I went from one bed to the next, from one slumbering child to the next.
‘What is it? What’re you seeing, Stella?’
‘I’m not sure.’
I squinted and turned my head to try catching something in the corner of my eye. Tried reaching out with my senses to see if they’d pick up anything being purposefully hidden from me.
‘There’s something… wrong with them,’ I said.
‘Well, yeah, I put that together myself, Columbo.’
‘No, I mean… I’m not sure. It’s like I can almost see something. A dark fuzz; a slight shadow sitting above each of them. Only I can’t actually see it. Like, I almost see it in the corner of my eye, but I don’t. It’s more that I sense it. Taste it in the magic surrounding each bed.’
‘Okay, well, what d’you think that means?’
‘It means that something dark has taken these children, and if we don’t find out what, none of them will ever open their eyes again.’
7
The first child, the one with the red hair, was called Lucy. She lived in a nice three bedroom house on Clitherow Avenue, a two minute walk from the nearest tube station.
Her mother let us in, David smiling a comforting smile and showing her his badge.
‘I’ve just stopped back to have a shower,’ she explained, apologetically, as though we might judge her for not being at the hospital. Was that suspicious? Shouldn’t she be there, at the hospital, sat in the waiting room with the rest of the terrified parents?
‘That’s okay, Miss Callow,’ said David. ‘We just wondered if we could take a look at Lucy’s room.’
She nodded, hands worrying the cloth of her shirt, then led us upstairs. Lucy’s bedroom door was decorated with a sticker that pictured her name written in flower petals. Miss Callow’s hand dithered on the handle.
‘It’s okay,’ said David, his voice soothing. He was used to situations like this. ‘We can take it from here, Miss Callow. You leave us to it and go take that shower.’
Her mouth twitched momentarily into a smile. ‘She always got up early. That’s why I… I shouted up. Then knocked on the door. Then stood over her, nudged her, then shook and shouted. She just wouldn’t wake up. I thought she was… at first, you know? Thought she must be, because why wouldn’t you wake up if someone was stood right over you? Shaking and shouting at you? Why won’t she wake up, detective? Why won’t my Lucy wake up?’
Tears were pouring down her cheeks, but as David went to comfort her she turned away and headed off down the corridor towards the bathroom.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘Let’s take a look.’
He opened the door to Lucy’s room and stepped inside. I lingered and looked down the hallway to where Miss Callow had disappeared. I heard the shower start to blast, loud enough to almost cover her sobs. That deep-down love that a parent has for a child, was that what my witches had for me? Had they thought of me like that, or was I nothing more than a device to them? Something they fashioned from dirt, spit, and magic to make their job easier?
‘Oi,’ said David, popping his head back out of the bedroom, ‘You coming in, or what?’
I stepped into Lucy’s room, leaving her mother’s tortured tears behind.
The room was beyond neat; even the items on the dresser were placed just so. Posters of grinning young men covered the walls.
‘Which one’s your favourite, then?’ said David pointing to a poster featuring four non-threatening males, none of which looked as though their face had known the feel of a razor.
‘What are they?’
‘What are they?’ he parroted, rolling his eyes. ‘You know, sometimes you really do sound like a sixty-year-old.’
‘That is my age.’
‘Well, yeah, but… look, never mind.’
Lucy’s room had a heavy scent to it. A mixture of clashing smells. Chemical, flowery smells from a variety of sprays and creams and fat, multi-coloured candles.
‘Lucy’s mother,’ I said. ‘Do you think there’s anything in that?’
‘What?’ asked David. ‘You think she might be some sort of evil witch? Or a monster pretending to be Lucy’s Mum?’
‘Well, no, I don’t think so. I didn’t sense anything off about her, at least not like that. But isn’t it a bit weird that she’s already left her daughter alone at the hospital?’
