He wore a white shirt turned nicotine yellow under a faded tailcoat, the back of which licked at his heels like a serpent’s tongue as he lead me into his parlour.
I followed him through a forest of long, sticky flytraps that hung from the ceiling, studded with dead bluebottles. The Coyote walked ahead of me, his posture hunched, his arms barely moving. He looked like a rejected concept drawing of Quasimodo.
We arrived in a windowless room lit by a single, naked bulb, its sickly glow illuminating the outlines of a few tatty bits of antique furniture. A raven clinging to a perch squawked as we entered.
‘Shall we begin?’ the Coyote asked, clapping together a pair of waxy, white hands.
‘How about you start off by telling me exactly what it is you do?’ I replied.
He offered me a piano-key grin. ‘I specialise in helping people get from this plane to the next,’ he explained, ‘sneaking them under the wall, so to speak.’
‘Simple as that, eh?’
‘Simple as that.’
‘And when you say “the next”...?’
‘...Heaven mainly,’ he clarified. ‘The bulk of my clientele are people who want in on paradise, without the scrutiny that getting there entails. Rich men looking to bypass the pearly gates. CEOs stricken with cancer, retired lawyers dying of old age, disgraced priests given months to live. The list goes on.’
‘So you help these people duck the red velvet rope, and get fat off the profits?’
‘That’s about the size of it, yes.’
I thought of Sarah, buying her way out of jail after she’d orchestrated my murder. The real sharks don’t get tangled in the mariners' nets, oh no. The big fish never end up on the dinner plate.
Behind my back I screwed at my wedding ring, but the nut wouldn’t slip the bolt.
‘Here,’ said the Coyote, holding up an envelope. ‘Your paperwork.’
‘Come again?’
‘For your escort. There’s a return ticket inside. Once you have your man, hand it over and have him read the details off the reverse to get him back here.’
I went to take the envelope off the Coyote, but he snatched it back.
‘Don’t expect Hell to be so civilised,’ he smarmed, his mouth doing something grotesque that I think was meant to be a smile.
I really disliked this bloke. He’d made a career out of counterfeiting Get Out of Jail Free cards. Helping villains cheat their fates and sneak into the Promised Land. I’ve done some dodgy things in my time, but this guy was an absolute toilet. The kind of person who’d watch Philadelphia and come out rooting for the AIDS.
I kept my contempt contained though. I had a job to do, and the Coyote was holding all the cards.
‘I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ he said, ‘but you’re a ghost, aren’t you?’
‘That’s right,’ I replied. ‘Why, are you worried I’m going to try and make sexy pottery with you?’
He made a noise that was something like a laugh. ‘Tell me, why would a ghost want to go to Hell? Was dying once not good enough for you?’
‘It’s a job,’ I said.
‘Ah, yes,’ he replied. ‘I had the pleasure of meeting your client when she paid up front for my services. She looked fine and smelled even finer. Of course, you wouldn’t know that, what with being a phantom.’ He put the envelope up to his hooked nose and took a couple of lungfuls. ‘Dabbed with her perfume,’ he said.
The man was oilier than a Friday night kebab.
Sensing my displeasure—and possibly my bunched fists—the Coyote handed over the necessary paperwork.
‘Thank you,’ I said, tartly, snatching the envelope off him.
There was a photograph of my target paperclipped to it. A young lad in his teens, bowl-cut hair, pretty boy features.
‘Now, where’s my visitor pass?’ I asked. ‘Only I’d quite like to come back from Hell myself once this gig’s done.’
‘Of course. I’ve already prepared your return document, as instructed. I just need to put your name on it.’ True to his word, he placed an extra ticket on a desk, dipped a quill into an ink pot, and prepared to furnish it with the necessary monicker.
‘The name’s Jake Fletcher,’ I told him.
‘That's your full title? No middle name?’
‘No,’ I replied, recalling my useless, drunk of a dad.
‘Surely everyone has a middle name?’
‘Apparently not.’
The Coyote shrugged and scratched a title onto my ticket before blowing on the ink and stuffing it into an envelope. ‘Don’t lose it,’ he said, handing it over. ‘There’s no foreign embassy in Hell.’
