Bad Soul

by David Bussell

  ‘Did you ever doubt it?’ I grinned, pulling out the Soul Dagger, tossing it point over handle and catching it safely by the hilt.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh. Well. Honesty is always a good policy. Here you go, stretch. Brian Teller, signed, sealed, delivered.’

  The Long Man reached out a large, clawed hand and took the dagger from me. He raised the blade close to his hollow eyes and inspected it, his rictus mouth grinning. ‘You have done well,’ he said.

  ‘Hey, I’m not just a passable face, you know?’

  The Long Man knelt by a gap in the trees and thrust the knife into the soil.

  The handle of the dagger flashed briefly with red light, then Brian Teller appeared. His soul. A see-through mist that held his shape. He turned to me, his eyes fixing on mine, and I can’t deny I felt a flutter of guilt, just for a moment.

  The Long Man touched a single claw to Brian Teller’s soul and he began to scream as branches pushed their way out of him. As his body, his soul, bent and twisted and expanded, until it was like all the other trees in the Long Man’s forest. Giant, gnarled, twisted.

  ‘Now,’ said the Long Man, ‘you require payment, yes?’

  ‘Wants to see,’ said the old woman, her face with its stitched-shut eyes craning from behind the tree that was Brian Teller’s immortal soul. ‘Wants a peek at some of the dark that’s been hidden from her. The dark that defines her. The dark that wants to drown her!’

  ‘Show me,’ I said, shifting from foot to foot. Eager, nervous.

  ‘Show her his face!’ said the old woman. ‘Show, for all the good it’ll do, for all the bad. Show her!’

  The Long Man took a knee before me, his large hands reaching for my skull.

  As they touched me, the forest disappeared.

  I was in James’ bedroom, his crib empty, the window open.

  ‘Jamesy?’

  I was out back, a pig up on its hind legs, my brother floating away in a ball of magic.

  There was a dark shape with eyes the colour of blood. The Red-Eyed Man.

  There were strange streets that I knew couldn’t exist. Secret streets. I was running along them, along slick cobbles, but why was I running? Was I running towards something? Running away?

  ‘James! James, come back!’

  My parents were going to be so angry with me. So upset. Thirty minutes. That was all they’d asked. Just keep him safe for thirty minutes. They trusted me, loved me, loved him, and I had to get him back.

  They took my baby brother and I’d do whatever I had to do to find him.

  I stopped, chest heaving, throat raw, looking around me, bewildered, terrified. Was this just a dream? Could it be real? It couldn’t be.

  ‘And what do we have here, wandering these hidden streets?’

  I turned to a doorway to find a tall shape lurking in the shadows.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  The figure stepped out. A man. A man in a long coat that almost reached the ground.

  ‘I need to know. Show me!’

  The grey started to sharpen. Colours. The coat was a dark purple. The man wearing it had black hair that hung down to his neck. His skin was pale, so very pale, like a ghost’s. His face was long, his features fine, a smile of contemptuous amusement resting easily upon his lips.

  ‘My name is Carlisle,’ said the man. ‘Now, who might you be?’

  19

  Two days later I was in London.

  I would have gone straight there from the Long Man’s realm, but even with the fresh tattoos fixing my wounds, I’d suffered a lot. I was exhausted. So I holed up in my messy flat and slept.

  I ignored all the calls from Lana.

  Ignored the texts from Parker.

  All I did was sleep and drink.

  I’d heard of Carlisle. Heard the wild stories whispered in the snug rooms of Baker’s Pub after midnight. The accusations. The warnings. They said he was powerful. Could wield magic like few others were able to. Was a master at it. They said he didn’t have much in the way of conscience. Said he lived to cause mischief. Worse than mischief, more often than not. Lived to break others under his boot, and that only a fool would dare test him. No one knew quite how old he was, and some claimed he’d just always been, walking the streets and hills and valleys of the Uncanny Kingdom, an imperious look on his face, as though he believed he owned the place. Others said he was nothing but a fantasist. A fraud. A rat that had pulled himself from the sewer and written his own, made-up history.

