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

by David Bussell

  I didn’t appreciate the insinuation. The charge he was levelling at me was what’s technically known as “gross abuse of a corpse” (though really, any abuse of a corpse is, by definition, pretty icky).

  I narrowed my eyes at the janitor. ‘I’m here on behalf of the woman this belonged to,’ I replied, showing him the scrap of blackened fabric clinging to the end of the poker.

  ‘And what makes you think I’d know anything about that?’

  I shot him a hard stare. ‘Oh, that’s an easy one,’ I explained. ‘See, I know you do, because she already told me you killed her.’

  The janitor’s nostrils flared. ‘So, you were having a conversation with a dead woman, is that it?’

  ‘Spot on.’

  He offered a self-satisfied smile. I wasn’t a threat to him, I was just some nutcase who’d wandered into his territory and overstepped his mark by a country mile. ‘If I were you, I’d wanna get going, mate,’ he said. ‘Or do I have to crack you one with this?’

  He slapped the stout wooden bat in his palm.

  I looked him up and down. He was a big lad—a proper unit—and going by the muscles I could see bulging beneath his dungarees, he could handle himself too. He’d wipe the floor with me if it came to a fight, I was certain of it.

  ‘Look, mate, I’m not after any trouble,’ I said, backing off.

  ‘Is that right?’ the janitor chuckled.

  I set the poker back down by the mouth of the roaring furnace. ‘I’ll get going now,’ I said, holding my hands up in surrender. ‘Just one thing before I do though,’ I added, Columbo style. ‘I know that you lured her into your home. I know that you strangled her to death with your bare hands and dragged her body to the bathtub so you could dismember her with an electric kitchen knife. Tell me this though: why did you cook her brain in a frying pan?’

  The janitor rocked back on his heels, eyes agog.

  ‘I mean, I know supermarket prices have been on the up a bit since Brexit,’ I said, ‘but you can still get a kilo of roasting pork for less than a fiver at Tesco.’

  He finally found his voice. ‘How do you know all that?’ he demanded. ‘How?’

  ‘You said it yourself,’ I explained. ‘A dead woman told me.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Everything.’

  He lowered his head as if defeated, but when he looked up again, a satanic grin had transformed his face. ‘Right,’ he replied, ‘then I suppose she told you about this too?’

  He unhooked the straps of his dungarees, pulled them down to his waist and whipped open his shirt. A cluster of rubbery black tentacles sprung from inside, dancing before him and oozing a gelatinous goo.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, eyes widening, ‘she did not mention that.’

  Bit of an oversight on her part, I’d say. This thing was no janitor. This was something else, a creature born of another realm, a monster dressed in a human suit. The woman I was working for—the woman this thing had murdered—had failed to inform me that her killer was something out of a Lovecraft novel, but then standing by as a spectre while you watch your remains getting chopped to bits is wont to fuzzy the old grey matter.

  The janitor/Cthulhu monster opened his mouth and screamed like two foxes fucking in a blender. ‘I’ll dice up your brains and fry them in butter!’ he shrieked as he came charging towards me, tentacles questing from his torso and making for my throat.

  It all happened so fast.

  I didn’t have time to snatch up the poker.

  I didn’t have time to get out of the way.

  I didn’t even have time to say, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you, mate,’ before the hellspawn janitor pounced—

  —only to pass right through me and into his own furnace.

  Woof!

  The creature went up like a box of matches, thrashing and wailing inside the white-hot oven. The scream he made was unbelievable; pure murder on the ear drums. The bloke was doing my head in, so I blotted out his racket by bumming the furnace door shut like I was closing a stubborn car door.

  And that was the end of that little escapade.

  I’m Jake Fletcher. Dead man. Professional ghost. An apparition trapped between this world and the next.

  Not that I’m complaining.

  After all, being a phantom has its advantages. When it comes to the earthly plane, I go as I please. I’m intangible, meaning I’m not hemmed in by physical constraints like walls, or locks, or red velvet ropes. Earlier, when I said I “passed through” the spiked black gates of Camden Cemetery, I meant just that. I manoeuvred my way to the other side of them like wind through a keyhole. Ghost style. No fannying about.