‘Okay,’ I replied, placing the envelope in my jacket pocket along with the other one, ‘that’s the way home mapped out, now how do I go about getting into the Bad Place?’
‘Oh, Hell's a lot easier to gain access to than Heaven,’ the Coyote explained. ‘Not many people queuing up to get in there.’
He turned and whipped a sheet of black velvet from what I’d assumed was a table, but turned out to be a coffin set on a wooden bier.
‘And what am I supposed to do with that exactly?’ I asked.
‘Climb aboard,’ the Coyote replied, sweeping a hand across the casket.
‘You’re having a laugh.’
‘You’re welcome to back out,’ he said, making a face that just about begged to be slapped. ‘Either way, I get my money.’
I wasn’t having that. No way was this Class A prick getting paid because his one honest customer hired a bloke who didn’t have the stones for the job.
‘Then what are we waiting for?’ I asked climbing into the silk-lined coffin and sitting there like I was riding a canoe. ‘Onwards and downwards.’
I saw the Coyote’s eyes glitter. ‘Very well,’ he replied. ‘I’d wish you happy trails, Mr Fletcher, but the journey to Hell is likely to be the least of your worries.’
He indicated that I lie back, so I shrank into the coffin and made myself comfortable. Well, as comfortable as it’s possible to be inside of a funerary box.
The Coyote slowly slid the coffin cover into place until the last chink of light was pinched from existence. The darkness pressed in on me, oppressive and heavy. As I lay there, arms pinned to my sides, I became convinced that my breaths were getting shorter, despite the fact that I don’t actually breathe. I heard sharp knocking sounds from above, the Coyote hammering nails into the casket with practiced precision, one blow for each nail. No going back now.
After what might have been a minute, but could have been five—it was impossible to tell with nothing to mark the passage of time—the Coyote finished his circuit of the coffin and all was silent. I tilted my head and pressed an ear to the wall of the coffin, straining to make out a sound.
Nothing.
No movement, no mystical invocations, just the quiet, wordless sonnet of the void.
Then, wham!
A startling jolt followed by a powerful rushing sensation that left my stomach somewhere in the heights of my ribcage. It was as though the casket I was trapped in had been blasted from a cannon.
Whoosh!
I felt g-force pull at my face as I hurtled feet-first into oblivion, screaming the whole way there. Only when the last of the cry had escaped my lips did I realise that the ride had come to an end.
The casket drifted gently now, floating along like a log flume returning to the station to pick up a fresh batch of riders. I lay there, mind fried, shaking like a shitting dog. Only once the horror of being shot blindly into the unknown had subsided, was there room for a new, even more frightening thought.
Where was I?
A sudden panic overtook me and I found myself clawing at the lid of the coffin and screaming again.
My screams made no sound.
I tried to illuminate my surroundings by summoning a magical flame in my palm, but when I spoke the words of the evocation, none came. My lips flapped soundlessly in the vacuum. It was as though some prankster god had po
inted his remote at me and hit Mute.
Hysterical now—in a manly way—I rained blow upon blow on the roof of my prison, until finally I felt it start to give. I managed to get my knees under it, and with one final push, pried the lid away from its nails and lifted it off.
I expected to be greeted by light. Burning reds and phosphorous oranges; the landscape of Hell. The Devil’s territory. Instead, I only found more black. A vast ocean of bewildering darkness. An infinite night.
And yet, there was something.
I twisted in my floating coffin and saw something quite unexpected.
A planet.
I was in outer space, looking down on the cloud-blurred contours of a great, spinning sphere. Its seas and continents were a vague, swirling mottle of greys and browns. This was a dead world, bereft of life. Bereft of hope. And surrounding it, rotating in the opposite direction, was an immense ring.
A ring that I was a part of.
It was made up of a sum of different parts, but unlike Saturn’s great halo, these parts weren’t chunks of ice and rock.
They were coffins.