  Either way, he was to be avoided, to be feared, to be respected.

  Well, now he was on my radar. Now he was part of my story. The story of the night my brother was kidnapped.

  Once I was ready, once I was strong, I got behind Sylvia’s wheel and raced, determined, towards London. Towards the city Carlisle called home.

  I’d wanted more than the Long Man gave me. After everything I’d been through to get him Brian Teller’s soul, I’d told him I was owed more.

  But the Long Man saw it differently.

  He gave me what I’d been offered: a fragment. A piece of the puzzle.

  I said I’d do other jobs for him, whatever it took to know the whole truth. The Long Man told me he didn’t take orders. If he wanted me he would find me. I’d argued, but found the forest gone, the Long Man gone, the entrance to his realm gone.

  I got the message.

  It was frustrating, but it was something. A new piece of the puzzle. A person who was there, who was involved in James’s disappearance somehow.

  I found Razor in The Beehive, a cosy London pub down a blind alley that catered to Uncanny folk. Razor was a nasty, brutish, squat man with a mouthful of sharp little teeth that could chew through bone. I needed to find Carlisle, to get word to him that I requested a meeting, and no one could achieve that better than an eaves like Razor. Eaves collected and passed on information, messages, knowledge, secrets. They heard everything, every whisper that passed their ears, and they stored it all up, ready to use, to sell, to barter. They were useful in my line of work, but I’d basically been blackballed by them due to an unfortunate misunderstanding. Well, not a misunderstanding exactly, more like a very clear understanding that I’d helped a bunch of them get murdered. Seemed they held that sort of thing against a person. Weird.

  Razor had not been keen to help me. The eaves had spread news of my blackballing all across their network, up and down the country, to every clan in the Kingdom. They all knew better than to help the woman with the magic tattoos. Not Razor though. I’d managed to persuade him with a few kind words and some very stern threats.

  I waited as Razor left The Beehive with my request, and slowly drank my way through three pints of strong lager before the door to the pub creaked open and Razor stepped back inside.

  ‘Well?’

  He nodded and waved me on. I drained the last of my pint and followed him outside.

  We walked a strange route, a route that didn’t make sense. We walked down one street, only for me to blink and find myself walking through the Egyptian wing of the British Museum. We’d take a door that ought to have led to the next room, only to emerge in a dusty old warehouse, across a sublevel of a multi-storey car park, under a pollution-choked motorway overpass.

  It was all a bit bewildering, a bit impossible, but these were the routes an eaves took. They were able to create unique paths, routes built from different parts of the city that didn’t touch, all mashed together to create a maze of their own design.

  After half an hour of trailing Razor in silence I found myself in a stinking sewer tunnel, following him up a metal ladder bolted to the grimy wall. The eaves pushed aside a manhole cover and we emerged, not into a street, but on to the roof of a tall building, the sky above sprinkled with stars. I stepped out and glanced down to find the manhole no longer existed. I shook my head. Some parts of the Uncanny Kingdom made less sense than others, but Razor’s world was a complete head fuck.

  Razor pointed into the distance and I sa
w a green, leather wingback chair with its rear facing us. Because of course, what else would be on the roof of a massive building?

  I took a step forward and saw that someone was sat upon the chair. ‘Is that him?’ I asked, but as I turned to Razor, I found he was no longer there. ‘I’ll take that as a yes, then.’

  I flexed my fists and felt the tattoos that snaked down my arms and across my shoulders swell with magic, with power.

  ‘I do hope you are not going to try anything so foolish as violence, Miss Banks,’ said the man in the chair.

  Said Carlisle.

  He rose, closing a paperback he was reading. He turned and held the book up to me. ‘Pet Sematary. Have you read it?’

  ‘I don’t really read much.’

