Hexed Detective_An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy

by Matthew Stott

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Eventually, I would’ve. I just… I didn’t know how legit the news was. Honest.’

  ‘Now, let’s not sully the moment with lies, Razor.’ He released Razor’s head and moved past him, stepping up on to the edge of the roof and looking out over the city, the surrounding office lights shining through the dark like distant stars. ‘Is what the late sewer-born said true? Has my artefact been spotted in Blackpool, of all places?’

  ‘Yes, so they say.’

  ‘They do say a lot, don’t they? Any name for me to hold on to during my travels up north?’

  Razor grimaced.

  ‘A name, Razor.’

  ‘Formby. The elder eaves in Blackpool. He’s been heard to mention your… your artefact, when he’s had too many ales. Says that someone in that place has it. Someone in Blackpool.’

  Carlisle turned to him and grinned. ‘Not for long, they don’t.’ And without looking, he stepped off the roof and fell out of view.

  5

  Ellie Mason could have sworn it was the next right, then the next left, then on until the roundabout, but now here she was driving down a road she didn’t recognise and the sky looked all wrong. It had a weird sepia tint to it, like a photograph in an old Western.

  ‘Shit,’ said Ellie. ‘Shitty, shit, shit.’

  Ellie had been to see a client two towns over and was now in a rush to get home to Blackpool. Her mum would already be throwing an epic shit fit. Ellie thought she had driven back the same way she’d travelled earlier, but now found herself driving up and down country lanes she didn’t recognise, and of course the sat-nav had decided to go on the fritz.

  There were no signposts, no other cars in sight, so she decided the very best thing she could do would be to turn around and retrace her steps. Sixteen minutes later she realised with a heavy heart that she was as lost as she had ever been.

  She pulled to a stop and checked her phone again, but found it still had a stubborn lack of signal. Ellie swore and struck the steering wheel with the heels of her hands. She was late. She’d promised her mum she’d be back home in time for dinner, and now she was late and getting later.

  It was just then that she saw the house.

  Ellie had not noticed the house until that moment, which seemed altogether impossible as it was so large, and situated directly in front of her. How had she not seen it? There were no other buildings along the road that she could see; indeed she didn’t believe she’d passed so much as a garage or a bus stop since she’d wandered off the path somehow.

  Ellie got out of her car and strode toward the front door. The house looked old. Very old. Vegetation covered much of the crumbling brick frontage, and several of the upstairs windows sported jagged cracks. If this had been a movie, it would be exactly the kind of house the main plucky heroine should definitely not approach, but always would.

  ‘Probably abandoned,’ Ellie told herself as she knock, knock, knocked on the front door, kicking up a tsunami of dust. She waited, but there was no response. Ellie gave it one last knock and then, just as she was about to turn and make her way back to her car, the door opened.

  Before her stood a man in a rabbit mask.

  ‘Oh.’ said Ellie, which was a reasonable response.

  The mask encased the man’s entire head, and was topped off by two large ears that pointed to the sky like antennae. The mask was not plastic or rubber, but covered with real, if tatty, fur. The man’s outfit was no less peculiar. He wore an old suit of the sort that may have been fashionable when her great, great, great, great, great grandfather was young.

  ‘Hello,’ said the man in the rabbit mask.

  ‘Hello,’ said Ellie.

  ‘Do you like my mask?’ asked the man as he stroked his large ears and smiled. Ellie did not know how she knew the man was smiling, but she did.

  ‘It was my mother’s, father’s, mother’s once upon a time, when the mountains were small and the seas were song, or so the story goes. For a time it was lost to us, but I found it where I thought I would, in the forest, under a tree, and I dug, dug, dug it up.’

  As the man spoke, Ellie felt a strange upside-down sensation in her stomach. She recognised that mask. She didn’t remember her dreams most of the time, but this one dream—this one recurring nightmare that had poked and prodded at her for her entire life—this dream she remembered.

  The dream of the rabbit mask.

  ‘Now, Ellie, how may I help?’ asked the man.

  It was silly. Daft. Absurd. A coincidence of some sort, surely? Dreams didn’t seep into the waking world.

