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

by David Bussell

  ‘Go ahead,’ she said.

  I picked it up. It was cold and weighed heavy in my palm.

  I whipped off the hankie and found myself holding a pearl-handled revolver.

  ‘Cool!’ I remarked. ‘Is this the demon laser I asked for?’

  ‘It’s a gun,’ Jazz Hands replied, flatly. ‘You point it at the thing you want to kill and pull the trigger.’

  Huh. Well, that’d work too.

  ‘Thanks,’ I told her, slipping the gun into the inside pocket of my jacket.

  ‘Be careful,’ she said, full of motherly concern.

  ‘Always am.’

  ‘A month ago I gave you an enchanted knife you could carry. Before you’d even vacated my premises you almost had an eye out.’

  ‘You didn’t let me finish. Always am... since then.’

  I doffed an imaginary cap as Jazz Hands rolled her eyes, then I made haste.

  ***

  A second later I arrived at the rendezvous location, gun in my pocket, hand tight about its grip.

  Would the magician show I wondered. I’d shouted my mouth off at The Beehive, word must have spread. Someone was bound to have passed the news on to the guilty party at some point.

  So there I was, walking among the dead, using myself as tasty bait. Would the rogue magician keep to the shadows, or would he take this opportunity to get me off his tail? Was he out there waiting for me, watching me even then as I walked from burial plot to burial plot, or would he give me a wide berth?

  A light breeze rolled across a blanket of newly browned leaves, making the cemetery seem to whisper. There were no voices though; it was too late for the living and no place for ghosts. The graveyard was full of bodies, and yet nothing but empty.

  Then I heard a noise. A commotion up ahead.

  I ran, wading through a sea of tombstones until I arrived at the source of the disturbance.

  A man lay dead on the ground.

  His chest sliced open.

  His rib cage cranked apart.

  I pulled out my gun and scanned the area, trying to get a bead on the killer. There was no one out there, not as far as I could see. Whoever did this was gone.

  I returned my attention to the body and stooped down to see if I could ID him. His face didn’t ring any bells. Sixty or so years of age, dressed like a school supply teacher, an upper crust whiff about him. One of those chinless wonders with a face that seemed to connect to his neck with nothing happening in between.

  The old man’s body was splayed out on a magic circle that had been painted in his own blood. This wasn’t a ward like before though. This was weakening magic – a trigger spell to sap the life force of anyone foolish enough to set foot inside the circle’s boundary.

  The rogue magician had been here, that much was obvious. It seemed my visit to The Beehive had been a success, and that he’d gotten word I wanted a word with him. So then why cut and run, and why leave me a corpse for a calling card? What was the message? Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity, could that be possible? Was this poor sod coming to see his departed old mum, only to end up joining her in great hereafter?

  I looked down at him and saw something odd in the pattern of blood surrounding him. A spot of something breaking up the red. A spot of something tar-like. I crouched down to get a better look at it. It was black—a deep, deep, stygian black—and it gave off some truly unholy vibes. Was this blood too? The demon’s blood?

  Not wanting to touch the stuff, I took a sample by dipping the tip of my revolver into it. Maybe Jazz Hands would be able to make something of it.

  But before I got to that, there was something else bothering me.

  I began to look around the area close to the body, even peering behind a gravestone or two. I was stood three feet from a dead man, a man that had only just been murdered, and yet there was something very obviously missing.

  His ghost was gone.

  The soul feaster had eaten well tonight.

  12

  A cemetery tour guide found the old man’s body first thing the next morning. The police transferred it to St Pancras Mortuary for inspection, and Detective Inspector Stronge invited me along to attend the next stage of the investigation. I hitched a ride to the meet in Mark Ryan’s body. I’ve spent enough time in the guy’s skull now that I know his routine by heart, so finding him is never a problem.

  Stronge and her partner, Maddox, flashed their warrant cards at the front desk and led me down a series of antiseptic corridors and into the autopsy room. Dr Anand was there, dressed in her customary blue plastic apron and scrubs. The two of us were intimately acquainted, not that she knew it. Wait, that didn’t sound great, let me try again....

