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

by David Bussell

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not mad, I just make a poor first impression. I have that on good authority from a friend of mine.’

  ‘You’re friend is right,’ replied Mrs Coates, swigging back a mouthful of lemonade.

  I took a look at the woman sat opposite me—her tightly-permed, blue-rinsed hair, her smoker’s mouth puckered like a cat’s behind, her tired, lived-in body—and wondered what on Earth she was talking to me for. I was hoping for something juicy to distract me from all the recent murder business. It could be anything, anything at all. A haunting in her mews, a suspected vampire bite sighted on the lily-white neck of her favourite niece, the body of a deceased faerie fished out of her ornamental pond, anything! A potential gamut of weirdness stretched out tantalisingly in front of me.

  ‘Mr Lake, my cat Boris has gone missing.’

  Or it could be a missing fucking cat.

  ‘Come again? It sounded like you said you dragged me all the way here because of a cat.’

  ‘Yes. My cat Boris is missing.’

  ‘Yup, that’s what I thought it sounded like.’ I swallowed a mouthful of pop and a crisp or two.

  ‘I’m beside myself with worry, Mr Lake! My Boris is an inside cat! Oh, occasionally he’ll take a little stroll around the garden, but he never crossed the garden fence, he doesn’t like it out there! So for him to go missing, for days even, well, I imagine you can understand my distress.’

  She placed a couple of MISSING posters down on the table. Boris the cat looked back at me, one ear white, the other black.

  ‘Mm-hm,’ I replied, tipping the rest of the crisps into my mouth and having a good chew. ‘Mrs Coates,’ I said, trying not to spit crisp shards into her saggy face, ‘I’m not really in the beloved pet retrieval business. I’m in the weird, unexplained, and hopefully supernatural business. Unless your cat was of the witches variety, or perhaps resurrected from a pet cemetery, I’m not entirely sure why you decided to look me up.’

  ‘Oh, well you see, Mr Lake, it’s not just my Boris. There’s Ginger, too.’

  ‘Ginger?’

  ‘Oh yes! And Cotton, Sooty, Nemo Bananapants; and that’s just the cats from my street. All told, as far as I know, a good twenty-seven cats have gone missing, and all on the same night.’

  ‘Twenty-seven?’

  ‘Twenty-seven!’

  ‘In one night?’

  ‘In one night!’

  Hm. Okay, maybe there was something to this story after all. It wasn’t the village greengrocer levitating off the ground and speaking in ancient Babylonian I’ll grant you, but that many cats going AWOL in a single night definitely strayed on the weird side. Chances were it was just some local nut with a cat compulsion, or maybe an increase in the local fox population, but what the hell, it would help take my mind off the previous night.

  ‘Okay, I’ll have a poke around Mrs Coates, see what’s what.’

  ‘Thank you! I do worry for Boris, he should be home and safe!’

  ‘My fee is fifty pounds a day, with a minimum of four days payable.’

  ‘Oh, okay. That’s a bit steep.’

  ‘A small price to pay for the hope of rescuing poor, lost Boris, is it not?’

  ‘Of course. Of course, yes!’

  I held out my hand. ‘Those four days are actually payable upfront. In cash. Paper cash, no coinage, if you please.’

  Mrs Coates dug into her bag for her purse.

  Two-hundred quid! Even if the whole cat thing turned out to be a whole load of nothing, as very much suspected, two-hundred smackeroos was not to be sniffed at.

  I sipped at my second glass of lemonade and had a think about what I’d like to spend my money on.

  6

  ‘You were supposed to be here thirty-three minutes ago,’ said Big Marge, eyes fixed on the pages of her suburban infidelity and botched tit jobs magazine.

  I strolled up to the hospital reception desk and gave her a wink. ‘Aw, that’s nice, you’ve been counting the minutes until I walked in here. It must be love.’

  Big Marge raised an eyebrow then jabbed a meaty thumb in the direction of a mop and bucket. ‘I’ll tell you what you’re not going to love; the three inches of shit up the walls of the second floor Men’s.’

