Fresh Hell: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (The Ghosted Series Book 1)

by David Bussell

  I followed the police officers through the hole, across some broken tarmac, and into the warehouse. The interior was dark, dusty and mostly empty, save for a few wooden pallets, some empty shelves, and a clapped out forklift. The forensics team were on site already, dressed in protective clothing and shoe baggies, analysing blood spatter, collecting evidence, poring over the scene. I watched them drifting around in their white boiler suits and thought they looked ghostly in their own way.

  Stronge weaved between cordons and approached the Scene of Crime Officer. ‘So, what do we have?’

  The officer tugged down his face mask and pulled back his hood. ‘So far we have hair, some soil samples, and a whole lot of blood.’

  Stronge nodded. That much was to be expected. ‘Fingerprints?’

  ‘Nothing yet.’

  Maddox chimed in. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes.’

  I shadowed the officer as he led the detectives down a thin corridor marked by police tape. The space either side of us was a hub of activity, a crowd of CSIs performing fingertip searches, crawling over the scene like army ants. Having squeezed between them, we arrived at a cluster of evidence tags surrounded by a cordon of police tape. A photographer was leaning over it, taking snaps of what was inside.

  There, drawn on the floor in lines of white chalk, was a pattern. A series of intersecting circles enclosed in a square, the corners of which were marked by candles, now just puddles of wax. In my line of business, I’d seen similar things before. It seemed Ingrid had been used as a blood sacrifice. An offering to win the favour of a demon.

  Oh yeah, those are real too.

  There’s a whole world that exists beneath the surface of the one most people know. Us Insiders call it the Uncanny. Ever since I was a kid I knew it was there – knew there was something more to the story than I was being told. I could see them, the things that shouldn’t exist. The ghosts, the demons, the boogeymen. It wasn’t until I died that I learned about the rest. Witches, warlocks, imps and skinwalkers. Hidden networks of streets, sewers infested with fairies, even a succubus-run, anything-goes sex club in Soho that I may or may not have poked my nose into from time to time. Hey, I may not take advantage of Mark’s bits on the side, but I’m a ghost, not a monk.

  The fact is that all manner of bonkers shit is going on that you normals don’t know a thing about, but it’s every much as part of this city as your local corner shop, and it’s happening right under your noses.

  Still, something wasn’t right here. The realm of the Uncanny is meant to live alongside the world as you see it, not collide with it. It’s not a free-for-all, with ghouls and goblins scampering through the streets of London Town. There are things that shouldn’t be able to crash into the normal world, at least not without a great deal of effort. One of those things is demons. Demons belong in hell, just like angels belong in heaven. Even for the most skilled magician, drawing a demon into the physical world is hard work. Summoning a demon capable of skinning someone alive would be like trying to push a water balloon through a brick wall.

  I watched a forensics officer take a scoop of chalk from the pattern on the floor and deposit it into a Sure-Seal bag. I felt a chill – the kind ghosts aren’t meant to feel. If something like this could be pulled off, summoning a demon, what could that mean for reality as we knew it? Could it be that the barriers were weakening somehow? The stitches popping? Whatever was happening, long-term, it didn’t fill me with rainbows and smiles.

  I looked closer at the chalk pattern on the ground. It was a ward: defensive magic to make sure the demon was kept in check. A barrier to stop the guest murdering its conjurer before a bargain could be struck. So, we had a sacrifice, a ward, and a demon. Only one thing missing: a lure. A summons targeted at a specific demonic entity. Without one of those, the conjurer might as well be throwing his invitation to the wind.

  While the authorities chatted among themselves, I scanned the area looking for the missing lure. I found it a few yards from the site of the sacrifice, lodged under a rack of dented aluminium shelves. It looked as though it had been knocked aside, most likely by Ingrid as she fled for her life. The lure was a ram’s skull with a sigil etched into its forehead. An infinity symbol with two evil eyes staring out from the holes.

  There was that chill again.

