A Three-Book Collection

by M. V. Stott

  Liam looked at the circle, unsure that this was the best course of action. ‘What if I don’t?’

  ‘I did mention pushing you out and taking over your body, did I not? You would be dead, which most people are not altogether keen on.’

  Liam stepped into the circle. He looked down at his feet to see the chalk words and symbols he had sketched had begun to glow a pure, brilliant white.

  ‘The trap is activated,’ said Carlisle. ‘Now we wait.’

  ‘You know you said you left your body to go looking for help because you couldn’t leave where you were?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe you should have just stepped out of your body, waited for one of these things to come get you, then followed it out and grabbed your body back. Been easier, probably.

  Silence.

  ‘Carlisle?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  Rita whirled around, axe at the ready. The alleyway and Mr. Cotton were gone. She was back in Big Pins.

  She shuddered, her chest untightening. Cotton and Spike had been terrible before, but with the Angel’s power too, she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to stop them. She could still feel the power of them. Mr. Cotton had been showing off, flooding the dreamscape with this fresh power and showing her just how puny she was. How useless and scared she should be. She’d swatted away at it with her axe and hadn’t even left a scratch.

  ‘Rita.’

  She turned to see Formby and Waterson.

  ‘Are you two okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Waterson. ‘Still dead, but otherwise in top condition.’

  Rita slumped down on a bar stool. ‘We’re in such deep, deep shit here.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Waterson.

  ‘Their power. The Angel’s power. It’s just… it’s too much.’

  ‘Hedgehog!’ said Formby.

  ‘What?’ replied Rita, looking to the wide-eyed Formby who was pointing past her.

  ‘Oh crap,’ said Waterson.

  Rita turned to see a figure stood in the open doorway to the basement. He wore a hedgehog mask and was holding up a white-gloved fist stained red with blood.

  Rita jumped up, wielding her axe.

  ‘Get out of here, you spiky prick!’

  Mr. Spike opened his fist and what he had been holding clattered to the floor.

  ‘Are those… I think those are teeth,’ said Waterson.

  Rita remembered Ben Turner, dead behind the bins.

  ‘My, my, and my again, I do hope nothing tragic becomes of him. Would that not be awful, Rita Hobbes?’

  ‘No…’

  Mr. Spike was giggling.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Waterson, but Rita wasn’t listening.

  She ran at the giggling Spike, who was busy smearing the blood over his mask. She screamed and swung her axe, but it didn’t stick into Spike, into his body. Instead, it tore through him, causing his 2D image to rip in two and disappear.

  ‘Ben!’ She ran down the basement steps, almost tripping over her own feet in the process, and burst into the basement.

  Ben Turner was curled up on the floor.

  ‘It’s not real. That’s not him.’

  She took a step towards him. A pair of bunny ears on a hairband had been slipped on his head.

  Waterson stepped past her and went to Ben, kneeling down next to his body, Formby following.

  ‘It’s a trick. It’s just a trick, right?’ said Rita, but she knew the truth.

  Formby looked up to Rita. ‘He’s gone.’

  Rita sat down on the basement steps, wrapping her arms around herself. It was cold down there.

  17

  Bob the exorcist woke in his ratty chair, the only stick of furniture in his rundown excuse for a front room.

  ‘Still alive,’ he said, not quite certain if he said it with surprise, sadness, or relief.

  Bob had been chosen by the Vatican to serve as an exorcist when he was just six years old. Bob was originally from London, so it might come as a surprise that he was pulled in by the Vatican, but their Uncanny arm had people everywhere, searching for new soldiers in their fight against the dark.

  Bob’s parents, devout, fearful, had been delighted. He had shown a natural affinity with the dark and the things that dwelled there. It came as easily to him as breathing.

  ‘That’s the power of our Lord and Saviour, Robert,’ his handler, his trainer, had told him.

  He had developed into one of their frontline people. The first to be sent to the worst places imaginable, saving innocent people from the machinations of demons, and worse.