  The only time I’m ever corporeal is when I make a special effort to be that way, like I did when I needed my hands to get inside that furnace. The rest of the time I’m basically smoke, as our friend, Mr Janitor Monster, discovered the hard way. I’m also invisible to most people, unless they have The Sight, which evidently the hellspawn burning up in that furnace did. The only reason he could see me was because, just like yours truly, he too was a member of the Uncanny.

  What do I mean by “Uncanny”?

  The Uncanny is everywhere. It’s all around you and always has been, but too few see it. The supernaturally inclined—ghosts, magicians, whatever the hell that janitor was—we’re tuned into the Uncanny’s frequency. We see the world that overlaps your world. The world that only exists in the corners of your perception. The floaters in your eye. The world your conscious mind filters out. The impossible place that you smother with the mundane.

  Dealing with that janitor was my first successful job as a Paranormal Private Investigator (Finally, a P.P.I. that’s worth a damn!). My client, as I mentioned before, was the ghost of the woman he’d crisped in the same crematorium he ended up dying in, a hot dollop of karma if ever there was one. I broke the news to my client and she wept tears of joy before the golden elevator arrived to take her to the Great Hereafter. That’s what happens once an earthbound spirit gets a ribbon tied on their unfinished business, they get to pass on to their final reward. Well, most of them do. Some of us aren’t so lucky.

  The sun came up, colouring the cemetery with the watery light of early morning. I sat there for a while among the tombstones, reflecting on a job well done, until I caught strains of choral music coming from the nearby chapel. I checked my watch and sat bolt upright when I realised what day it was.

  Typical me.

  Late for my own funeral.

  2

  In the movies, funerals are all wreaths of colourful laurels, tearful widows in elegant veils, and grim-faced pallbearers doing their best to contain their sorrow as they dutifully go about their solemn task.

  In reality, what you get is a lot of awkward coughing, a pack of semi-strangers slyly checking their phones to make sure they haven’t missed anything important on their feeds, and a doddery priest reading a sermon from a hastily-scrawled crib sheet.

  The man in the white collar threw in a few all-purpose platitudes about how, ‘Nobody could take my place,’ and how I’d be, ‘Missed by many,’ but then why were the only people I could see in attendance foreign to me? No one there knew Jake Fletcher really, least of all the bloke officiating the whole debacle, who managed to get my surname wrong and call me ‘Jake Felcher’ on not one but two occasions (thanks for that, Padre). I suppose it’s to be expected. Spend your life mucking about with black magic and malevolent spirits, and your Christmas card list soon starts to shrink.

  After the service I stood in line, waiting to pay my respects to the deceased. Next to the open casket, supported by a cheap-looking easel, was a large picture of my face glued onto a bit of foam board. The photo’s colours were washed out, and the image distractingly low-res, having been haphazardly cut and pasted from my Facebook page.

  I queued for the coffin beside a gaggle of rubbernecking old dears who were only too happy to see someone besides themselves lying face-up in a box. After they were done gl
oating, I finally got to approach the coffin and say goodbye to an old friend.

  There I was, Jake Fletcher, RIP, eyes closed and hands arranged palms-down on my stomach like I was trying to disguise a hearty meal. Except there was nothing left inside of me now but formaldehyde.

  The mortician had done a wonderful job on me. I’d never looked better, really. I hadn’t been brave enough to wear makeup in life (barring a brief flirtation with guyliner as a teenage goth), but I have to confess, it looked great on me. My skin was glowing, my lashes were thick and lustrous, and you could barely even see the multiple lacerations and crush wounds that put me in a coffin in the first place.

  I died from being pushed under a moving train. It sounds gruesome—and looked it too—but it was over in a flash. One second I was staring down at the tracks watching a mouse gnawing on a discarded chicken wing, the next I felt a shove and found myself lying across the rails in front of the 11:45 to High Barnet.

  I figured out later that my wife had orchestrated the whole thing. She’d put a colleague of mine up to it, the same colleague she was sleeping with behind my back. The man was a priest, of all things: Father Damon O’Meara. Christ knows what I did in a past life to earn that little Game Over screen, but it must have been pretty heinous.

