Bad Blood

by David Bussell

  I unfolded the paper. Written upon it in neat, fountain-penned handwriting was a list. A very long list.

  ‘Jesus, I thought I had enemies.’ I stuffed the note into my pocket. ‘Just know that I’m billing this one by the hour, and that my hourly fee is outrageous.’

  I turned and left the room, eager to say goodbye to Incest Mansion and get to work.

  4

  You make some strange bedfellows in this business, and the one I was about to pay a visit to was about the strangest I knew.

  I saw Palace Pier in the distance, the last remaining Brighton boardwalk, the only one that had yet to crumble into the sea, even though many of the city’s locals wished it had. The splendour of the pleasure pier had long since evaporated. Once a grand old Victorian folly, Brighton’s most well-known landmark was now a tacky, eye-wateringly overpriced tourist trap staffed by surly teenagers serving seafood that could turn a person’s stomach inside out.

  It was night-time still and the shoreline was frozen over, turning the pebble beach into a carpet of glistening white quartz that crunched beneath my thick, leather boots. I stepped beneath the shadow of the pier and saw icicles clinging to its underside like daggers of glass, ready to strike. I heard muffled grunts over the sound of the lapping tide and saw a huddle of silhouettes gathered among a shanty town of tents, set up under the pier for shelter. The city’s homeless. They reminded me of the skeksis from The Dark Crystal: frail, atrophied, dressed in piles of filthy rags. It was sad, really. Sleeping rough on a night like that, the salty coastal wind chipping away at them, eroding them like chalk until there was nothing left.

  I looked to the gloomy underside of the pier and called up. ‘You there, little man? Coochie coochie coo!’

  The rough sleepers didn’t pay me any attention. What was one more unbalanced woman raving away to herself in the night?

  At first nothing stirred, then I heard a wracking cough and saw something flutter down from the rafters. Not a flock of starlings, as you might expect, but a wee bonny baby. A chubby bubby. With wings.

  A flying baby, Erin? Have you been at the disco biscuits?

  Nope.

  Take it from someone who knows, the world of the Uncanny is a strange one. A never-ending circus. Actually, no, not a circus, more like a zoo. At least in the circus the animals are trained.

  The winged baby bobbed down to my eye-level and hovered before me.

  ‘Hi, Cupid,’ I said.

  Yup, Cupid. Him from the paintings and the statues, the one with the bow and arrow. Now, I know what you’re picturing: a precious little bambino with blue eyes and bracelets of pudgy pink fat around his wrists and ankles. Yeah, strike that from your mind. The real Cupid isn’t some unblemished, dewy little cherub. Far from it. These days, he looks more like a fermenting potato dressed in a grimy nappy. Worn down by the world, ravaged by neglect, his sapphire eyes—once cool and crystalline—now cloudy and grey. His voice bruised by years of cigar smoking, which had left him with the vocal timbre of a rolling boulder.

  Cupid let fly a great hacking wheeze and hawked some phlegm onto the beach, right beside my boot. Nice. ‘What do you want?’ he growled.

  ‘Got a job for you,’ I replied. ‘I’m looking for a kid.’

  ‘Bloody hell, I know you like ‘em young, Banks, but this is a new low, even for you.’

  I gave him a look so cold it could freeze mercury. ‘I’m not looking for a hook-up, you stupid cupid.’

  ‘Good. Because you know I’m out of the romance game. No use for it nowadays; the internet took care of that.’ He plucked the limp string of his bow, firing an imaginary arrow at nothing.

  ‘Can we get back to what I came here for?’

  ‘Well, go on then, get on with it, will you? I don’t have all night.’

  What exactly Cupid got up to at night I had no idea, but that was kind of the point. He was a squirrelly little bugger who kept himself to himself, and because of that he moved around Brighton pretty much unseen. That made him a useful set of eyes. Plus, he was small and able to get into places that most people couldn’t, and as an added bonus, he was only visible to normals he wanted to be seen by. That’s why the rest of the rough sleepers who lived under the boardwalk had no idea he was living in their attic. All in all, Cupid was the perfect spy, and I had plenty of use for a spy. Sure, I had my list of suspects to tick off, but it made sense to get the little angel involved too. Cover as much ground as possible, that was the trick.

