner is?’ he said. ‘My, my, and my again, I do hope nothing tragic becomes of him. Would that not be awful, Rita Hobbes?’
‘Get out of here, go!’ Rita yelled at Ben Turner.
He ran to the basement door, half relieved to be getting out of the firing line, half ashamed to be doing so.
But what, exactly, could he have done? He was just Ben Turner, ex-accountant, ex-werewolf. He didn’t have any power to deal with this sort of thing. No magic axe, no magic anything. The best thing he could do was whatever Rita told him to do.
So he bolted across Big Pins and into the basement, locking the door behind him. The door that had kept him in when he’d still been affected by the lycanthropy curse. The one that had prevented the beast he turned into from getting out and causing bloody havoc.
Breathing heavily, Ben slowly backed down the stairs, straining to hear what was going on beyond the door, but he couldn’t hear anything. There should have been a giant fight going on, magic exploding, people screaming, that sort of thing, but there was only silence.
Confused, he made his way back up the basement stairs and pressed his ear to the door.
What was going on out there? Were Rita and the walking corpse having a polite chat? A gentle whisper in a far corner over a pint and a packet of crisps?
Ben frowned and moved his head from the door. Maybe it was over already? Rita had smacked the corpse with her axe, and that was that.
He placed his hand on the door’s lock, ready to open it, when he realised he could actually hear something. It wasn’t coming from the other side of the door though, it was coming from inside the basement.
It was someone’s breath, rasping.
Ben turned around to see.
Dan Waterson was in a park.
‘Okay…’
This time he was not surprised to find himself transported somewhere. This is what they did, Cotton and Spike, picked you up and dropped you in some nightmare construct.
‘Right then, what is it this time?’
At first he didn’t recognise the park at all, then he turned to see a set of swings. The metal frame was rusted and the two swings had metal chains and a simple wooden slat to sit upon. That’s when he realised where he was.
‘Grafton Park.’
He’d been six and angry and ran out of his mum’s car in an area he didn’t live in. He’d been full of fury and had found himself in a park. In this park. He’d sat on the swings, hoping his mum would be frantic with worry. With terror. That’d teach her for shouting at him just because he’d spilled his can of pop across the back seat.
‘Oh,’ said Waterson, ‘right.’
A man had approached him that day as he sat on the swing, his skinny legs dangling, bottom lip pouting. A man with matted hair and missing teeth. He’d run his dirty fingers across Waterson’s face and laughed like a lunatic. Little Waterson had tried to run, only for the man to grab hold of the scruff of his jumper. Waterson had struggled and screamed and kicked and the man had laughed and laughed. Eventually, he’d wriggled out of his jumper and sprinted blindly across the park and out on to the road, only to bump into his mum, who was halfway between fury and relief. For a moment it looked like anger would win out, but it only to took one look at her boy’s face for that to melt away. Waterson had experienced nightmares of the laughing man for years after that.
And there he was, that same man, shuffling towards him now.
‘You know, you’re smaller than I remember,’ said Waterson.
The man opened his toothless mouth and began to laugh, only for his form to ripple and warp.
‘Um. Okay,’ said Waterson.
The Laughing Man rippled once more and was replaced by the flickering, not quite there form of a new person. Only it wasn’t a person, not really.
It was an Angel.
‘...leas… enn…’ said the Angel of Blackpool, Its voice broken into pieces.
‘What? You want me to lease something?’
‘..se… ner.’
Waterson wondered what the purpose of this was. He’d been terrified on a deep, awful level by the Laughing Man as a child, but he’d never been scared of the Angel. Not like that. Why were Cotton and Spike swapping out that old, primal feeling fear with this?
‘...if… stop them… release… have to release Jenner…’
And then the Angel was gone.
Liam was on his hands and knees sketching with a piece of chalk on a paving stone.
‘What are these?’ he asked.
‘They are shapes that hold power,’ replied Carlisle.
First Liam had drawn a large, unbroken circle. Within that circle he had then been asked to draw tiny symbol after tiny symbol in an exact pattern. A pattern that began skirting the inside radius of the chalk circle, then spiralled closer and closer to the circle’s centre.
Liam could see the shapes he had to draw in his mind’s eye. He would close his actual eyes and there they were, one after the other, and he could recreate them easy as pie.
�
��What sort of power?’ he asked.
‘There are creatures. Almost things. Creatures without physical form who hunger for one. One of these bodiless bastards stole my body while I was in my astral form, and is no doubt taking it for a joyride, hell bent on causing chaos and murder with the thing.’
The magic that had been used to bind Carlisle to the prison didn’t work with the almost thing inside of him. Magic was a contract, and with a different person inside, the contract was broken. The binding spell useless. And so his hijacked body ran free.
‘Why does it want to murder?’
‘Why? You might as well ask why a spider catches a fly. Because they do. Because they must. And now that one of these things has my body, it can do so with reckless abandon.’
‘Unless you get your body back and stop it.’
‘Precisely.’
Liam closed his eyes and saw the final shape that he was required to draw.
‘What will this circle do to it?’ he asked as he drew a triangle with all sorts of weird squiggles within it that looked like they might be letters of some sort, but Liam had never seen letters like them before.
‘Two things. Firstly, if the thing in my body is within reach, it will attract it.’
‘How?’
‘We will place bait into the circle. The words and symbols will make the bait the tastiest thing for miles around. It will radiate, like an angler fish’s lure in the dark depths of the ocean. Irresistible.’
‘What’s the bait?’ replied Liam, sitting back on his knees to take in his completed handiwork.
‘You are the bait.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do not worry, it is quite safe.’
Liam was not absolutely sure that he believed Carlisle. ‘What if your body is too far away for the bait to work?’
‘Then I shall do my best to push you out and take over your body.’
‘Oh. Can you do that?’
‘Let’s hope we do not need to find out, I would not wish to be so small a second time.’
‘What’s the other thing it can do? You said two things.’
‘It will trap the thing. My body. The circle is meant for it and it alone. Once it steps within it, it will not be able to step out again unless the circle is broken. Now come along, get into the circle and wriggle around like the tasty bait you are.’