  ‘Consider me shocked,’ he replied, slipping the book into the pocket of his long, purple coat.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘You do not know?’

  ‘I know a little,’ I replied.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘You’re a criminal.’

  ‘Just that? You do me a great disservice.’

  ‘Tell me more then.’

  ‘I am Carlisle. I have double-crossed angels, done the dirty on demons, and nicked the gold-stuffed purse from the back pocket of a goddess. If you must know one thing about me, then let it be this: I, Carlisle, am a scoundrel. A liar. A bounder. A ne’er do well.’

  Man, this bloke really liked the sound of his own voice.

  ‘You missed “egotistical tit”,’ I added.

  Carlisle grinned. ‘Oh, I thought that was rather implied, I do apologise.’

  He stood quite still, not at all worried. I felt as though, if he wanted to, he could take me out without breaking a sweat.

  ‘Oh, do not doubt it, assassin,’ he said, buffing his nails.

  ‘You read minds?’

  Carlisle didn’t reply, just studied me with sparkling eyes.

  ‘We’ve met before,’ I said, wandering over to the side of the roof and leaning against the barrier, looking down at the street far below.

  ‘Oh? My apologies, I have quite forgotten you.’

  ‘It was a long time ago. I was a little girl.’

  ‘Well, weren’t we all, once?’

  ‘My brother was kidnapped.’

  I turned back to him. Carlisle’s chalk-white brow was creased. His grin faltered.

  ‘Now… yes… I do believe I recall such a meeting.’

  ‘My brother was stolen away, taken down strange cobbled streets that didn’t exist. Taken by something.’

  ‘You were weeping,’ said Carlisle, trailing off like he was trying to wrangle his thoughts but they were slipping from his clutches. ‘Red eyes… red eyes… who is he with the eyes that burn red?’

  My chest tightened. ‘Why were you there?’ I asked.

  ‘You’d found your way into a blind alley,’ he said, ignoring my question. ‘To an intricate puzzle of interconnected blind alleys, in fact, that stretched for miles. To Other London, as those who frequented the place once called it.’

  ‘Other London? Where the hell is that?’

  ‘Hm? Oh, I’m afraid tragedy befell the place. It no longer exists. Once there were entrances to it all across the Uncanny Kingdom, but now, alas, they are lost.’

  ‘Isn’t that convenient?’

  ‘Not for those who were walking its hidden streets at the time, no.’

  I grimaced and stepped towards Carlisle, fists clenched, my tattoos glowing bright scarlet.

  ‘Well, isn’t that adorable?’ said Carlisle, tickled.

  ‘What did you have to do with the disappearance of my brother?’

  ‘Me? I feel like I should be offended.’

  ‘Tell me what happened!’

  Carlisle’s eyes bored into mine, and I felt a sudden need to take a step back. Satisfied, he smiled again, relaxed.

  ‘I found you lost and crying. That is all that I know.’

  ‘So you’re saying you saw nothing else and that you weren’t involved in any way?’

  Carlisle’s smile faltered again, just for a moment. What was that? Doubt? A lie? What was going on inside that head of his? I had the terrible feeling he was keeping something from me, and that there was nothing I could do to get it out of him.

  ‘I did not take your brother,’ he answered flatly.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘Now, is our business concluded?’

  I stepped towards Carlisle again, and this time he let me approach.

  ‘If you’ve lied to me, you’ll pay.’

  ‘Ooh, I am usually the one that does the threatening. This is a lovely change of pace, Miss Banks.’

  ‘I don’t bluff,’ I replied, stopping a few feet from him. ‘Not when it comes to this. Not when it comes to my brother. If I find out you’ve kept anything from me, there isn’t a place you can go where I won’t find you.’

  Carlisle nodded. ‘I believe you, little one.’

