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

by David Bussell

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked the fox.

  ‘Just a quick hello,’ he replied, waving his axe.

  ‘Yes. Hello. Now if you wouldn’t mind sodding off, I’m not in the mood for you or your red-haired master’s crap right now, okay?’

  ‘I lost my better half too, you know.’

  I blinked, then looked to the fox, confused.

  ‘Oh yes. You lost you a lady, I lost mine. Two of us were the fiercest team you ever did set eyes upon. She must’ve slain a thousand with her axe, an’ me at her side, doing likewise.’

  ‘What happened?’

  The fox shrugged. ‘Death has everyone’s number. Hers was called and now here I am, alone and ready to go meet her.’

  ‘The Red Woman, she won’t let you die.’

  ‘As is her right. Can’t complain. Mustn’t grumble. I serve my time, and then my time comes, sure enough.’

  ‘What did you do, fox?’

  ‘What’s that?’ came Eva’s sleep-bleary voice from behind, causing me to once again take the car on a sudden, s-shaped path. ‘Who you jabbering at?’

  I looked back to the passenger seat, but the fox was gone.

  ‘No one. Nope. Just me, having a one-sided chat. Keeping myself company, ha!’

  ‘Idiot,’ she said, before settling back down to sleep.

  ‘Right. Yes. Sorry.’

  I drove on, to the coven.

  The Cumbrian Coven—the place I apparently used to call home—is an old, stone building situated down something called a blind alley. Blind alleys are secret streets, hidden from the sight of most people. The coven basically sits in the middle of nowhere, so there are no buildings either side of this “alley”. Instead, it was secreted at the end of a sort of wrinkle in reality. An impossible fissure down which a building lurked, like a bug behind a skirting board.

  Which is a bit weird, yes.

  But then almost everything about my life was weird now. I refer you to my recent conversation with a chatty fox.

  I parked up, shook Eva for close to ten minutes until she woke up and almost throttled me to death, then followed her as she weaved her way drowsily into the coven.

  ‘Okay, right, now the lessons can begin,’ said Eva, as we stood in the coven’s shambolic library, sat just off the main room. There were large, wooden book cases, and giant, ancient looking grimoires scattered all over the place. It looked as though someone had thrown a fit and trashed the place, but then it always looked like that.

  ‘One question,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why are you holding that large stick?’

  To answer my question, Eva struck me across the legs with it, and I screamed high and sharp as I hopped around the room.

  ‘Any more questions?’ she asked.

  ‘No, no, I’m good.’

  ‘Then let’s get started.’

  During the past week I had proven myself able to perform some aspects of magic, though always by chance. Which is to say I had no idea how I’d accessed that part of me, and no clue as to how I might recreate the effect once I had done it.

  ‘We’ll start with something so simple a brain-dead idiot could do it,’ said Eva. ‘So, just do your best, love.’

  ‘Great pep talk.’

  I yelped as the stick connected with my legs again. ‘Ever hear the phrase, “You catch more flies with honey”?’

  ‘Ever hear the phrase, “I’m going to twat you with this stick if you don’t shut your gob”?’

  I shut my gob.

  ‘Right,’ continued Eva. ‘Hold out your hand, palm up.’

  I did so with some trepidation, expecting the sting of the stick across my mitt at any moment.

  ‘We’re going to try fire first. Piece of piss, fire, look...’

  Eva held out her hand and a flame blazed into life, hovering in a perfect sphere about an inch above her palm.

  ‘Okay, so, how do I do that then?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I’ve sort of done it before, but I’ve no idea how, and when I try to think “hot thoughts”, nothing happens.’

  ‘Hot thoughts,’ repeated Eva.

  I nodded.

  ‘Jesus Christ…’

  I thought it best to move on, for fear of another stick incident. ‘So, are there magic words, like in Harry Potter? Perhaps in Latin, or ancient Greek, or ancient, I don’t know, Welsh?’

  The ball of fire flew past my head, singeing the left side of my hair. My perfect hair.

  ‘I think I’d just prefer the stick from now on,’ I said.

  Eva obliged.

