‘Hey, my best girl had just been cruelly torn away from me for three years. I was distraught.’
I laughed out loud at that. ‘Distraught? It was your fault!’
‘Are we still playing the blame game? I thought we’d settled this.’
‘Settled… I… when?’
Kirklander waved airily. ‘I dunno. Earlier. All water under the bridge now anyway, right?’
‘No! Very much not all water under the bridge. Water very much on the bridge.’
‘Jesus, you love to hold a grudge, don’t you?’
‘You are unbelievable.’
‘Oh, you know that first-hand, baby,’ replied Kirklander with a wolfish look that made me quiver. A little. Just a little, okay?
‘Look, you only ended up doing, what, six months?’ he said. ‘Could have been worse. Much worse. Why not quit harping on about the past and look to the future?’’
‘What I’d really like to do is punch you in the head until the pile of shit you call a brain leaks out of your ears.’
He laughed and grabbed his wallet, pulling out a stack of cash and sliding it towards me. ‘There’s a few hundred there. Best I can do right now. I’m sorry, okay? I actually even mean that.’
I picked up the money, pocketed half of it, then threw the other half back at him. ‘Keep the drinks coming, you bastard.’
Kirklander grinned and headed to the bar as I did my best not to jump on him and chew on his earlobe. The struggle was real, folks.
I was on one of the streets that didn’t exist again.
I was dreaming. I knew that. Whenever I relived these moments I knew it was only my unconscious mind working its way through an old flick book of images, of sounds, of pain. That didn’t make the dreams any less real though.
‘James? Where are you?’
Now I was running across the grass behind the council estate I grew up in, James floating, giggling, carried by a ball of scarlet light, the pig climbing over a fence and away as James floated on after it.
‘Jamesy, come back, please!’
I ran at the fence and then I was stood before an old-looking building criss-crossed with timber beams. I staggered back, confused, and found cobbles under my feet. There was someone stood hidden in the doorway of the building. A tall, narrow shape. I didn’t recognise this memory. This was new. This was a piece I’d forgotten, resurfacing at last.
‘And just what do we have here, wandering these hidden streets?’ asked the shape as they stepped from the doorway and walked towards me.
I didn’t recognise the voice. Couldn’t recognise it. It was as though all emotion had been drained out of it, all character, leaving behind an empty husk of a thing. Male or female, young or old, I just couldn’t tell.
I squinted at the grey shape, trying to get some clarity, willing my memory to sharpen the image and reveal who it was that the Long Man had shaken free.
‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘What’s your name? Tell me!’
I woke with a start, sitting bolt upright, heart thundering in my chest.
‘Well that’s not a disturbing way to wake up,’ said Kirklander.
I turned to see him entering his en suite bathroom. I was sprawled across the bed, still fully dressed. The bedroom, like all of Kirklander’s pad, was slick and minimalist. Crisp, Egyptian sheets, a bedroom cabinet topped with polished marble, and a widescreen TV set into the wall. Everywhere was spotless and in order, no room for an abandoned cup or an overlooked cobweb. It was the kind of place Patrick Bateman would feel right at home in.
‘Here.’ He passed me a glass of filtered water which I snatched out of his hand and downed in one. I tried to remember how I’d ended up back at his place, but all I could pull together was a table steadily filling with empty glasses of all shapes and sizes, and angrily demanding that a karaoke machine be found so I could unleash a killer rendition of You Oughta Know by Canadian goddess Alanis Morissette. A demand that I really, really hoped hadn’t been met.
‘Thanks. Did we, uh…?’
Kirklander grinned devilishly. ‘Did we make the beast with two backs?’
I grimaced. ‘Well?’
‘Afraid not. We were both far too pissed to do anything besides sleep. I am now, though, ready, willing and very, very able to rock your world.’
‘That’s a hard pass.’
‘Are you sure?’ he replied, looking around. ‘I see a man, a woman, a bed. Seems rude not to.’
I stood and grabbed my leather jacket from where I’d tossed it the night before. It felt light. I reached inside, searching. ‘Shit. Shit!’