  As I left him, as I left London in the rear view of the Porsche, I felt, with a clear certainty, that I would see Carlisle again. For the first time in many years I had a new piece of the mystery surrounding my brother’s kidnap. No, make that two pieces. I had a person, Carlisle, and I had a place, Other London. A place cut off from the real world, a place I had to find my way back to.

  I should have been unhappy—unhappy and angry that the bounty the Long Man had promised me didn’t lead directly to my brother—but instead I smiled. After years of policemen picking apart my story, of therapists telling me I was misremembering events, of my own family straight up calling me a liar, I now knew for sure that what I saw that night was real. My brother was taken from me by a man with red eyes. I didn’t imagine it. I wasn’t hallucinating. Others had been there. He was real, and so long as he was real, I could find him.

  I cranked up the radio and started singing along at an obnoxiously loud level. I had a foothold at last. I had foundations to build on. A path to follow. Sooner or later, that path was going to lead me to the door of the creature responsible for the disappearance of my brother. To the destruction of my family. To the end of the life I once had.

  And there was one other thing I knew for sure.

  When I found out where the Red-Eyed Man was hiding and knocked on his door, he was going to pay. I was going to make him regret ever getting involved with Erin Banks.

  As I laughed and sang along to the radio, I felt a tear spill from my eye.

  I was getting somewhere.

  At last.

  At long last.

  I was getting somewhere.

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  Uncanny Ink: Bad Blood

  Here’s a SNEAK PEEK at the next Uncanny Ink book, Bad Blood…

  If Erin Banks has a moral code, you’d need an Enigma machine to crack it.

  So it’s no surprise when she takes a contract from the city’s most powerful crime syndicate, the Galoffi family; an incestuous brother and sister who run their operation as man and wife.

  When the mobsters’ young boy is kidnapped, Erin is tasked with getting him back. The only problem: the list of potential suspects is longer than a polar night, and body parts are already showing up in the mail.

  Someone snatched the heir to the Galoffi fortune, and whoever they are, whatever they are, they’re not asking for ransom money. So why did they do it, and what do they want in return?

  1

  Be mindful, they say. Pay attention. Live in the moment.

  Live in the moment? Blurgh. Forget that. The moment is that puddle of fresh sick I just had to step o
ver. The moment is that bloke honking his horn and hurling racial insults from the window of his Ford Fiesta. The moment is the guy across the road shoving his girlfriend into a hedge. The moment can go fornicate with itself.

  Me? I prefer booze.

  Give me blacking out and forgetting the moment entirely. Give me waking up the next day with a club banger playing in my head and no recollection of the night before. Give me skipping over the moment and coming around in the future like some tipsy time traveller.

  It was Friday night and I was on my way down Kingsway Road heading to my flat, weaving through the faceless mob of pissed-up Londoners that descend on Brighton every weekend. The wind howled and the rain lashed down, but I was seven pints deep and invulnerable to the weather.

  I squinted through the downpour. There’s something not right about a seaside town in the wintertime. Something awful, like a clown in the rain with his makeup dribbling off his face. I looked out to sea and saw what was left of the West Pier, chromed by the light of a silver shilling moon. Its remains poked out of the water like the skeleton of some ancient sea monster, dead as a dinosaur. Dead as I felt inside.

  A bit dramatic? I was drunk and brooding, cut me some slack will you?

  I heard a screech and looked over my shoulder to see a long car pulling up next to me; a sinister-looking blacked-out limo that looked as though it ran on human blood. Which, in the world I punched and head-butted my way through, wasn’t entirely out of the question. I mean, I once worked with a guy whose mode of transport was a motorbike made from the flesh and bones of people he’d murdered, and powered by their tormented souls. Gross? Yeah. Also very cool. And shit, could that bike eat up the tarmac. Nought to sixty in the time it took to blink.

  The driver’s window of the limo rolled down and a pair of eyes peered through the gap.

  ‘Get in,’ the driver barked.

  ‘Do I look like a hooker to you?’ I shot back, still walking, not upping my pace any.