Uncanny Kingdom: An Eleven Book Urban Fantasy Collection (Uncanny Kingdom Omnibus 1)

by David Bussell

  Vic could wait though. He wasn’t going anywhere, and besides, I had a grieving wife at home. Sarah and me might have been on a bit of a downslope, but you don’t live with another person for as long as we had without building up a certain… well, dependency might be too strong a word for it… let’s say, familiarity.

  Whatever that purple smoke was about, its effect wore off the moment I left Jazz Hands’ magic shop. I made my way back invisibly to Tufnell Park via King’s Cross Station. I walked across the concourse on the way to the Underground entrance, past all the rush hour commuters, past platform 9 & ¾, the tourist attraction where Harry Potter fans could pose with a trolley embedded in a brick wall. If you ever want to see what human misery looks like, take a gander at the poor buggers they make stand next to that thing: the ones in the red waistcoats. The minimum wage teenagers they pay to hold the end of the tourists’ big woolly scarves, always out of frame, all to give the impression that some Potter nut’s neckwear is flowing gracefully behind them as they swan off to Hogwarts.

  But then I saw something even more miserable than that. A group of apparitions, thirty of them at least, floating towards me, holding hands like a string of paper men cut by a child. As they got closer I saw that they were surrounded by a flickering orange aura. I stood, rooted to the spot, as they drew closer still. I could see now that the aura was more than just a light show, it was fire. The apparitions were wreathed by flames and burnt all over, no hair, no eyebrows, their features melted and raw. They looked like the ghosts of witches set on fire for practicing black magic, only these were no cackling hags, just dead human beings caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  The apparitions whimpered like lost children. ‘Help us,’ they begged.

  The fire.

  The one that had ripped through King’s Cross station, back in ‘87. The one sparked by a lit match, tossed down the side of an escalator, back when the contraptions were made of wood.

  ‘Please, help us,’ wailed the ghosts, their pitiful voices rising in pitch.

  I ran.

  I’m not proud of it, but I ran as fast as my legs would carry me.

  10

  I arrived back at my flat so lost in thought that I could hardly remember what I was doing there. Matter of fact, I was so distracted, I even went for my house key, as if I needed a bit of metal in my pocket to go places anymore.

  I phantomed through the front door and headed for the lounge. I heard the crying before I got there. Man, she was really howling. Poor Sarah, this had to be hard on her. I’d been so preoccupied with my own stuff that I’d hardly spared a thought for her. How was I going to make her feel better? There had to be some way I could let her know I was okay without freaking her out.

  I crept closer to the lounge. She was crying still, at least… was that crying? Was that crying or was that something else? I rounded the door jamb. There she was, sat on the couch, head thrown back and whooping like a nutter.

  She wasn’t crying, she was laughing!

  Laughing at an episode of Two Broke Girls.

  Fucking. Two. Broke. Girls.

  The widow was not in black. Instead she was dressed in jeans, and halfway through a bottle of Rioja that had stained the skin red either side of her lips, leaving her with a creepy Joker smile. I was beginning to get the distinct impression that my death had not been the bombshell I’d suspected it might be.

  The doorbell rang.

  Sarah shot to her feet and ran for it, passing through me as if I wasn’t there (a metaphor if ever there was one). She flung open the front door without checking the peephole. Damon was there. Father Damon O’Meara, my old partner, in case you forgot.

  ‘Sarah,’ he said, in his gravelly Irish tongue.

  He opened his arms and she went in for a hug. Wanna know how dumb I am? For about ten seconds I had it in my head that he’d shown up to offer his commiserations. My old colleague, showing a bit of professional respect, checking in on the grieving widow.

  Then their mouths locked.

  Steady on, I thought. That’s a bit much. There’s consoling, then there’s downright disrespect.

  Without coming up for air, he closed the door behind him with his toe and pushed Sarah against the wall of the hallway. They kissed greedily, breathless and hungry, hands roaming all over. It was the kind of passion me and Sarah hadn’t shared since our college days, if at all.