  ‘I wondered if.... wait, how do you know my name?’

  ‘Because you look like an Ellie.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Oh yes, and I look just how you’d expect a Mr. Cotton to look.’

  Ellie looked back to her car and wondered why she wasn’t already running towards it.

  ‘Are you going to a fancy dress party?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, at some stage, more than likely,’ replied Mr. Cotton and his large ears twitched. Ellie ignored that, because of course the ears were just part of a tatty old mask and so could not have twitched at all.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, it’s just I don’t seem to know where I am and my phone isn’t getting a signal. Do you think you could direct me back to the main road? I’m sure I could find my way again from there.’

  ‘You would like to be put on the correct path?’ asked Mr. Cotton.

  ‘I’m running late and haven’t a clue where I’ve gotten to. Daft of me, really. I don’t know what happened, must have been daydreaming and taken a wrong turn or something.’

  ‘So many wrong turns lurk where the right turn may be,’ said Mr. Cotton, nodding. He clapped his white-gloved hands together and dust exploded, like a teacher slapping a chalk duster against the wall. ‘I believe I would like to help, and I believe I will. My brother would also like to help.’

  Ellie turned at the sound of someone breathing, rasping. Before her stood a second man, shorter than the first, but dressed just as anachronistically. This one, the brother, wore a tatty hedgehog mask. As Ellie watched, spiders began to crawl out of the eye holes of his hedgehog mask. Large, thick-legged spiders. Her breath caught in her throat.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Mr. Cotton, ‘my dear brother and I know exactly where you are going. Oh, we’ve known that for a long, long time.’

  Ellie’s mother called the police a little after nine that night.

  6

  Rita Hobbes and Dan Waterson were sat in the plush, warm front room of the house Ellie Mason shared with her mum. There seemed to be a numbers war raging between the amount of brightly-coloured pillows the room contained, and the amount of pictures featuring Ellie. The pillows were winning by one, as far as Rita could tell.

  ‘Sugar?’ called Janice Mason, Ellie’s mother, from the kitchen.

  ‘Two in one, none in the other, please Mrs Mason,’ replied Waterson.

  Janice Mason entered holding a tray with three china cups on it. ‘Here we go, three lovely cups of tea.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Rita, as Janice placed the tray on to the coffee table and retreated to a plump, bright yellow chair.

  ‘So,’ said Rita, ‘Mrs Mason, you haven’t heard from Ellie now in almost twenty-four hours, is that correct?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, her hands worrying at the hem of her cardigan. ‘I know I waited too long. Too long to call you. But she always tells me not to fret so much. She’s an adult, she says. But, you know, it’s hard when you’re a mum. Hard to give them space.’

  In fact, she had only waited two hours after the time Ellie had said she would return home before calling the police.

  Normally Rita and Waterson wouldn’t be asked to look into a case like Ellie’s. At least, not so soon. She’d barely been gone twenty-four hours, and she was an adult. It was too early to know for sure whether anything bad had happened. But, as it turned out, Ellie Mason was the same age as
Jane Bowan. Two females, of the same age, in the same town, go missing, without warning. Just disappear off the face of the Earth, without taking any of their belonging with them, and without using their phones, or their bank cards.

  But those weren’t the only common denominators.

  No, it turned out that Ellie and Jane had known each other. Matter of fact, they’d been in the same class in school growing up. Both officers had decided to keep Jane Bowan’s disappearance out of the conversation though. No sense upsetting Mrs Mason unduly.

  ‘Could she have gone to a boyfriend’s, or girlfriend’s, without telling you?’ asked Waterson. ‘Could it just be a case of crossed wires?’

  ‘No. No, no. We had a special meal planned, she would never forget that. And even if she had, why wouldn’t she pick up her phone? I’ve rung, and I’ve rung…’ Mrs Mason broke off, pulling a paper tissue out of the now half-empty box perched on the arm of the chair and dabbing her eyes.

  ‘Sorry if any of our questions upset you,’ said Rita, ‘we know how broken you must be feeling, but we need to get as clear a picture as possible to help us find Ellie.’

