Something Rotten: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (The Ghosted Series Book 2)

by David Bussell

  Stella caught my look. ‘You okay, Jake? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘Funny,’ I said. ‘You know, you might just be the funniest witch’s familiar I’ve ever met.’

  I was putting on a brave face though. Truth was, I was bricking it. If I’d done my calculations correctly, we were about to walk into the final showdown, and while I can hold my own in a scrap, I still had no idea what we were about to face. Who was the Hooded Man? What was he? A magician? A demon? Some other archfiend of the underworld?

  Stella bought us access to the crematorium with the same finesse she’d shown the padlocked gate, putting a fist through its sturdy wooden door and unlatching it from the other side.

  ‘I could have done that without leaving a bloody great hole,’ I said. ‘You know, what with being an apparition that can pass through solid objects.’

  She shrugged and I followed her down a breezeblock corridor covered in a spaghetti junction of old gas pipes. At the end of it was another door, and beyond that, a faint murmuring sound. Without taking a breath, Stella pushed open the door to the facility’s cold storage unit.

  The far wall of the room looked like a giant filing cabinet, only instead of archiving documents, it housed a stockpile of human remains. More notably though was a man. A man with his back to us and one hand pressed against the wall of drawers, palm to the metal.

  A man in a hood.

  ‘Stop,’ I managed to say.

  The Hooded Man ceased his murmuring and turned to reveal a piano key smile. He was young, some kid of African by the looks of it, and dressed like the sort of bus stop loitering youth the Daily Mail likes to get its knickers in a twist about.

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘And look, you brought a friend!’

  I recognised the voice as the one I’d heard at the morgue with Dr Anand.

  I could see now why the vampires were so quick to give him Fergal’s body. He wasn’t much to look at, but he absolutely crackled with menace. Not that that stopped Stella laying down the law.

  ‘Get away from there,’ she demanded, her fists throbbing with arcane power. ‘Right now.’

  ‘As you wish,’ he said, and removed his palm from the wall of drawers.’

  Now it was my turn to speak. ‘If you want to carry on living, pal, I’d suggest putting your hands over your head.’

  ‘Living?’ he said, still grinning. ‘What is life but animated death?’

  And with that he was gone, slipping out of the room’s fire exit like a greasy smudge.

  ‘What the f—?’ I started saying, then decided my time would be better spent giving chase.

  I made for the door the Hooded Man had departed through as fast as my legs would carry me, but just as I was about to reach it, a morgue drawer burst open right in front of my face. With no opportunity to change my trajectory, I pummelled headlong into the thing like I was running into a low beam. The floor and the ceiling exchanged places, then suddenly I was flat on my back and contemplating the drawer’s aluminium underside.

  ‘Bastard,’ I wheezed, but the worst was yet to come.

  As well as using his magic to make the drawer solid to ghosts, the Hooded Man had also tampered with its contents. With the contents of the entire refrigerator in fact.

  I heard a pitiful moan and saw a pallid hand reach out from the drawer above. After that came a withered face, deathly skin pulled tight against the skull beneath. Judging by the advanced age of the body, it belonged to one of the pensioners that had been gassed a few hours prior. As suspected, the Hooded Man had set the wheels in motion for another vigilante attack.

  The eyes of the dead pensioner flicked open to reveal two luminous orbs that burned like white-hot marbles. He began to clamber from his drawer, and I just about managed to roll aside before his bare, toe-tagged foot stepped onto my face.

  More drawers slid open—five in total—spewing out fresh, moaning corpses with malice on their minds.

  The Hooded Man had done a swifty, that much I was sure of, the question now was what were we going to do about the killers he’d left in his wake?

  The oldies turned to me in unison, their five sets of eyes boring into me like hot drill bits. Apparently, I’d been promoted to the top of the Hooded Man's hit list. Number one with a bullet.

  ‘Any chance you want to do something about that?’ I asked Stella, pointing at the flock of naked murder-fogeys coming my way.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, you could start by magicking them away before they have my throat out.’