  I covered my eyes but my hand was transparent. All I could do was stand there watching my wife suck face with one of my least favourite people, and thinking, “Jesus Christ, it’s just as well I am dead, because I’ve got nothing much to live for now.”

  Sarah grabbed the hair at the nape of Damon’s neck and peeled his face from hers. ‘How long?’ she asked.

  ‘Until what?’

  ‘Until we can stop hiding.’

  Damon tried to avoid the question by going in for another kiss, but she turned away at the last second. ‘Not long,’ he replied, frustrated. ‘We just have to give it a bit more time before we go public. We don’t want people to start talking.’

  Oh, don’t you, Damon? What’s the matter, worried it might seem a bit insensitive, hooking up with a freshly-minted widow before her dead hubby’s even in the ground?

  Only that wasn’t the half of it.

  Damon took of his coat.

  Underneath was a red, woollen scarf.

  I was so shocked I fell through the floor and landed in the flat below.

  11

  Tempting as it was to visit a shitstorm on my murdering widow, I decided Sarah could wait. The person I really wanted words with was the guy who actually pushed me under that train. I just had to wait for him to stop boning my wife first, that’s all.

  After a spirited, and frankly eye-watering, bout of lovemaking, Damon snuck out of my flat like a thief in the night. I followed him at a distance as he made his way home, waiting for an opportune moment to strike. After an hour-long journey, he arrived in Stoke Newington, a well-to-do neighbourhood in Hackney, home to Guardian readers and trust fund kids.

  On foot now, he crossed the road and hung a right to take a shortcut through Abney Park Cemetery. Toppling monuments lay scattered around, rubbed smooth by time and festooned with ivy. A London fog hugged the ground, curling about Damon’s ankles as he weaved a path between grave plots. It was the perfect place for a showdown.

  They say the best revenge is to live a good life, but seeing as that wasn’t an option anymore, I thought I’d just cave Damon’s skull in with something heavy.

  Without making a sound, I found a loose piece of broken-off gravestone, hefted it over my head and padded towards him. I was just about to bring it down on him when he stopped suddenly and turned around.

  ‘I know you’re there, Jake.’ he said.

  The jolt to my concentration caused the chunk of rock I was carrying to pass through my hands and hit the earth below with a dull thud.

  He laughed. ‘Did you forget you’re not the only one with The Sight?’

  Stupidly, I had. ‘How long have you been watching?’ I asked.

  ‘Since back at Sarah’s place,’ he said, grinning like a split watermelon. ‘You’re a bit of a perv, ain’tcha, my lad? Peeping on the two of us going at it hammer and tongs.’ He gave me a wink that made me want to slap his face off.

  Like I say, for a believer, Damon’s got a pretty selective understanding of the bible and its teachings. He has a tendency to run with the bits he enjoys (the vengeance and destruction stuff) and discard the passages he doesn't (killing, coveting, basically everything else). The guy really was a perfect shit.

  ‘Why d’you do it, Damon? What did you have to kill me for?’

  I figured for a religious man, Father O’Meara was well overdue a confession.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ he replied. ‘Sarah wanted shot of you. Had done for years. You think she likes living in that pokey flat, cut off from her da’s money and spending everything she makes supporting her no-good husband?’
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  ‘If she wanted a divorce so badly, why didn’t she just say so?’

  ‘And risk ya taking half the money she has?’ he said. ‘Besides, who has the time for all that?’

  Jesus, I knew Sarah was ruthless, but this was taking it to a whole new level. Had she really talked Damon into offing me just to spare herself some admin? I guess in her mind it was no big deal. I'd been dead to her for years, what was the harm in making it official? But no, there was more to it than that: another of those deadly sins... pride.

  ‘You were an embarrassment to her, man,’ Damon went on. ‘She only kept you around as long as she did because she didn’t want to admit defeat to her old folks. She married the rebel to piss them off, with your black magic and your Iron Maiden ting. Ya think she’d have bothered with ya if she knew you’d still be bollocksing about with the stuff as a grown man?’

