Uncanny Kingdom: An Eleven Book Urban Fantasy Collection (Uncanny Kingdom Omnibus 1)

by David Bussell

  ‘There are no people like me,’ I replied.

  ‘You may have a point there,’ he said. ‘You’re certainly the first ghost detective I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Kill one more person and I’ll be the last ghost detective you ever meet.’

  The corpse grinned like a split watermelon. ‘That’s good,’ cackled the mystery man within. ‘That’s very good!’

  The possessed cadaver convulsed, shoulders shaking with cruel pleasure. Mocking laughter rang hard off the cold, ceramic tiles of the theatre, making surgical instruments rattle and dance in their tray, and then just as quickly as it had begun, the corpse’s eyelids snapped shut and the body slumped onto its slab, still once more.

  15

  I was shaken by my run-in with the Hooded Man, but nowhere near as shaken as Dr Anand was. To save her spending the rest of her life in a rubber room, I spent a little time in her brain before I took off, clearing her browser history, so to speak. Now, whenever she reflects on the events of that evening, all she’ll see are mundane, workaday memories of her cutting up a dead child.

  And I thought my job was weird.

  Since it was obvious that the Hooded Man planned to strike again, I needed to get ahead of his game. If I could figure out who he planned to off next, maybe I could catch him in the act, and though I still didn’t understand his motive, I was starting to get a pretty clear picture of his MO. So long as he followed his existing pattern, the next victim would be another one due for the bottomless pit, and his killer the one he’d wronged. That narrowed things down by quite a margin.

  It was late still, but there was no time to waste. I picked up the phone and got Stronge on the blower.

  ‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’ she slurred from the other end of the line.

  ‘Time to rock and roll,’ I told her. ‘Listen, I need you back at the station and up to your nuts in that HOLMES suite.’

  The HOLMES system is an investigation database that allows officers up and down the country speedy access to criminal activity logs.

  After Stronge was finished shouting at me, she eventually dragged her arse to the office and called me from the control room. ‘What am I looking for, Fletcher?’

  ‘The Hooded Man is going to need a new puppet. I need you to let me know about any murders that have happened in the last twenty-four hours.’

  The phone went silent except for the clackety-clack of keyboard strokes, then eventually Stronge picked up the conversation. ‘Nothing,’ she reported.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘What do you want? This is London, not the Gaza bloody Strip.’

  I sighed. ‘Roll back another twenty-four hours.’

  Again, more tapping. ‘Still nothing.’

  ‘Damn it.’

  ‘Do I need to remind you that no murders in forty-eight hours is actually good news?’

  Maybe it was, but it was going to make the search for the Hooded Man a fuck sight harder. ‘Forget about murders then. Check for suicides, suspicious deaths. Is there anything that jumps out at you? Anything at all?’

  The wait was a lot longer this time, but I wasn’t going anywhere.

  ‘There’s this,’ she said. ‘It only happened a couple of hours ago so the details are still coming in, but five pensioners just wound up dead.’

  ‘All at once? How?’

  ‘Says here carbon monoxide poisoning. Happened in a care home they were all living in. There’s a note attached saying the landlord’s under investigation.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Relatives of the deceased reckon they complained at him for weeks that something was up with the boiler, but he fobbed them all off.’

  That definitely got my spectre-sense tingling. Fresh meat with a grudge to settle? This was right up the Hooded Man’s alley.

  ‘So, what now?’ asked Stronge. ‘Go stake out the dead OAPs?’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ I replied. ‘You go find the landlord and keep him out of harm’s way.’

  ‘Sod that for a game of soldiers. So long as our man’s going corpse shopping, that’s where I’m at.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We can’t have another man getting killed. Someone has to look after him in case our hoodie’s already making a move.’

  ‘Then I’ll put a couple of uniforms on him—’

  ‘No!’ I told her, putting my foot down. ‘I need someone I can trust over there. It has to be you, Kat.’