Coffins of all shapes and sizes, millions upon millions of them, stretching out in a great arc, as far as the eye could see. I stared at them, wide-eyed with wonder, as I drifted along with the flow of caskets, pirouetting endlessly around the giant, lifeless marble below.
What are you supposed to do with that kind of information?
I mean, really?
Fucked if I knew, which is why I chose to lay down, slide the coffin lid back into place, and enjoy the rest of the commute with an uncluttered mind. There are some things in this life you’re just not meant to understand, I reckon, so why get in a tizz about it?
But the ride wasn’t over yet. My container lurched to the left and I found myself sliding on my back toward the coffin’s foot piece. Soon the casket had tipped completely vertical, and I realised with some alarm that I was standing upright as the box plummeted towards who-knew-what.
Horrified, I rode out the rest of the nail-biting plunge—my scream returning as the pine torpedo carried me from the sky—until it finally met the ground in a terrific explosion.
Boom!
The fragile casket shook hands with unforgiving matter, and when I opened my eyes I found myself lying upon a bed of kindling at the bottom of a smoking hole, spat to the ground like a chewed up wad of bubblegum.
I was alive!
Well, you know, as alive as a ghost is going to get.
Concussion still ringing in my ears, I propped myself up on wobbly, toothpick legs, and clambered up the sloped wall of the crater to pull myself topside.
I was in Hell alright, but not the Hell of a Bosch painting.
This Hell was an urban dystopia. A post-nuke wasteland. A once-proud metropolis reduced to a godless, inner-city junkyard.
The husks of ravaged buildings nodded to the ground like tired old men, desperate for their beds. Rivers of abandoned cars choked the roads, burned out and turned to rust. Ash swirled about my ankles, carried on the caprice of a dirty breeze.
I inspected my immediate surroundings. The Coyote’s coffin had delivered me next to the crumbling ruins of a bombed-out train station. A sign hung crookedly from a crumpled metal awning above me, and I craned my neck to get a read of it.
CAMDEN TOWN, it said.
So, Hell was Camden, was it? I suppose I should have seen that one coming.
9
The Devil’s abode wasn’t some fiery pit lurking beneath the Earth's mantle, though it was a touch on the humid side.
The Hell I’d arrived in was a cracked mirror-image of my usual stomping grounds. This was a Camden turned upside down and back to front. A Camden whose lights had been turned out. Whose very air was grotty and corrupt. A Camden Town that had been torn to pieces instead of being left to bob gently on a wave of polite gentrification.
The sky above was an ink spill flecked with a few grains of salt, a pinprick scattering of stars spread across a permanent night. It was as though Satan had unzipped his trousers and pissed out the sun.
I took a few steps into the wasteland, feeling disorientated, struggling to find my equilibrium. My centre of gravity seemed out of kilter, as though someone had snuck into my gut and moved it five yards to the right. I took out the compass Prudence had given me and tried to get my bearings, but when I looked down at the dial, my attention was drawn to something on the ground.
A lone shoe.
Nothing unusual on the streets of my Camden—I pass by one most days when I’m not dodging coils of dog mess or pools of pigeon-pecked vomit—but there was something different about this discarded loafer.
It still had a foot in it.
Triggered by my intrusion, a cloud of flies scattered from the foot in a whine of protest. I recoiled, staggering backwards into a dilapidated phone box. Putting a hand out to steady myself, I snagged my palm on a jag of broken metal, which gouged a red split into my flesh.
I cursed and stared at the cut in disbelief. Wounded by a phone box. Now there was a turn-up for the books. Apparently, I was solid here. Not just some thin wisp of consciousness, buffeted by the winds of circumstance; I was a man of flesh and bone again.
As I’m sure you can imagine, this came as a bit of a surprise.
The thought of having a physical body was both thrilling and terrifying. Thrilling, because I could feel and smell and taste everything around me. Terrifying, for all the same reasons. Being an apparition, I’ve gotten used to being bulletproof. On Earth, life’s rough edges hold no fear for me. When I walk into the road, I look straight ahead, traffic be damned. When I step into a lift, I don’t bother to check whether the shaft is empty. I dance with Death and take him for breakfast afterwards.