‘Maybe, but I wouldn’t read too much into that. This sort of thing hits people in different ways. I’ve had husbands who were just informed their spouse had been murdered go into work the same day. Like they’ve gone into autopilot, going through the motions of their day like everything was just fine. I can understand her wanting to get out of that hospital and take a shower. To feel vaguely human for a minute.’
To feel vaguely human. I understood the appeal, if not the sensation.
I nodded and looked around the room, reaching out with my senses as David began looking through Lucy’s drawers.
‘You know, I’m not exactly sure what you’re hoping to find,’ he said. ‘Unless there’s an empty can of magical sleeping gas under the bed.’ He laughed, then looked at the bed for a few seconds. He stepped over, knelt down, lifted the dangling duvet and looked under the bed. He let the duvet drop and turned to me. ‘No gas can.’
‘Nothing in the air either. Not like at the hospital.’
There was no strange signature to the room’s magic. No hints of the dark shadows I could almost see back at the room full of sleeping children.
David sighed and sat on the small, single mattress, the springs creaking as it adjusted to his weight. ‘Okay, so we’ve got six kids from the same class falling into comas on the same night. And all of them zonked out after they got into bed. None of them fell face-first into their dinner, or collapsed in front of the TV. They all went to bed like normal, and the first time anyone knew something was up was when they didn’t get up for school the next morning.’
‘And now they all have something over them. Something I can’t quite see.’
‘Right. So…?’
‘I’m not sure.’
David sighed again and leaned back, one hand resting on the pillow. He stopped and turned towards it.
‘What is it?’
‘I heard a crinkle.’ He lifted the pillow, there was a piece of paper folded underneath. He looked up at me, one eyebrow raised.
‘Could be something,’ I said.
‘Yeah, or it could just be a love note Timmy had Gina pass Lucy during Chemistry.’
There were just three words on the piece of paper, neatly written with red biro in flowing, joined-up handwriting.
‘Well?’ asked David. ‘Don’t keep me in suspenders, what does it say?’
I handed him the piece of paper.
It said Wake No More.
8
We checked a few of the other kids’ bedrooms but didn’t find any other notes. I’d wondered if the note under Lucy’s pillow held some sort of curse. That whoever rested their head on it slipped into a coma. Written words can be infused with magic and used like booby traps. The lack of notes in any of the other bedrooms quickly derailed that idea.
Still, it was too strange a coincidence to dismiss, so as David left to head back to the hospital, I made my way home, to the coven, the note stored safely in my pocket.
‘Wake no more,’ I said, as I walked down the blind alley that led to the coven door. I rolled the words around to see if any residual Uncanny taste or images emerged just from my saying them, but there was nothing.
I entered the coven and made straight for the main room, throwing my leather jacket over the back of a rocking chair and causing it to creak back and forth noisily before settling into silence again. I remembered how much that creak-creak-creak would drill into my head when I was having a bad day. Trin, one of my witches, moving back and forth, a tireless piston, the sound of the chair accompanied by the click-clack of her knitting needles as she created an endless supply of scarves, sweaters, and gloves.
Some nights Trin d
idn’t go to bed at all, and I’d lay awake in bed, squashing earplugs in to try and cut out the noise that seemed so enormous in the dead of the night.
Now I missed that noise.
Sometimes I even lay awake, unable to sleep, because I couldn’t hear it.
I pulled the note from my pocket and opened it to reveal the neatly-penned words.
Wake No More.
Nothing else. Just one piece of paper with those three words written dead in the centre.
I grabbed a piece of chalk and crouched down onto one knee, sketching a simple pentagram shape onto the one-metre square piece of black slate fixed to the floor in front of the open fireplace (the fireplace was rarely used, the coven has central heating. We’re not savages). Great waves of power washed towards me as I raised both hands above my head and acted as a focal point for the magic in the room. I placed the correct words together in my mind, then pushed my open palms towards the chalk pentagram, infusing it with power. The lines glowed red for a heartbeat, then went back to normal.
