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

by David Bussell

  When Vallens upset the Order of the Eternal flame’s brazier, she unleashed a blaze that burned their headquarters down to the ground. It was only through quick thinking and good fortune that I tossed the seraphim sword, climbed back inside Maddox’s body and scooped up Stronge before the place was razed.

  The paramedics rushed the two detectives to the nearest hospital, where they were treated for smoke inhalation and various secondary injuries.

  Not long after she was admitted, I went to pay Stronge a visit. I decided it was high time me and her had a talk – real talk, as the yanks are fond of saying.

  Greeting her with a familiar face would have been my first choice, but since my usual mule, Mark, was still in pokey, I had to improvise. I arrived at the hospital with the intention of possessing a nurse and passing along my message that way, but the second I entered Stronge’s ward, she sat up from her bed like she’d seen a ghost, which of course she had.

  ‘Who are you?’ she demanded, making a crucifix of some hospital cutlery.

  This I was not expecting.

  ‘You can see me?’ I said, pointing at my face.

  ‘Of course I can see you.’

  ‘Well that’s… odd.’

  ‘I mean… I can see you, but… what are you?’

  ‘I’m a ghost.’

  It seemed Stronge could actually see me. The real me. I’d heard of this happening before. Sometimes, when people have a traumatic experience with the Uncanny, they’ve been known to develop The Sight. It’s like it triggers something in their mind. Busts open a locked door.

  I took a couple of steps towards her, hands held up in surrender. ‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘I’m a friend.’

  I took a seat on the edge of her bed and she swept a hand through me.

  ‘You know, in the ghost community, that’s considered quite rude,’ I explained.

  ‘I know you,’ she wheezed, her lungs still feeling the effects of the smoke. ‘I do, don’t I? Where do I know you from?’ she asked, studying my face.

  ‘A few years back you solved my murder. My name’s Jake Fletcher.’

  I’ll save us both some time and summarise how the meat of the conversation sandwich went down. I explained how I was a ghost that had, up until that moment, been carjacking a former bully to help her solve crimes. I explained the purpose of my investigation and broke down Ingrid Vallens’ scheme, being extra sure to let her know that the guy she’d banged up in the model’s place was in no way complicit.

  It was a lot for Stronge to unpack, but she handled it well, all things considered.

  ‘So, the person I’ve known all these years is really your… what do you call it…?

  ‘My meat suit. Mark’s just a vessel. I’m the genuine article.’

  Stronge slapped her forehead. ‘You didn’t even change your name! Why didn’t I make the connection before? Why didn’t I realise you were the same Jake Fletcher as the one we had on the slab five years ago?’

  I chuckled. ‘It is a bit of a stretch: a dead man coming back as a ghost and setting himself up as a paranormal P.I. Don’t be too hard on yourself about it. Even Quincy wouldn’t have put those pieces together.’

  ‘Really? Quincy is your go-to? Why not Sherlock Holmes?’

  ‘What’s wrong with Quincy?’

  ‘Who goes with Quincy?’

  We stopped and stared at each for a moment before breaking out in laughter. I’d just revealed the guy who’d been helping her out all these years was a ghost, and here we were arguing over fictional sleuths.

  Stronge relaxed and rested her head on her pillow. ‘So, what do we do now?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, the good news is that you’re not one of the hoi polloi anymore.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘You’ve had a peek behind the curtain now, which means you’ve graduated from being a normal to what we call an “Insider”.’

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean? Like I’m in some kind of secret society?’

  ‘Exactly. Really, really secret.’

  ‘Let me get this straight; I’m supposed to stay quiet about all the things I’ve seen? About ghosts and magic and skull-faced demons?’

  I aimed a gunfinger at her. ‘Spot on.’

  She shook her head. ‘Forget it. People need to know about this stuff.’

  ‘Trust me,’ I replied, ‘they really don’t. People are scared of the dark. They freak out at the sound of their plumbing. Can you imagine what they’d do if they found out vampires were real?’

  ‘Vampires are real?’ Stronge screeched, sitting bolt upright.

  I cocked an eyebrow at her. ‘You take my point?’

  She sighed and ran a hand through her bob. ‘What about Maddox?’ she asked. ‘He’ll know.’

  ‘He won’t, I’ve already seen to that, and I need you to help me keep it that way. Not a word to him about any of this. Your partner’s had it out for me since day one – you tell him I’m a ghost and he’ll be Googling proton packs before you finish your sentence.’

  ‘What about my superiors then? What do I say to them?’

