I looked from the safe house to Max and back again. My jaw dropped, but at least it didn’t fall off. . . .
“You can’t be serious.” I gawked up at the wrecked outline of the massive building perched on the crest of the hill. “How can you call this a ‘safe’ house? It doesn’t even look safe to be in. For starters, half of it’s missing!”
Max gave me a lopsided, guilty grin, but Jem
ini cut him off before he could offer any sort of explanation.
“It was Evil Clive’s idea,” she stated, shoving past the pair of us and making her way directly up the hill. “It’s the highest point overlooking Mortlake. It will be easier for Cheapteeth’s demons to find you here.”
Easier to find me? I played these words over and over in my head, but they sounded wrong.
“I thought the idea of a safe house was that the bad guys wouldn’t find you,” I complained, reluctantly following the receding vampire girl.
“Evil Clive reckons we should dangle you like bait in front of Cheapteeth,” Max muttered, keeping pace with me. “You know, so that he sends his minions to try to snatch you.”
“And that’s what he wants to happen?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
I looked up at the wreckage once again. It loomed large against the murky skyline. Seemingly half the house was missing: I could see open rafters and gaping holes in lower outlying roof sections, and the east wall was no more than a stack of crumbling bricks around an old stove.
I remembered the place from my school days. They called it Prospect Hall, which always made me laugh. The locals avoided it, partly because it was rumored to be haunted, but mostly because it was structurally unstable and had claimed the lives of at least three builders.
In the normal world, no one lived there and the entire building had long been abandoned. However, the dead had definitely been busy here. . . .
“Get ready to meet someone very special,” Jemini said cheerfully.
To my astonishment, she marched up to the house and knocked on the front door. This was particularly pointless as we could all see an old lady sitting beside the fireplace through the front-room wall and could have easily just shouted to her instead. It took nearly ten minutes for the door to open, and—when it did—the frame shifted several inches.
There, outlined in the doorway, was the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen in my life.
There were spots on top of moles on top of boils: the massive wart on the side of her neck had so much hair that for a second I actually thought there was someone else standing beside her.
“Hello, Jem,” she said, with more of a grimace than a smile. “You all had better come inside; I was told to give you some dinner.”
Jemini nodded, stepped into the doorway, and turned around to beckon us forward.
“You already know Max,” she muttered. “The other one is Ed Bagley. Ed, this is Mrs. Looker.”
I wasn’t prepared for the name: I just wasn’t. I tried really, really hard to keep a straight face . . . but I still spat out my tongue, and part of my cheek landed on Mrs. Looker’s left shoe.
I was apologizing on and off for the next hour, even as the poor old crone was dishing up milk and cookies. To make matters worse, half the flesh around my stomach flopped onto what remained of the carpet, so the first cookie I ate landed in a series of mushy puddles around my feet.
“So . . . er . . . thanks for letting me stay here, Mrs. . . . Looker,” I said, trying to divert attention from the mess on the floor.
The old woman nodded, and I noticed that her eyes were glowing blue. “That’s okay, dear. I don’t get many visitors these days . . . and, of course, I can’t leave.”
“Mrs. Looker is a gaunt,” said Jemini instructively. “Gaunts are like ghosts, except they’re not allowed to wander. Mrs. Looker is cursed to haunt this house for all eternity.”
“Wow,” I said. “That really sucks—this place is a serious dump. You must—”
Max elbowed me in the ribs.
“This was my family home, dear,” Mrs. Looker said, without even the slightest trace of anger or upset. “I’m afraid it’s gone to ruin over the last few years.”
I was about to mutter some feeble attempt at an apology when Jemini leaned over and whispered in my ear.
“Her husband is still alive. He’s in a nursing home in the living world—it’s best just to let it be.”
I smiled weakly at the gaunt but couldn’t help feeling a bit sad for her. There were ghostly photographs of the old woman’s family everywhere.
“You’re not looking too good, pal.”
The statement had come from Max, and looking down at myself, I could see he was right.
My flesh, which had until now been dropping off in ugly lumps and leaving me looking like a giant walking slab of Swiss cheese, was beginning to change. A horrible, sallow shade had seeped beneath it, and every layer looked stretched in some way, like plastic wrap gets if you pull it tight over the top of a jar.
I was, quite literally, rotting away.
The others were staring at me, all except Mrs. Looker, who was holding down the tablecloth so that it didn’t blow away in the wind.
I didn’t want to ask the question, but I couldn’t help myself—I had to know. “What happens when this all peels off? Do I just . . . disappear?”
Jemini, the world’s foremost source of knowledge on everything, shook her head. “No, you shed back to the bone.”
For a moment, I just gawked at her. Then I put two and two together, and my eyes widened.
“Is Evil Clive a zombie?” I sputtered, starting to rise from my chair. “Is that why he’s so determined to protect me, because I’m like him?”
A deathly silence settled over the table, but it was interrupted when part of the living room wall suddenly imploded, spewing several bricks onto the threadbare carpet.
Max immediately assumed a sort of half-wolf shape: it was a warning sign I’d seen a few times before, like a dog sensing danger.
I got to my feet as quickly as I could.
