by M. V. Stott
To feel vaguely human. I understood the appeal, if not the sensation.
I nodded and looked around the room, reaching out with my senses as David began looking through Lucy’s drawers.
‘You know, I’m not exactly sure what you’re hoping to find,’ he said. ‘Unless there’s an empty can of magical sleeping gas under the bed.’ He laughed, then looked at the bed for a few seconds. He stepped over, knelt down, lifted the dangling duvet and looked under the bed. He let the duvet drop and turned to me. ‘No gas can.’
‘Nothing in the air either. Not like at the hospital.’
There was no strange signature to the room’s magic. No hints of the dark shadows I could almost see back at the room full of sleeping children.
David sighed and sat on the small, single mattress, the springs creaking as it adjusted to his weight. ‘Okay, so we’ve got six kids from the same class falling into comas on the same night. And all of them zonked out after they got into bed. None of them fell face-first into their dinner, or collapsed in front of the TV. They all went to bed like normal, and the first time anyone knew something was up was when they didn’t get up for school the next morning.’
‘And now they all have something over them. Something I can’t quite see.’
‘Right. So…?’
‘I’m not sure.’
David sighed again and leaned back, one hand resting on the pillow. He stopped and turned towards it.
‘What is it?’
‘I heard a crinkle.’ He lifted the pillow, there was a piece of paper folded underneath. He looked up at me, one eyebrow raised.
‘Could be something,’ I said.
‘Yeah, or it could just be a love note Timmy had Gina pass Lucy during Chemistry.’
There were just three words on the piece of paper, neatly written with red biro in flowing, joined-up handwriting.
‘Well?’ asked David. ‘Don’t keep me in suspenders, what does it say?’
I handed him the piece of paper.
It said Wake No More.
8
We checked a few of the other kids’ bedrooms but didn’t find any other notes. I’d wondered if the note under Lucy’s pillow held some sort of curse. That whoever rested their head on it slipped into a coma. Written words can be infused with magic and used like booby traps. The lack of notes in any of the other bedrooms quickly derailed that idea.
Still, it was too strange a coincidence to dismiss, so as David left to head back to the hospital, I made my way home, to the coven, the note stored safely in my pocket.
‘Wake no more,’ I said, as I walked down the blind alley that led to the coven door. I rolled the words around to see if any residual Uncanny taste or images emerged just from my saying them, but there was nothing.
I entered the coven and made straight for the main room, throwing my leather jacket over the back of a rocking chair and causing it to creak back and forth noisily before settling into silence again. I remembered how much that creak-creak-creak would drill into my head when I was having a bad day. Trin, one of my witches, moving back and forth, a tireless piston, the sound of the chair accompanied by the click-clack of her knitting needles as she created an endless supply of scarves, sweaters, and gloves.
Some nights Trin didn’t go to bed at all, and I’d lay awake in bed, squashing earplugs in to try and cut out the noise that seemed so enormous in the dead of the night.
Now I missed that noise.
Sometimes I even lay awake, unable to sleep, because I couldn’t hear it.
I pulled the note from my pocket and opened it to reveal the neatly-penned words.
Wake No More.
Nothing else. Just one piece of paper with those three words written dead in the centre.
I grabbed a piece of chalk and crouched down onto one knee, sketching a simple pentagram shape onto the one-metre square piece of black slate fixed to the floor in front of the open fireplace (the fireplace was rarely used, the coven has central heating. We’re not savages). Great waves of power washed towards me as I raised both hands above my head and acted as a focal point for the magic in the room. I placed the correct words together in my mind, then pushed my open palms towards the chalk pentagram, infusing it with power. The lines glowed red for a heartbeat, then went back to normal.
I placed the note, open with the words visible, at the centre of the pentagram, then kneeled before it, hands on my thighs, head bowed and eyes closed.
The light in the room dimmed, though I hadn’t turned them off. It was the magic, responding to my request. My request to explore, to investigate, to interrogate. I was pushing everything I could think of into the piece of paper, sat in its place of focus within the chalk pentagram. Demanding the power within the London Coven reveal something about the note, about the words. To reveal the curse that had been placed upon it.
I came at the problem from every direction I could think of. Used any spell or magical command that seemed useful, but they all came up with a big fat nothing.
As far as I could tell, the paper wasn’t infused with any magic at all.
The words written upon it weren’t cursed.
The ink wasn’t laced with anything that might seep out and put the child in a coma after they closed their eyes.
It was just an ordinary piece of paper that Lucy had written three words onto.
I swore and sat with a thud on the floor, glaring at the note.
It must mean something. I could feel it. This wasn’t just some random coincidence. The piece of paper meant something. The words meant something. I just didn’t see the whole picture yet.
***
‘Is he here?’ I asked.
Lenny nodded and gestured to a far corner of the The Beehive pub. Razor was hunched at a table alone, half hidden in shadow.
‘Can I get you another of what you had last night, Stella?’ he asked.
I remembered how I felt waking that morning, pictured myself a little too close to Detective David Tyler’s lips the previous evening, and shook my head.