  ‘The kid I’m looking for is named Leo,’ I told Cupid. ‘Leo Galoffi.’

  The cherub’s eyebrows practically shot off his head. ‘God Almighty, Banks, what have you got yourself into this time? The Galoffis ain’t for messin’ with. Last bloke I knew who had a falling out with them took a long walk off a short pier. This pier, as it happens.’

  ‘Maybe he just wanted a swim.’

  ‘Then the concrete boots were a bad choice.’ He shrugged and burped at the same time. It was a full-frontal assault on the nostrils. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll help you, but first I need to see the bunce.’

  I dug my wallet from my jacket pocket and plucked out a couple of twenties. ‘Here...’

  He grabbed them with his chubby little mitt and crammed them into the front of his nappy. ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll keep an eye out for the kid,’ he said.

  I bunged him another twenty.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘If you come across a man with red eyes, even a whisper about one, you let me know.’

  He squinted at me then bobbed his head. ‘Will do. Oh, you do know I’m colour blind, right? Did I mention that?’

  ‘Give me my money back,’ I said, but Cupid was already flying up and away. ‘You little turd!’

  I pulled my jacket closed against the night wind whipping off the sea and headed back up the beach, burning red eyes glaring at me every time I blinked.

  A kidnapped baby. Sophie’s sighting of a shadowy figure with blood red eyes. The unexpected reminder of my little brother’s abduction had stirred some things up in me. Things that refused to settle. Shreds of memories, eddying about my mind.

  Cobbled streets that didn’t exist.

  The world smeared in panic.

  An empty crib.

  I should have gone straight home. Back to my flat to get a few hours kip before I got to work. That’s what I’d intended to do. It took me a while to even notice that I’d headed off in the wrong direction. That my feet had taken me to another place. Somewhere I hadn’t been in a long, long time.

  I approached the graffiti-smothered construction hoarding that surrounded the council estate and tore the padlock from its gate. I say “construction hoarding” despite the fact that no construction was planned to take place there, and never would be.

  I grew up in this part of Brighton. It was bad then but it was even worse now. Back when I was a kid, the worst we had to put up with was mouthy teenagers, the odd mugging, and cars pulling doughnuts on the street (the ones that weren’t on concrete blocks, anyway). Now it was organised gangs, unprovoked stabbings, and people selling drugs right out of their kitchen windows. That last one was how the estate ended up surrounded by hoardings in the first place. You see, once the drug dealers had really bedded into the area, it didn’t take them long to move on from distribution and make the leap to manufacture. I mean, the police stayed well clear of the area, so why not grow some weed? Why not press some pills? Why not cook some meth?

  You’ve got to admire their entrepreneurial spirit, right?

  Thing is, it turns out that watching a few episodes of Breaking Bad doesn’t make you Walter White. These guys were more like Jesse Pinkman with brain damage. Heating explosive chemicals when you couldn’t manage a C in Science class is a surefire recipe for disaster, and that’s exactly what we got when a kitchen lab burned out of control and gutted half the estate. I read all about it in the newspaper. The tenants from the flats who weren’t torched alive were rehoused, and the whole building cond
emned. The only reason the place hadn’t been torn down completely was because, unlike the rest of Brighton, no one wanted to rebuild on the site. To this day the estate just sits there, a blackened mausoleum that even the locals won’t mess with. Board up the windows and salt the earth, that’s the attitude around these parts. Abandon hope all ye who enter.

  I swung the hoarding gate open, causing its hinges to shriek like ungreased brakes. I hissed, as though the sound would cancel the noise out and mask my intrusion, even though no one was listening. What was I worried about, disturbing shadows?

  I made my way across the estate’s scorched forecourt, surprised to discover that the building still smelled burnt, despite the fire brigade having long since doused the place. Thankfully for us, my family had moved out a few years before the blaze, but not before we’d suffered a tragedy of our own. Not before we lost my little brother, James.