I placed the note, open with the words visible, at the centre of the pentagram, then kneeled before it, hands on my thighs, head bowed and eyes closed.
The light in the room dimmed, though I hadn’t turned them off. It was the magic, responding to my request. My request to explore, to investigate, to interrogate. I was pushing everything I could think of into the piece of paper, sat in its place of focus within the chalk pentagram. Demanding the power within the London Coven reveal something about the note, about the words. To reveal the curse that had been placed upon it.
I came at the problem from every direction I could think of. Used any spell or magical command that seemed useful, but they all came up with a big fat nothing.
As far as I could tell, the paper wasn’t infused with any magic at all.
The words written upon it weren’t cursed.
The ink wasn’t laced with anything that might seep out and put the child in a coma after they closed their eyes.
It was just an ordinary piece of paper that Lucy had written three words onto.
I swore and sat with a thud on the floor, glaring at the note.
It must mean something. I could feel it. This wasn’t just some random coincidence. The piece of paper meant something. The words meant something. I just didn’t see the whole picture yet.
‘Is he here?’ I asked.
Lenny nodded and gestured to a far corner of the The Beehive pub. Razor was hunched at a table alone, half hidden in shadow.
‘Can I get you another of what you had last night, Stella?’ he asked.
I remembered how I felt waking that morning, pictured myself a little too close to Detective David Tyler’s lips the previous evening, and shook my head.
I made my way over to Razor and sat down on the stool opposite him.
‘Familiar,’ he spat.
The last time I’d spoken to Razor I’d left him in a bloody heap on the toilet floor, but that was months ago. Now fresh bruises patterned his face. By the looks of things, someone else had dealt him a beating, and recently.
‘You’ve been in the wars, there, friend,’ I said. ‘Care to talk about it?’
He glared at me, ‘What do you want? Did you come here to attack me again?’
I smiled. ‘No, not this time,’ I replied.
‘Oh, it must be my birthday. Hip-hip-hooray.’ He sneered, exposing two rows of sharp, yellowed teeth.
Razor was an eaves; a low-level Uncanny that specialised in knowing things. In skulking around and picking up secrets to pass on for a price. In the case of an eaves, the price is a dose of magic they feast upon. Despite being Uncanny, eaves don’t have access to magic in the same way as I do, but they crave its nourishment.
If you want information about something, there’s a good chance the likes of Razor know it.
I slid Lucy’s note across the table towards him. He glanced down, then back up. ‘And? What’s this then?’
‘You tell me.’
‘It’s a piece of paper, Familiar. I’ll take my fee now.’
‘Funny.’
He picked up the paper with the ragged nails of his cigarette-stained fingers and sniffed it.
‘Where’d you get it?’
‘From under a kid’s pillow. She went to sleep and never woke up.’
‘Aw, you’re going to make me cry here.’
I snatched the piece of paper from his dirty digits and stuffed it into my jacket pocket.
‘“Wake No More”,’ I said. ‘What does that mean to you? Have you heard the words used before? As a hex, as anything at all?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Well, thanks, Razor, you’ve been a big help.’
I stood and began to make my way to the exit, frustrated to arrive at another dead end. I still wasn’t used to actually investigating. I’d been created to fight, not to gather intel.
‘Hey, Familiar.’
‘What?’ I sighed, half-turning back to him.
‘Don’t think I’ve just forgiven you for what you did to me. That was over the mark.’
Was Razor really trying to threaten me? I twitched in his direction and he shrank back into the shadows.
‘That’s what I thought.’
I turned my back on him and walked out of The Beehive, feeling my phone vibrate in my pocket. I pulled it out. It was David.
‘Anything new?’ I asked.
‘You know, you really need to work on your greetings. Most people go with a friendly “hello”.’
‘Get to it,’ I replied.
‘That note we found, I think I might have some new info on it.’
9
The flat belonged to Angie Tyler, David’s sister. I realised then that I hadn’t even known he had a sister. To me he was just David. A detective in the police force and a friend, and that was all… at least until we got drunk the other night and… no, I didn’t even want to think about that.
