A Three-Book Collection

by M. V. Stott

  The dream had ghosted around inside of her sleeping mind ever since she was small. She would wake in the black with the imagined smell assaulting her twitching nose and she would shake, as though she were a dog attempting to throw off water after a frantic, deep plunge.

  Often, Jane would forget what it was that had made her wake up with such an off-kilter feeling. Other times she would recall nothing more than the rabbit mask itself, or perhaps just its damp basement smell.

  ‘Do you like my mask?’

  She turned over in bed and kicked her legs.

  ‘You’re doing it again,’ said Greg in a weary mumble, patting her flank with the back of one hand.

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘Oh, must be someone else then.’

  ‘Do you like my mask?’

  Jane smiled and turned on to her side, her back to Greg, and curled so that her knees almost touched her chest. She knew when Greg tapped her that she’d been having the rabbit mask dream, even if she couldn’t remember it. Rabbit mask was the only dream that made her kick and squirm.

  ‘Knock, knock,’ said the man in the rabbit mask, ‘it’s time. Time to start, time to end. Time to send you round the bend.’

  That morning, as Jane stumbled from the bed to the shower to the kitchen to the couch, she had no idea that she would never have the rabbit mask dream again.

  Never have any dream again.

  Greg had already been up and out of bed when she woke, but she could hear him now, clattering around in the kitchen.

  Jane grabbed the remote and flicked on the TV set. Static greeted her. ‘Shit.’ She pressed another channel. More static. ‘Greg, is the telly broken?’

  ‘No,’ replied Greg. ‘Everything is fine, fine, fine.’

  Jane went from channel to channel, but all were gone. Finally, she discovered a channel that was working. On screen was a close-up of what looked like a mask, fashioned into a hedgehog’s head.

  It made Jane’s heart judder.

  It wasn’t the rabbit mask of her dreams, but it was clearly of the same type. Old, tatty, wrong.

  Jane jabbed at the remote and the TV changed channel.

  The man in the hedgehog mask stared out at her.

  She changed the channel over and over again, but there he was, there he always was, the mask filling the screen.

  As her heart boom-boomed, Jane got down on to her knees and shuffled forward on the carpet, peering closer at the hedgehog mask. It seemed to her that its wearer was returning her gaze, which, of course, was impossible.

  Impossible.

  Jane could hear the person breathing, in and out, in and out, raspy, harsh against the mask. She had the strange fear that if she were to move any closer towards the screen, the hedgehog man would reach out and grab hold of her.

  ‘You shouldn’t sit so close you know,’ said Greg, who had entered the room behind her. ‘You’ll get square eyes,’

  ‘Greg, I don’t think I like this TV channel.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. It’s fine, fine, fine.’

  She turned from the screen to look up at her boyfriend, who smiled down at her. It was an odd sort of smile, Jane thought, but that wasn’t the oddest thing about Greg. No, the oddest thing was that he didn’t have any eyes. Birds had taken up home inside his head, their small, sharp beaks poking out of Greg’s eye sockets.

  ‘Oh, I enjoy this show,’ said Greg, pointing to the hedgehog-masked stranger on screen. ‘Do I? I think I do. I’m sure I’ve seen it before and before and before.’

  As she listened to Greg talk, Jane realised he didn’t sound much like her boyfriend at all. The voice was too flat, empty of any colour or nuance. It was like someone had hollowed out his voice, and if she were to poke one of his words with her finger as he spoke them, it would collapse in on itself.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  ‘I am Greg. Greg your boyfriend. We have dated for years and years and rent this house at a reasonable cost, all things considered. Shall we kiss?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Greg, and he dug into his pocket, retrieving a fist of soil full of fat, wiggling worms. ‘Everything is fine, fine, fine.’ He began to pull worms from the soil clump and hold them before his eye sockets, the beaks snapping hungrily, until one found its target and pulled the worm from his fingers and hauled it into his head.

