‘The incident, whatever happened in that back alley, the place is heavy with it. It must have pulled out your childhood trauma.’
‘Well, that back alley can fuck right off,’ he replied, laughing, before raising a middle-finger in the alley’s direction. The laugh was a hollow one, and as he lowered his hand he turned to me, his face grim.
‘Stella, we have to stop this thing. We can’t let it make any more children feel that way. We have to find it, and we have to kill it.’
19
David was quiet on the tube ride back to Hammersmith. I could tell he hadn’t quite shaken off the fear that the trigger location had dragged out of him. I wondered whether that fear was generated by the place, or if it was an effect of the creature it had created. Whatever the case, it was obvious from our visit that it could force adults to experience the worst of their past emotions, but what about me? I didn’t have a childhood. I was born exactly as I am, exactly as I always will be until something kills me. I had no childhood trauma to attack, but I knew how deep down and painful those kinds of fears could be in other people. People who were actually born and then grew up. Effects of bad events when you’re a little kid can scar you like nothing else. That alley, that creature, whatever it was that had affected David, it hadn’t done anything to me. There was no childhood and no trauma that it could latch onto.
Lucky me.
As we got off the train and stepped out into Hammersmith, David looked at his phone and swore.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Amy didn’t reply to the message I sent before we got on the tube.’
‘Maybe she just hasn’t seen it yet?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, maybe.’
But somehow I already knew that wasn’t true.
We began to walk fast, almost breaking into a run as David dialled again and again, swearing as it went to voicemail, hanging up, and trying, hanging up and trying.
He ran ahead as we turned into the blind alley, the coven door at the other end.
‘Amy!’ he shouted.
She should be okay.
She should be safe.
I left a spell on her to keep her awake.
Into the coven, David already heading for the main room, to the couch where the previous night I’d sat and watched Dirty Dancing with his niece.
And there she was.
Curled up and fast asleep.
‘Amy, wake up. Come on, Amy!’ David patted her, shoved her, pulled her up into a sitting position. She wouldn’t wake up.
‘Do something!’ he said, staring at me, desperate.
I reached out and placed my hands on her temples.
‘Wake.’
Nothing.
I tried again, putting more force behind the word, pushing more of the magic of the coven into myself and out through my command for Amy to wake. To open her eyes. To be safe.
After fifteen minutes I staggered back, David staring at me in disbelief.
‘What? Is that it?’
‘I can’t reach her. She’s gone.’
His eyes blinked slowly then he turned back to Amy, fast asleep beside him.
‘You cast a spell on her. You said she’d be okay.’
I felt the knot of guilt twist in my stomach. I’d had good reason to think she’d be okay. A spell that keeps you awake, keeps you alert, was child’s play. I’d thought it would be too dangerous for her to go to the alleyway with us. As it turned out, there was no safe place for Amy. Sooner or later, it was going to get her.
She’d said the lines.
Repeated them out loud.
And that meant she was the creature’s to take.
She belonged in the creature’s realm now and there was nothing we could do to stop it.
Nothing at all.
‘I’m… sorry.’ It was the best I could do. I didn’t have anything else to offer.
David closed his eyes, teeth bared like he might yell, then I saw it just melt away. He looked at me.
‘What am I going to say to my sister? I’m a detective, Stella. I protect people. How can I tell her I couldn’t even protect my own niece?’
‘It’s not your fault. There’s nothing we could have done.’
‘So what? What do we do now? We just let it have them? We just let it have Amy? I go to my sister’s house and tell her that her daughter is dead? Worse than dead?’
‘No. Not yet. Just because we can’t protect them, doesn’t mean we can’t stop this. Doesn’t mean we can’t stop it taking any more. And she’s alive! Look at her. Amy is alive. She’s breathing, warm, her heart beating. When I touch her head I can still feel her brain working in there. She’s not dead. None of them are. It doesn’t want them dead; it wants them alive to feel whatever it is it wants them to feel.’
‘So, we can get Amy back? This isn’t it, she’s not going to stay like this?’
‘Do you think I’d let it keep her? Let it keep any of them?’
I looked at Amy and I pictured the room full of children slumbering at Ealing hospital, and I felt my fists tighten, knuckles throbbing, magic swirling around them.
‘We’re going to show this bastard what we do to things that mess with kids.’
20
It’s stupid to make promises you don’t know you can keep, but as I looked at David and saw the pain on his face, all I wanted was to make him feel better. Make him feel hope. Make him believe in me.
I wanted that face to go back to its normal, smiling self. To see the sparkle in his eyes again. The idea of that fear eating away at him made my stomach drop.
But it was stupid.
I had no idea if I had it in me to stop this. My witches had done it once, but so what? What was I compared to them? I was a witch’s helper, that’s all. I didn’t have a tenth of their knowledge or a fraction of their mastery over the Uncanny.