  6

  I went to an old friend for her view on what I’d seen. She goes by the name of Madame Olena, but I prefer to call her Jazz Hands, on account of her being a magician. She’s a serious woman with the wisdom of a million fortune cookies. She’s also the proprietor of a premises called Legerdomain, a dusty little magic shop tucked away in a King’s Cross back alley; stage props on the shelves, real magic under the counter.

  I arrived at the shop in an instant. It’s a skill I have. If I picture a place I’m familiar with and think about it hard enough, I can just kind of go there. I suppose in a comic book they’d call it something fruity like “translocation” or “teleportation.” Like a superpower. Personally, I prefer not to think of it that way. Superpowers are for ‘roided up beefcakes buzzing around in their jammies. I’m just a working pleb with a couple of tricks up his sleeves, I’m no Superman. Being dead ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know? As a ghost, just kicking a ball about without my foot passing through it is a ball-ache. Plus, I’m invisible to anyone without The Sight, which is as annoying as it is useful. Oh, and like a London cabbie refusing to go south of the River, I can’t cross large bodies of water either.

  Still, being able to zap from one place to the next is pretty handy.

  I appeared in the middle of Jazz’s magic shop atop a Turkish rug that’s more hole than thread. The surrounding decor was the same as ever, liver-red walls and bowed black shelves heaving with all manner of magical knick-knacks and doo-dads, all lit by the scant shafts of sunlight that managed the penetrate the store’s grimy windows.

  An entry bell tinkled and the woman behind the counter sat up straight on her stool. I wouldn’t have tripped an ordinary chime, but there was no getting one over on Jazz Hands. She’d rigged this bell magically to sound whenever a ghost entered her premises, or more accurately, when I did.

  ‘Can I help you?’ asked the woman, not looking up from her magazine.

  ‘No thanks, just browsing,’ I replied.

  Jazz Hands closed her mag and sighed. It’s funny, she acts like she spends all her spare time studying up on ancient grimoires, but every time I catch her she’s got her nose buried in a celebrity gossip rag.

  She reached down for the pair of pince-nez hanging on a chain around her neck and perched them on her nose. Right away her eyes landed on me. See, as well as the early warning system, she’d also manufactured a pair of violet-lensed glasses that allowed her to see ghosts. I guess you’d call them “spooktacles,” but only if you were a complete wanker.

  She addressed me in a croaky voice that told me this was her first conversation of the day. ‘If you’re planning a visit I’d prefer you call ahead instead of appearing in the middle of my shop like a bloody—’

  ‘Ghost?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Since apparently she was entertaining, she checked her reflection in the blade of a trick guillotine and smoothed down her frizzy brown hair. Jazz Hands wasn’t exactly what you’d call a looker, but with the right light and a bit of slap, she had a kind of schoolmarmish charm.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘are you going to stand there like a lemon or are you going to tell me why you’re here?’

  She acts all tough and spiky, but she loves me really. Besides, she has her uses. What Jazz Hands knows about the Uncanny could fill an aircraft hangar.

  ‘Got a new case,’ I told her.

  She reluctantly set her magazine on her lap. The graphic close-ups of celebrity cellulite and tales of Khloe Kardashian’s troubled marriage would have to wait.

  ‘Very well then. Get on with it.’

  I brought her up to speed. The skinned super
model, the black magic ritual, the contents of the warehouse.

  ‘A ram’s skull?’ she said. ‘A bit bread and butter, don’t you think? Oh, for a wayward magician with a little imagination.’

  ‘This one had a carving on it. An infinity symbol with two eyes.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ she replied, and pulled a dusty old bestiary from under the counter. ‘Like this?’ she asked, flicking to a tab and showing me the page.

  I was presented with a black and white plate of a goat’s skull. It was engraved with a collapsed 8 dotted with two pupils and was a dead match for the one at the crime scene.

  ‘That’s the kiddie,’ I told her. ‘So, what’s it supposed to summon?’

  Her expression turned grave. ‘It calls on a demon said to be able to grant its summoner the power of everlasting youth.’

  ‘Righty oh. One of them Faustian pack deals; The Devil Went to Georgia and all that.’