I made my way over to Razor and sat down on the stool opposite him.
‘Familiar,’ he spat.
The last time I’d spoken to Razor I’d left him in a bloody heap on the toilet floor, but that was months ago. Now fresh bruises patterned his face. By the looks of things, someone else had dealt him a beating, and recently.
‘You’ve been in the wars, there, friend,’ I said. ‘Care to talk about it?’
He glared at me, ‘What do you want? Did you come here to attack me again?’
I smiled. ‘No, not this time,’ I replied.
‘Oh, it must be my birthday. Hip-hip-hooray.’ He sneered, exposing two rows of sharp, yellowed teeth.
Razor was an eaves; a low-level Uncanny that specialised in knowing things. In skulking around and picking up secrets to pass on for a price. In the case of an eaves, the price is a dose of magic they feast upon. Despite being Uncanny, eaves don’t have access to magic in the same way as I do, but they crave its nourishment.
If you want information about something, there’s a good chance the likes of Razor know it.
I slid Lucy’s note across the table towards him. He glanced down, then back up. ‘And? What’s this then?’
‘You tell me.’
‘It’s a piece of paper, Familiar. I’ll take my fee now.’
‘Funny.’
He picked up the paper with the ragged nails of his cigarette-stained fingers and sniffed it.
‘Where’d you get it?’
‘From under a kid’s pillow. She went to sleep and never woke up.’
‘Aw, you’re going to make me cry here.’
I snatched the piece of paper from his dirty digits and stuffed it into my jacket pocket.
‘“Wake No More”,’ I said. ‘What does that mean to you? Have you heard the words used before? As a hex, as anything at all?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Well, thanks, Razor, you’ve been a big he
lp.’
I stood and began to make my way to the exit, frustrated to arrive at another dead end. I still wasn’t used to actually investigating. I’d been created to fight, not to gather intel.
‘Hey, Familiar.’
‘What?’ I sighed half-turning back to him.
‘Don’t think I’ve just forgiven you for what you did to me. That was over the mark.’
Was Razor really trying to threaten me? I twitched in his direction and he shrank back into the shadows.
‘That’s what I thought.’
I turned my back on him and walked out of The Beehive, feeling my phone vibrate in my pocket. I pulled it out. It was David.
‘Anything new?’ I asked.
‘You know, you really need to work on your greetings. Most people go with a friendly “hello”.’
‘Get to it,’ I replied.
‘That note we found, I think I might have some new info on it.’
9
The flat belonged to Angie Tyler, David’s sister. I realised then that I hadn’t even known he had a sister. To me he was just David. A detective in the police force and a friend, and that was all… at least until we got drunk the other night and… no, I didn’t even want to think about that.
Angie lived in a terraced house in Acton, West London. The Victorian house had been split into two dwellings, with Angie and her daughter taking up the bottom floor.
Angie opened the door. She was in her mid-thirties with a riot of dyed-blonde curls that she’d attempted to tame with various clips and bands. She didn’t remind me of David at all.
‘You Stella, then?’ she asked.
‘Yep.’
‘Let her through, Ange,’ came David’s voice from inside.
I followed her through into the front room. The TV was on, halfway through an episode of Murder, She Wrote.
‘There she is. Hey, Batman,’ said David, hopping up off the couch.
‘Robin,’ I replied, nodding in his direction.
‘What?’ said Angie.
‘Oh, inside joke, sis’, never mind.’
‘Right. I’ll put the kettle on then.’
As she left the room David turned to me, his eyes widening momentarily, ‘Not one for the big chucks and yucks, my sister.’
‘I didn’t know you had a sister.’
‘I didn’t know myself until about six years back. Turned out my Dad had been a bit of a twat before I was born and got another woman pregnant. Angie turned up on my doorstep one weekend, telling me she was my half-sister.’
That explained the lack of family resemblance. She must take after her Mother.
‘Okay, so why am I meeting your sister?’
***
Amy was thirteen years old and had inherited her mother’s mess of thick curls, though hers were dyed bright purple.
She looked up from fiddling on her phone as we entered her room and stood sharply from the edge of her bed, as if we’d just caught her doing something embarrassing. ‘Oi, Uncle Dave, heard of knocking, yeah?’
‘Why, what were you doing?’
‘Nothing!’ she said, her face flushing.
‘You know I’m a police officer? Family or not I will cuff you and take you to the station, isn’t that right, Stella?’
‘Um. Yes. That is right.’
Amy rolled her eyes, but then broke into a giggle. She obviously had more of a sense of humour than her mother.
‘Stella Familiar, this is my awesome niece, Amy.’
‘Familiar? What kind of a second name is Familiar?’ she asked, arching a brow.
‘Well, it’s the kind of second name I have,’ I replied.
Amy looked to David, who, judging by the grin plastered across his face, was enjoying this awkward little conversation.
‘Okay,’ said David, ‘Tell Stella what you told me.’
‘Which bit?’
‘The whole bit.’
Amy sighed and sat back on the edge of her bed, looking down at her phone and sweeping her thumb across it to absent-mindedly scan Facebook.