But I was going to have to be careful here. Very careful. This was a world that had been custom designed to kill me. Every part of it stung my senses, as though it were expressing its indignation at my trespass. The smell of the place savaged my nostrils; a brutal bouquet that smelled like a mountain of burning corpses with an overture of human shit. Despite the breeze and the sunless sky, the air was dank and sticky, and when I licked my lips, I tasted my own sweat as it ran from my face, briny and hot. As my anxiety grew, I felt my heart pounding in my chest, brought to life as if by jumper cables.
I focussed on the compass. On my job. On the only thing that I had any real control over.
The needle pointed south-west now, so I waited until my heart had stopped pounding, then headed off in the direction of my target. I couldn’t pinpoint my destination exactly, which rendered my powers of translocation pretty much redundant, so I’d have to make do with my legs. Still, I attempted a trial jump to a point-of-sight location, just to make sure everything was ticking over as it should be.
Of course it wasn’t.
As well as losing my powers of intangibility and invisibility, I’d also lost the ability to instantaneously hop distances, which made me something of a sitting duck in this place. Hell had robbed me of my every advantage, leaving me with all of the bad stuff and none of the good. Out here, in Camden’s dark reflection, all jagged and spiteful, I was just a big balloon full of blood, begging to be popped.
As I trekked through the desolate wasteland, glancing at the needle of my compass as I went, I was overcome by the niggling sensation that I was being watched. It was a feeling that made me want to run in every direction at once, but instead I stayed the course, shaking off the blanket of dread and continuing on my way. I figured if someone or something really were tracking me, surely they’d have struck by now?
Perhaps this was just how Hell made everyone feel. A permanent paranoia that eyes were on you and the worst was about to happen.
Then I heard a scream, sharp and loud.
Was that my target? The person I’d come here to rescue? Could it really be that easy?
I looked to the compass again. No, the needle pointed the other way.
Don’t get involved, I told myself. This i
sn’t your problem. You’re not here to interfere with the ecosystem. Just carry on flying under the radar and do your job. In and out like a randy chimney sweep, that’s the way to do it.
Did I heed my own advice though? Did I, balls.
Instead, I instinctively found myself running in the exact direction of the disturbance, proving once and for all that there’s no situation I can’t turn into a bad decision.
I rounded the ruins of a destroyed pub and saw a young man in an army uniform engaged in the fight of his life. Literally. A giant, fanged maggot chomped at the soldier’s leg, its maw a ring of large, white teeth, mean enough to chew through granite. The only reason the maggot hadn’t made off with the soldier’s limb already was because he’d managed to get inside the thing’s mouth with a length of steel rebar, which he was using to pry its jaws apart.
The giant maggot looked like nothing that existed in reality. It was a sickly yellow colour and covered in a thick, segmented hide that oozed with a phlegmy mucus. I’d never seen anything like it, and would have been happy for it to have stayed that way.
‘Help me!’ screamed the soldier, spotting me as I appeared from behind a patch of debris.
The uniform he had on looked to be from World War Two—the Allied side, I was glad to see—and he wore a cluster of medals pinned to his chest.
I drew my shooter and took aim at the maggot chewing on his leg, but then remembered my six bullet limit. Did I really want to use up what little ammo I had saving a bloke I didn’t know? A bloke who’d wound up in Hell? He could have been a full-blown war criminal for all I knew.
‘Please,’ he begged, losing the fight with his attacker, whose teeth had almost gnawed through the makeshift crowbar and torn into his calf.
What could I do? I couldn’t just let the man die. Or re-die, considering his current surroundings.
I pulled back the hammer of the gun and lined up a shot, but the maggot squirmed and thrashed, making for a hard target.
I hesitated. Even though I pack a piece, marksmanship isn’t my strong suit. London’s not exactly flush with shooting ranges, and my eyesight’s never been too sharp. I’d be taking a big risk sending a bullet the soldier’s way. Still, how else was I supposed to take down that maggot? Kill it with good vibes? Talk it to death?
Twice Damned: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Ghosted Book 3) Page 5