  Jane wondered how he could see her with his eye sockets full of beaks. How could he think at all with a skull stuffed with feathers and talons and sharp, hungry squawks? She stood and began to edge away from Not Greg, as she now thought of him. Not Greg with his dead voice and his starving beak eyes.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Not Greg, feeding fat worm after fat worm to the snapping beaks.

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Oh, that’s not true. That’s not true at all,’ said Not Greg as she edged around the room, moving slowly toward the door. Not Greg turned from her, back to the TV set. ‘Ah yes, I do remember this show, I knew I did. This is the Mr. Spike show. Mr. Spike is funny, you know. Or terrifying. Or silly. Something along those lines.’

  Jane was three steps from the door, her eyes never leaving Not Greg as he stood transfixed by the non-moving person in the mouldy hedgehog mask.

  ‘Once I met Mr. Spike on a road that didn’t exist. He took off his mask and I pulled out my eyes so as not to see what was shown. I can laugh about it now, you know. Everything is funny, given time.’

  A beak pierced the back of Not Greg’s head and wiggled and fought until the bird’s entire head poked through, slick with gore, and stared at Jane with black, blank eyes.

  She ran from the room.

  From the house.

  From Not Greg and his head full of birds.

  From the man in the hedgehog mask.

  She raced for her car and started the engine, stomping the accelerator and leaving her house behind, but she found that the sound of the man in the hedgehog mask’s breathing remained. Rough and guttural, constant and steady, as though he was in the passenger seat, leaning over, his masked face centimetres from her ear. Jane felt as though she could feel his hot, damp breath on her face, smell the rancid air blowing from his lungs, landing damp and sticky upon her skin. It made her feel like she wanted to lean away, even though the car was empty. Like she wanted to turn her face away and gag.

  It was just another dream, that’s all.

  She thought she’d woken up, but she hadn’t, not really.

  That had to be the truth of it, because real life wasn’t like this.

  Or perhaps she’d gone mad.

  It was all very strange and unreal and it made Jane feel all shaky on the inside, like her organs were bashing into each other like pinballs. Going batty had always been one of her greatest fears. Some yelped at spiders scuttling, others trembled deep down at the very idea of travelling by airplane, but the worry that sneaked up on Jane in her darker times was the fear of losing her marbles.

  ‘Who are you, then?’ her Granddad Thomas would say when she went to visit him in those final few years.

  ‘It’s me Granddad, Jane, your granddaughter,’ she would reply, softly.

  ‘Oh? Oh, no. No, I don’t think so love, I’m only twenty-two, I haven’t even had kids yet,’ and he would look down at his wrinkled, brown-spotted hands in confusion.

  ‘You’re not mad, or dreaming, not at all,’ said a man sat calmly on the back seat of the car.

  He wore a rabbit mask.

  The wheel turned sharply and the car tyres screamed in complaint as the world lurched round and round, until things came to a sudden stop and Jane bashed her head painfully against the door window and things turned into fuzz and sparks.

  ‘My name is Mr. Cotton; I believe you recently met my good brother, Mr. Spike.’

  Her world tilting, Jane fumbled at the seat belt with rubber fingers.

  ‘Look at you now,’ said Mr. Cotton, ‘all grown up and ready for the chop. The first of a bad batch.’

  Free of h
er seat belt, Jane pushed open the door and stumbled out of the car, now resting diagonal with a rear wheel up on the pavement. Her hands scuffed the ground as she made her escape, painting the tarmac red.

  ‘Where are you going, Jane? It’s time. Your time. He’s waiting for you, rude to be late.’

  Jane had felt scared many times in her life.