Two werewolves forced their way through the gap in the wall, then parted to admit the sad and bedraggled form of Forgoth the Cursed. I’d only met little Forgoth once, but while the kid was undoubtedly pathetic to look at, he was certainly worth having around in a fight . . . as was Mumps, the free-roaming demonic entity who masqueraded as his teddy bear.
Max immediately sprang to his feet, one eye on the cloud-covered moon. Even Jemini and Mrs. Looker became visibly tense.
“What—” I started, but Forgoth put a finger to his lips and pointed up at the sky.
“They’re coming,” he whispered. “And there are loads of them.”
FOURTH MISTAKE:
Forgoth was puffing and panting, green mist and ghostly essence spilling out around him like a cloud of dust. I couldn’t guess exactly how a phantom might run out of breath, but he was certainly showing all the signs of heavy exhaustion.
“C-C-Clive asked me to keep a watch on Cheapteeth’s circus,” he managed, as we all gathered around him. “B-but as soon as I arrived on the edge of the field, all these flaps opened up in the big top and a load of demons flew out.”
“Demons?” Max asked, sharing a pained glance with Jemini.
Forgoth nodded. “Small, red, and spindly with sharp teeth and leathery wings. They look like a red cloud when they’re all together. The midget and that weird floating girl with the sewn-up eye left with them. They’re heading this way.”
“We should run!”
The words were Max’s, not mine, but my formerly possessed left hand twitched at the merest suggestion of fleeing from Kambo Cheapteeth.
Did I mention how much I hate being a zombie? Oh good, thought I might have forgotten to do t
hat.
“So . . . do we run or not?” Max repeated.
As usual, he and Forgoth were looking at Jemini and everyone was ignoring my opinion completely, despite the fact that if the demons did turn up, it would be me they’d carry off in a cloud of zombie dust. I was getting increasingly annoyed at just being ignored; everyone seemed to know more about my situation than I did, and no one ever managed to spare the time to fill me in. It was like constantly being at a surprise birthday party you hadn’t wanted.
“Evil Clive sent you here for a reason,” Mrs. Looker announced. It sounded like there would be more to her announcement, but she didn’t actually say anything else.
Yet another mysterious message with no apparent meaning.
I felt my hand twitch suddenly, and every muscle in my body tensed.
Suddenly there was an ear-splitting thunderclap and a streak of lightning that seemed to come straight out of a B horror movie and into my face.
Literally.
“Argh!” I screamed, jumping about three feet in the air.
“Ed!” Jemini shouted, rushing over but stopping short of actually touching me. “Are you okay? You just got electrocuted!”
“Really?” I yelled back, my fingers finding a lump of charred flesh where the crest of my skull used to be. “Do you think?”
“Bad luck, dude,” Max growled. “That’s mental. Seriously, of all the places it could have hit!”
“Yeah,” I muttered, picking at bits of my head and flicking them spitefully at the walls. “I thought the same when the truck got me.”
The second flash of lightning seemed to go on forever and lit up the afternoon sky around Prospect Hill.
I really wish it hadn’t.
FIFTH MISTAKE:
To say the demons occupied the sky in every direction would have been an understatement: they were the sky.
It took me a while to realize that each tiny gap between two demons was in fact filled . . . by at least two other demons. They were horrible, spindly, chittering humanoids with long claws, screwed up faces, and leathery wings.
The sky was heaving with them.
“We’re mincemeat,” Max whispered, eyeing the writhing mass of bloodred skins. “Well, I mean, you are already, but—”
“Look!”
Everyone stopped talking when Jemini pointed a shaking finger at the middle of the floating army. There, supported on a cushion of her own bizarre airstream, was Jessica Stein, Kambo Cheapteeth’s demented sidekick.
I couldn’t get the word harpy out of my head whenever I looked at her.
She hovered on the wind like some giant insect, hair plastered over her sallow face and black, rotting teeth forcing her mouth into a sick smile. Her one good eye was hidden under the flow of jet locks, while its opposite continued to ooze freely from the stitches that held it firmly shut.
Thanks to Jemini’s brilliant research skills, we now knew a lot more about Miss Stein than we had when I first ran into her. A tightrope walker with a love of unspeakable heights, she’d been committed to a lunatic asylum after she went wild during a show and started to randomly attack the audience. Before the police could capture her, however, she’d broken into a shop that sold doll’s houses and sewn one of her own eyelids shut. No one knew why.
What we did know was that in death she could float unaided and had claws like a dragon.
“Run!” Forgoth shouted, shaking me from my reverie. “Run!”
“NO! STAND YOUR GROUND! THEY WILL NOT ENTER THIS HOUSE!” Mrs. Looker cried, throwing out her hands in a wild gesture. All the doors and windows slammed shut, some with such force that a line of terrible cracks appeared in the plaster. The house on Prospect Hill had sealed like Fort Knox in a matter of seconds.
I would have been quite impressed had it not been for the fact that we were watching the sky through a hole in the living room wall.
We didn’t get much time to dwell on this, as it was at that precise moment that the demons fell on us like a rogue wave in a surfing competition, breaking over the house in their hundreds.