  I stared down at my patched-up, Frankenstein’s monster of a corpse and asked myself, Where did it all go wrong? Was it the day I shook the kaleidoscope and meddled with the Uncanny, or was it the day I first met Sarah Godfrey?

  We found each other at college. I was the slacker art student with lank hair and a thing for Iron Maiden, while she was the leggy, blonde, law undergrad with the upturned nose and a heart so hard you’d think it had been frozen in carbonite. Sarah and I had no business crossing paths, let alone ending up together, and yet that’s exactly what happened. The fact that she was miles out of my league was plain to everyone—most of all me—but I grabbed that opportunity with both hands. I couldn’t believe my luck. Here was this beautiful, cultured creature with so much money that even her laundry bag was Gucci, and there I was: a future dole-claimant with paint under his fingernails and a freezer full of economy minced meat.

  Her interest in yours truly was an absolute mystery, at least until I realised that she was interested in me in the same way a cat is interested in a half-dead mouse. I figured out after college that Sarah had only hooked up with me to piss off her overbearing father, who’d had his daughter’s future mapped out comprehensively since he sent her to finishing school. And while most girls her age would have made do with inviting their trenchcoated, roll-up smoking suitor to the country estate for the next family reunion and watching the heart attacks pinball around the crowd, Sarah took it to the next level.

  She married the reprobate.

  All that effort, just to rub her daddy's nose in it. The old man told her she was forbidden to date a no-prospects, self-styled rebel with a thing for the occult, so to show him who wore the trousers, she dragged me down to the registry office and we got hitched right out of college. It felt like a big win at the time, but on balance, we both should have listened to the old feller.

  The novelty of our union soon wore off. When the hoo-ha died down, the trust fund dried up, and the reality of the situation kicked in, Sarah came to realise that she’d ended up the butt of her own joke. Gone was the risqué, anarchic affair with the unschooled bit of rough, replaced by a loveless marriage to a guy who called himself an exorcist and made less than minimum wage.

  Standing by the coffin filled with my cadaver, I felt my ring finger itch and fidgeted with my wedding band. Somehow that always seemed to happen when Sarah popped into my head. I’d have gotten rid of the thing, but since I died under that train wearing it, I’m stuck with it forever now. On the plus side, I was wearing a nice suit too when I curled up my toes, which means, as a ghost, I’m always dressed in my Sunday best. Then again, looking spiffy at your own funeral is kind of a mixed bag, emotionally speaking.

  But where was I? Oh right, yes, my untimely end.

  Like I said, Sarah put her lover, my ex-partner in the exorcist trade, up to killing me. She did it partly for financial reasons—to stop me getting my hands on her family's considerable wealth, despite the fact that I had no interest whatsoever in milking the Godfrey fortune—but most of all, I think she did it out of pride. Divorcing me would have been an admission of defeat, and Sarah didn’t like to lose. The woman’s a real ice queen like that.

  A new song came on the funeral playlist; some generic, grinding bit of organ music from a royalty free hymn catalogue. It wasn’t for me. My playlist would have been wall-to-wall Maiden, maybe with some Judas Priest thrown in, since this was a religious occasion. As I suffered through the gloomy dirge, asking myself who put this shitshow together, the likely culprit appeared.

  My older sister, Janet, long estranged. She was there with a young boy, hers presumably, and a middle-aged man with a head so bald and shiny that I felt confident I could have seen my reflection in it, were I not invisible. The years had not been kind to Janet, whose naturally hawkish features were now at odds with the rest of her body, which had turned into a sort of reverse hourglass.

  Janet and I had fallen out a long time ago, back when we were teenagers. I’d put an ultimatum to her then, demanding she pick a side. It was either me or Mum. Who’s it going to be? I demanded: Your brother of fourteen, who looks up to you like a surrogate mother, or our actual mother, a cruel, resentful alcoholic who knocks me about on a daily basis.

  She chose Mum.

  According to Janet, our mother didn’t mean it, she was just “sick” and needed “help.” Never mind that her little brother was catching a beating every day just for the sin of looking like the dad that ran out on us. Never mind that she once punched me in the face so hard she managed to dislodge a retina. Never mind all that.

