Dark Lakes, Volume One: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (A Dark Lakes Collection Book 1)

by Matthew Stott

  Someone, somewhere, was about to get murdered.

  20

  It was about an hour before Maya’s phone buzzed.

  A man had been roused by the sound of a ruckus next door. Breaking glass, furniture smashing. He’d gone to take a look and found his elderly neighbour curled up on her kitchen floor, quite dead. He hadn’t had to check for a pulse to make sure as she, like the others, was a withered, mummified horror. His screams had alerted a passer-by, who’d informed the police, who’d informed Maya.

  There was no need for Eva and I to tag along. We knew what we’d see and we knew what had happened, so we stayed with the stone circle, with Elga and her Kin.

  The missing stone reappeared shortly after Maya left. There was blood sprayed across its surface, and not dried blood like the other stone. This blood was very much wet.

  ‘This is crazy,’ I said. ‘I mean, the soul vampires with octopus limbs, and demons buying souls at the bottom of a well, those are all crazy too, but a crazy I can wrap my head around. But these are stones. Stones aren’t alive.’

  ‘There’s always a first time,’ said Eva.

  ‘What’s more, stones don’t kill unless they’re being used as a tool for a living, breathing creature.’

  Eva stopped her visual examination of the stone and stood bolt upright, looking at me in surprise.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘What is it? Is there a wasp on me?’

  ‘No wasp.’

  ‘Phew.’

  ‘If there was a wasp,’ she said, ‘I would give you no indication and wait for it to hopefully sting the shit out of you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘But what you said, that flicked a little switch in the brain meat.’

  ‘What did I say?’ I asked.

  ‘The stones. The stones. They’re just the tip of the iceberg. I think? Yeah. Or…? Something else. Someone else.’ She knelt and placed her hand against the ground in front of one of the stones.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Not one hundred percent sure.’

  Then Eva flopped down, placing her ear against the muck.

  ‘Hm,’ she waved me over, ‘come and have a listen.’

  ‘Listen? To the grass and the soil?’

  Eva continued to waggle her hand at me so I did as she asked.

  ‘What am I listening for?’ I asked.

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Right.’

  So I listened.

  Then listened a bit more.

  ‘Not sure I’m getting anything.’

  Eva hopped up onto her feet and began striding away, lighting a cigarette as she did.

  ‘Oh, are we off?’

  ‘Yup,’ replied Eva, blowing a cloud of smoke into the air.

  ‘But what about the circle, Elga and her Kin?’

  ‘I think we need to go and ask Malden the dull as ditchwater eaves a few more questions. I reckon we didn’t ask the right ones last time. Come along, idiot.’

  I flicked the grass, and a spider, from the side of my face and hurried after her.

  Mickey Finn’s, the local drinking hole for magical and monstrous types, was still open despite the fact it was gone two in the morning.

  ‘This place never closes,’ said Eva, as if reading my mind. ‘Half the things that drink here only wake up at night, so they keep the place running twenty-four seven.’

  Malden was at the same table we’d met him at the first time. He smiled a ratty, toothy smile, and waved us over.

  ‘Greetings and salutations, my coven friends.’

  ‘I’ll get the drinks in,’ said Eva, leaving me to keep Malden company.

  ‘So,’ I started, ‘how’s your evening been?’

  ‘I’ve been to the toilet eight times in the last two hours. Eight times.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Four were merely to deposit urine, as you would expect from all of the alcohol imbibing.’

  ‘Goes right through me, too.’

  ‘But, and this is where it gets interesting…’

  ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘The other four were a combination of urine and solids.’

  ‘Your use of the word “interesting” may have been a stretch, I think.’

  ‘Four times! In such a short space of time, I don’t know what to think. It’s a new record, I’ve made a note of it.’

  Eva sat next to me, placing a pint before me whilst she gulped from her own. Which, I noticed, had a shot glass sat inside of it.

  ‘Thank god you’re back,’ I hissed from behind my glass as I placed it to my lips.