  I yelped.

  3

  I arrived at Carlisle Hospital some hours later, legs throbbing from multiple blunt force traumas, and still no closer to becoming a magic whizz.

  I’d strained and strained until it felt as though I was going to pop a vein in my temple, but try as I might, fire refused to appear from my hand. I’d tried to be cheery about the whole affair. It was only my first lesson, after all. Things were bound to improve, I said. Practice would make perfect. Eva had been less sanguine about it, grunting as she’d walked out, and launching her stick in my direction as she did so.

  So, I was a witch without magic.

  Or at least without magic that I could properly access.

  It was as though whatever had happened ten years ago—whatever it was that wiped my memory—had shoved all of my special talents into a room in my mind and locked the door. There was just no getting to it, at least until I found the key.

  As the doors to the hospital’s reception area slid closed behind me, Big Marge— manning the desk as usual—looked up from her magazine and waved me over.

  ‘Hi, Big Marge. Have you done something different with your hair, because you are looking particularly striking today.’

  ‘Washed it,’ she replied. ’Police are here again.’

  Ah, yes. It turns out that when someone vanishes into thin air, as Chloe Palmer had, the police take a bit of an interest.

  ‘Oh? Have they, um… heard from her?’

  ‘No. Word on the ward is, she’s been kidnapped. Or moved to Birmingham.’

  ‘I don’t know which is worse,’ I joshed.

  Marge grunted. ‘Hasn’t been in contact with you, has she?’

  ‘Nope.’

  But part of me really, really wished that she had. That somehow it was possible for her not to be dead. Just for me. Just for a little while. There was magic in this world, I knew that for a fact. Was it too much to ask that Chloe come back to life? Okay, sure, she’d gone a bit loopy at the end there, but we all have our off days, don’t we?

  ‘Have the police said anything?’ I asked.

  ‘Just the usual. Say they have a number of leads they’re looking into, all the usual crap. Say they’re sure they’ll find her.’

  They’re never going to find her, I thought. There’s nothing to find.

  Big Marge crossed herself, then slapped her meaty hands together in prayer.

  ‘I hope they find something. Chloe used to bring me a doughnut every Tuesday. I liked her.’

  I didn’t feel much like continuing the small talk, so I made my way sullenly to my locker and slipped into my overalls, hoping that a few hours of manual toil would distract me from my woes.

  ‘Joseph Lake.’

  Detective Maya Myers was stood behind me. Now, Maya not only knew who I really was, but she knew the truth about what had happened to Chloe. She’d been there when it had happened. She was still a detective though, which meant having to go through the motions of an investigation into Chloe’s disappearance.

  ‘Hello, Detective. Detectives.’

  Maya’s new partner was stood next to her. Tall, broad, head like a tombstone, hair-cut severe, pleasantries absent. Detective Martins. Maya had been teamed up with him since the sad death of Detective Sam Samm, her previous partner, who’d been murdered by the soul vampires Chloe had been in charge of.

  Seeing Maya, and the lack of Detective Samm—nice, not especially sm
art, Detective Sam Samm—reminded me that Chloe no longer being around was, on the whole, probably not such a bad thing. No matter how much it knotted my stomach, people had died. Good people. Because of her.

  ‘Has Dr Chloe Palmer been in contact with you?’ asked Detective Martins; or rather, grunted Detective Martins. Unlike the lovely Sam Samm, Detective Martins was, and I’m thinking of the best way to put this, a complete and utter bastard.

  ‘No. Nope. At least not since yesterday.’

  Detective Martins stepped forward. ‘What do you mean? Did she contact you yesterday?’

  I backed up until my shoulders bashed against the metal of my locker, Detective Martins’ sour breath savaging my nostrils.

  ‘No! No, no! Just, since you asked me yesterday. You asked me the same thing then and she still hasn’t been in contact. Believe me, detectives, the moment Chloe Palmer contacts me, you two will be the first to know. Oh yes.’

  I looked to Maya, who widened her eyes momentarily at me in a, Get your shit together, for fuck’s sake, sort of a way.