  But there is always a price to pay for playing with the dark arts.

  Most in his line of work did not live very long. Toiling with dark magic took a toll on a man’s body. Ate it up. Turned it against itself. The mind, too. There were many ways an exorcist for the Vatican could go. Perhaps something they fought would fight back. Or the dark magic would infect a body with cancers, or push a person to suicide.

  And the things in the black, the creatures from the pit, they were always waiting. As soon as you stepped into battle against them, announced yourself as their opposition, you were added to a list. It was not a good list to be on. Sooner or later, if the dark magic didn’t eat you up, something would slither out of a corner to scratch you off that list. That was the price paid for doing the Lord’s good work, and Bob had accepted that.

  Eventually, sickened by the hypocrisy he saw in his own world—a world he had always believed to be on the side of the light—he had walked away. That’s how he found himself sat in a basement flat in Blackpool of all places, waiting for the end to come.

  He meant to go down fighting. To bloody a few noses. But the waiting was torture. He’d been there for years now, and he could feel the eyes upon him. All day, all night, they were watching.

  Drink and junk food and pretending he didn’t give a fuck helped. He lived that way for long enough that it fooled his own mind into not caring, into shrugging off any fear, any anticipation.

  Apart from when he woke up. He’d remember then.

  He struggled up out of his chair, a half-empty can of lager clattering from his lap and on to the floor, the remains of the drink gurgling out.

  ‘Shit.’ He bent down and grabbed the can, saving about an inch of liquid. ‘Waste not want not.’ He drank the warm remains before tossing the empty can into a darkened corner.

  He thought he saw something flinch out of the way. A patch of dark in the darkness. Bob ignored it, reached into a plastic bag on the floor by his chair, and pulled out a fresh can of beer, foam exploding as he opened it.

  ‘Breakfast of champions.’

  He wondered what time of day it was. There was no real light bleeding through from the tiny window high on the wall, so it must be late. He hoped a bakery close-by would still be open, he wanted to chase his lager with a nice pie. And then another lager or six at the pub. ‘Don’t wait up, dear,’ he said to the dark corners of the room and headed for the front door.

  He opened it to find two people stood outside waiting. One was a young boy with thick, blonde, curly locks. The other was a tall, absurdly pale man in an almost floor-length, purple coat. The man appeared to be trapped within a chalk circle, and was not at all happy about it, though his teeth-gnashing and foam-mouthed raving had been silenced by the spells he saw drawn within the circle.

  ‘My name’s Liam,’ said the boy.

  ‘Hello Liam.’

  ‘The ghost inside me that isn’t a ghost wants you to kick a monster out of his body.’

  Bob the exorcist looked from the boy to the silent lunatic with murder in his eyes, then back again. ‘You’d better come in then,’ he said and walked back inside.

  The pie would have to wait.

  Mr. Spike had done terrible things to Ben.

  Rita hadn’t seen them, but she could tell from the expressions on Waterson and Formby’s faces that his killer had taken pleasure in the killing. They hadn’t needed to kill her to ge
t their kicks. Instead, Cotton and Spike had prodded at her and found a way to get a response they could feast on. And now they had it.

  As she’d stepped into that basement and seen Ben Turner’s body—so strangely small looking, like he’d shrunk in death—her mind had recoiled with anger, with fear, with horror.

  Oh, they must have liked that.

  They must be having a good laugh about it right now. A little revenge on her for how she had dispatched them.

  Waterson sat down next to her in a booth upstairs. She was watching the last cat video Ben had sent her, replaying it over and over again.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘What happened to his ghost, Waters? Is he okay somewhere, do you think?’

  Waterson opened his mouth to speak, paused, then started again, ‘I… I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

  Big Pins became blurry and Rita angrily brushed her sleeve across her eyes. Any tears she shed would only be giving Cotton and Spike more of what they wanted. She would grieve once she had beaten the shit out of them.