  Dr Anand didn’t recognise the man stood before her, but she would have recognised the real me. The man under the meat suit. See, Anand was the coroner that dealt with my sliced up remains, so she’d seen parts of me that even I didn’t know about. She was a major asset in solving my murder too, which made her alright in my book.

  ‘Okay, let’s do this,’ she said, with just a touch too much relish for my liking.

  While she snapped on a pair of powdered latex gloves and the rest of us rubbed oil of camphor under our noses, a couple of assistants fetched the corpse of the recently deceased. They rolled in a gurney and carefully lifted the bag containing the body onto the room’s ceramic autopsy slab.

  ‘Thank you, gents,’ said Anand. ‘Please close the doors behind you.’

  The assistants did as they were asked and Dr Anand unzipped the bag. I noticed Maddox recoil slightly as she did it. Obviously this wasn’t his favourite part of the job.

  Inside, was the body of the old man, just as I’d left him, save for the relocation. The only difference was the toe tag.

  Anand whistled when she saw the state of the corpse’s chest, all opened up and flapping in the breeze. ‘Looks like somebody got this one started for me,’ she joked.

  The three of us stood back while she did her job, delving around in the dead guy’s chest cavity for clues.

  Stronge leaned over and whispered in my ear. ‘No coffee today?’

  ‘Sorry, I was in a rush.’

  She smiled that rare smile of hers. ‘Don’t worry about it. We can always grab one afterwards.’

  Interesting.

  Not that she was talking coffee two feet from a mangled corpse—Stronge’s always had a stomach to match her name—but that she was so obviously hitting on me. I’d always felt like there was a spark between us, and God knows I have a thing for ice queens, but this definitely seemed like an escalation.

  ‘Sounds great, Kat,’ I whispered back, ‘but I can’t.’

  I don’t mind a bit of flirting here and there, but going the distance in another guy’s body? What can I say, I’m just not that kind of ghost.

  Stronge pulled back. ‘Don’t get any ideas, Fletcher. I just wanted to discuss the case.’

  Maddox heard her raised voice. ‘Everything alright?’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ Stronge huffed.

  Dr Anand broke the tension. ‘This is interesting…’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Maddox, gingerly stepping forward.

  Anand picked up a pen from one of the stainless steel counters and used it to point inside the cadaver’s chest cavity. ‘See that?’

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ Maddox replied, wincing.

  ‘Exactly! No heart. Somebody took it out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Better to ask how. See the incision there, through the skin? See how clean it is?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Now look at what’s going on inside the chest. See the aorta there? The pulmonary artery?’

  Maddox hesitated then leaned in for a closer look, green around the gills but keen not to show it.

  Anand went on. ‘Unlike the opening laceration, the internal wounds are imprecise. Sloppy.’

  Stronge stepped in. ‘I’ve a feeling this is leading somewhere, so can you please cut to the chase
?’

  Dr Anand arched an eyebrow. ‘It looks as though the victim's heart was eaten from their chest cavity. Chewed out.’

  ‘Jesus!’ said Maddox, before sprinting to a bin and chucking up his guts.

  I stifled a smile. The big Jessie.

  ‘And that’s only the half of it,’ Anand added.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Stronge, covering for her partner while he ejected his breakfast.

  ‘Neither of these wounds was caused post-mortem. Both occurred while the victim was alive.’

  Arched over behind me, Maddox up-chucked again.

  I leaned into the body. ‘You’re sure?’ I asked Dr Anand. ‘That the body was opened clean?’

  ‘Sixteen years of medical training and a master’s degree in criminology? Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ve got this one, Mystic Meg.’

  I walked right into that one. Still, what I didn’t know about dead bodies I more than made up for with my know-how of demons, and if there’s one thing I’d learned about this one, it’s that it didn’t eat its dinner with a knife and fork. The soul feaster would have stuck its head through the old feller’s chest and gone at him like it was bobbing for apples. This meal had been dished up. Served hot and presented like a waiter lifting the lid on a soup tureen. That could only mean one thing.