  Undead could hurt undead. Rules of the game.

  ‘They’re people,’ said Stella. ‘I protect people, not destroy them.’

  ‘Those aren’t people!’ I cried. ‘They’re dead bodies being used as puppets. There’s more life in a eunuch’s ballbag!’

  The mouldy oldies continued to advance on me, ponderously slowly. They came like a tide of encroaching lava, backing me into a corner, which I was surprised to find completely solid. The Hooded Man had turned the whole of the room super-corporeal.

  ‘Come on, Stella. Get it together.’

  ‘I see their souls,’ she said. ‘I see their emotions burning bright...’

  ‘Those aren’t emotions, love, he’s doing a number on you.’

  It was plain as day to me, but something the Hooded Man had done was throwing Stella for a loop. He was preying on her responsibilities as London’s guardian, taking advantage of her code, tricking her into believing these were people we were facing and not just empty vessels.

  The monster mash was upon me now. Naked pensioners pressed me into the corner of the room, clawing at my body, digging into my flesh. I tried to get away from them by translocating but there was too much magical static in the room, so instead of reappearing on the opposite side of the unit, I went briefly out of alignment then snapped back into focus.

  Including the angel, that was the second person that had pulled that stunt on me now, and I enjoyed it just as much this time as I had the first.

  I fought against my attackers but they were too strong, juiced by the Hooded Man’s murder magic. They fought like barbarians, relentless and savage, battering me with fists like anvils. I put up my arms to defend myself, but the rain of blows smashed me to the ground.

  ‘For Chrissakes, Stella... those aren’t people…’

  Hearing me, she raised a fist, which fizzed and sparked like a welder’s torch. She’d drawn a lethal payload of magic from the room, but lacked the certainty to unleash it. Instead she held it inside of her, clutching onto it, too unsure to pull the trigger.

  Meanwhile, the juiced geriatrics piled on top of me, one onto the next like a playground bundle. The mountain of bodies weighed hard and heavy, mashing me into the floor, pressing down like a giant boot on my ribcage.

  Through the cracks in the mountain I saw Stella, unblinking, horrified, chewing on her bottom lip as she wrestled with the dilemma before her. She’d been built to vanquish evil, not massacre the elderly. No matter how obvious it seemed to me, she just couldn’t see the situation for what it was. The Hooded Man’s illusion was too stark for her to deny. Something had short-circuited inside of her, I could see it on her face. Stella had gone haywire.

  I reached an arm through a gap in the pile and tried to latch onto her ankle, but she stood just out of reach. If I could only make contact with her there was a chance I could take possession of her body and do the spell-slinging myself. Just a couple more inches. I stretched so hard I thought my arm might pop out of my shoulder, but there was no getting to her. I’d have to find another way out of this mess.

  Beneath the crush an old woman’s face pressed into mine, her features twisted like a gargoyle’s. She snarled and spumed at the lips, and the added lubrication caused her dentures to slip from her wrinkled mouth and drop into my eye socket, hard and slimy.

  Sometimes this job is not so great.

  The rabid old dear closed her hands around my throat
and I struggled to get out a few last words before she pressed her thumbs into my windpipe and crushed the unlife out of me.

  ‘Help me....’ I croaked. ‘Please…’

  Stella continued to dither, fist raised but impotent.

  I looked her right in the eye and let out one final plea. ‘Stella… these people… voted Brexit.’

  Finally she snapped out of her trance, punching forwards with her fist and letting fly a mighty scream. The room’s frigid air transformed her breath into smoke, making her look like she was belching fire, and at the fulcrum of her punch a molten arc of blue fire burst from her knuckles.

  For a split second the room turned the colour of an inner city public toilet lit by UV lamps to prevent drug-users finding a vein. A fraction of a second after that the whip of fire had torn through the bodies piled on top of me and reduced them to a pile of smoking ashes.

  I’m telling you, it was some real Industrial Light & Magic shit.