‘It was just after what happened to all those kids. On the news. Not waking up and that.’
She shifted uncomfortably.
‘Go on,’ David prompted.
‘Well, there’s this rhyme and stuff that we all know at school, a sort of dare thing, and it’s scary even though it’s stupid. I know it’s stupid, I’m thirteen, I’m not a kid.’ Her face flushed again with a mix of embarrassment and anger.
‘You’re very grown up,’ said David. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, like I say, there’s this rhyme that kids at school started sharing. And then I heard on the news about the kids going to bed and not waking up, and Uncle Dave came over for lunch and he’s talking to Mum about it all. Mentions this note he found under one of the kid’s pillows—’
‘“Wake No More,”’ I said.
Amy nodded and looked at her knees, then back up at me, her eyes saucer-like. ‘I said the rhyme! I was trying to show Carly Fisher I wasn’t a baby, so I said it. Said it like eight times, because I’m not a kid, and now, what happens if I go to sleep? Will I wake up again? Am I gonna die?’
A tear escaped her eye and ran down her cheek. David sat next to her and put his arm around her.
‘Hey, Ames, it’s okay. You did the right thing telling me, because you know what bad things hate? Me and Stella over there. Nothing bad is going to happen to you, you have my word. Okay?’
She looked up to him and sniffed, wiping away the tears with the back of her sleeve and nodding. ‘You promise for real?’
‘For real.’
‘Amy,’ I said, ‘What happens if you say the rhyme? What are you all scared of?’
‘It’s just stupid, dumb kid stuff, that’s all. It’s just, the word is, if you say the rhyme out loud, it will come for you when you sleep. It’ll find you in your dreams and you’ll never wake up again.’
Wake No More.
‘What’s the rhyme, Amy?’ I asked.
‘I don’t wanna say it out loud again. It’s just, it gets under your skin. So Uncle David asked me to write it down instead.’
She stood and made her way over to her little dresser table and picked up a piece of paper. She held it away from her, pinched between two fingers as she walked back to me, like she was afraid it would bite her if she held it any closer.
As I took the note she gave a slight shudder of relief and quickly made her way to the other side of David, hiding behind him.
The first line of the note was familiar, the rest was new…
Wake no more
Said nobody’s child
Kicked and beaten
Turned mean and wild
Wake no more
Said the fearful small
For now I am here
To punish you all.
10
David and Amy talked with Angie for a while as I sat on the couch and sipped my tea, re-reading the rhyme over and over as Jessica Fletcher taught the police of Cabot Cove how to solve a murder.
‘For now I am here, to punish you all,’ I said under my breath.
The words had weight. On paper, they were nothing, just ink. But as I spoke them, I could feel the darkness that existed within them. Feel the magical shapes they cut in the air around me.
A curse activated by being spoken out loud.
The shapes of the words were strange and made no sense to me. But I could feel things in them. Feel dread. And terror. And pain. It was like I could hear a small voice, crying out in pain, at the back of my head. Something alone and terrified and angry. No, not angry, furious. A white hot, blind fury.
And there was something else too.
A hunger.
A relentless need to go on and on and on. This wasn’t some one-time phenomenon. Six kids went to bed the same night and never woke up, but that was just the beginning. The opening act.
I looked down at the piece of paper again and muttered the rhyme under my breath so only I could hear
it. I felt the mess of feelings wash around me again...
More, more, more, never enough, never, never, never—
‘For now I am here, to punish you all.’
All.
The children of London were in danger. Every single one of them.
***
Amy had spoken the rhyme out loud, so there was no way we could leave her behind. The only place she could be was with us, even if that meant filling her in more on the nature of what was happening. Filling her in a bit about me and about the Uncanny. The alternative was leaving her behind and vulnerable to whatever it was that was behind this… this bewitchment.
‘She’s gonna stay with me for a few days,’ David explained to Amy’s mum. ‘A little uncle-niece bonding time, isn’t that right, Amy?’
Amy nodded, looking guilty as hell. Angie shrugged and made sure her daughter packed a bag with enough clothes to last a few days.
‘She was a bit easy to convince,’ I said later, as the Tube train roared and rocked.
‘She’s okay. She wants us to have a close relationship, so any time I wanna drop in, or take Amy out, she’s all for it. I can’t say I feel great about lying to her, though.’
‘What would you have told her?’ I asked. ‘That her daughter might be prey to some malevolent sleep curse? She’d have thought we were crazy.’
‘I know, but still. Got a little guilt-seed in my belly.’
‘The worst thing we could have done was leave her behind, David. Trust me. I spoke the poem out loud. I felt it. There’s something going on with the words when they’re all together. Something awful living inside of it. And Amy’s spoken them out loud.’
I looked over to Amy, stood holding onto a bar, swaying back and forth, earbuds in and listening to music through her phone.
She was just a kid. A little girl who wanted to listen to music, scowl at her Mum, and talk nonsense with her friends on the internet. And now she was in the sights of something I couldn’t quite see.