‘Looking for this?’ said Kirklander, holding up the black, crystal-bladed Soul Dagger the Long Man had given me.
‘Give that back,’ I snatched for it only for him to pull it out of reach.
‘Interesting doo-dad, this. The Soul Dagger, if I’m not mistaken. And hey, this is me, I’m never mistaken.’
I elbowed him in the side then grabbed the dagger as he bent double.
‘Go through my stuff again and I’ll do worse than wind you, got that?’
Kirklander straightened up, a little red-faced as he caught his breath. ‘So the demon’s got you doing a soul retrieval, has he?’
I didn’t respond, just put on my jacket and slid the knife back into the inside pocket.
‘Dangerous stuff. Probably wraiths and who knows what else.’
‘Not interested.’
‘I’ll tell you what, out of the goodness of my heart—’
‘—Ha!’
‘—I’ll team up with you. Safety in numbers and all that.’
‘Oh, you mean like last time, when you ran off like a bitch and I got three years?’
‘Hey, I’ll even take a forty-sixty split to make up for the money owed. What do you say?’
‘Forget it, pretty boy.’
Kirklander pressed his hands to his chest and fluttered his eyelashes. ‘You think I’m pretty?’
God, he was annoying. And pretty. ‘This is my gig and I’m doing it alone. I don’t need anyone’s help. And even if I did, you’d be the last person I asked.’
I headed for the door, but Kirklander stepped in my way. ‘Change your mind.’
‘I would advise you to move.’
‘Come on,’ he sighed. ‘I want in. Don’t be stupid here.’
‘Stupid?’
‘Sorry, sorry, I meant thick-headed.’
‘Oh, much better.’
He reached up and cupped my face tenderly between his large hands and smiled, fixing his dreamy eyes on mine. ‘We’re a great team, Erin. You know we are. I’ve made mistakes in the past, but come on, I’ve changed. I’m a new man. A new man who’s missed you. What do you say? Don’t you wanna get the band back together?’
I felt butterflies in my stomach as my eyes flickered from his, to his lips, and back again.
Then I kneed him in the balls.
As he cried out and folded in half I shoved him aside, sending him crumbling to the plushly carpeted floor, red-faced and eyes bulging.
‘See you around, you utter, utter bastard,’ I said as I left, leaving behind the sound of Kirklander alternately laughing joyfully and whimpering in agony.
Stupid, sexy, Kirklander.
7
With my magic tattoos reapplied, the Soul Dagger safely on my person, and Kirklander smacked around a bit, it was time for the rubber to meet the road.
First stop, Highstaff, the little country hamlet Brian Teller had been living in before he dropped off the radar. The hamlet that was now apparently home to a wound in reality thanks to his skipping out on his debt to the Long Man.
I opened the tiny garage I rented round the back of my flat to reveal my little wreck of a car. Highstaff was around eighty miles north of Brighton, so it was time for a bit of a road trip.
As the car coughed and complained its way out of the garage, my phone rang. I pulled it out to see Lana’s name on the screen. I contemplated ignoring it, but answered anywa
y.
‘Yo, Lana, what’s up?’
‘Just wanted to call and say sorry about yesterday. You’d just got out and I went and started pressuring you into getting a job.’
Even when she was in the right, Lana was always the first to apologise.
‘No worries,’ I said. ‘I suppose I’m sort of sorry, too. A bit.’
‘Have you thought about it though? The job idea?’
‘Oh, loads. Honest.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Busted.’
‘So what’re you doing?’ she asked.
‘Heading out on a job.’
A pause. ‘Is it dangerous?’
‘No,’ I replied, though I knew she’d see the bullshit in that, too. ‘The price is too high to turn down, Lana.’
‘Money isn’t everything.’
‘It’s not money. It’s information. About James.’
‘What? What information?’
‘Just… just information. Look, I’ve gotta go. I’ll see you soon, okay?’