  Stella looked around the place, her skin suddenly pale.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, putting an arm around her shoulder. ‘They were just puppets. The people who owned those bodies are ghosts now, back at the old folks’ home, playing cribbage and complaining about immigrants.’

  ‘You’d better be right.’

  ‘Trust me, Stella, I know dead things.’

  ‘What about the relatives?’ she asked. ‘How will they pay their respects now?’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about that. I mean, it’s not as though these bodies weren’t headed for the oven anyway.’

  Stella ran a hand over her face and let forth a long sigh.

  ‘Cheer up, love, it might never happen. Okay, yeah, we didn’t catch the bad guy, but we’ve got him on the run now.’

  The fire escape door the Hooded Man had fled through flapped in the breeze.

  ‘What is that?’ asked Stella, pointing through the exit.

  There was a light coming from outside. I went to have a gander and saw a glow emanating through the window of the chapel across the way. It had a touch of the divine about it, and was accompanied by the faint sound of gospel music.

  ‘Is that him?’ asked Stella. ‘The man in the hood?’

  I felt my shoulders slump. ‘No, this is someone else.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘We’re doing nothing. Me; I’m going to church.’

  ‘You can set foot on hallowed ground?’

  ‘I'm a ghost, Stella, not the kid from The bloody Omen.’

  I trudged towards the exit.

  ‘Do you still want me?’

  ‘Is that your way of asking me out, Stella?’

  By way of an answer, she raised a crackling magical fist.

  ‘Point taken,’ I said. ‘Now why don’t you go back to your coven and let me take it from here? This one’s between me and him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A solid gold arsehole, that’s who.’

  16

  Ribbons of pastel light streamed through the stained glass window of the church, settling in coloured pools on the cemetery.

  The was no sense in running. Not anymore. The man inside that building was just going to keep coming at me, and for the sake of Mike and Fergal, I couldn’t let him stand in my way. I had to get the guy off my back, if only for a little while.

  I strutted towards the old stone chapel, cracking my knuckles as I went. I could have phased right through the front door but I wanted to make an entrance, so instead I magicked it open and forced my way inside. The heavy oak door swung in and its croaking hinges echoed around the empty edifice.

  Almost empty.

  Celestial light emanated from the chapel’s confessional, leaking out from behind the booth’s maroon velvet curtain and casting an eerie glow upon the building’s dusty interior. I could see the place had fallen into ruin. Thick cobwebs hung on every surface, across chandeliers, across musty prayer books, across a ghoulish statue of Jesus nailed to a cross that stood upon the church altar like a pointed warning.

  As I approached the confessional I saw a pair of legs sticking out from beneath the velvet curtain, suited in dazzling white. I entered the other side of the booth and took a seat opposite the wooden grille.

  ‘Forgive me Father, for I have sinned,’ I told the silhouette across from me. ‘Is that what you want to hear?’

  ‘I’m afraid it's too late for a confession,’ said the angel on the other side.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘It wasn’t hard. You’ve left quite a trail in your wake, Mister Fletcher.’

  I suppose I had; getting into fisticuffs with vampires, chasing around after hanged kids and duffing up a bunch of undead OAPs. But then subtlety had never been my strong suit. ‘What do we do now then?’ I asked the man in white.

  ‘Now we go Upstairs,’ he replied.

  ‘You know, I could really do without this right now. Do you any idea what I'm up against here? What this city is up against? How about instead of getting in my way you help me?’

  ‘It is not my remit to help you, Fletcher. It is my job to bring you in.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ I sighed, ‘you're a bureaucrat. A traffic warden.’

  ‘You have no idea what I am.’

  ‘Yeah, I do. I know your type, all mouth and no trousers. You act all that in your poncy clobber, but you haven’t got the bollocks for a proper dust up.’

  ‘If I were you I’d shut my mouth before my list of sins is appended to.’

  ‘Chalk ‘em up, you pillock. I don’t give a monkeys.’

  ‘Consider it done, Mister Fletcher.’

  ‘Good, and how about you go fuck yourself while you’re at it.’