But he’d stood there in front of me looking so small, so broken, that the words had just come spilling out. What if I wasn’t able to keep my promise though? What would David think of me then? Would he walk out of this dusty old coven and never look back? Would he leave me behind, a failed familiar, alone in the city?
It didn’t matter that I’d made the promise when I shouldn’t have. I’d made it, which meant I had to keep it.
David got a call from work and I managed to convince him to go. It was no good him sitting at the coven with Amy. He should carry on as normal and I’d do whatever I could to wake her up. The truth was, I just didn’t want to be in the same room as him until I had some sort of a plan figured out. Some course of action that made me feel as though I was doing my best to keep my promise.
All night I sat with Amy. I’d carried her through into one of the empty bedrooms and laid her out on the bed. I wondered how long she’d stay there. How long until she opened her eyes. Maybe she’d stay in there for good, until her body finally gave out on her. If that happened, would the part of her the creature had taken to its realm die, too? Or would it get to keep that part forever? To torture it for eternity.
I looked through the books of magic my masters had collected over their long lives, searched for anything that might be useful, but nothing came up. If only they’d kept records of some sort, then maybe I’d have an idea how to tackle this situation. But my witches weren’t the type to keep records. There wasn’t a scrap of evidence anywhere of their centuries of fighting monsters. No records, no reports, no computer files I could use to CTRL-F “Monster who steals sleeping kids.”
I walked the coven, going from room to room, lost in my thoughts. The creature didn’t live in this reality. Back in the alley where the monster had been born, I felt like as though I’d seen a glimpse of its hiding place. Felt its realm rubbing up against our own.
Maybe…?
Was there a way to tempt it out? What if I could manipulate reality at the monster’s creation point and pull it into our world? If I could do that—lure it from its safe space and into this realm—maybe then I could kill the thing. Destroy it fo
r good.
Still, just going to the alley and demanding it appear wasn’t going to be enough. I needed more. I would need some sort of physical link to the incident. To give me a direct connection to what happened there. Something real. Something related to the creature’s birth.
I needed to find one of the people involved in whatever crime had gone down there decades ago.
My phone rang. It was David.
‘Hi.’ I realised my voice sounded small, embarrassed. I coughed and straightened myself out.
‘How’s Amy?’
‘Good.’ That was stupid. She was far from good. I didn’t want to even imagine what terrors she must have been facing. ‘Sorry. She’s… there’s no change. She’s in one of the beds.’
There was a pause on the other end.
‘David?’
‘Sorry, still here. I think I have something.’
‘What? What is it?’
‘I did a bit of digging through the files, went way back, checking anything in the past hundred years that mentioned that back alley.’
‘And? What did you get?’
‘I think I found the incident. I think I found what started all of this.’
David told me what he’d found.
And I realised just why that monster had been born.
21
I met David at the gates to Acton Cemetery. It was dawn, the sun just pulling itself clear of the horizon. Forty-eight more kids hadn’t woken that morning. Forty-eight more families, confused and terrified, demanding to know why their child lay dead to the world.
‘Are you sure Amy will be okay on her own?’ asked David.
I wanted to reassure him, but I also didn’t want to lie.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, now I feel loads better.’
‘She’s as safe as anyone can be at this point. No one will be able to get to her at the coven, but if all we do is sit by her side playing nurse, we’ll just be watching her die. So let’s get on with this.’
I strode through the cemetery gates with David at my side.
It had happened eighty years ago. Twenty years before my witches created me. David had read about it on an old police blotter – a matter-of-fact rendition of something terrible. Something beyond terrible.
Alice Travers had been nine years old, sent by her mum to buy some bread early one morning. She never made it to the shop. Two kids from her year at school had been out early too. A boy and a girl who had made it their daily routine to terrorise Alice. Eventually, it lead to their exclusion from the school they shared, and Alice had thought it was over.
It almost was.
The two kids knew Alice would be out alone, bright and early. Being sent to the shop for bread was a daily chore. The boy had been the first to see her. It seemed like he was on his own. Alice had run, straight ahead, towards the shops, and the boy had given chase. Alice met the girl soon after, blocking the path ahead. The bullies has purposefully cut off two paths of escape, forcing Alice to blindly run down the back alley. The back alley out of view of any passers-by. The back alley with the dead end.
Alice must have realised right away that she’d made a mistake. Did she know what was about to happen? She must have been terrified but thought, at worst, they’d punch and kick her. Taunt her. Spit on her. Did she have any idea at all about what the two bullies really had in store for her that morning?
I wondered how they’d gone about it. Had they padded towards her, slowly and deliberately, enjoying the fear? Dragging it out until Alice’s heart felt like it was going to give out? Or had they run into the alley, sprinted towards her, hungry to get started?
The kids, when the police picked them up, claimed they hadn’t meant to kill Alice Travers. That they’d just wanted to teach her a lesson for getting them into trouble. For getting them excluded from school and in terrible strife with their parents.