  As I mopped up a stranger’s abandoned anal deposits, I found myself musing once more on the previous night’s terminal encounter. Someone had attacked Mary Taylor and Janet Coyle, and I found it highly unlikely that it was the mysterious tramp. No, whoever it was—whatever it was—had something of the unnatural about it. I’d felt it in that burst of… of whatever it was that washed over me when our skin briefly touched.

  Something of the night had attacked those women. Something hungry. No, something starving. A patch of dark given life. A shadow that sought to kill and feast. Which sounds crazy I know, and probably wasn’t going to fly too well when I was called in to answer Detective Maya Myers’ no doubt numerous questions.

  Whatever it was that killed that woman, I could only hope that Mary Taylor had something useful to offer the police so they could cage the animal before it struck again.

  ‘You know, you really have a gift for cleaning up other people’s shit,’ remarked Neil Smith, doctor and all-round wank puffin, as he entered the toilets and made his way to the urinal to relieve himself.

  ‘Doctor Neil—’

  ‘Doctor Smith—’

  ‘Doctor Neil, I’m going to take that as a strange yet genuine compliment as to do otherwise would make you seem like a tosspot, and I know you don’t want to be thought of as a tosspot.’

  Neil made to reply, stumbled as he tried to fully take in my reply, then gave in, zipped up, and began to wash his hands. He eyed me evilly in the mirror. ‘I don’t like you,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you’ve certainly kept that information close to your chest.’

  He narrowed his eyes again, unsure whether I was taking the piss or not. For someone so educated, he really was quite slow.

  ‘One day, turd boy, something horrible is going to happen to you. Something worse than horrible. Something just, ooh, awful. And when that happens, I’m going to be there front row and centre.’

  ‘Something worse than this conversation?’

  Doctor Neil grimaced, threw the paper towel he’d been drying his hands on in the bin, and stomped out of the room, swishing his white doctor’s coat in a way that didn’t at all scream super villain.

  I finished up and washed my hands three or four times in scalding hot water, then complied with my stomach’s grumblings and went off in hunt of a vending machine. Not every man can think of food after such a near-turd experience, but I have a surprisingly strong constitution for a person of such a remarkably svelte build. Besides, this wasn’t the first present I’d been given from the bottom shelf.

  ‘There you are,’ said Chloe, rounding a corner as I bit down on the second finger of my Twix.

  ‘Were you looking for me?’ I asked, desperately hoping that the smell of excrement wasn’t clinging to me like a poop wetsuit.

  ‘In your dreams,’ Chloe replied, grinning.

  ‘You just missed another classic Joseph and Doctor Neil conversation.’

  ‘You know he doesn’t like it when you call him Doctor Neil.’

  ‘Doctor Neil doesn’t like it when I call him Doctor Neil? Did Doctor Neil tell you that, because Doctor Neil hasn’t said a thing to me about it.’

  Chloe grinned and gave me a playful shove.

  ‘So, how’s Mary Taylor?’ I asked.

  ‘Alive and awake.’

  ‘She’s spoken? Does she know what her attacker looks like? Does she know why he was attacking her, or what he was hoping to get?‘

  ‘Woah, woah,’ said Chloe, raising her arms, ‘I’m sorry but I haven’t interrogated her to within an inch of her just-about-hung-onto life just yet, Columbo!’

  ‘Right, yes, of course. Though perhaps more Sherlock than Columbo; I would never wear such a ratty coat.’

  Chloe rolled her eyes
and managed to look so adorable doing it that I practically swooned.

  ‘‘Gis a bit of that then,’ she said, snatching the last of my Twix and sliding it into her mouth in a way that may or may not have made my knees wobble a touch.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘You’ve gone a bit pale. Well, paler than normal, so really, really pale.’

  ‘I’m fine. All good in—’

  ‘Please don’t say “the hood.”’

  ‘—The corridor. All good in the corridor.’

  Chloe smiled as she turned and headed away. ‘Cheers for the choccy. See you later, Columbo.’

  ‘Yes, but not if I, you know, see you first you won’t. Not in a stalkery way.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Chloe, turning on her heel and walking backwards. ‘I made a crap load of chilli last night. It’s gotta go if you fancy tea at mine tonight.’