  ‘Oh, no need to whisper, idiot,’ replied Eva, ‘Malden here knows he’s as boring as marital sex, don’t you, Malders?’

  ‘It has been mentioned over the years. Can’t see it myself, mind you. Would you like me to tell you about my toilet situation?’

  ‘You really don’t want to hear it,’ I said.

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘Eight within two hours, four for solids.’

  Eva whistled. ‘A new record.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Perhaps we could get onto the stones?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Elga and her Kin?’ said Malden. ‘How’d you go? You find them, then?’

  ‘Yes, we found them,’ I replied.

  ‘Lovely example of a night circle, that.’

  ‘I think you held out on us, Malden,’ said Eva.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s not just your ordinary night circle, is it?’

  ‘Depends; everything is ordinary to someone. Just depends who you are.’

  ‘Those stones are moving,’ I said. ‘They leave, they kill someone, then they return to their place in the circle.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Malden, wiping at his crusty nose with the back of a filthy sleeve. ‘Suppose that makes sense.’

  ‘What is the circle, Malden?’ asked Eva.

  ‘Well, it’s a graveyard, really. The stones themselves aren’t Elga and her Kin, they’re just, well, headstones I suppose is the best way to describe them.’

  ‘Headstones?’ said Eva. ‘Headstones for who?’

  ‘Don’t you know, Janto?’ asked Malden, using my, apparently, real name. It felt a bit weird to be addressed with it.

  ‘Should I?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, it was you and your witches who put them down. Elga and her Kin.’

  ‘We did?’

  ‘I don’t know the details, but Elga and her Kin were a powerful cabal of some sort. You sorted them out and that’s where their bodies lay forever more. Trapped under the circle. One under each stone marker.’

  ‘Sorry, but why didn’t you tell us all of this the first time we asked?’ I said.

  Malden looked at me, utterly confused. ‘I recall you asked where it was, not what. It may sound pedantic, but I answer what I’m asked, you see. It’s good to be accurate and not add in extraneous details that the question asker may find dull, and tedious, and in any way not apropos to the answer they actually, in reality, require.’

  ‘Four poos?’ asked Eva.

  Malden held up four fingers. ‘Four. And each of them sizeable.’

  21

  Eva compensated Malden for the fresh information with some sweet, sweet magical succour, then went to the bar to get us in another round. Meanwhile, I made my way to the Men’s. Yes, the scene of Malden’s now infamous four poos.

  If Malden was correct—and Eva seemed confident that he was—it seemed that the stones themselves were not the problem. They were merely the blade used for the cutting, clasped in the real murderer’s hand. It also seemed that I had, in my empty past, dealt with whoever Elga and her Kin were myself, and that their current situation was all mine, and my fellow witches, doing.

  I’d asked Eva why she hadn’t known about it, but Malden had said it was before her time.

  As I emptied a pint-full into the urinal (honestly, it goes right through me, beer. My bladder is weaker than an Adam Sandler film) I thought agai
n about Eva’s earlier revelation about my age. About how I was thousands of years old. To have lost so much experience, so many memories... I had thought losing twenty or thirty years was horrific, but this took it to a whole new level. If I’d had access to my memories, I’d have known immediately about the stones, about who Elga and her Kin were, what they were capable of, and how to defeat them. I’d done it once, stood to reason I’d be able to do it again. If only, if only, I knew the what, the how, the everything.

  But I didn’t.

  I didn’t know a shitting thing, and being told about it sparked naught. No half-memory, no sense of déjà vu, no prickle of familiarity.

  I shook off, zipped up, and went to wash my hands.

  Chloe was waiting for me in the mirror as I looked up.

  ‘Joe!’

  ‘Jesus, Chloe.’

  She looked awful. Okay, she was dead, but the other times I’d seen her, she’d still looked, well, healthy. Now she was drawn, grey-skinned, her body trembling.

  ‘Please, Joe. You’re the only one that can help me!’

  ‘I don’t know how.’