  ‘I’m really not the hugging type,’ said Waterson.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Plus I’m a ghost, so couldn’t hug you even if I wanted to.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But just know that I am. In my head, I’m hugging you.’

  Rita smiled. ‘Thanks, Dan.’

  Waterson blinked in surprise. ‘I think that might be the first time you’ve ever called me Dan.’

  ‘It was weird, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Very weird. Stop it.’

  ‘Understood, Waters.’

  Waterson laughed, then stopped, feeling guilty. ‘You’ll stop them, you know,’ he said.

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘They’ll rue the day they picked on Rita Hobbes.’

  ‘Everyone does.’

  ‘And wherever Ben is, whatever’s happened to him, to his soul, it’ll be resting easy, because he knows you’re going to twat those fuckers.’

  Oh, she would. Somehow she had to. She was going to be their worst nightmare.

  The chalk circle slid across the floor, nudging the man within it forward, until it was stood against one wall.

  ‘My mum tells me off if I draw on the walls,’ said Liam, looking around at all the pictures, shapes, and words daubed all over Bob the exorcist’s living room.

  ‘My mum’s dead,’ said Bob, ‘so she doesn’t tell me fuck all.’

  Bob peered closer at the eyes of the man trapped in the circle.

  ‘Who is he, then?’

  ‘His name’s Carlisle.’

  Bob turned to Liam, eyebrows raised. ‘That so? A bloody celebrity, in my humble flat. What an honour.’

  Carlisle scowled inside of Liam, he knew when he was being taken the piss of.

  ‘I don’t think he liked that,’ said Liam, shuffling on the spot.

  ‘Do I look like I give two tits what he thinks?’ replied Bob. He’d heard of Carlisle, of course. Most with any connection to the Uncanny had heard of Carlisle. Most of what they heard was not good. ‘So you went and slipped into the astral, did you? Without safeguarding your body? I thought you were supposed to be smart.’

  Liam listened. ‘He says there was no other option at the time. He was trapped with an Angel and Mr. Cotton and Mr. Spike.’

  ‘Shit does like to mix with shit,’ said Bob.

  Liam peered into a darkened corner of the room. ‘How is it so dark over there? Light’s on, but I can’t see the corner. Or that corner over there.’

  ‘Can’t always shine a light on evil,’ replied Bob, taking a mouthful from his can and unleashing a bone-rattling burp. He scrunched up his nose and wafted a hand in front of his face. ‘Talking of evil... Christ, what have I been eating?’

  ‘Carlisle is saying lots of loud, rude words now.’

  ‘Simmer down in there, all right?’ replied Bob. ‘I’m not in the habit of helping out bastards, at least not in the past, but you’re catching me on a good day, so I’ll help you get your body back.’

  ‘He says thank you. It sounded like he was saying it through clenched teeth. (...) What? Well, it did!’

  ‘I have something I want in return though, no freebies today.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Liam.

  ‘I know the sort of thing Carlisle offers, and I want the same.’

  Liam frowned as he listened to Carlisle. ‘He says okay.’

  ‘So I get a promise?’

  Liam nodded.

  ‘It better be a big promise.’

  ‘He says it is.’

  ‘Okay then,’ said Bob the exorcist. ‘Better get me tools, then.’

  Bob walked from the room and through to a kitchen. The sink looked like it was giving birth to a creature made of mould and turds. It was not the most hygienic of kitchens.

  Bob grabbed an old-fashioned leather bag; the kind doctors on call had used a hundred years previous. He’d been given the bag and its contents after graduating the training the Vatican had given him. It contained the tools of an exorcist’s trade: the complete apparatus for dealing with a demonic entity and deporting them from a human host.

  Most in Bob’s business preferred to clean their tools regularly as they became rusted, bloodied, gore-coated. Bob did not clean his. Not ever. For one thing, he hated cleaning. For another, he believed the remnants of past jobs only amplified a tool’s potency, like a cooking pot that was never scrubbed completely clean, the chef believing it enhanced the flavour of the next dish.