  I couldn’t tell her the truth. Stronge was a tough old bird, and if I let on that I was sending her on a wild goose chase to keep her out of trouble, there was no way she was going to give in. The Hooded Man was going to be where those bodies were—I could feel it—and I wasn’t about to put her in the middle of a boss fight. No, I couldn’t lose her that way. Kat was too important for that. She was my best link to the land of the living. She was a damned fine copper. She was my friend.

  ‘Why are you doing this, Jake? I thought we were partners.’

  It pained me to say what I said next, but I had to get her off my case, and since pissing off women was a speciality of mine, that’s the arrow I drew. ‘We’re not partners, Stronge. DC Maddox is your partner. I’m the dead bloke you pester when you run into a tight spot.’

  ‘That’s not true—’

  ‘It is and you know it. Now go take care of the living and leave the supernatural stuff to me.’

  ‘Forget it. I’m not letting you push me to the sidelines while—’

  ‘Just tell me where the bodies are so I can take this guy down.’

  ‘No, you listen to—’

  ‘We’re running out of time here.’

  ‘This isn’t the way—’

  ‘Just do your fucking job, Kat!’

  She went quiet. Eye of the tornado quiet. ‘Camden Crematorium,’ she hissed. ‘Next to St. Pancras Old Church.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, but she’d already ended the call.

  I let out a long sigh.

  Kat’s anger I could handle. Her death I could not.

  Between running around after the bad guy and trying to stay ahead of my avenging angel, I couldn’t tell whether I was coming or going. One minute I was doing the chasing, the next I was being chased. I felt like a ghost running around in a maze after Pac Man, and as a fellow phantom, that's a pretty spot-on analogy.

  Since the morgue was at capacity, the bodies of the OAPs were being kept overnight at the nearest available cold storage unit, which belonged to the parish crematorium.

  I called Stella Familiar on my way there. I wasn’t going to risk dropping Stronge into the danger zone, but Stella lived for this stuff. Literally; she was created by a coven of witches for the specific purpose of fighting fiends and battering bogeymen.

  Lucky for me, she picked up the phone this time, and since she still owed me a favour, agreed to put aside a job of her own and do a little moonlighting on my behalf.

  ‘Thanks for coming, Stella.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she replied, ‘especially since it sounds like you’re completely out of your depth.’

  Now I think about it, Stella stayed “off-camera” during our opening chapter, so I didn’t feel the need to describe her for you. Let me remedy that now by putting a picture in your head. I’ll start by saying this: when that coven of witches built Stella, they built her right. She has the kind of beauty you see on a billboard for a fancy hair conditioner; flawless skin, legs for days, and an arse that could broker an international peace treaty. Even more impressively, she seems somehow oblivious to her own physical qualities, as though she’s too modest—or perhaps too focussed on smiting demons—to take the time to look in a mirror. Instead, she carries herself in an understated way, dressing in a tomboyish leather jacket and wearing her hair straight and unfussy. That arse though. Hoo boy.

  ‘How’s your detective friend, David?’ I asked her, thinking back to our adventure in the nightmare realm. ‘Actually, is he just a friend, or—?’

  ‘Just a friend,’ she replied, def
initively.

  ‘Easy, tiger, no need to get testy.’

  She shrugged it off. ‘What about you? How’s Detective Stronge?’

  I thought back to our recent phone conversation and decided to move the subject on a notch. ‘Hey, check us out, we both have detective friends. You know, Stella, we've got a lot in common, you and me. We should really get together one night and chat about it.’

  ‘I’m busy that night.’

  ‘Come on! We’re both Uncanny, we both fight for the same side, and we’re both knockout gorgeous. Besides, it’s not like either of us is getting any younger.’

  ‘Only because neither of us ages.’

  ‘See, there's another thing we have in common.’

  ‘Give it up, Jake.’

  ‘What is it? You don't like this body? Because I can get a better one – just name your type.’