  ‘Make sure you do, Mr Lake’ said Maya.

  ‘And you’re sure she will contact you?’ asked Martins.

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘Oh, so you think she’s dead?’

  I knew what he was doing. He was trying to bombard me with questions, to throw me off centre, make me inadvertently say something I might be hiding.

  Luckily, Maya also knew what he was up to.

  ‘Just be sure we’re the first people you tell if you hear anything,’ said Maya. ‘Do we understand each other, Mr Lake?’

  I nodded vigorously in the affirmative.

  ‘You better,’ said Detective Martins, ‘because if I find out that you’re keeping anything from me, I’ll make balloon animals out of your intestines.’ He prodded me hard enough in the gut to leave a bruise by way of punctuation.

  ‘Consider it fully got.’

  He sniffed dismissively, then turned and walked away. Maya gave me a quick smile before she made her exit too.

  At a time like this, it was good to know I had an inside woman on the case. And someone, like Maya Myers, who had first-hand experience of the Uncanny side of the country.

  I grabbed my mop and set off for the first job of my shift, cleaning up some vomit from the first floor bathrooms. It was a job I looked forward to more than my next encounter with Detective Martins.

  I suppose you could say that the three of us were something of a team now; that is, me, Eva Familiar, and Detective Maya Myers.

  Maya was a London detective, transferred up to the sticks of Cumbria after seeing another partner of hers murdered horribly by... well, something. Something not normal and altogether monstrous. Now, since stumbling into the strange case of Chloe Palmer and the army of soul vampires, she’d made it clear that she expected to be part of any future paranormal investigations, which was fine by me. I liked her, and I hoped she might act as something of a buffer between me and my violently-inclined familiar.

  Plus, like me, she was new to all of this Uncanny stuff. Okay, I wasn’t exactly “new”, but I may as well have been, thanks to my secretive swine of a brain.

  ‘I know, you know,’ came a voice, distracting me from my musing.

  A thin, grating voice. The voice of one Dr Neil.

  ‘Good to see you as always, Dr Neil.’

  Dr Neil didn’t like me. There didn’t seem to be any one incident behind the dislike, I think it was just my personality, which I have it on good authority can be annoying.

  ‘It’s Dr Smith! Call me Dr Smith, you lowbrow shit-mopper!’

  ‘You know, name-calling isn’t very nice, Dr Neil.’

  He glared at me, pacing back and forth across the bathroom like a pasty tiger, wondering whether or not to pounce on the majestic antelope stood proudly before it.

  ‘Where is she, shit-mopper? Where’s Chloe?’

  ‘As I’ve already said, I don’t know. I wish I did.’

  I felt guilty lying about that to most people, but with this particular specimen, oh, it felt good.

  ‘Everyone knows you mooned after her,’ said Dr Neil. ‘Following her around like a little puppy. She was a doctor, she was one of us, the last thing she would have done was touch a little scrote like you.’

  Every part of me wanted to say, “Hey, I’ll have you know she fancied me and we mushed our chew-holes together just a few days ago, before I discovered the whole murder thing, but still! Mouth mushing!”

  I did not say that.

  Admitting to Dr Neil, or any police other than Maya, that myself and Chloe had recently become more than just friends, would very likely put me under a very sharp microscope. Woman goes missing? Keep an eye on the boyfriend and see how he reacts.

  Well, almost boyfriend.

  More or less boyfriend.

  I already mentioned the mouth mushing, yes?

  ‘Listen, Dr Neil, I’ve no idea where Chloe is, or what happened to her. If I did I would tell you. We were friends. Good friends.’

  ‘I’ll never know what she saw in you.’

  Hm. Did Dr Neil have a crush on Chloe? I’d never really considered that before. I liked to spend as little time as possible thinking about Dr Neil, generally speaking, but he seemed genuinely upset. Angry even. Had he been nurturing a little unrequited love for Chloe at the same time as me? That would explain the obvious animosity he had for yours truly.

  ‘I’m sure the police will find her,’ I told him. ‘Safe and sound, you’ll see.’