  The summoner and the demon were working together.

  But to what end? If the rogue magician had convinced the demon to grant him eternal life, what was he doing running errands for the thing? I’ve heard of some wasted lives in my time—I count mine as one of them—but this took the cake.

  Stronge broke my concentration. ‘The body, do you think there’s any connection between this one and the body we found in the canal?’

  For a second I thought she was talking to me, but the question was for Anand.

  The doctor shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. The skinning was meticulous. This killing… this was a frenzy.’

  Maddox wiped his mouth. ‘Great, so now we’ve got two killers on the loose.’ He turned to me and shrugged. ‘So…?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So, who did it? Who’s our suspect?’

  ‘Oh, right, yeah. Well, I don’t know that just now… not yet anyway.’

  ‘And you’re our psychic are you? What the fuck are you even doing here, Fletcher?

  ‘It’s not that simple, I need time to make a connection,’ I bullshitted.

  ‘Bollocks,’ he replied, smelling it.

  ‘I told you who the first victim was, didn’t I? Ingrid Vallens. Without me you’d still be trying to figure out how to dust a skinned body for prints’

  Maddox’s lip curled. ‘Yeah, I’ve been wondering about that. About where you get your tip-offs. Tell me this, Fletcher, you ever hear of Occam’s razor?’

  I had, but I hadn’t expected to find it living in his thick head.

  Maddox answered for me. ‘It’s a principle that says the simplest solution is usually the best one. So, I keep wondering to myself, what’s the simplest solution for the way you keep staying ahead of us? Is it that you can communicate with the spirit world? Or is it that you know something about these dead bodies that you’re not telling us?’ His eyes bored into me like a pair of hate-rays.

  Stronge put a stop to it. ‘Will you two put your dicks away?’ She smacked me in the chest with the flat of a clipboard. ‘He’s messing with you – we already have an ID on the heart donor.’

  I took the clipboard and scanned the name at the top of the front page. Henry Carter PhD, retired theology professor. No criminal record, no known enemies.

  ‘Why would someone bump off this guy?’

  ‘That’s what I’m hoping you can tell us.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, except, thanks to the soul feaster, there was no ghost for me to question like there was after Ingrid’s murder. I stroked my chin, stalling for time while I thought of something to say. I had nothing.

  Dr Anand saved me. ‘Could it have been a ritual? One of those blood sacrifices?’

  Maddox snorted. ‘Like in the films? Leave it out. What we’re looking for is a lunatic with a sharp knife and a head full of wrong.’

  I suppose he was half right. In any case, I wasn’t going to correct the guy. What would I tell him? That there was a bona-fide demon on the loose? That there’s black magic afoot in the city? I didn't like the bloke, but I wasn’t about to lay that load on him.

  I turned to Stronge. ‘I’ll get a read on the killer soon enough, but in the meantime what else aren’t you telling me? Did he leave any clues? Were there any witnesses?’

  ‘Just the one,’ she replied.

  I threw up my hands. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ I mean, talk about burying the lede. ‘Well? Did you get a photofit?’

  ‘We’re waiting on that,’ said Maddox.

  ‘Waiting for what, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘For the witness to come out of her coma.’

  13

  It was getting on for three in the morning and I was wandering the streets of Camden in the pissing rain.

  It was day four of my investigation and I was no clearer about the identity of Ingrid’s killer than when I’d started. I had to come up with something, and soon. Something solid to send her to the Good Place and clear some of that red ink from my account.

  I passed a revolving door of tattoo parlours and kebab shops, thinking back to what Stronge had told me about the coma witness. Apparently she lived in some big, glass, Grand Designs house overlooking the cemetery, and saw the murder go down through one of her floor-to-ceiling windows. Hazard of living in a transparent house I suppose – sometimes you’re going to see some things you wish you hadn’t.