  ‘Anything you like as long as it isn’t the truth. The Order’s HQ burned down, so you don’t have to worry about evidence. Find a way to sweep the rest under the carpet. Case unsolved. One for the X-Files.’

  She pouted and folded her arms. ‘You’re asking an awful lot, Fletcher.’

  I smiled, made my hand solid and rested it on her shoulder. ‘It could be worse,’ I told her. ‘At least you came out of this alive.’

  I sat up and went for the door, then remembered I had one thing left to say. ‘Kat,’ I called back.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Take care of yourself. You’ve seen the Uncanny now.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So that means the Uncanny see you back…

  I found Maddox in the ward next door with his arm in a sling. I crept in and waved my arms about in front of him, just in case he was able to see me too now. He didn’t even blink.

  ‘Oi, Maddox, you massive twat!’

  Not a twitch, so I borrowed an abundantly proportioned Nigerian nurse I found doing the rounds, and paid him a visit that way.

  ‘How are you today, Mister Maddox?’ I asked.

  ‘Detective Inspector Maddox,’ he corrected.

  I ignored him and used the nurse’s meaty paws to lift his egg-bald head and plump the pillow beneath.

  ‘Do you mind?’ he protested, squirming as I brushed his fragile wing.

  I chuckled. ‘You have been in the wars, haven’t you?’ I said, in an accent that was, to put it politely, a bit borderline.

  ‘Yeah,’ he replied, then looked at me quizzically. ‘I mean, I think so. It’s all a bit blurry.’

  Just blurry? It sounded as if I might not have done a good enough job scrubbing that peanut brain of his. ‘What do you mean, blurry?’ I prompted.

  ‘I don’t remember much exactly. They’re calling it a fugue state—some work-related stress thing—but I have these flashes… hellfire, a five-pointed star, some… thing with claws.’ He shook his head as if to erase the memories like an Etch A Sketch drawing.

  I changed the subject. ‘I bought you something to eat, Detective,’ I said. I put a tray in front of him, on top of which sat a plate of something the hospital canteen generously referred to as “food”.

  He prodded at a scoop of mashed potatoes thick enough to plant a flag in. ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ he sniffed.

  ‘I’ll go back and see if they’ve got anything more to your taste,’ I said, and rolled the food trolley towards the door. ‘Who knows, maybe they’ll have some nice, tasty hot dogs.’

  I gave him a wink that freaked him out more than the hellfire and the demon combined.

  Back at the nick, Mark Ryan was declared no longer a suspect and cleared of any wrongdoing. I managed to get to him before he woke up and walked him home for a nice, long nap. He’d be okay, even if he did find himself with another gaping black hole in his memory
. Something told me the bill for his therapist was going to run pretty high this month, which was only fair. The way he’d treated me at school had given me plenty to talk to my shrink about over the years. Still, I’m not completely heartless, despite all the things he put me through as a lad. I decided I’d go easy on him for a bit, let a bit of time pass before I hopped back inside for another run around. I’m nice like that.

  The shop bell tinkled as I arrived in Legerdomain to give my old pal Jazz Hands a debriefing.

  ‘Still alive, I see,’ she noted, peering through her magic spectacles.

  ‘Yup. Well, after a fashion.’

  ‘How did it go, then?’

  ‘Piece of piss,’ I told her. ‘Never in harm’s way.’

  She arched a brow so high it practically lifted off her head.

  ‘Okay,’ I confessed, ‘it did get a little bit naughty.’

  I gave Jazz Hands an account of my confrontation with the Ingrid demon, making sure to gloss over the parts I knew she’d lose her tits over. In my version of the events I’d faced my enemy down with a no-fail strategy, not just blundered in there half-cocked and hoping for the best. In the end, my story was less a tale of derring-do than a tale of derring-didn’t-really-do-at-all.

  Still, Jazz Hands was not a happy camper. ‘I told you, she grumbled, ‘I told you you should have deferred to the London Coven.’

  She had a point. I’d only survived this one by the skin of my teeth – next time I’d take whatever help I could get. ‘Do you have a name?’ I asked. ‘A contact at this coven place?’

  ‘Stella,’ she said. ‘Stella Familiar.’

  I nodded and made a mental note.

  After that, I gave Jazz back the magic ring she’d borrowed me. She placed it in the wall safe hidden behind the sage face of James Randi and asked after the revolver. The gun was a goner I explained, poached by the police and committed to an evidence locker. She groused some more and then, once she felt I’d been suitably chastised, returned to her celebrity magazine.

  She was reading a particularly scintillating piece on Kristen Stewart’s new haircut when a thought occurred. ‘The sword you slayed the soul feaster with,’ she said, ‘did it happen to have a name?’