  I hadn’t visited the estate since then. Since shortly after I’d woken up one night to find James gone and looked out of the bedroom window to see a pig walking on its hind legs. Saw a patch of dark with eyes that burned like molten rubies.

  I made my way up a crumbling concrete staircase to the second floor of the building. I worked a crowbar under a wooden board covering the front window of our old flat and prised it off. A charred, mulchy stench greeted me from within; burned wood dampened by firemen’s hoses. I took out my phone and found its screen (shattered from my run-in with the Galoffis’ goons; another expense to be added to their bill). I swiped the spidered glass and stabbed the button that lit the torch.

  I shone the light inside, into the kitchen, and saw the walls were blackened and blistered, the ceiling swollen and bellied out. I crawled through the window and set my feet down on a long-untrodden floor covered in fragments of dislodged plaster and broken tile. I checked the scorched kitchen cupboards and found a few rusted cans of tinned food inside: barely-remembered brands that had long since gone out of circulation.

  What the hell was I doing there? What was the point? All this place had to offer now were bad smells and worse memories.

  I padded deeper into the flat, through the empty, stagnant lounge and into the hallway, where the blackened walls came to an abrupt end. The fire had only affected the front part of the property – at the rear, the charred walls gave way to old, browned wallpaper blotched with water-stain scars.

  The flat was dark and ominously silent. I padded along creaky, charcoaled floorboards, my feet ringing loud as thunder, as though someone had turned the volume of the place to its maximum setting. A hallway led me to the back of the flat, past a bathroom laced by generations of spiders, and into a box bedroom.

  Into James’ bedroom.

  No one had taken over the property after my family moved out. The widely-reported child abduction made sure of that, along with the piss-poor rep of the area, so the parts of the flat that still survived were much as we’d left them. My parents couldn’t bear to look at James’ belongings after his case went cold, so his bedroom was occupied with artefacts of a life half-lived and hastily abandoned.

  The light from my phone found a constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars that once belonged on the ceiling, now scattered about the ground among stalks of fungus that had taken root in the soggy carpet. I saw an old combi TV/video, blanketed in dust. Flattened soft toys and empty photo frames. A poster of the alphabet hanging on by its last tack.

  A crib.

  Suspended over it was a mobile hung with rocket ships and planets to match the rest of the room’s theme.

  I went to the bedroom window, the one overlooking the green behind the estate, and in my mind’s eye I saw shapes there. A pig in sackcloth, standing upright like a man. My brother hanging in the air, kicking and bawling. A jumble of disjointed memories that made no sense.

  I sucked in a breath of mildewed air. What was I expecting to find? If James was out there still, alive, I wasn’t going to find him in the old family home. I was brooding on the past, and brooding wasn’t going to bring my brother back.

  I turned to the door, ready to leave, when a breeze rubbed my skin and sent the mobile above the crib spinning. At first I thought there must have been a crack in the window letting in air, but the wind wasn’t coming from outside. The wind wasn’t wind at all.

  The temperature took a sudden dip as the room turned unnaturally cold. Inside-of-an-igloo cold. Nipples-like-hat-pegs cold. A bitter frost shot across the walls, etching them with bolts of ice. The air around me was suddenly sprinkled with floating, frozen crystals that sparkled like granulated sugar. If it weren’t for what happened next, I might have thought it quite beautiful. Might have snapped a pic for Instagram, even.

  The bedroom door slammed shut with a terrific bang, so loud that I almost made a paint job of my panties. Next thing I knew, all the furniture in the room, crib included, was lifted into the air as if the house had been filled with invisible water.

  ‘What the…?’

  I ducked just in time to avoid a table lamp, which was sent my way by an invisible hand and delivered into the wall behind me with a splintering crash.

  Great.

  A poltergeist.

  A chair floated to the centre of the room, pivoted in the air, and came flinging at me. I managed to leap aside and avoid the worst of it, but one of the chair’s legs clipped me in the gut, knocking the wind out of me.

  A spike of rage stabbed the back of my eyes. What was a poltergeist doing setting up shop in my family home?

