Twice Damned: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Ghosted Book 3)

by David Bussell

My dad’s words, telling me to be strong.

  Think like Superman.

  Useless drunk. What did a man who walked out on his family know about being strong?

  Still, I bit down on my lip and gripped that cable for all I was worth, wrapping it twice around my wrist for extra purchase. The pain was excruciating. I felt like I was going to be torn in half. I held on though. Held on despite everything. Despite the agony, despite the betrayal that had lead me to this point, despite the pure hopelessness of my being here.

  Think like Superman.

  Think like Superman.

  Think like fucking Superman.

  And then, finally, and with a sharp crack, something gave.

  I’m happy to report that it wasn’t me. Instead, one of the chain’s links jawed open, and the maggot—let fly like rubber band—shot into the depths with my anchor in its mouth. Thank Christ. I must have weakened the leg iron with all that bashing I’d given it earlier. Finally, one for the plus column.

  I cried out in triumph as I clawed my way out of the pit. I’m not a religious man, but in that moment I’d have welcomed them all into my heart: Jesus, Odin, Cthulhu, the whole frigging gang.

  I heaved myself onto terra firma, gasping for air, limp as a piece of wet lettuce. There’d be no opportunity for rest though. No time to grab a breather. Not while the maggot was heading back to the surface, jaw snapping, teeth gnashing.

  I just about managed to roll to one side as it erupted from the ground like hot lava, went spiralling into the air, then came raining down on my face.

  I threw my arms up defensively and caught the fleshy sausage in my hands. It was much bigger than I’d given it credit for, about four feet in length and coated in a thick layer of slime, which made it a real bastard to keep hold of. It snapped at my nose with its ring of knife-edged teeth, drooling on me, hot and foul, breath like an unflushed toilet. I dug my fingers into the maggot’s leathery hide and managed to flip the thing over and wrestle it to the ground. Climbing on top of the piss-coloured worm, I bore down on it with all my weight and punched it hard in what I approximated to be its head.

  Wallop.

  ‘Out of your element now, aintcha?’ I hooted, as I landed another blow.

  I was giving that maggot a right old seeing to.

  I swung again and the grub spritzed me with black blood. A couple more like that and I’d have had it, but the sneaky bastard refused to play ball.

  The maggot wriggled free of my grip, sliming its way from under me and digging into the rotten earth to resume its subterranean activities.

  ‘Arsehole!’ I yelled, as it slipped away, back into its element.

  I staggered to my feet, hoping I’d taught the maggot a lesson, but true to form, it did an about-face and redoubled its attack. I really was losing my patience with the thing by this point.

  What now? I could have run I supposed, but I was too tired to have made it very far.

  Time to put on my big boy pants.

  What I needed was a weapon. Scanning my surroundings, my eyes landed on the support pole of a broken-down market stall covered in the cinder-choked remnants of union jack mugs and gas mask bongs. No longer tethered to the ground, I limped over to the stall and wrenched the pole from its moorings.

  The maggot cut through the ground like a shark through water. A train of earth churned in its backwash as it rushed toward me, eager to make its kill. I took up the pole and held it in front of me like a medieval lance.

  Almost on me.

  Almost on me.

  I narrowed my eyes and adopted a sniper-like focus.

  The giant maggot exploded from the ground with a belch of ash and dirt, sailing through the air and opening its mouth like some grotesque flower—

  —And I ran it right through.

  Ran it through from mouth to tail, skewering it on my lance like a sausage on a stick.

  21

  Only once the excitement from the fight had worn off—once the adrenalin had bled fully from my system—did I remember I was trapped. The jaws of Hell had snapped shut. This was it for me. My Hiroshima of the soul.

  Eventually I decided, seeing as I was going to be knocking around this place for the foreseeable, that I might as well make myself comfortable. So I went home, or the Hell equivalent of it anyway. Not to the office in Chalk Farm where I ran my agency from. Not to the place I was at before that, the flat I lived in with Sarah, back when I was alive. No. Where I went back to was my childhood home. The place I’d lived in as a kid, before I emancipated myself from my family and ended up on the path that led to me becoming an exorcist.