  There was the time she was six and her dad had taken her to the local swimming baths. She’d thought she knew what she was doing, but soon enough she’d walked too far, and under she went, knowing there was no way she’d be able to get above the water again to catch her breath—

  There were the times in class when the teacher was going from pupil to pupil and she knew she was going to have to stand and speak in front of everyone and her mouth was so, so dry and her heart was fluttering—

  There was the time she climbed over a fence to retrieve a ball, and just as she found it and picked it up she heard a low growl and turned to see the biggest dog that had ever been, baring its fangs, head down, drool pouring, and the fence was too far away and there was no way she was going to make it but she turned to run anyway—

  But this wasn’t like that, this was a deep down terror, primal and old and undeniable. It was other and it was wrong and it was inevitable. It was where she’d always been headed.

  Jane felt like curling up into a ball and crying.

  Instead she ran.

  Ran down streets she didn’t recognise, which she knew was impossible, because she knew every street in Blackpool like the back of her hand. She’d lived her entire life in the same faded seaside town, clinging to the west coast of England, shaking hands with the sea, and yet turn after turn took her deeper into confusion.

  ‘Just one thing, just show me one thing I know,’ but the strange and the new were all that she found.

  This wasn’t her home. This wasn’t her town. She was lost and she was going to have to stop running because her body couldn’t stand another step. Half crouching, half falling, she reached out to cushion the blow as she dropped to the ground and tore at the air with great, ragged breaths.

  ‘There you are, I’ve been waiting for you.’

  She looked up to see the man in the rabbit mask stood before her.

  ‘You’re not real,’ said Jane. ‘You’re just a nightmare. You’re not real!’

  ‘It’s true, I am a nightmare, but I am also very real. My name is Mr. Cotton, and this is my dear brother, Mr. Spike.’

  The man from the television, the man in the hedgehog mask, stepped in beside him.

  ‘What do you want?’ Jane begged.

  ‘I told you. It’s time. The Magician is waiting.’

  And then Mr. Spike took off his mask.

  3

  The man had been running for a long, long time.

  It had started on the Underground—on the Piccadilly line—as the train shot rat-a-tat and shaky through the dark. His plan had been to change at Green Park, hop on to the Victoria line, and head for Oxford Circus.

  The carriage was crammed with people heading towards the always crowded shopping hub of London, and the man was stood, gripping a bar, uncomfortably close to a cluster of strangers. Normally, the close proximity of a hygienically challenged man’s ripe armpit would have driven him to distraction, but he had far worse things demanding his attention today.

  He thought he’d been discreet, but Carlisle had discovered what he’d done.

  He’d been drinking at The Beehive pub, sure his secret was safe, when an extremely unpleasant eaves who went by the name of Razor had delighted in telling him that his secret was, in fact, public knowledge. It seemed Razor had sold him out for a taste of magic, ratted on him to someone he knew who would pass on the information to Carlisle’s ears.

  The man had abandoned his three-thirds-full drink and fled the pub in search of sanctuary. Carlisle knew that the man had told the London Coven about what he’d been up to, and Carlisle was not the sort to let that go.

  He knew people on Oxford Street, people who could squirrel him away, undetected. He had a feeling that he’d have to stay hidden a good long while; it was said that Carlisle had been known to nurse grudges for centuries. He was hopeful that he’d been tipped off early enough to make it into his hidey hole. More than hopeful.

  He was three stops from Green Park when things started to go wrong.

  The train lurched to a stop at Gloucester Road and belched up its passengers, who shoved their way out of the carriage before the waiting horde bundled on to the train after them, staking a claim to whatever small space they could find.

  The man had a beanie hat pulled down so it almost covered his eyes, and was doing his best not to catch anyone’s eye. Travelling on the underground was a dangerous gambit he knew, eyes were everywhere, but it was also the quickest way to get where he needed to be. So he’d taken the risk, shrinking under his hat and hiding within the folds of his large overcoat.

  Over and over in his head he repeated the mantra: see me not, see me not, see me not. It was a weak type of perception magic. It didn’t render him invisible, but it did make people less likely to notice him. Made people who might feed information back to Carlisle less likely to see him and take note of the direction he was heading in.

  It would have worked, too. As long as Carlisle himself wasn’t the one to see him.