  I snorted. ‘That’s fucking rich. All she’s done is jump ship from one exorcist to another. How long do you think she’s gonna stick with you, Damo?’

  He gave me that rictus smile again. ‘Look at me,’ he said, fingering his white collar. ‘I’m respectable. Besides, ya think I’m going to piss away the rest of my life busting ghosts for a few quid an hour? You were always short-sighted, Jake. Clearances are only one of the jobs I do for Vic.’

  He went on to describe the rest of his business dealings with our mutual benefactor: the gambling, the sex trafficking, even some veiled allusions to the stuff on Vic’s computer that I wasn’t supposed to see. The bloke was up to his nuts in sleaze. No wonder he could afford to live in this part of town.

  ‘Unlike you, I’m a provider,’ he said. ‘Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to get away to me bed. I’m all tuckered out from banging on your wife.’

  I made a lunge for him but passed right through the other side and fell flat on my face.

  He screamed with laughter, sending a blackbird rocketing from its perch in a tree above. ‘Look at yourself, man, yer a fecking loser,’ he howled. ‘Yer nothing, fella. Yer shit on me shoe.’

  He reached inside his jacket and brought out a bundle of sage. ‘Never go anywhere without the tools of the trade,’ he said, then took to it with his lighter and began wafting the smouldering stems about.

  He was using a technique called smudging, an exorcist’s opening salvo against an Uncanny entity. Smudging was a purifying ritual used to cleanse the material plane of any spectral contamination. And it was working.

  I started to feel dizzy—all woolly in the head—and I looked down to see my body boiling away. Evaporating to nothing. He was bleaching me like a grease spot, just like I’d done to the kids at that birthday party. Just like I’d done to a hundred other lost souls, and a hundred before that.

  ‘Don’t take it personally,’ Damon said as he sterilised my spirit. ‘I’m just sending you home a wee a bit before time.’

  He tossed the sage and moved on to the second stage of the ritual. Out came the holy water, filched fresh from the font. He uncorked the bottle with his teeth and began whipping Jesus juice at me left and right, burning holes right through me.

  ‘Begone, heathen!’ he screamed, cackling like a devil. ‘I cast ye out!’

  The bloke was having the time of his life. And look, I get it, busting does feel good (side note: if a Ghostbuster dies in the line of duty, is it up to his colleagues to bust him? It’s a real poser that one, professionally and ethically).

  There was nothing I could do to stop what Damon was doing to me. I could feel my soul being torn apart, ripped to shreds and sent off to oblivion. I was about to die for the second time in as many days. I collapsed to my knees, weak as piss. I tried to force myself up again, and found a rock resting on the ground beside my hand.

  A weapon.

  Something I could fight back with. I tried to wrap my hand around it but my fingers passed clean through. I didn’t have the strength to pick it up. To make myself solid. I was tissue now, circling the toilet bowl, heading for the U-bend

  ‘Give it up, fella,’ roared Damon. ‘Yer totally banjaxed!’

  I was about ready to give up, when a splinter of moonlight caught the crucifix dangling around Damon’s neck. His talisman. His protection against the forces that would do him harm.

  That was it!

  A talisman. If I could find one of my own to focus on—something I truly believed in—maybe I could resist the effect Damon was having on me. There was only one problem: in order to do that I’d need to submit to a higher power, and like I’ve been saying from the start, me and the Big Man have never much jived. There was no getting around that. Faith isn’t something you can fake: you either believe in a thing utterly, or you don’t at all.

  But there’s more than one kind of higher power.

  Seizing on an idea, I loosened my tie and dug around under my collar.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Damon, mocking my futile effort.

  ‘Banishing evil,’ I told him, and pulled out my talisman.

  Eddie the Head.

  A pewter pendant of Iron Maiden’s grinning, skull-faced mascot, bought at the merch table of their ‘98 Brixton Academy gig.

  My talisman.