  If you asked me why, I still couldn’t tell you. A homing instinct maybe? I certainly didn’t go there for any sentimental reason. I had no fond memories of the place. No nostalgia. All I got when I thought of that house was the smell of booze and the sting of my mum’s backhand. Still, it was as close to a home as I had now, and honestly, what did it matter where I hung my hat at this point? I was in damnation, never mind the location.

  My heels dragged in the dirt as I slogged across the bleak landscape of Camden Hell. I missed the sun. I missed a sky, clear and blue. But here in Hades, the sky never changed, forever the colour of shite after one too many pints of stout.

  The house was different but the same. Hell had stripped it to the bone and turned it skillet black, but then it had always been a hollow, colourless place. I stepped through the ruined front door and laughed as I caught myself wiping my feet on the welcome mat. Even as a kid it was only something I only did out of habit. The house was so filthy from neglect that you’d have been better off wiping your feet on the way out than in.

  I went to the front room and dumped myself face-down on the settee. The one I used to lay on to watch cartoons as a little kid, the cloth on its arm worn through to the cheap wooden frame beneath. The hole I’d made, despite the repeated thrashings my mum had given me to teach me not to put my feet on the furniture. My first real rebellion.

  ‘Hello, Jake,’ said a man’s voice. ‘You’ve grown.’

  I twisted around to see someone stood in the doorway, his face set in the same signature resting smirk that had become my own. Only I wasn’t smirking now, I was staring at him, bug-eyed, mouth jawing silently.

  ‘Dad?’

  He looked to be about my age—maybe a few years older—the age he’d have been when he died of a heart attack. God, he looked just like me. You’d have thought we were brothers.

  This place. I felt as if I was losing my mind every half hour.

  ‘It’s good to see you again, Son.’

  The feeling was not mutual. Aside from the fact that I straight up despised the bloke, I had doubts that it was even him I was talking to. Yes, he’d died back in the Nineties, and Lord knows he’d earned a place in Hell, but who was to say that this wasn’t just some demon wearing his face? Another of the Devil’s little scams.

  Springing to my feet, I grabbed the intruder roughly, pushed him up against a wall and cocked a fist. ‘Who are you?’ I demanded.

  ‘I know I was never around much, kiddo, but surely you remember your old man?’

  ‘Prove it!’

  ‘How?’ he cried.

  ‘What’s my middle name?’

  He sighed. ‘Trick question: I never gave you one. Are you still pissed off about that?’

  It was him alright.

  ‘Tell me what you’re doing here,’ I insisted, fist still raised, knuckles white.

  ‘Are you going to punch me, Jake? Is that it?’

  ‘Why? Worried you'll get hurt, Dad? Don’t worry, just pretend you're Superman, eh?’

  Unable to contain my anger, I sent my fist over his shoulder and put a hole in the plasterboard wall.

  There was a flatline of silence, then he spoke. ‘You know I only told you the Superman thing to keep you distracted?’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I snorted. ‘Distracted from what?’

  ‘From the spell.’

  ‘Spell? What did you say? Sa
y that again.’

  ‘The spell,’ he repeated. ‘When you broke your arm, I used a numbing spell on you. To mask the pain. Picked the trick up from a Sufi I met in India, back in my college days.’

  He was talking about magic. Healing magic too, which is a real pig to master, so if he was telling the truth, he must really have known his onions.

  ‘You’re saying you’re a magician?’

  ‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘Where do you think you got it from? You know what they say: the apple never falls too far from the tree.’

  I was knocked for six. My no-good, errant, bottle-of-Famous-Grouse-a-day dad was an Uncanny?

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Jake. I’ve always had a talent for magic, ever since I was a boy. I only knew the basics back when you were a lad, but I’ve learned a lot more since. I educated myself in augury for one thing, which is how I knew you’d be stopping by. What about you, Son? Did you master the arts?’

  ‘Well…’ I said, embarrassed at my relative ineptitude, ‘I can pop a lock like no one’s business.’

  ‘That’s all?’ He looked disappointed. ‘You never did apply yourself.’