  ‘He wants to know if this will damage his body much,’ asked Liam, keeping his distance from the thrashing, grasping arms of Carlisle’s body, despite the fact he knew it could not reach beyond the circle to grab him.

  ‘Hard to say, really,’ replied Bob, re-entering the room. ‘He’s got an almost thing lodged in his body, and prising those dicks out can be tricky. Sometimes they slide right out with a little levering, sometimes you’ve got to hack and hack and hack, and by the time you’ve wiped the blood off your face to take a look at things, the almost creature is gone, and you’re left not so much with a body as a pile of meat confetti.’

  Bob dropped his bag on the chair and opened it, pulling out a hammer.

  ‘Let’s get to work then.’

  Linton had closed Big Pins—something that was almost unheard of—to help Formby take Ben Turner’s body to the police. Formby knew an officer they could hand it off to who would make sure the right things happened. Make sure his friends and family knew he’d passed on.

  ‘I know this isn’t the best of times,’ said Waterson, as Rita poured herself a gin and tonic.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, frowning at her drink and splashing in another hefty slug of gin.

  ‘There was this weird thing in my dreamscape.’

  ‘Okay. Like what?’ Rita slumped back on to a stool and drank.

  ‘Well, at first, it was like you’d expect, something from my life that I was scared of, but then it changed into something else. Someone else.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Angel. Your big bad, so to speak.’

  Rita sat up and frowned, more focussed now on Waterson than her drink.

  ‘It wanted me to release the guv.’

  Rita recalled her own interaction with the Angel of Blackpool. How it had come to her in a dream and asked the same.

  ‘Do you know what?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think we should give It what It wants.’

  ‘Right. That feels like a really, really—and I’m going to add a third really here—bad idea.’

  Rita stepped back behind the bar and poured herself another drink.

  ‘Oh, it’s the worst idea ever.’

  Carlisle did not like the thought of a thing being inside his body. He didn’t even like when other people wore his clothes. He once tore a man’s throat out for trying on his coat. This was, of course, much worse. He felt it on a primal level, the revulsion at someone—or to be more accurate, something—using h
is body as their own.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Bob. ‘I should leave the thing inside you, Carlisle, just to teach you a lesson. And it’s not as though you don’t deserve it, things you’ve done.’

  ‘Tell him to keep his weasel words to himself,’ said Carlisle.

  He glanced to the corners of the room, the too-black places that had unnerved Liam so. There were things there, he could sense them. Almost see them. The price of Bob’s chosen profession, no doubt. Heinous bailiffs waiting to emerge from the shadows and claim their debt. Carlisle wondered why people like Bob willingly did what they did when the cost was so very high and so very unavoidable. Was doing the right thing really worth all that?

  Bob stood in front of Carlisle’s possessed body, just an inch from the chalk circle. He pulled a rather nasty looking knife from his leather bag and raised it above his head, mumbling words that Carlisle did not understand. As Bob continued with his invocation, the knife blade began to glow, white hot.

  Carlisle heard whispers. Many voices, overlapping, all seeping from the darkened corners of the room.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Carlisle ordered Liam. ‘Do not get close to the dark corners.’

  As Bob continued to chant his strange words, white tendrils began to weave from the corners towards Bob. Should he warn him, Carlisle wondered, or was this all part of it? Was he leeching dark magic to use as his own? Was that how this was going to play out? Carlisle had seen a lot of things in his long life, but had never witnessed a Vatican-trained exorcist at work.

  The tendrils of light wrapped around Bob as the almost thing in Carlisle’s body thrashed and raged. It seemed to Carlisle that it knew exactly what was going on, and did not care for it one bit.

  And then the whispers stopped, the tendrils of light disappeared, and Bob ceased his chant. All was quiet.

  ‘What now?’ said Carlisle. ‘Ask him.’

  ‘I hear you,’ said Bob, raising a hand. ‘What happens now, is this...’