  And look, I’m aware of the irony of using a heavy metal icon to fight the forces of darkness, but what can I say? Here was a thing I could believe in utterly. Because Maiden shred.

  There was more to it than that though. Sure, the mighty power of Bruce Dickinson and his cohorts had given me focus, but what really saved me was a belief in myself. It had been too long since I’d let that guy get a look-in. Living with Sarah had left me with a pretty low opinion of myself: as a provider, as a man, as a human being even. Let a person run you down day in, day out, and your confidence is bound to take a knock. Since discovering she’d orchestrated my murder though, I was suddenly caring a lot less about Sarah’s opinion of me. So yeah, I think I might have tapped into myself as a higher power. I was my own talisman. Yeah, it’s some hokey, New Age shit, but there it is.

  Whatever I did, it worked like a charm. Ever hear of the three-fold law? It’s a magical principle which states that whatever energy a person puts out into the world, it’ll be returned to them three times. Well, Damon had thrown some pretty nasty juju my way, and because of that, he was about to get a triple dose in return.

  The blowback hit him so hard that he took off from the ground, ragdolled through the air, an angry tangle of limbs, and slammed into a gravestone hard enough to break it in two. Pow! Have some of that, sunshine! The dust settled and I went over to check on him. He was alive, but out for the count. I stared at his ugly mug. Even unconscious, he still had that hateful look on his face, like the world was his enemy. How the hell did he end up that way? What was going on inside of that fat head of his?

  I decided I’d take a look.

  12

  At 3:45am, “Father” Damon O’Meara walked into Kentish Town police station and turned himself over to the authorities. He insisted on speaking to DS Stronge, the officer overseeing my case. She came into the station especially to hear his story.

  As well as handing over a scarf that matched the fibre evidence found on my body, Damon freely gave a taped confession that detailed the exact manner in which he’d been instrumental in my murder, along with his accomplice, my ex-wife, Sarah Godfrey. Stronge could hardly believe her luck. There it was, all tied up with a neat little bow on top.

  ‘Can you believe it?’ she was heard to ask a colleague after making the arrest. ‘It was the wife after all.’

  Damon was detained and taken into custody. He entered his holding cell without putting up a fight. Didn’t so much as a flinch.

  Not until I let him anyway.

  You see, I’d been working him like a puppet since back in the cemetery. Spiritual possession; you’ve heard of it I’m sure. The words he’d been speaking into a tape recorder the last couple of hours, all mine. Of course, he recanted them the moment I left his body and breezed through the bars of his cell to freedom, but i
t was too late for that. It didn’t matter how much he protested, how much he screamed, the cops had everything they needed to put Damon away for a very long time.

  Exiting the station meant heading up from the basement where the cells were, so I doubled back and made for the ground floor. I was just about to hit the stairwell when I heard a ping and I turned to see a nearby lift door slide open. From inside I was treated to a wall-to-wall gold interior and the familiar strains of Iron Maiden – an invitation if ever there was one. This was it. My way back to the afterlife. I’d always imagined a luminous pillar shining from the heavens like God’s own spotlight, but apparently the Man Upstairs had a real thing for lifts.

  Well, this was it. I’d solved my murder and it looked like I was being given another chance to cross over. I stepped into the lift and the doors closed behind me. The selection panel only had the one button. I went to press is but hesitated, my finger hovering over it just like it had the doorbell of the Mitchell House before I died.

  I thought of myself sat across a desk from the Big Man, called to account for my actions on Earth. What was I going to say in my defence? That I hadn’t meant to scrub all those souls from existence? That I hadn’t known I was doing wrong? Was ignorance a good enough excuse to buy my way into the Good Place? I doubted it, I really did. No, I reckoned I had a lot of work to do to balance out my mistakes. To get all that red out of my ledger. But what could I do? I was a dead man. An exorcist who wound up a ghost. A walking punchline.

  I stood in the lift a good, long while, wondering how a man like me might do some good in this world, and then it dawned on me—