  I laughed bitterly. ‘What, like you applied yourself to your marriage? To your kids?’

  His shoulders slumped in defeat. ‘I suppose I asked for that.’

  ‘Too right you did!’ I yelled, feeling my throat go hoarse, watching my spittle hit his face. ‘You walked out on us, Dad! What kind of a man does that?’

  He took it like a champ. Didn’t fight back. Didn’t defend himself. Just met my eye and told it like it was.

  ‘I used to blame everyone else for my problems, Jake. Your mum, you, your sister, the whole wide world. It wasn’t my fault that I drank. Never mine. That was someone else’s crime. It took coming here to make me realise that it was an inside job all along.’ He opened up a cabinet and produced an unopened bottle of single malt. ‘Fancy a tipple?’

  ‘Are you taking the piss?’

  ‘For you, not for me. I don’t touch the stuff these days.’

  He placed a single tumbler on the sideboard and poured me a generous measure.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked, eyeing the bottle.

  There was that Fletcher grin again. ‘Told you I was magic, didn’t I?’

  He handed me the tumbler. I didn’t take it, so he set it back down again, and there it sat on the sideboard, as inert as our conversation.

  ‘So,’ he said, taking a seat in an armchair and drumming his fingers on the armrest, ‘what shall we talk about, Son?’

  Resigned, I laid back down on the settee opposite him and kicked up my heels in another act of dissent. ‘I don’t know, Pops? Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been up to your whole life?’

  He laughed. ‘Not much to tell, really. The rest of my life was just as much of a mess after I walked out on your mum.’

  ‘And what about this?’ I said, gesturing to our surroundings. ‘How did you wind up here?’

  His face darkened and he looked to the carpet. ‘They say I ran someone down.’

  ‘They say?’

  He spoke in a reedy whisper. ‘Drunk hit and run. I don’t remember doing it. If you think I was a drinker back when you knew me, you should have seen me after I left.’ His knee jittered as the ball of his foot bounced nervously off the floor. ‘The heart attack came before the trial.’

  I refused to let my face betray any sympathy. ‘So, you wound up in the Castle?’

  ‘Yeah, but I didn’t stay there for long.’ He waggled his fingers, miming casting a spell. ‘Found the hospitality a little lacking.’

  Dizzy had mentioned a breakout; maybe Dad had been instrumental in that. He’d certainly proven himself a flight risk in the past. I suppose I could have asked him outright how he’d managed to gain his freedom—I mean, we were hardly pressed for time—but his escape from prison wasn’t uppermost of my thoughts.

  ‘What made you come here?’ I asked.

  ‘I reckoned it was about time I came home,’ he replied, ‘even if I am about thirty years too late.’

  If he expected me to laugh, he was barking up the wrong tree.

  ‘I should never have run out on you, Jake. Really. I don’t know what else I can say. But what’s done is done, and I don’t expect forgiveness. Jesus, don’t expect it, don’t want it, don’t deserve it.’

  ‘Then you’re in luck.’

  Is this what I had to look forward to now? Stuck here with my deadbeat dad, listening to his worthless apologies for all eternity? Was this my real Hell? A beware what you wish for punishment for the kid who used to pray for his dad to walk back through the door?

  He offered me a wan smile. ‘That's enough about me though. What about you, Son? You look skinny.’

  ‘Yeah, I died.’

  He didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘Heard about the ghost thing. Shame. Still, at least you’ve got your health, eh?’ he added with a wink.

  He was trying so hard to win me over it made me sick.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said, exasperated at the man. ‘You expect me to just sit here and pal around with you now, is that it? A good old bonding sesh?’

  ‘I don’t expect us to be friends, but—’

  ‘—Tell me why you did it. Tell me why you buggered off and left us with her.’

  ‘It wasn’t any one thing,’ he sighed. ‘I was young, had two kids before I was ready, got stuck in a loveless marriage. I couldn’t hold down a job, and had myself a serious drinking problem...’