  ‘You know, you make it very difficult not to incinerate you with a fireball.’

  We walked on in silence, but it was obvious she was crazy about me.

  I mean, probably.

  We arrived at the wrought iron fence surrounding the church yard. I knew this place. I ought to, I was buried there. My earthly remains had been interred on the grounds a few years back after I crossed over, which is a polite way of saying, “Got brutally murdered.” That story will have to wait for another time though, much as I’d like to vent about it here. Suffice to say, the matter has left me a mite peeved.

  I peered through the fence. While the crematorium beyond was still in business—if vacated for the night—the adjoining church was closed for repairs. The building had been declared unsafe and forced to shut its doors after ground movement created by the crumbling Roman drains beneath it caused the structure to subside. To date, the charitable donations required to stabilise its foundations and fix the damage remain far below the necessary target. Make of that what you will.

  We approached the iron gate that led into the church yard. A thick chain had been looped through it and secured with a heavy-duty padlock, barring our entrance. I was about to jimmy it open with a bit of kleptomancy when Stella reached past me and took the lock in her fist. A moment later it was dribbling between her fingers like silver water.

  ‘Open Sesame,’ she quipped.

  She pushed through the gate and into the church’s graveyard with me at her heels. As we headed for the crematorium I looked across to the chapel, which was shadowed by a gathering of gnarled trees that creaked ominously in the breeze. Somewhere out there, among the chapel’s surrounding tombstones, was my own grave.

  Stella caught my look. ‘You okay, Jake? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘Funny,’ I said. ‘You know, you might just be the funniest witch’s familiar I’ve ever met.’

  I was putting on a brave face though. Truth was, I was bricking it. If I’d done my calculations correctly, we were about to walk into the final showdown, and while I can hold my own in a scrap, I still had no idea what we were about to face. Who was the Hooded Man? What was he? A magician? A demon? Some other archfiend of the underworld?

  Stella bought us access to the crematorium with the same finesse she’d shown the padlocked gate, putting a fist through its sturdy wooden door and unlatching it from the other side.

  ‘I could have done that without leaving a bloody great hole,’ I said. ‘You know, what with being an apparition that can pass through solid objects.’

  She shrugged and I followed her down a breezeblock corridor covered in a spaghetti junction of old gas pipes. At the end of it was another door, and beyond that, a faint murmuring sound. Without taking a breath, Stella pushed open the door to the facility’s cold storage unit.

  The far wall of the room looked like a giant filing cabinet, only instead of archiving documents, it housed a stockpile of human remains. More notably though was a man. A man with his back to us and one hand pressed against the wall of drawers, palm to the metal.

  A man in a hood.

  ‘Stop,’ I managed to say.

  The Hooded Man ceased his murmuring and turned to reveal a piano key smile. He was young, some kind of African by the looks of it, and dressed like the sort of bus stop loitering youth the Daily Mail likes to get its knickers in a twist about.

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘And look, you brought a friend!’

  I recognised the voice as the one I’d heard at the morgue with Dr Anand.

  I could see now why the vampires were so quick to give him Fergal’s body. He wasn’t much to look at, but he absolutely crackled with menace. Not that that stopped Stella laying down the law.

  ‘Get away from there,’ she demanded, her fists throbbing with arcane power. ‘Right now.’

  ‘As you wish,’ he said, and removed his palm from the wall of drawers.’

  Now it was my turn to speak. ‘If you want to carry on living, pal, I’d suggest putting your hands over your head.’

  ‘Living?’ he said, still grinning. ‘What is life but animated death?’

  And with that he was gone, slipping out of the room’s fire exit like a greasy smudge.

  ‘What the f—?’ I started saying, then decided my time would be better spent giving chase.

  I made for the door the Hooded Man had departed through as fast as my legs would carry me, but just as I was about to reach it, a morgue drawer burst open right in front of my face. With no opportunity to change my trajectory, I pummelled headlong into the thing like I was running into a low beam. The floor and the ceiling exchanged places, then suddenly I was flat on my back and contemplating the drawer’s aluminium underside.