Angie lived in a terraced house in Acton, West London. The Victorian house had been split into two dwellings, with Angie and her daughter taking up the bottom floor.
Angie opened the door. She was in her mid-thirties with a riot of dyed-blonde curls that she’d attempted to tame with various clips and bands. She didn’t remind me of David at all.
‘You Stella, then?’ she asked.
‘Yep.’
‘Let her through, Ange,’ came David’s voice from inside.
I followed her through into the front room. The TV was on, halfway through an episode of Murder, She Wrote.
‘There she is. Hey, Batman,’ said David, hopping up off the couch.
‘Robin,’ I replied, nodding in his direction.
‘What?’ said Angie.
‘Oh, inside joke, sis’, never mind.’
‘Right. I’ll put the kettle on then.’
As she left the room David turned to me, his eyes widening momentarily, ‘Not one for the big chucks and yucks, my sister.’
‘I didn’t know you had a sister.’
‘I didn’t know myself until about six years back. Turned out my Dad had been a bit of a twat before I was born and got another woman pregnant. Angie turned up on my doorstep one weekend, telling me she was my half-sister.’
That explained the lack of family resemblance. She must take after her Mother.
‘Okay, so why am I meeting your sister?’
Amy was thirteen years old and had inherited her mother’s mess of thick curls, though hers were dyed bright purple.
She looked up from fiddling on her phone as we entered her room and stood sharply from the edge of her bed, as if we’d just caught her doing something embarrassing. ‘Oi, Uncle Dave, heard of knocking, yeah?’
‘Why, what were you doing?’
‘Nothing!’ she said, her face flushing.
‘You know I’m a police officer? Family or not I will cuff you and take you to the station, isn’t that right, Stella?’
‘Um. Yes. That is right.’
Amy rolled her eyes, but then broke into a giggle. She obviously had more of a sense of humour than her mother.
‘Stella Familiar, this is my awesome niece, Amy.’
‘Familiar? What kind of a second name is Familiar?’ she asked, arching a brow.
‘Well, it’s the kind of second name I have,’ I replied.
Amy looked to David, who, judging by the grin plastered across his face, was enjoying this awkward little conversation.
‘Okay,’ said David, ‘Tell Stella what you told me.’
‘Which bit?’
‘The whole bit.’
Amy sighed and sat back on the edge of her bed, looking down at her phone and sweeping her thumb across it to absent-mindedly scan Facebook.
‘It was just after what happened to all those kids. On the news. Not waking up and that.’
She shifted uncomfortably.
‘Go on,’ David prompted.
‘Well, there’s this rhyme and stuff that we all know at school, a sort of dare thing, and it’s scary even though it’s stupid. I know it’s stupid, I’m thirteen, I’m not a kid.’ Her face flushed again with a mix of embarrassment and anger.
‘You’re very grown up,’ said David. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, like I say, there’s this rhyme that kids at school started sharing. And then I heard on the news about the kids going to bed and not waking up, and Uncle Dave came over for lunch and he’s talking to Mum about it all. Mentions this note he found under one of the kid’s pillows—’
‘“Wake No More,”’ I said.
Amy nodded and looked at her knees, then back up at me, her eyes saucer-like. ‘I said the rhyme! I was trying to show Carly Fisher I wasn’t a baby, so I said it. Said it like eight times, because I’m not a kid, and now, what happens if I go to sleep? Will I wake up again? Am I gonna die?’
A tear escaped her eye and ran down her cheek. David sat next to her and put his arm around her.
‘Hey, Ames, it’s okay. You did the right thing telling me, because you know what bad things hate? Me and Stella over there. Nothing bad is going to happen to you, you have my word. Okay?’
Uncanny Kingdom: An Eleven Book Urban Fantasy Collection (Uncanny Kingdom Omnibus 1) Page 17