  He went on like that, cliche upon cliche. There were no real revelations. No one big calamity that set him running, just a series of hardships heaping on top of each other, until, finally, something gave. He didn’t leave us because of anything we did. He left because he didn’t know what else to do. Not out of malice, but because he was scared.

  I held up a hand. ‘Okay, okay.’

  I found it hard to stay angry at the man. Sure, he’d done some horrible things in his time—you didn’t need to tell me that—but the sins of life don't amount to all that much in death. Besides, I’m no angel myself. I’ve done bad things too. Sure, I never walked out on two kids and flattened someone in a hit and run, but hey, he’d already been judged by the Almighty for those evils. My scorn seemed a bit puny by comparison.

  I stood and walked over to the sideboard. ‘I think I will have that drink after all,’ I said, picking up the tumbler of whiskey.

  What else could I do but raise a glass to this ludicrous situation? Oh, there was one thing, I supposed:

  ‘I’m tired of being angry at you, Dad,’ I said, as I tipped back the drink. ‘I think I’ll stop now.’

  I slumped back onto the settee with my empty glass and saw the corner of his lips begin to turn upwards.

  Immediately, I felt strange. My eyelids heavy. My mind in free fall.

  ‘Did… did you put something in the whiskey?’ I rasped, as the glass tumbled from my hand and rolled across the carpet.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You… poisoned me?’

  ‘Not poison. Magic. I gave you a priming potion.’

  ‘For what?’ I looked down at my hand. It was insubstantial. Only half there.

  ‘For getting you out of this place,’ he said. ‘I’m going to do one good thing with my life, Jake, even if it is a bit late in the day.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ I felt woozy, ready to pass out.

  ‘You don’t need to understand. You just need to combine your magic with mine. I’ve prepared the spell already, but there’s a missing component that I need you to help me with.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The magic word,’ he replied, smiling. ‘Your middle name.’

  ‘I don’t… have a middle name.’

  I remembered the story my mum had told me so many times. How my dad had written his own name on my birth certificate, too drunk to realise he wasn’t signing for a package.

  ‘You do have a middle name,’ he insisted.
‘I just never gave it to you.’

  More games. I was so tired of games. ‘Tell me… what it is.’

  ‘Jake.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, Jake. That’s your middle name. After mine.’

  ‘Then... what was... my first name meant to be?’ The fog had returned, smudging the edge of my vision like vaseline on a camera lens. Like a dream sequence from an old yank soap opera.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Dad asked, and I managed a nod. ‘Your middle name—the magic word—is... Barnaby.’

  I coughed up a laugh. ‘You mean… I was almost called BJ?’

  Dad laughed too. ‘Yup. Maybe being a no-good drunk wasn’t the worst thing I ever did, eh?’

  I giggled drunkenly. ‘Barnaby,’ I said, and as I said it, I felt something change inside of me. I looked down to find my hands had all but vanished.

  ‘Goodbye, Son.’

  ‘Wait,’ I slurred, ‘don’t go.’

  ‘I have to, Jake. I belong here. But you don’t.’

  The world smeared like a Polaroid yanked out too early, and then it was gone.

  22

  Silence rang in my ears. I was floating. Floating in blackness. Twisting aimlessly in the void.

  What was this? Where had dad sent me? Was I in purgatory? Was that the only place left for me now? No longer welcome in the land of the living, blackballed from Heaven and Hell. Was this what had happened to all of the ghosts that I’d cleansed? Sentenced to an eternity of personal nothingness. Trapped in a lifeless limbo.

  I suppose I deserved it. I’d had my time among the living, I was glad to be out of Hell, and Heaven was a closed shop for someone of my standing. Besides, did I really want to end up in the Good Place anyway? I’d spent years polishing my halo, but really, what was Heaven anyway but a big cloud full of corpses? The zoo where they kept God.

  I turned again in the void, the silence comforting now, the pure, unpolluted darkness that surrounded me actually quite tranquilising. I didn’t feel desperate or panicked or claustrophobic. I felt resigned to my fate. I was okay with where I’d ended up. At peace.

  Then I saw something peeking through the blackness. A glimpse of something solid in the inky gloom. Was I not alone after all? Was I sharing this purgatory?