  ‘Bastard,’ I wheezed, but the worst was yet to come.

  As well as using his magic to make the drawer solid to ghosts, the Hooded Man had also tampered with its contents. With the contents of the entire refrigerator in fact.

  I heard a pitiful moan and saw a pallid hand reach out from the drawer above. After that came a withered face, deathly skin pulled tight against the skull beneath. Judging by the advanced age of the body, it belonged to one of the pensioners that had been gassed a few hours prior. As suspected, the Hooded Man had set the wheels in motion for another vigilante attack.

  The eyes of the dead pensioner flicked open to reveal two luminous orbs that burned like white-hot marbles. He began to clamber from his drawer, and I just about managed to roll aside before his bare, toe-tagged foot stepped onto my face.

  More drawers slid open—five in total—spewing out fresh, moaning corpses with malice on their minds.

  The Hooded Man had done a swifty, that much I was sure of, the question now was what were we going to do about the killers he’d left in his wake?

  The oldies turned to me in unison, their five sets of eyes boring into me like hot drill bits. Apparently, I’d been promoted to the top of the Hooded Man's hit list. Number one with a bullet.

  ‘Any chance you want to do something about that?’ I asked Stella, pointing at the flock of naked murder-fogeys coming my way.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, you could start by magicking them away before they have my throat out.’

  Undead could hurt undead. Rules of the game.

  ‘They’re people,’ said Stella. ‘I protect people, not destroy them.’

  ‘Those aren’t people!’ I cried. ‘They’re dead bodies being used as puppets. There’s more life in a eunuch’s ballbag!’

  The mouldy oldies continued to advance on me, ponderously slowly. They came like a tide of encroaching lava, backing me into a corner, which I was surprised to find completely solid. The Hooded Man had turned the whole of the room super-corporeal.

  ‘Come on, Stella. Get it together.’

  ‘I see their souls,’ she said. ‘I see their emotions burning bright...’

  ‘Those aren’t emotions, love, he’s doing a number on you.’

  It was plain as day to me, but something the Hooded Man had done was throwing Stella for a loop. He was preying on her respo
nsibilities as London’s guardian, taking advantage of her code, tricking her into believing these were people we were facing and not just empty vessels.

  The monster mash was upon me now. Naked pensioners pressed me into the corner of the room, clawing at my body, digging into my flesh. I tried to get away from them by translocating but there was too much magical static in the room, so instead of reappearing on the opposite side of the unit, I went briefly out of alignment then snapped back into focus.

  Including the angel, that was the second person that had pulled that stunt on me now, and I enjoyed it just as much this time as I had the first.

  I fought against my attackers but they were too strong, juiced by the Hooded Man’s murder magic. They fought like barbarians, relentless and savage, battering me with fists like anvils. I put up my arms to defend myself, but the rain of blows smashed me to the ground.

  ‘For Chrissakes, Stella... those aren’t people…’

  Hearing me, she raised a fist, which fizzed and sparked like a welder’s torch. She’d drawn a lethal payload of magic from the room, but lacked the certainty to unleash it. Instead she held it inside of her, clutching onto it, too unsure to pull the trigger.

  Meanwhile, the juiced geriatrics piled on top of me, one onto the next like a playground bundle. The mountain of bodies weighed hard and heavy, mashing me into the floor, pressing down like a giant boot on my ribcage.

  Through the cracks in the mountain I saw Stella, unblinking, horrified, chewing on her bottom lip as she wrestled with the dilemma before her. She’d been built to vanquish evil, not massacre the elderly. No matter how obvious it seemed to me, she just couldn’t see the situation for what it was. The Hooded Man’s illusion was too stark for her to deny. Something had short-circuited inside of her, I could see it on her face. Stella had gone haywire.