  Mrs Mason smiled and composed herself. ‘Yes, sorry, just all a bit frightening. I’m just so worried that I’ll never see her again. That something… that something very bad has happened to my baby.’

  No one liked this part of the job—sitting with frantic or grieving family members, telling them bad news, or pushing them to answer a barrage of questions with their heads in pieces—but Rita had got used to it. Or as used to it as she could. She made it a rule to stay detached from people like Mrs Mason, otherwise the job would have driven her to a nervous breakdown years ago.

  ‘Is there anything you can tell us about the days, or weeks, leading up to Ellie’s disappearance, Mrs Mason?’ asked Rita.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Anything, anything at all,’ said Waterson.

  ‘Okay, well, let me think on that.’

  ‘A change in her habits,’ said Rita, ‘a change in her way of acting around you, or other people. Maybe she said something that seemed odd but you brushed it off.’

  ‘I really can’t think of much.’

  ‘If anything comes to you, anything at all, let us know, okay?’ said Rita.

  ‘Yes, definitely, I’ll wrack my old brain and try to… well…’

  ‘Mrs Mason?’ said Waterson.

  ‘It’s nothing. Daft.’

  ‘Let us decide that,’ replied Rita.

  ‘It’s just, well, my Ellie has always suffered with bad dreams, off and on.’

  ‘Bad dreams?’ said Rita, looking to Waterson.

  ‘Yes. About a man in a creepy old rabbit mask. Probably from some old film she watched that she shouldn’t have. It’s just, in the last few weeks, she’d started mentioning how she’d been having the dream a lot more. Almost every day. But I mean, I’m not sure how that can help you at all.’

  Rita nodded and wrote ‘Rabbit Mask Dream’ into her notebook. ‘Thank you, Mrs Waterson.’

  Ellie Mason opened her eyes.

  Her throat was very dry, she ached, and she could feel the cold of the stone she was laid out on. She tried to get up, but found her wrists and ankles were attached to the stone; handcuffed?

  Ellie felt terror. Deep down terror that robbed her of the ability to talk, to scream, to beg.

  There was movement to her side.

  Ellie lifted her head to see a figure step out of the gloom. The figure wore dark red robes. A goat mask covered his head.

  Ellie tried to talk, croaked, coughed, attempted to regain control of her breathing, then tried again.

  ‘Please…’ her voice came out a thin whisper.

  The figure didn’t reply.

  It was then Ellie noticed what he held in his right hand.

  It was an axe.

  A small hand axe, a wooden handle, a rusted metal blade.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the man in the robes, his fingers flexing around the axe’s handle. ‘Thank you so very much.’

  Rita rolled off Chris Farmer as he panted and attempted to catch his breath, and looked up at her bedroom ceiling.

  ‘Well done, you’ she said. ‘Gold star.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ he replied.

  Rita sat up and reached for the glass of water from the bedside table, taking a sip.

  ‘So,’ Chris began.

  ‘So?’ Rita replied.

  ‘It’s really getting late.’

  ‘Yup. You’ll probably want to be heading home, what with it being a school day and all.’

  ‘Right. That’s absolutely what I was going to say.’

  Rita knew full well it wasn’t, but she was in no mood to soothe his feelings. She was happy with their arrangement, especially as she was planning to fly the coop pretty soon. It wasn’t her fault if Chris was looking for more. She had the feeling she was going to have to cut this sex-relationship off soon. Cut it off at the knees. It wasn’t her fault. She’d never intended for him to fall for her. She never wanted to break his heart, especially as she’d still have to work in the same building as him. Awkward.

  Chris leaned over and kissed her. ‘Okay, I’m off, you cold-hearted, sexy, loveless thing, you.’

  ‘Aw, that’s the nicest thing I’ve heard all day.’

  Chris laughed as he pulled his clothes back on, gave the side of the bed he’d just vacated a last, wistful look, then said his goodbyes.