  So I went it alone. I waited until I was legally an adult, then I moved out, got a job, saved a little money, and enrolled in college on a hard luck scholarship. Once I was out of that house, I never looked back. I went to uni, I made some new friends, and I started studying the occult between art classes. That lead me to becoming an exorcist, which in turn, led to me getting pushed under a train and wearing a pine overcoat.

  I looked to the coffin. My life had amounted to little more than a pile of mistakes, one bad decision stacked on top of another. A ladder to failure, and eventually, to death at the hands of my own wife. I felt my ring finger itch again and struggled to pull my wedding band off, knowing full well that it was going nowhere.

  I watched my sister pay her respects to my gussied-up corpse and wondered where the rest of my family had gotten to. I was totally out of the loop about that lot these days. I’d hear things on the grapevine from time to time: Granny Rice won a sum at the bingo, Dad died of a heart attack, Mum was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver. That last one came as no surprise; she was probably at home drinking right now. She'd been a boozer forever, since before I arrived on the scene even. It's a wonder I wasn't born pickled, really.

  I caught sight of a stray funeral programme and saw my sister’s name listed under the credits, confirming that she was, as suspected, the person who’d arranged this sorry little shindig. Trust a member of my own family to know the least about me. If Janet knew anything about her kid brother, she’d never have seen him buried on church ground, she’d have dumped his old bones off the nearest cliff instead of wasting her money on this pantomime. Not that she'd spent much on what was, at best, the minimum viable product of a funeral. At least she’d made the effort though, even if it was the very definition of too little too late.

  The whole affair had made me feel rather miserable, but from the looks of things, I was the only one. Scanning the rest of the “mourners”, I saw expressions ranging from bored, to tired, to downright indifferent. Even my own sister remained offensively stoic. There truly wasn’t a wet eye in the house. What a shower of bastards, I thought. Is it asking too much to expect some crying at yo
ur funeral? Some heartfelt sobs, a dab of the eye, a bit of smeared mascara? Holy shit, was that kid of Janet’s playing Candy Crush on his iPhone?

  I had to get out of there. I took one last look at my lifeless body, then left the building with glide in my stride, marching through the exterior wall and arriving outside to an ashtray sky. The weather had turned miserable fast. The air was heavy and primed for a storm, but the elements were no threat to me now. As I headed off, taking the shortest route out of there, I passed through the church cemetery. Row upon row of white marble tombstones sprouted from the manicured grass, each of them perfectly polished and identical to the rest, except for the inscription it bore. I noticed that one of the burial plots was open and freshly-dug, and inspected its headstone to discover a familiar title.

  JAKE FLETCHER.

  There was no middle name written on the tombstone, because I don't have one. There’s a reason for that. Just like my mother, my errant father was also a boozer. He never beat me (as far as I can remember), but his drinking left a mark on me all the same. He left the biggest one the day I was born.

  The story goes that he was so drunk when my mum delivered me, that when the midwife handed him a birth certificate to write the newborn’s name, he scribbled his own down instead. Apparently, he got confused and thought he was signing for a package.

  Yup.

  So, that’s the story of how I became Jake Fletcher, a dead man with his deadbeat dad’s name.

  Yeah, go ahead and laugh.

  3

  That all went down five years ago.

  Since then, I've seen some pretty big changes in my kind-of life. I managed to get a handle on the whole being a ghost thing, I made some spooky new friends, and I even found a vocation as a detective (with a pretty decent client roster, I might add).

  As for the people that turned me into a ghost in the first place, their fate has been a mixed bag. Father Damon O’Meara was found guilty of murder and given a life sentence, currently serving time at Her Majesty’s Wormwood Scrubs Prison. And Sarah? Well, despite her role in my homicide, my treacherous wife is the only one of us whose situation stayed the same. Instead of being indicted, Sarah kept out of jail on account of her family being filthy rich. The wealthy don't suffer for their misdeeds, at least not for long. Sarah didn't so much as catch a slap on the wrist for plotting my downfall. Thanks to the services of her high-priced team of lawyers, she sidestepped a conspiracy to murder charge and never saw a day in court. That's how it is in the land of the living, the guilty get off scot-free. The real judgment... that comes later. In Hell.