  ‘You should take this more seriously,’ she said, and leafed forwards a couple of pages to point at another plate. ‘Look...’

  She showed me a woodcut of… well, I hesitate to call it a creature even. It looked like a skeleton, with a slippery layer of flesh covering a set of long, sinewy limbs. It had claws as sharp as steak knives and two smouldering eyes that burned with unholy malice. Real nightmare fuel, this thing.

  ‘They call it “fuere epulone,” Jazz Hands explained.

  ‘In English?’

  ‘The soul feaster.’

  Nasty. ‘Well, at least it’s out of our hair now.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Not to tell you your job, Jazz, but a demon returns to its realm after a bargain is struck.

  Them’s the rules’

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not. Demons are tricky buggers. If this one managed to find a way to break through the summoner’s ward, it could be out there still… and hungry.’

  In case you didn’t figure it out from what I said earlier, that’s bad. Demons are meant to keep to their plane, not go running around London willy nilly. I remembered the strange feeling I had back at the wharf and suppressed another shiver.

  ‘That doesn’t add up,’ I argued. ‘If the demon had gone AWOL we’d be looking at two

  dead bodies right now: the sacrifice and the summoner.’

  ‘Not if the demon ate the summoner.’

  She followed the book’s text with her finger, translating it from Latin as she read. ‘The demon feasts on souls, but it also has a taste for human flesh. To remain on the material plane, it needs to consume both.’

  She snapped the book shut, making it puff a cloud of dust.

  If she was right and the demon was out there still, things were likely to get pretty dicey around these parts. And bloody. Not to mention deathy. A runaway demon is not the sort of thing you take on lightly. Or at all, if you’ve got any sense in you. But this was my case, and I’d made a promise to Ingrid.

  ‘Don’t even think it,’ said Jazz, as if reading my mind.

  ‘What?’ I protested.

  ‘This isn’t your fight, Fletcher. There are beings in this city far more suited to taking on the things that go bump in the night.’

  ‘I am a thing that goes bump in the night!’

  ‘You know what I mean. This is too dangerous for you. Besides, you need to keep a low profile if you want to stay off His radar.’

  Yeah, it was a little too late for that.

  ‘I appreciate the concern,’ I told her, ‘but the walls are closing in. I was given a message last night – some emissary of God telling me that if I don’t solve this case in a week I was going back upstairs to answer for my sins. I can’t have that, Jazz. Because call me a handsome ol’ cynic, but I don’t think there’s anything good waiting for me up there.’

  I had to solve Ingrid’s murder, had to rub some of that red ink out of my account, because right now it looked like Carrie on prom night.

  Jazz stared back at me, her mouth set in a hard line.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘are you going to help me or not?’

  She shook her head and muttered something sweary under her breath. ‘What do you need?’

  I smiled. ‘Let’s start with the summoner. What can you tell me about the person who conjured this thing?’

  ‘So long as you’re determined to pull at this thread, I’d start your investigation with the Order of the Everlasting Flame. They’re a group of magicians dedicated to the pursuit of eternal life. If you’re looking to find someone desperate enough to summon the soul feaster, the Order would be a good place to start.’

  ‘Right-o. So where do I find these nutters?’

  She shrugged. ‘That I don’t know.’

  ‘What? I thought you knew everything about the hocus pocus in this town.’

  ‘Not everything.’

  ‘You managed to track me down easy enough, back in the day.’

  ‘You were hardly a four leaf clover.’

  Fair do’s.

  It looked like I was going to have to get my intel from someone a bit more in touch with the streets. Thankfully, I knew just the man.

  ‘Cheers for the help, Jazz,’ I said, and prepared to make haste.

  ‘Hold your horses,’ she said, and ducked under the counter. ‘I have something here that will help…’

  She resurfaced with a ring.

  ‘Jazz, this is all so sudden. But yes, yes, a thousand times yes!’

  She looked at me like I’d crimped off a turd on her Turkish rug.

  ‘Tough crowd.’