  I didn’t want to look at her. It gnawed at my insides. Why couldn’t she just be dead? And by dead, I mean dead-dead, not whatever this was. And as soon as I thought that, I felt a wave of shame crash over me. How could I even think that? And how could I let myself become so distracted by everything else that I’d just put Chloe on the backburner?

  This was my responsibility.

  ‘Chloe, what’s happening to you over wherever it is you are?’

  ‘They keep coming for me,’ she said, her voice a stammering whisper as her head kept twitching to look back and to the side, obviously terrified that someone was going to creep up on her.

  ‘Who keeps coming for you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, barely keeping it together enough to speak. ‘They want me, Joe. They said... they said they’re going to eat what’s left of me, and then that’ll be it. I won’t even have an afterlife. You’ve got to get me out of here!’

  I pressed my hand against the mirror, wishing I could push straight through and grab hold of her, pull her back into this world, make her safe.

  ‘I’ll ask Eva. Make her help.’

  ‘She won’t help, you know that. Or worse, she’ll make sure she helps out the thing trying to end me entirely. It has to be you, Joe. I know you can help me. You can help me and then we can leave this and be together. Properly together, forever.’

  There was a blur of movement to her left and I pulled away from the mirror in surprise.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘They’ve found me! Please, Joe, please be quick! I know you have the power to help me. Please.’

  ‘Chloe!’

  She turned and ran as I slapped the mirror.

  ‘You’ll never believe it.’

  I jumped at the voice, turning to find Malden in the doorway, shaking his head. I looked back to the mirror, but there was no sign of Chloe, of whatever it was that was after her.

  ‘Go on,’ said Malden, ‘never in a million years will you believe me.’

  I turned back to Malden and sighed, ‘What won’t I believe?’

  ‘Guess who’s about to check into his usual toilet stall for a fifth solids deposit of the night?’ Malden pointed at himself, then shook his head. ‘What a crazy, crazy day.’

  He chuckled to himself as he shuffled over to the toilet stall. I gave a last glance into the mirror, my heart beating way too fast, and left in search of a drink.

  I joined Eva, downing half of my pint in one go.

  ‘Oh, now we’re talking,’ said Eva, rubbing her hands together. ‘Big boy drinking time, is it, love?’ She raised her glass high. ‘To Malden’s fifth shit of the evening,’ and then downed it in one go, before pulling out her tobacco tin and starting to roll a fresh smoke.

  ‘Another two over here, Grunt,’ said Eva, waving her hand at the giant barman.

  ‘So, Elga and her Kin, who are they exactly?’

  ‘Beats me. Before my time. We could go back to the coven, search through all those boring books and see if there’s any record of them, or…’

  ‘Or…?’

  ‘Or I could do some more potentially dangerous fucking with your brain.’

  ‘More?’

  ‘Yeah, like with the magic amplification trick I banged together to take care of all those bastard soul vampires the other day. Sorted those fuckers out, but forcing me through you left you with a bit of brain damage. Won’t be able to pull that trick again.’

  ‘I’m sorry, brain damage? You gave me brain damage?’

  ‘You probably won’t even notice it, considering how fucked that lump of crap between your ears is anyway.’

  Grunt placed a couple of fresh pints before us.

  ‘Thank you, garçon,’ said Eva. ‘Grunt, how’s the magic dampening in here?’

  ‘Is good,’ grunted Grunt.

  ‘Should be possible to do a little bit of memory work though, right? Only I can’t be fucked to go outside to do it, not with us getting so comfy here.’

  ‘It possible.’

  ‘Nice one.’

  Grunt moved away as Eva somehow inhaled a lungful from her cigarette and took a gulp from her pint at the same time.

  ‘Magic dampening?’

  ‘Oh yeah, all these sort of social drinking holes employ a bit of the old magic dampening. Imagine two Uncanny types in here, loaded up and pissed off. Not a happy end to that story. So, these places sit in a dampening bubble. They don’t stop magic entirely, but it stops anything too tasty going down.’