  What she saw was recorded on her mobile phone, though not with enough clarity to be of much use. The video she captured was just about useless – dim, shaky, and worst of all, shot in profile. What is it with some people? I swear to God, I could be filming the end of the world and I’d still have the sense to shoot it landscape.

  I was given a chance to review the video footage at the station. It showed the silhouette of a slim, four-limbed creature crouching over its victim, head buried in his chest. True to Dr Anand’s report, the vic was very much alive as it happened, thrashing about like a downed power line. It made for hard viewing, and I only got to see the blurry, happening-in-the-distance version. What the witness saw with her own eyes must have been far, far worse. No wonder it triggered the heart condition that laid her out.

  After dropping Mark off, I’d headed over to Jazz Hands’ place with the sample of black blood I’d sourced at Highgate Cemetery. If it really was the demon’s blood, there was a chance—even if it was a slim one—that it could be used to power a dowsing spell, except instead of looking for water, I’d use it to find the thing behind these murders.

  Naturally, Jazz Hands had tried to talk me out of it, but I’d charmed her into helping me – by which I mean I’d begged her for close to forty minutes.

  Now, I know a thing or two about magic, but Jazz Hands? Well, she may not have written the book on it exactly, but she sure owns a fuck of a lot of them.

  She took a scraping of the sample, verified that it was indeed demon blood—soul feaster blood to be exact—and diluted it with a potion that practically hummed with magic. After that she took the stirred-together solution and smeared a dollop of it on the centre of my chest.

  ‘Just follow the pull,’ she’d told me.

  The dowsing effect wouldn’t last long I was told, so the chances of it working were slim, but I was feeling lucky. I’d find that demon in no time, I was sure of it.

  I tromped around Camden for going on three hours.

  I wandered this way and that, up main roads and side streets, hopping from location to location when each proved a bust. Occasionally, I had the feeling like my chest was tingling and the spell was working, shepherding me in a certain direction, only for the sensation to peter out and disappear.

  I was about ready to call it a
night and go back to my boxed sets when my chest suddenly broke out in tingles, like a family of ants was having a party between my nipples.

  And that’s when I heard them. Screams.

  Lots of them.

  The noise came from up ahead, a little further down the high street and tucked down a side alley. What was it? Cries for help or just a bunch of drunks exercising their lungs? Had I found what I was looking for? I wouldn’t know unless I checked it out, so I sprinted down the road and took the corner.

  Terrified ravers were pouring out of an all-night fetish club called F*I*S*T. They were scared out of their wits, wailing like banshees, their faces chiselled with dread as they piled onto the pavement.

  I worked against the tide, passing through the screaming clubbers as I forced my way into the building and past the empty ticket office. I phased through bodies dressed in studded leather, in rubber tuxedos, in gas masks, and, in the case of one particular reveller, a crown made of foot-long dildos.

  Thrash metal blared from downstairs, loud as gunfire, jangling my senses like marbles in a tin can. I followed the noise-abatement-order-defying racket to the basement, bounding down the steps three at a time. The stairs bottomed out in the club’s main room, and there, in the middle of the dance floor and lit by the frantic pulse of a strobe light, I found a dead body.

  But that wasn’t all I found.

  Hunched over it was a figure, head bowed and feasting noisily on the corpse’s heart. A mirror ball shaped like a human skull swarmed the grisly scene with pinpricks of white light.

  I’d found the fucker.

  Stood nearby, her mouth agape, was a lone lubber dressed like Tank Girl—all pink neon dreads and bovver boots—a peculiar specimen known as a cybergoth that you only find within a hundred square yards of Camden. She was frozen to the spot, knees locked with fear. ‘W-what are you?’ she squeaked, not at me—I was invisible to her eyes—but at the creature on the dance floor emptying out a dead man’s chest cavity.

  It was a fair question. I circled around the DJ booth to get a better look at the thing, moving silent and unseen. It was hard to make the demon out under the UV lamps and dry ice, but I soon found the right angle.