‘Okay. Just, please, don’t go doing something stupid like getting yourself killed, because I will be so, so annoyed at you.’
‘Promise.’
I hung up and headed out of Brighton, bound for danger. I wondered if I was going to be able to keep that promise.
Highstaff was a tiny, leafy village home to less than fifty people, but by the time I got there, that number had dropped considerably.
I parked up on the outskirts and went in on foot. I didn’t want my ticket out of there getting caught up in whatever was happening, cutting off my fastest form of escape, so I left it well out of range.
It didn’t take me long to find something strange. Something horrific.
I found a woman sitting cross-legged on the green that lay in the centre of a circle of houses. The woman was around forty, with dirty blonde hair.
‘Hey,’ I said, giving her a wave.
In the time it took to blink, the woman was no longer sat cross-legged, she was stood and facing me. I’d seen no movement, no steps between her sitting and standing. It was like a film skipping forward, losing frames.
‘My mummy bought me a new bike,’ the woman said in a voice that sounded much younger than it should. It sounded like maybe a seven-year-old girl’s voice.
‘What happened to you?’ I asked her.
Without moving, the woman was now leaning against a lone oak tree that had sprouted from the green.
‘But Billy from down the road, he said he should be allowed a go as he was the best at riding bikes and I was scared he’d do something mean to me if I said no, so I said yes, even though it was my new bike and I didn’t want anyone except me to ride it and ring its shiny bell.’ She said it all in one breathless take.
‘Do you know where Brian Teller lives?’ I asked.
My breath caught in my throat as the woman was suddenly pressed against me, hugging me, her head on my shoulder, sobbing like a child.
‘He broke it! Billy broke my bike! He laughed as I screamed and begged and then just threw it off the bridge into the river!’
I tried to wriggle free, only to realise she was no longer hugging me. Now she was sat cross-legged like she had been when I first saw her. It was all a little on the unnerving side, I can tell you.
‘So, Brian Teller?’
‘My mummy bought me a new bike.’
She was caught in some sort of loop. Her body, her voice, her thoughts, all of them as they were when she was a child, preoccupied with the loss of her bike. Brian Teller’s escape, the wound he’d caused, was doing something strange to people’s histories. There was no use in asking any more questions, she couldn’t reply to me, she could just read the lines of her past over and over, so I moved on. I wondered if that was it for her, if she was trapped, maybe dead in a way already, or if I was to find Brian, if I was to take his soul where it belonged, would she recover?
I felt as though I already knew the answer to that one.
The whole area felt bad. Felt wrong. Like I’d stepped into a room that had just been host to a murder. It made me shiver. Made my skin prickle. As I stepped off the green I noticed something else weird: Highstaff was entirely silent. No birds, no cars, no voices, not a lick of wind rustling its trees and hedges. It was as though the entire place was holding its breath.
As I stepped onto the pavement, something brushed against my ankle, causing me to take a hop back. I looked down to see a cat. Well, most of a cat, at least. It no longer had any skin, any muscles, it was just bones and organs. It looked up at me and opened its mouth, but it didn’t meow or hiss or purr. Instead it screamed, high and sharp. It was a woman’s scream. The cat closed its mouth and bolted.
‘Well, that can’t be good.’ I straightened my jacket and pulled out the black-bladed dagger, my palm sweaty.
I found Brian Teller’s house on the second go. The first house I tried had apparently belonged to an old woman named Ethel. I’d found what was left of Ethel in the kitchen. Her nervous system stood by the oven, her eyeballs staring at me as I entered. At her feet lay the empty skin of a cat.
I’d skipped out of that place pretty fast I can tell you.
Brian Teller hadn’t taken much with him, even his most recent post had been left on a sideboard by the front door.
‘Brian, I don’t suppose you’re in here, are you? It would make things much easier for me if you are. I promise I won’t hurt you, I’ll just gently shove a big dagger into your heart. That cool with you?’
No, Brian was not in there.