  Well, that certainly made sense. Flying fists were one thing, but literal flying whilst two pissed up blokes lobbed fireballs at each other would definitely be an issue.

  ‘Okay then,’ said Eva, ‘seeing as, for once, you know more than me, only you don’t know more than me, I’m going to see if I can rattle a memory or two loose.’

  ‘How are you going to do that?’

  ‘With great fucking difficulty.’ Eva reached out and placed the tips of her thumbs on my temples, closing her eyes.

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Just think about Elga and her Kin. Think about that title, and think about those stones, I’ll try and throw a rope in and see if anything climbs up.’

  ‘Right. Okay. Thinking now.’

  And so I did. I closed my eyes and thought that name, over and over, like a mantra. At first, nothing happened, but then Eva’s fingers began to feel hot. The temperature slowly rose until it felt like my skin was burning. My whole face. My whole head in fact.

  ‘Eva.’

  ‘Shh, I’m getting something.’

  The temperature rose higher and I felt myself pulling away.

  ‘Stay still, idiot.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Aha! Got something!’

  ‘Eva, that’s starting to hurt.’

  ‘Well, this is gonna hurt a fuck ton more.’

  ‘What is?’

  I opened my eyes in time to see Eva pull a fist back, and throw it at my head.

  She was not lying.

  It hurt like a mother-shitting bastard.

  Though not in the way I was expecting. Rather than her fist connecting with my nose, her knuckles cracking the bone, blood exploding out, and me falling back off the stool and onto the floor, Eva’s fist passed through my face and into my head. You could say it was like her hand had become ghost-like, insubstantial, only I felt it. I felt jagged shards of pain shoot through every bit of me.

  I’m pretty sure I was screaming by that point. I mean, you would, wouldn’t you?

  Then I saw them.

  Elga and her Kin.

  It was night and I entered the dark place, with Lyna and Melodia either side of me. They were waiting for us, Elga at the front, her head encased in a goat mask, a freshly torn out heart in her hand, blood and gore dripping through her fingers and onto the ground.

  ‘Elga!’ I heard myself
say, only it didn’t sound quite like me. There was a different flavour to the voice. I looked down and saw my hands throbbing with power, with fire, and—

  The picture skipped, onto another memory, another shard. No, a jumble of shards. Dead bodies strewn across the ground, broken, hundreds of them. No, thousands. Tens of thousands. Generations torn apart by Elga and her Kin as they destroyed, unstoppable.

  But then there we were again, the three of us, the three that stop the unstoppable.

  But only just.

  Only just.

  I could see Lyna, see Melodia, battered, bodies criss-crossed with wounds, exhaustion about ready to take them down.

  ‘Janto,’ said Melodia, her voice a weak whisper. ‘Stop them. You have to stop them.

  I blinked and the visions, the memories were over. I was still at the table, Eva wiping at her hand with a napkin, Malden sat opposite.

  ‘Did… did it work?’

  ‘Sort of. I certainly saw the twats, but nothing exactly useful. Apart from seeing how strong they are. Fuckers nearly wiped you three out. That’s some crazy, next level power, that.’

  I reached for my drink, hand trembling, and took a sip, only spilling a little down my chin.

  ‘Did you put your hand inside my head?’

  ‘Sort of. Also sort of not. Spells can be complicated, know what I mean?’

  ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry, forgot who I was dealing with, love.’

  Malden raised his hand, ‘If you’re interested, that was a mission aborted on my end. From my end. A false alarm.’

  ‘Better luck next time,’ said Eva, then snorted.

  ‘I still have the memories in my head, the memories you shook loose,’ I said.

  Eva shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, you would, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Couldn’t you have done that before?’

  ‘Could have, yeah, but it hurts me more than it hurts you, and it hurts you like a motherfucker.’

  ‘But you could help me remember more about my past, about me. Not just me hearing about things, but actually experiencing them, knowing them, you could do that with your ghosty fist trick, there, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I laughed and clapped my hands together.

  ‘Not gonna, though.’