  I climbed to my feet, and as I rose, the light from my tattoos painted the walls red, thawing the room. ‘Let’s get a look at you then, Slimer.’

  The floating furniture fell to the ground and something began to materialise. Something levitating a foot from the mouldy carpet, a smudged, semi-translucent figure shimmering with a hazy blue light. The figure came into focus: a woman, pearl-white and dressed in a night dress and curlers. Scraggly grey hairs sprouted from her jaw, making her look like she'd wet her chin and walked through a cobweb. She had a kind face, the face of your favourite granny, not the face of a chain-rattling banshee.

  ‘This is my home,’ said the phantom granny, ‘you’re not welcome here.’

  ‘I hate to break it to you, old girl, but you’re haunting the wrong address. This is where I grew up.’

  I raised my fists as the ghost drifted towards me. Yeah, I felt a little daft. If I threw a punch it would only sail right through her.

  She cocked her head to one side, her eyes roaming my face. ‘Erin?’

  I felt my arms go slack. ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘Oh, little Erin, it is you! How did you grow so big? Are you sleeping on a pillow full of compost?’

  Okay, now this was getting weird. As far as I knew, I wasn’t acquainted with any ghosts. I might be a bit on the jaded side, but I was sure I’d remember a thing like that.

  ‘You really scared me,’ said the ghost, fanning her pallid, semi-translucent fingers on her chest. ‘Coming here uninvited; I thought you were a burglar.’

  I looked pointedly about the wrecked room. ‘Who in their right mind would rob this gaff?’

  ‘It’s happened before,’ said the ghost, hooking a thumb under the collar of her night dress and lowering it a couple of inches to show a ragged, silvery line across her throat.

  ‘Who did that?’ I asked, seeing the scar and finding my voice oddly maternal.

  ‘A man who was here when he shouldn’t have been,’ she replied, morosely, ‘years ago now. He showed me his smile and he showed me his knife. I didn’t like the look of either.’

  Home invasion? Burglary gone wrong? It seemed impolite to ask. Either way, you’d think the estate agent who sold the place to my parents might have mentioned that an old lady was brutally murdered there. Actually, what am I saying, you wouldn’t think that at all.

  ‘I remember you,’ said the ghost, bubbling with enthusiasm. ‘So often I don’t but then sometimes I do. I forget and I forget and then there you are, sha
rp as the metal that took my life. Did you get good grades in school, Erin? Do you still have a thing for that little boy with the BMX who lives in the flat across the estate?’

  ‘What? Barry Battams? Christ, that’s a blast from the past,’ I said. ‘He really knew how to pull a wicked wheelie, though, how’s a girl to resist?’

  ‘Karl Malten courted me when I was just a girl and he was close to thirty. He brought me sweet things and flowers and nice words that rhymed, but my dad chased him off with a hammer.’

  ‘Okay. So have you always been in this place? Ever since...’ I mimed dragging a knife across my throat.

  ‘I was here since before you moved in,’ she replied, ‘and here I am still. Has Karl Malten asked after me, do you know? My dad chased him off with a hammer.’

  ‘Riiight. So you saw the whole of my childhood, eh? Like, everything?’

  I remembered my stuffed teddy that I sometimes used to… actually, you don’t need to know what I used it for. That’s my business. The point I’m making is that knowing a ghost had been watching over my early years unseen was forcing me to reevaluate some things. To cringe as I considered some of the stuff I’d done in my youth, knowing that there was very likely a second set of eyeballs in the room. Then again, it also meant I might have had a second witness to some of the things I’d seen...

  I went to the crib. ‘This is where James slept. You remember James, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ the ghost replied, ‘darling little boy, chubby as the Michelin man. I would sing to him when he had trouble sleeping and no one would hold him. He could see me. No one else but darling James, he could always see me.’

  The ghost went to the window and stared through the glass. I heard a sniff and realised she was crying.

  ‘I haven’t given up on him,’ I told her. Reassuring a dead woman. You get to do something new every day in this line of work. ‘If he’s out there still, I’m going to find him. You might even be able to help me do that.’

  The ghost turned. ‘How?’