  I want you to understand how much self control it took at that moment not to launch myself from the floor and go for another of those freeze frames.

  ‘It’s a date!’ I said. ‘Well, no, not a date, but another thing. A meal.’

  Chloe shook her head and turned to face where she was going again, disappearing around the corner. ‘Come round about seven, yeah?’

  ‘Will do!’

  Okay, was that a date? It could be. I mean, I said the word “date” twice. But Chloe didn’t, she just said she wanted to get rid of some old chilli before it went bad. Then again, she didn’t say it wasn’t a date after I mentioned the word date. Twice. Maybe it was a date?

  No.

  Don’t be stupid.

  Or…?

  I know I sound somewhat like a man who has never known the touch of a woman, and there’s some truth to that. After waking by Derwentwater ten years ago, I was too preoccupied with just who on earth I was to really be interested in hitting on the ladies. Plus, well, in some respects it’s like I am only ten years of age. I had no experiences stored in my head from my no doubt legendary sexual history. Not a kiss, not a hand-hold. After a few years I did make some tentative steps into the world of boy-girl stuff, but then Chloe came into my life and, well… I won’t say I’d exactly been saving myself for her, but I hadn’t been actively trying to give my equipment a thorough means-test either.

  And now here we were.

  With the maybe-could-be-date.

  Chloe and me.

  Or is it Chloe and I?

  As I pondered the conundrum further, I liberated more chocolate from the vending machine. Once I was done with that I went to pay the surviving member of the previous night’s horror show a visit. I wanted to check that she was well, but I had an ulterior motive. I wanted to be close to her, to see if any of that residual weird sensation I’d felt the previous night was still there. The strange feelings and sights that had washed over me. See if I could make sense of it. See if she was in any fit state to answer a soft question or two about exactly what, who, and why she was in hospital and her friend was in the morgue.

  I was going to try and put it more delicately than that though. I may be an idiot, but I’m not an idiot.

  I tapped softly on the door then stepped inside.

  ‘Hi, Mary, are you awake?’

  The only response was from her heart monitor, beep-beep-beeping a hello.

  It was as the door closed behind me and I stepped towards the bed that I began to realise that something wasn’t altogether correct. It was a sensation as much as anything I saw. My skin itched and I felt the gooseflesh rise.

  ‘By the pricking of my thumbs,’ I said, hushed.

  It was at this point that I saw the markings on the floor. Strange shapes, daubed in what looked like blood, arranged in a circle around Mary’s bed. The same sort of occult-looking symbols I’d seen around the first victim.

  This was not good.

  ‘Mary?’’

  Something dripped on my head, stopping me in my tracks. I lifted my hand and touched the spot, bringing my fingers before my eyes to see sticky red.

  ‘Oh…’

  I looked up to find a dark, quivering shape attached to the ceiling. Now I had a starker look at the thing, it was less person-shaped than I had first thought. It had a torso, legs, and a head, but the rest of it consisted of numerous octopus-like limbs that held the thing to the ceiling by row upon row of suckers.

  At this point I should have been racing from the room, screaming my throat raw as I tried not to pee myself, but instead a strange calmness descended over me. A sense that what I was looking at was not a creature from a lunatic’s fever dream, but vermin to be exterminated.

  ‘You’re done, ‘ I said. ‘You’ve had your fill, now get the hell out of here!’

  The creature’s hairless head twisted sharply to look at me, its eyes giant, wide, and entirely yellow, its mouth a screaming beak that screeched with fury.

  The strange sense of calmness suddenly left me to be replaced with a familiar, all-consuming terror. I staggered backwards, almost falling over the chair behind me. With little time to think about what I was doing, I grabbed the chair and launched it in the beast’s direction. The chair struck it squarely on the head, causing it to scream in anger before its octopi limbs sent the thing swiftly towards the window, launching it through the glass and out into the car park beyond.

  I gasped for breath for a moment or two, relief coursing over me that the thing had chosen flight over fight, then ran to the broken window to see where the creature was fleeing to.