  Doctor Neil grunted, then turned on his heel and stormed out of the bathroom. That must be it. A secret love that had festered inside of him for years. Now, a more unpleasant person might use that revelation to try and shift attention onto that other person. To drop a little anonymous tip that perhaps years of jealousy had finally gotten too much for old, frustrated Dr Neil, until finally he’d snapped and done something rash.

  Tempting.

  But no.

  No matter the pressure I was under, that wasn’t me. Even if Dr Neil was an epic wanker.

  It was about three seconds after this thought that I looked up at the bathroom mirror to see Chloe reflected back at me.

  Yes, the same Chloe who I had killed just a few days previously.

  Which, all things considered, was a bit of a bloody shock.

  4

  Of course, there’s no way that had actually been Chloe in the bathroom mirror.

  No way.

  The explanation was simple: I hadn’t been sleeping, I felt a huge amount of guilt over Chloe’s death, and, well, I just plain missed the girl I’d known. Loved even. And so hello momentary delusion.

  When I blinked, the reflection had disappeared. The only thing I saw was my own slack-jawed face, staring bug-eyed at something that was no longer there.

  Couldn’t have been there.

  I felt queasy and decided to cut short my shift. I told Marge I was sick, shoved my overalls in my locker, and hurried out to the Uncanny Wagon.

  It definitely hadn’t been her.

  I just needed to sleep, and to get away from the place we’d spent so much time together. That was all. Hopefully.

  Then again…

  Were ghosts a thing in this new world of monsters and magic that I’d stumbled into? If there were souls that could be eaten, then that suggested ghosts were a thing. Maybe there was a book on that back at the coven. I made a mental note to ask Eva about that.

  I was halfway back to my flat in Keswick when those familiar words rang out for the second time that day.

  ‘All hail the saviour!’

  ‘Getting a mite tired of that,’ I said to the fox on the passenger seat. ‘Don’t you have any fresh material?’

  The fox lowered his axe and slumped his shoulders. ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said, sighing. ‘What d’you want now? I was hoping to go home and have a bit of a nap.’

  ‘I want nothing but my own death.’

  ‘Right. Cheery.’
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  ‘She, however, wants much more.’

  I wasn’t sure exactly when or how it happened, but I suddenly became aware that I was no longer driving down a familiar road. The Uncanny Wagon screeched to a halt as I stamped on the brakes. I stopped with such force that the fox tumbled from the passenger seat and down into the footwell with a startled cry.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  The fox grumbled as it clambered back up and twisted its helmet into the correct position.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘The Red Woman wants to see you.’

  I stepped out of the car and looked up at the fire that raged across the sky. No blue, no clouds, just an endless expanse of flames.

  I was in the Dark Lakes.

  The bizarre, bone and blood smeared counterpart to the Lake District. A place that—so I’d been told—was home to an army of the dead that awaited my instructions.

  Well, they could just keep on waiting. The fact they were dead and most likely evil aside, I didn’t feel at all comfortable in a managerial position.

  ‘She has nothing I want to hear,’ I told the fox, who was trying to encourage me to follow him.

  ‘How’d you know? Maybe she does.’

  ‘I’m not interested in whatever is going on here. Not interested in any army, especially not a dead one. Not interested in any of your Magic Eater nonsense. Can’t you just tell her to find some other poor sap to bother? I’m sure there are any number of power hungry maniacs back there who’d welcome a zombie army with open arms.’

  ‘Not my job. Not my instructions. Not my duty. I am here in service of the Red Woman, and she commands that I watch you, look after you, and bring you to her when she so desires. Best not keep her waiting.’

  The fox turned and strode forward. Well, strode as best as its little legs would allow, its bushy tail bobbing along in a jaunty fashion behind it.

  I sighed and followed on. What was I supposed to do? I had no idea how to hop back into my own version of the lakes, so the best I could manage was to do as the fox asked and get this over with as quickly as possible.

  The Dark Lakes was an empty, quiet sort of a place. Actually, quiet is probably not the right word. It was more like you sensed an absence. A loneliness that nipped at your skin. A raw longing. An itching despair. The scent of tragedy in the air.