  ‘One more of those and I’ll forget about taking you Upstairs for judgment and send you the other way myself.’

  ‘I’d like to see you try, mate.’

  ‘Gladly.’

  ‘Come on then!’ I shouted. ‘Let’s be ‘avin’ ya!’

  He shot out of his side of the booth just as fast as I did mine. In one hand he held a set of glowing manacles. The other was balled into a fist.

  ‘Let's try this again, shall we?’ he said, coming at me.

  I backed away fast.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mister Fletcher? Suddenly not so tough?’

  I retreated another step and found myself climbing the altar. I’d soon have my back to the wall.

  ‘How would you like to proceed from here?’ asked the angel, giving the cuffs a jiggle as he ascended after me. ‘The choice is yours: either come quietly this time or be taken by force. Frankly, I’m hoping you’ll choose the latter.’

  I had no intention of fighting him. He might not have looked like much of a hard case, but I’m sure the Big Man knew better than to send a rank amateur my way. So, instead of putting up my fists, I presented my wrists.

  ‘I thought so,’ he smarmed.

  He held out the manacles. ‘Kindly face the wall and place your hands behind your back.’

  I did as asked, turning to face the life-size crucifix decorated with our Lord and Saviour.

  He took two more steps to cover the distance between us. I heard the cuffs ratchet open. Felt chill metal graze my wrist—

  And then I went to work.

  Just as the cuffs were about to click shut I whirled about, carrying the bracelet to the crucifix and snapping it onto the ankle of Jesus. While the angel stood there, agog, I used his surprise to snatch the other bracelet off him and squeeze it shut on his own wrist. It was nothing really. A bit of stage magic I learned back in my breathing days. A simple parlour trick, but crafty enough to get one over on this toolbag.

  The man in white snarled and swiped at me with his free hand, but I pulled away fast and moved out of his reach. He delved into the pocket of his pristine white blazer for a key, but came up empty. When he looked up again he found me dangling it on my finger.

  ‘Sorry, boss,’ I told him.

  He strained at the cuffs, so hard
he almost wrenched the crucifix from its moorings, but he remained very much captive. I had him at my mercy, for the moment at least.

  ‘Well?’ he roared. ‘What now?’

  Good question. I suppose I could have taken advantage of the situation and laid into the feller, but something told me that maiming an angel wasn’t going to get any red out of my account. Instead, I decided to reason with him.

  ‘Just answer me this, okay? How’s it going to play with your boss if you pull me off my case and this looney toon murders more people?’

  ‘You’re asking me to let you go, is that it?’

  ‘We've been in this situation before, mate, we both know how it goes. You throw some bullshit roadblock in my way, I hurdle it, take down the bad guy, and buy myself a hall pass. So come on then, what is it this time? How are you going to make my job more difficult than it already is?’

  The angel weighed up his options, wobbling his head like a dog trying to shake off a stubborn veterinary cone. Finally, he gave up. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’m going to let you carry on this doomed cause since it will almost certainly end in your death.’

  ‘Thank you very much. So, what’s my handicap then? Don’t tell me, I have to take the hoodie down with one hand tied behind my back? Eyes closed? Dressed like a pirate?’

  He smiled. ‘No. You’re free to continue as you please… with one exception. You must bring the Hooded Man to justice without Uncanny assistance.’

  ‘You mean Stella.’

  ‘That’s right. If you truly want to offset even one of your many, many sins, it falls upon you to deal with this threat alone.’

  ‘Who cares how I pull it off as long as I get this killer off the streets?’

  ‘Don’t ask me to explain the system. I don’t make the rules.’

  ‘It really feels like you do.’

  He shrugged and made a face that made me want to smack the Catholic out of him.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll do this one without Stella—’

  ‘—Without any Uncanny assistance—’

  ‘—Without any Uncanny assistance then.’

  ‘Good. And when you’re done—in the unlikely instance that you don’t end up deader than you already are—return to this chapel and call my name.’