I walked through Brian Teller’s house and wondered just what it was that this man had sold his soul for. What would it take for a man to willingly do a deal with a demon that damned him to an eternity of torment? It was usually money. Greed was the ultimate motivator. Or maybe it was power over someone else. A woman that he wanted, thought he deserved but couldn’t have. Was Brian some creepy stalker who thought he was owed the attention of some poor woman who just wanted to be left alone? If that was the case, I’d take a great delight in delivering him to the Long Man’s creepy forest.
I began to wonder what I’d sell my own soul for. Did I have a price that I’d be willing to pay? What if James, alive and well, was on offer? What if he could be returned to me? Would I take that deal? Would it be enough? Maybe I’d need more. Maybe I’d want those responsible for taking him on their knees before me, ready to be punished over and over and over. Would I give my soul for that?
I shook the thought away. I didn’t want it to take root and find myself stood in the doorway of the Long Man’s black cathedral, naming my price.
Brian Teller’s house looked very ordinary. Cosy, if a little messy. A family home? There were kids’ drawings stuck to the fridge, toys left out on the carpet in the front room, a picture with Brian and a beaming young girl, maybe six years old, sat on his shoulders. So Brian Teller was a father. No evidence of a wife, though. No smiling woman joining the pair in any of the photos dotted around the place.
I went from room to room, finding no evidence of magic, of wizardry, of anything Uncanny. How had he managed to dodge the Long Man when his time had been called? Running from a demon wasn’t as simple as just skipping town. There had to be a trick to it. There had to be magic involved somehow, and from everything I was seeing, Brian was just an ordinary bloke. How had he managed to sidestep the debt collector?
I found my answer in the cellar.
There were several notable things in the dank, stone basement. First of all there were all the scorch marks. They spread across the flagstones of the floor, stretched up the walls, and reached across the ceiling in waves. Something had erupted with ferocity inside the cramped space. Then there was the jagged, blazing crack in one wall. No doubt this was the wound I’d been told about. The schism. The result of Brian Teller breaking his contract with the Long Man.
The crack began in the centre of the cellar floor then gaped up the wall and all the way to the ceiling. A crack wide enough to re
ach into. It throbbed with a strange, unnerving energy, a black light oozing from within, hissing and spitting
The starting point of the crack, and the reason it existed—the same reason Brian Teller had been able to cheat a demon—was on the floor. A chalk circle, big enough for more than one person to stand inside.
I pulled out my phone and stood over the circle, making sure to stay on the side opposite the crack. I checked the flash on the camera was activated and took several pictures.
‘What is all this?’ I muttered.
Sketched around the radius of the chalk circle were all sorts of strange symbols, shapes and letters. A protection spell of some sort I had to imagine. So, Brian Teller, who seemed otherwise to be a very run-of-the-mill father, had somehow found access to protection magic of enormous power? It certainly would have taken more than any old protective ward to keep out a demon of the Long Man’s strength.
‘Brian, Brian, just who have you been mixing with?’
It was as I pocketed my phone that I realised I was no longer alone in the cellar. There was something crouched in the corner. Something that wanted to feast on me.
8
At first it was nothing more than a patch of dark, squatting in the shadows.
‘You might as well come out, I can see you,’ I said, even though that was only partially true.
I heard a sound like teeth chattering as the dark juddered forward and began to unfurl. It wasn’t a person, not as such, though it seemed to have similar proportions. The skin of the creature—if it could even be called skin—was made of some ink-black web, dark as a void. Its head possessed no facial features other than a far-too-large mouth.
‘I take it you’re one of those wraith thingies, then?’ I said, backing away to the stairs. My tattoos glowed red, firing up my engines. They illuminated the dark basement, filling me with strength, sharpening my senses.
‘Well? I said, cupping a hand to my ear. ‘You’ve got a big enough gob on you, webby, why don’t you use it?’
This was dumb, trying to engage the thing that I’d been told to run from, but I’ve got an awful curious seam in me. This creature, this wraith, was like nothing I’d seen before. It was bizarre, it was terrifying, it was fascinating.
Bad Soul Page 5