  I saw no sign of the beast, with its huge yellow eyes and numerous gross, sucker-limbs. Instead, I saw the homeless woman, sprinting away from the hospital.

  7

  Checking on Mary, I was relieved to discover that she was unconscious but otherwise okay. Some fresh wounds, but only superficial. For the second time now, I had been her unwitting saviour from Mr Octopus. Which no, is not the most fearsome of names to give to the dark, twitching horror I’d witnessed, clinging to the ceiling with its thick mollusc limbs, but it was the first thing that sprung to mind.

  I pulled out my phone to snap a few pictures of the occult shapes daubed on the floor around her bed. As with the last time, I felt a strange sensation teasing at me as I looked at the symbols. A sense that they were imbued with an energy of sorts. With a meaning that my brain insisted I understand.

  Mary moved and moaned in her bed, derailing my train of thought.

  ‘It’s okay, Mr Octopus has gone, you’re okay.’

  I patted at her arm like a worried aunt, then ran from the room, intending to tell Big Marge in reception to get the police on the blower. I then screeched to an almost-falling-over halt as I realised I was leaving Mary alone and that Mr Octopus might well take the opportunity to return and finish the job. Also, that I still had my phone in my hand and I could call the police myself and stay with her.

  So I did that.

  An hour later I was sat in the hospital reception, cradling a styrofoam cup of coffee and eating my third bag of crisps. My diet really was shocking, it was a wonder I still cut such a lithe, dashing figure. With great hair.

  As police wandered back and forth, I went over what had happened in my head for the hundredth time. The beast, the creature, Mr Octopus. There’d been no sign of it after it launched itself through the window. The only thing I’d seen was the homeless woman who’d been stalking me, legging it out of view. A reverse of what had happened the previous night, when I’d chased after the woman, only for her to give me the slip and the dark shape to barge past me.

  Was it possible this woman and Mr Octopus were one and the same? I’d read all sorts of interesting guff about shape-shifters in my trawls through the internet, although they tended to be from person to animal—human to wolf, mainly—and I hadn’t read anything about people turning into half-person, half-octopus thingies. I was fairly sure I’d remember one of those.

  ‘Deep in thought again, Mr Lake?’

  Detective Maya Myers’ matter-of-fact tone snapped me out of my thoughts. I looked up from my co
ffee to see her and a second detective stood before me.

  ‘Ah, Detective Maya Myers, good. Good that you’re here.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Well, not good. Tragic, because of the earlier murder. And the new almost-murder. But now you’re here I’m sure things will settle down.’

  ‘Was that sarcasm?’

  ‘Oh. No. I don’t think so.’

  Detective Myers raised an eyebrow. It really hadn’t been sarcasm, I was glad she was on the case. I like to think I’m an okay judge of character, and something told me that no one as scary and no-nonsense as Myers could be anything other than a first rate detective. And judging by the case so far, that’s exactly what this situation was going to require.

  She nodded towards the man stood next to her. He was short, a little pudgy, and almost entirely bald, despite looking to be only in his mid-twenties. God can be cruel.

  ‘This is my partner, Detective Sam Samm.’

  ‘Sam Samm?’

  He nodded. ‘Two ‘M’s.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The second Samm.’

  ‘Right.’

  Detective Myers pulled out her notebook. ‘So, the details.’

  Ah, yes, those things. Tricky. I could hardly tell her the truth of what I’d seen, or at least what I thought I’d seen. I’d have sounded like a raving loon. People do not have beaks or rows of octopus limbs bursting out of their sides. Not in Cumbria, anyway. Maybe in London.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘as I told the first officer on the scene, I entered the room to find a… a person was—how I would describe it now—leaning over Mary Taylor’s bed. So, I said, “Hey now, you there, what’s all of this about?” just like that.’

  Detective Maya Myers’ face slid from neutral into unimpressed. ‘Mm-hm, go on.’

  ‘Then, I sort of just ran at the bastard.’

  ‘I’d have been cacking me pants,’ said Samm. ‘I don’t really like confrontation.’ He shivered and stuck his tongue out at the same time.

  ‘Detective Samm,’ said Maya, ‘What made you want to become a police officer?’