  ‘Here you go, chuckles,’ she said, holding out the ring.

  I took it off her and rolled it over in my palm. Jazz Hands was a dab hand at enchanting, and had perfected a spell that made certain items tangible to me. Usually, solid objects pass through my body like a dodgy madras, but once Jazz had worked her magic I could touch them, hold them, even wear them.

  I examined the ring closer. It had a silver band and was set with an opal-like stone of shifting colours. I was really hoping for something I could use against a demon. A weapon, the more dangerous the better. ‘What is this, some kind of mood ring?’ I asked, squinting at the thing. ‘What colour is “disappointed?”’

  Jazz Hands shot me a wicked frown. ‘It detects lies,’ she said. ‘Hold it up to the person you’re questioning and it will tell you if they’re being honest with you. If what they’re saying is true, it will glow blue in colour. If it’s a lie, it will turn red.’

  ‘That’s it? A voodoo truth detector? Can’t you knock me up something with a bit more oomph? A demon laser or something?’

  She blinked twice. Slowly. ‘A demon laser.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You ungrateful shit.’

  I laughed. ‘Aw, you love me really.’

  ‘I certainly do not.’

  I held the ring up to her and it turned red, quickly followed by the colour of her face.

  ‘See you around, sweet cheeks,’ I said, and disappeared with a wink before the swearing really started.

  7

  I went to Frosty for the low-down. Frosty’s a homeless guy I know, a victim of the Tory’s austerity measures. He used to get disability benefits for his gammy legs, but when the DWP declared him Fit to Work, he lost everything. With no way to look after himself, he took to the streets begging. He didn’t last long. There was a cold snap that winter and Frosty didn’t see the other side of it. He froze to death on Camden High Street, and he lies there still, a ghost.

  ‘What’s up, feller?’ I asked as I knelt down beside him.

  He coughed and hawked up a blob of ectoplasm. ‘What do you want, Fletcher?’

  He didn’t look well, but then he never did. Dying of hypothermia will do that to you.

  ‘I need to pick your brains,’ I told him.

  ‘You’re out of luck,’ he replied, ‘I haven’t had one of those in donkeys yonks.’ He cackled as he poked a finger into his head, right up to the knuckle. The cackle quickly turned into a hacking cough that led
to another delightful eruption of ectoplasm, spat just to the side of me. I shuffled away from the up-chuck as it trickled towards my shoes.

  You might wonder why I’d choose to hang about with such a charmer, but Frosty is without a doubt the most useful ghost I’ve ever met. No one’s more in touch with the streets than old Frost, and I mean that in every sense of the phrase. His pitch is a spot of pavement under a Sainsbury’s cashpoint – a patch of pavement he’s permanently frozen to. You’d think this would limit his power to know things, but you’d be dead wrong. See, where some ghosts can phase through solid objects and *ahem* teleport, Frosty has a different skill set.

  From his vantage point, he’s able to read the minds of anyone he comes in contact with. Even better, he’s able to get a read on anyone that person has come in contact with, and the person they were in contact with before that, and so on and so on. It’s a whole six-degrees of separation thing. Thanks to that, Frosty knows pretty much everything that goes on in this neighbourhood. After all, everyone knows something.

  People queued at the ATM, oblivious to the two ghosts chatting by their side. Frosty stole a look up a woman’s skirt as she withdrew a couple of twenties.

  ‘Nice,’ he perved. ‘Have a butchers at that, Fletcher. No knickers, and she’s shaved it into a little heart.’

  ‘I’d love to take you up on that, Frost, but I’m a gentleman.’

  He snorted. ‘You’re dead, live a little.’

  ‘That’s a hard pass.’

  ‘Ooh, I’m so sorry, Your Majesty,’ he growled. ‘Look, are you going to get to the point or what?’

  Business time. ‘I’m looking for a cult calling themselves the Order of the Everlasting Flame. Got anything in the memory banks?’

  ‘Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Who’s to say?’

  ‘You. You’re the one to say.’

  ‘Perhaps I am, perhaps I’m not.’