Had they been telling the truth? Was it a case of bullying gone too far? Or maybe a mania had overtaken them, a blood lust as they egged each other on, past the point of no return. Maybe the creature had been there—almost a real thing but not quite—pushing them on and on to keep hitting, keep stamping, one more time, one more time, go on, enjoy the music of screams and broken bones. Dance to the pain.
Give me life.
They’d left Alice’s body behind the bins, legs sticking out. One of the shopkeepers found it a few hours later as he went to dump some old stock. Little Alice Travers, just nine years old and dead already. Her body a twisted mess. Who’d think two eleven-year-olds could be capable of such a bleak and vicious act?
The creature knew. And now it had come to punish them all. For Alice. For everyone like her.
‘Oi, over here,’ called David, waving me to him as he stood over a gravestone.
‘This must be it, look.’
Alice Travers, read the inscription, Beloved Daughter, 1928-1937.
Such a short life. Nine years and dumped behind some bins.
‘So, what now?’ asked David. ‘I didn’t bring a shovel. Are we just gonna knock on the gravestone and invite her out?’
I needed something from the incident itself. Something with a physical connection, and what would give me a stronger connection than Alice herself?
‘I’m not sure I feel entirely amazing about this,’ said David. ‘Fighting monsters is one thing, but robbing the graves of little girls is a bit, you know… much. I’ll be leaving this one out of my memoirs, anyway.’
‘We need Alice,’ I replied. ‘If it makes you feel any better, it’s just her bones down there, sitting in a box.’
‘Right, just a box of kid bones. That does make me feel lots better. Cheers, Stella.’
‘I mean, it’s not her anymore, it’s just stuff she left behind. She isn’t her body. She isn’t her bones. But those bones will give us the best connection possible to what happened in that alley eighty years back. Something to pry open the window between worlds and drag the creature out.’
‘So we can kick the shit out of it.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Right. So, are we just digging with our paws like a couple of dogs, or…?’
I raised an eyebrow and gestured for him to stand back. I stood at the foot of the small grave and breathed in slowly. The magic of the cemetery began to wash towards me in great, lapping waves as I made myself a focal point for the Uncanny. The background magic here was strong; this was an old place full of ancient things.
I felt the magic filling me up and reached out with my hands.
‘Alice,’ I said. ‘Alice, come here.’
I fixated on the command, rolling it over and over in my mind. I felt my hands become irresistible, an undeniable force, demanding and insisting.
The ground below trembled a little, then the dirt on the grave plot shook and split.
‘Alice. Alice, come here now. Come here.’
Something began to force its way out of the ground. A patch of dirty white that spread and then pushed itself out and into the morning light.
A skull.
Alice’s skull.
I lowered my hands, allowing the magic to drain away from me. I felt David step in beside me and we both looked at the small skull that had wriggled free of the earth, its eyes wide black holes.
‘Well,’ said David, ‘nothing about that was a poop-inducing nightmare.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Grab the skull and let’s get to work.’
As we left Acton Cemetery, David holding the skull under his jacket, nodding meekly at an old man giving his dog a morning walk, I felt hopeful. We had something to fight with now. Something we could use to pull this creature into the light.
Something to save Amy.
22
Back at the coven I used a pestle and mortar to grind a piece of the skull into a fine powder.
‘She’s still… she’s okay,’ said David, entering the coven’s main room to join me.
‘Good. I’ve finished,’ I said, indicating to Al
ice’s powdered skull before carefully tipping it into a leather pouch, which I placed in my pocket.
‘You know, there’s something very wrong about all of this. It just feels, odd. I mean, we just ground up a child’s head.’
‘Believe me, I’ve done worse.’
David nodded, then shook his head and laughed. ‘Jesus, my life was a lot more simple before you showed up in my house, yapping about monsters. I had a life and a job I was good at. Well, pretty good at. Sometimes. And now…’
I almost didn’t respond in case the reply was something I didn’t want to hear. I swallowed. ‘And now what?’
‘Well, it’s never boring, is it?’ he said, and winked.
‘No. No, it’s not.’
‘I just want to say, Stella, I wouldn’t change it. I wouldn’t want to go back. No matter how bad it gets, I couldn’t just turn my back on all this and pretend the Uncanny didn’t exist. I couldn’t, you know, turn my back on you.’
A heavy silence. I thought back to the drunken walk home from a few nights previous, about what almost happened, then patted the bag of ground skull in my pocket.
‘We need to get back to the alley. To the place Alice was murdered.’
David sighed and nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘You don’t have to come,’ I told him. ‘I can’t ask you to risk going through what happened last time. Not again.’
‘Hey, that’s my niece in there. My family. And even if it wasn’t, kids across the city are in danger. Helping them is my job. It doesn’t matter if that’s frightening, I took an oath. So let’s get on with it, yeah?’
We stood and left the coven, David checking on Amy one last time before we left her behind again. I wondered what it was she was experiencing as she lay still in that bed. What place the creature had taken her to and what it was making her go through. I almost felt like I could hear her screaming. Screaming in pain, in fear. Screaming for help.
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