  The man felt eyes on him. He repeated the magical mantra over and over, but the sensation would not go away. The hairs on the back of the man’s neck stood upright with alarm. His eyes darted back and forth until his gaze landed on a figure in the next carriage, staring at him through the window of the connecting door.

  He saw a long, shadowed silhouette wearing a dark purple floor-length coat, ragged like an old shroud. A chalk-white face stared back at him with two black-circled eyes that burned like coals.

  The man abandoned his mantra as his stomach turned and his heart slammed against his chest.

  As the train shuddered to a stop at South Kensington, the door between the carriages opened and Carlisle stepped across.

  Head down, the man bolted from the train, shoving aside complaining passengers that he neither saw nor heard. He didn’t look back, he knew Carlisle had him pegged, and to even make eye-contact might be enough for his pursuer to bring him down.

  He emerged on to the streets, his plan shot; a damp soap dancing from grasping hand to grasping hand.

  ‘Hey, are you all right, mate?’

  He didn’t answer, didn’t look to see who the concerned passerby might be, instead he ran and hoped a plan would come to him before he felt a cold hand grip his throat.

  He ran wildly and indiscriminately. Who knew, perhaps having no clear plan or destination would throw Carlisle off.

  Why had he even told the Coven about Carlisle’s illegal happy pill business? Why had he told Stella Familiar, who ran the place now since the death of her three witches? Because of his own short-sighted greed, that’s why. He’d been the messenger boy for someone who disliked Carlisle muscling in on their turf. Not only muscling in, but dealing in dodgy pills that were cutting down their clientele in ever-increasing numbers. Most of the gangs wanted to keep their customers alive, so when Carlisle started selling pills cut with who knows what—pills that had the unfortunate side effect of stealing years off a user’s life—well, they took exception to that. It was bad for business.

  Of course, they couldn’t be seen to be dealing with the Coven themselves, so they offered him a fistful of cash instead, and the promise of more to come if he did the job right. But no one did the dirty on Carlisle and got away with it. He’d been stupid, and it was going to get him killed.

  He ducked into a doorway to catch his breath, nervously glancing back to see how far ahead he was. Carlisle was nowhere to be seen. He felt a little hope twitch in his chest. Perhaps he’d been sharp enough to evade the great Carlisle? He’d always been fleet of foot when danger came a-knocking.

  ‘Have you decided to stop? Oh good, running is so
uncivilised.’

  The voice was like velvet.

  The man didn’t turn to it, he just ran.

  There!

  There on the ground, a way out, an escape hatch to another place.

  He pulled the metal sewer cover key from his pocket and fell to his knees, jamming it into the sewer cover, wrenching it up, and wriggling down into the dark to land with a wet thud several metres below. His eyes instantly became accustomed to the sudden switch from light to dark, glowing in the gloom, two large yellow beacons.

  Even before the metal sewer cover fell back into place, he was away. His body begged him to stop, but the man knew he couldn’t, not with death at his heels. And so he ran through the dark, his feet splashing through the damp trickle that snaked across the old stone floor of the sewer.

  He knew the sewers well. He’d grown up down there, in the labyrinth network of tunnels that ran like veins under the skin of London. He knew every twist, every dark turn, every hiding place. He hadn’t stepped out into the world above until he turned double figures. He felt better here. He was in his element in the sewer, and maybe, just maybe, it would give him the edge over the beast that stalked him.

  It did not.

  Something struck his ankles, twisting round and round and bringing him crashing to the slick, hard ground.

  ‘No! No!’

  His hands scrabbled at the rope that bound his legs together, but the rope only pulled tighter, like a python squeezing the life out of a dinner that had yet to accept its place on the menu.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ the man pleaded.

  ‘I don’t care,’ came the reply.

  Carlisle drifted out of the shadows, the other end of the rope in his black-gloved hands, his heavy boots splashing through the water.

  ‘You told tales on me, sewer-born. I find that extremely rude.’

  ‘They made me!’

  ‘Oh?’