“They can’t enter the house,” Jemini whispered excitedly, as several of the gangly creatures dived for the gap in the wall only to recoil as if they’d flown into a hot griddle. “It’s Mrs. Looker—she’s done something to the boundaries.”
The two werewolves who’d accompanied Forgoth through the wall immediately took to their heels, furring up and howling like the wind as they exploded from the house and tore into the demons.
Half submerged in the throes of change, both werewolves hit the demon swarm with a bang. Two of the hideous creatures immediately flew back into the air, somersaulting over each other and screaming in frustrated anger at the strength of the frenzied attack. But victory for the werewolves was short lived: two demons cast aside became four swooping back; three ripped apart became six fresh and ready to bite.
“They’re two of my pack,” Max growled, his teeth and fingernails beginning to lengthen. “And they’re not at their strongest without moonlight. I can’t just stand here with you guys and watch them shredded in front of me.”
“Maximus Moon,” Jemini said, turning to glare at him. “Don’t you DARE go out there.”
But she was talking to dead air: the wolf leapt through the hole and tore to the defense of his friends, just as another batch of demons lunged out of the sky.
“Max!” Jemini screamed, leaning out of the opening in the brickwork and making frantic gestures with her arms. “Max!”
Blue coils of electricity covered the holes in the house like fishing nets, repelling the demons at every point. Mrs. Looker muttered under her breath, snakes of energy crackling from her hands and feet as her eyes rolled back inside her head. As a further raft of electric tendrils danced from her shoulders and sizzled all over the house, she snatched hold of Forgoth, preventing the little phantom from leaving the house.
More and more demons flocked to attack Max Moon, and I watched with mounting horror as he reared and struck out in full werewolf form, sending several of the fiends somersaulting backward amid spiraling sprays of their own glistening green blood.
Well done, Ed. A voice cackled inside my head, and it had an edge to it. I couldn’t tell if it was my own voice or the voice of Kambo that dwelled in my hand . . . or even some strange mixture of the two, but it was definitely talking to me.
That’s the spirit. Watch your friends suffer and die while you’re safe on the inside, protected, coddled, safeguarded by the old witch woman. There’s a word for what you are, Ed—a word that sums up exactly what you’re all about.
COWARD.
Max was losing the fight. Max Moon, my first real friend in the world of the dead, was being forced to his knees by the demon horde, while their cackling and demented ghoul of a leader hovered in the sky and clapped her hands with unconcealed glee.
COWARD.
Mrs. Looker threw me a warning glance, but she’d have needed an army to stop me from hitting the hillside.
I might be a pathetic, putrid, stinking zombie, and I might be losing more and more flesh by the day . . . but I was still possessed of a limb that had single-handedly eviscerated packs of ghouls and an entire clan of revenants. It was time to fight.
I exploded from the opening in the wall and half rolled, half fell down the hillside. It wasn’t the way I’d planned to enter the fight, but my right leg crumbled a bit so I went down pretty much on impact.
The demons were on me before I’d even had a chance to roll over. Flapping their leathery wings, they wrenched me up and into the air.
They were deceptively strong and about twice as savage as they’d seemed when viewed from the house: I was in big trouble.
A rain of tiny-clawed hands carved into me, ripping slits in my face, arms and stomach, while two different sets of needle-t
eeth fastened on my thighs and ankles. I was being eaten alive.
I screamed with rage and frustration, turning and twisting to escape the millions of tiny points that seared into my flesh like burning needles, forcing every nerve in my body to throb with sudden, terrible agony.
The pain was unbearable, even for a dead guy like me.
Max Moon was faring slightly better, maybe due to my arrival, and had fashioned a rhythm of ferocious lunacy that seemed to be holding the flock at bay. He looked like a ball of hair, teeth, and claws being spun on some sort of wild axis. At least he was holding his own.
I wriggled with all my might, gasping a few torn breaths and watching through tear-streaked eyes as more and more of the little crazies cannoned into me, fastening themselves onto my rotting corpse with every means at their disposal.
This was a slaughter.
To make matters worse, I was being lifted further and further from the ground. Raised into the air and held aloft like some teddy bear snatched by a claw in a mechanical toy dispenser, I caught a sudden surge of fear as the demons began to fly apart. The pain still throbbing through multiple bite and claw wounds, I craned my neck around to see what was happening.
At first, I suspected they might be trying to quarter me. There were at least three on each of my limbs, and their wings were beating furiously.
Then, just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, they suddenly did.
The demons weren’t trying to quarter me, after all.
They were holding me out like a prize . . .
. . . a prize for her.
Jessica Stein, glaring down at me from lofty heights with her one good eye, let out one last crazy, blazing cackle . . . and dived.
I closed my eyes out of sheer terror but couldn’t keep them shut. Evidently, some twisted part of my own frantic mind wanted me to see exactly what was going to happen to me at the hands of this demented nether-witch. I tried to scream as the evil monster soared through the air with her skirts flapping and lank hair spraying out in all direct-ions. Then something unexpected happened, not to me but to Stein herself.
Undead Ed and the Demon Freakshow Page 2