  As soon as Rita heard the front door close, she stood and threw on the ancient, oversized t-shirt she wore to bed. She climbed under the duvet and was about to turn off the bedside lamp, but a thought itched at her. It was something Mrs Mason said, about Ellie having nightmares. And Jane’s fiancé, he’d talked about her having nightmares too. Of course, it had to be a coincidence... but when you added in the fact that they were in the same class together, suddenly it didn’t seem like such a stretch to add it to the case file. It was another connection after all, no matter how crazy it sounded.

  She checked the glowing digits on her phone. It was almost ten. Too late to call, really, but then this was about the case. She hustled downstairs, found the number in the file, and dialled. Four rings and then he answered.

  ‘Greg? Is this Greg Nicol?’

  ‘Hi, yes, I’m Greg, who is this?’

  ‘Sorry to call you so late, Mr Nicol, this is DS Rita Hobbes.’

  His voice wavered, obviously more worried he was about to hear bad news than good. ‘Oh, hello, yes, hi, what is it? Is there news?’

  ‘We have a number of promising lines of enquiry,’ Rita lied.

  ‘Oh.’

  Greg obviously saw through that one.

  ‘I just wanted to ask you a quick question, I think it might help.’

  ‘Okay, what question?’

  ‘You said Jane had been having bad dreams before she disappeared, right?’

  ‘Yeah. She’d had them all her life, but she’d been having them a lot more recently. Well, not “them”, “it”, the one dream. It was always the same one.’

  ‘Was it about a man in a rabbit mask?’

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  ‘Mr Nicol? Greg, hey, are you still there?’

  ‘How did… yes. Yes, she called it the rabbit mask dream. How did you know that?’

  7

  There were a lot of strange stories in Blackpool, and Formby knew them all.

  He knew the true stories, he knew the pretend stories, and he knew the stories that were both at the same time.

  Perhaps he knew those ones best of all.

  Formby was an eaves. An old eaves. Some said he’d lived as long as any eaves ever had, though his exact age was unknown. He’d lived too long and outlived too many for anyone to keep score.

  It gave him a certain celebrity in the Uncanny world, or perhaps notoriety was more accurate. Formby enjoyed it. Some people almost feared him. Said any eaves that had lived such an ungodly long time knew things, terrible things, that
no living creature should ever know.

  Well, there was some truth to that.

  Formby held secrets that must never be told.

  Truths that should always be denied.

  But back to the stories...

  Yes, Formby knew them all. It’s an eaves’ purpose to gather any and every bit of information that passed their large, slightly pointed ears. It all funnelled in and was stored in their memories. Everything they wanted to remember, and everything they didn’t want to remember, was in there, and Formby, like any eaves, was able to access it when needed.

  He knew the story of the Screaming Witch: a magical protector who fell for a demon and lost her mind. For laying down with a beast, the witch had been cast out of her coven—an unheard of thing—and was cursed to suffer never-ending torment.

  It was said, when the night was cold and dark, that if you listened closely, you could hear the cursed witch’s cries, weaved into the whistle of the wind. A normal person might miss the sound, as most were not attuned, but the witch’s screams were why the dogs of Blackpool were known to act strangely during a storm. To cower and bark and hide. They could feel the pain, the fear, and they wanted no part of it.

  If ever you took a walk on the beachfront alone after midnight and were very unlucky, you might even have seen the witch, staggering across the black sand, her face a mask of pain. Should you have the misfortune of crossing paths with the poor wretch, turn and head in the opposite direction, because if she were to lay a barely-there, icy finger on your skin, you would drop dead on the spot.

  Formby knew that story well, and had met with the Screaming Witch on many nights. Sometimes she was able to talk, to share scraps of information, but mostly she just begged for her torment to end. But there wasn’t anything Formby, or anyone else, could do to help her.

  He knew the story of the Devil Tree, too.

  In Carsters Park there was a giant, twisted oak, upon whose thick, gnarled limbs no vegetation ever grew, and no snowfall seemed to settle. Legend had it that a demon had been summoned in the park by a cabal of dark magicians, only for it to attempt to break free of their control. The dark magicians were forced to attack, to send the beast back to Hell, but part of the demon had remained. It sank into the soil and became part of an acorn that lay buried there, ready to sprout into an oak.