  ‘Yeah, it did. The elders called it the seraphim sword.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘The seraphim sword is a tool of the angels,’ she gasped.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘The blade is forged from iron derived from the blood of a thousand fallen demons. What have you done with it? Where is it now?’

  My face pinched. ‘It kind of got burned up by witchfire.’

  Jazz Hands’ face turned as white as the proverbial ghost. ‘There will be consequences for that,’ she said.

  I shrugged. ‘Aren’t there always?’

  I made good on my promise to Frosty and brought him the six pack of Special Brew I owed him, blessed by Jazz Hands for his drinking pleasure. He genuflected as I presented it to him, then glugged the beers down one after the other. I felt a bit sorry for him, watching the bloke sink six cans of bruiser juice, but it’s hard to grieve for someone who looks so damned happy.

  And what about me? What did I get out of all of this? Nothing I could lay my hands on, that was for sure, but then I stopped caring about material things the day I died. My reward was a spiritual one, a real one, not the bullshit kind the door-knockers with the pamphlets and fake grins are shilling.

  I watched the end of my Ghost DVD. It’s not such a bad film really; the ghost gets to be the good guy for a change, and Swayze smashes it as always. It was somewhere near the end of the movie that Whoopi broke the fourth wall again. Acting as a mouthpiece for whatever jobsworth it was throwing his weight around Up There, she begrudgingly let me know that I’d performed my duty and that I was off the hook. At least for a little while.

  For once I’d done some real good in this world – the kind that buys Brownie points with Him Upstairs. The kind that rubs a little red out of a man’s account. Maybe even a whole lot of red. This wasn’t sending down a pickpocket after all, or solving a little light fraud. This was big boy stuff. I’d sent a soul feaster back to Hell, and I’d brought a demonologist to justice too. No wonder the Big Man was so keen to have me send Ingrid’s soul His way, He must have known what she’d done and been champing at the bit to punish her for it. Would have been nice of Him to put me in the loop too, but what the hell. The important thing was that I’d completed His little assignment and bought myself some time before He came calling again.

  I stood and looked out of my office window at the messy sprawl of Camden Town beneath me. It was almost dawn. I watched the sun peek over the horizon and laser off the morning fog before settling in the sky like a great, molten coin. When you don’t sleep, you get to see a lot of sunrises—it’s one of the nice things about being a ghost—but this sunrise was special. A new day was coming. A brighter one than before.

  If I could defeat a rogue magician and win a fight with a demon, who knew what else I was capable of? What other kinds of Uncanny I could bring to justice. Vampires, werewolves, mermaids (just kidding), they were all on my shit list now. Sure, it might end up being the end of me, but it would hardly be a premature retirement. Besides, I owed it to them. Owed it to every soul I’d unwittingly scrubbed out of existence. Owed it to myself, too. To my future.

  My name is Jake Fletcher. Ex-exorcist. Departed do-gooder. Phantom on the run. And when the Big Man finally pulls me in to judge my soul, I’m going to be ready.

  The End.

  Something Rotten

  1

  All around town, artists were dying.

  Dying from electrocutions, from hit and runs, and unexplained heart attacks. Dying from falling objects, from bathtub drownings, and walking into open lift shafts. All of the deaths considered suspicious, but none of them suspicious enough to be ruled homicide. I might have sidestepped them myself if the deceased had been your rinky-dink, Camden Market artists selling affordable Banksy ripoffs and blown glass bongs, but these artists were the real deal. High profile painters, sculptors, and whatever the ones that shit the bed and call it an “installation” go by. Big name artists, falling like dominoes, and I had an inkling I knew who was doing the pushing.

  A good place to start with any crime is to question the motive, and sometimes, a lot of the time, most of the time, that motive is money. So I got to thinking, who was it that stood to profit the most from putting these artists to bed with a shovel?

  The buyers.

  The art lovers who measured their love in pennies and pounds. The collectors who cared less about art appreciation than they did the appreciation of their assets. And what better way to see those assets mature than for the artist who created them to suffer a premature death? The kind that caught the marketplace by total surprise and drove the value of their work sky high. The man who owned a work like that—the work of a famous, tragically defunct artist—would stand to make a tidy sum. The man who owned the work of two? Three? A dozen even? He'd be a millionaire a few times over. And a fucking suspect millionaire at that.

  That's how it is when a famous artist croaks; it's like their departure trips some kind of mystical inflation switch. A death bump, if you like. It stood to reason that a collector had a hand in these murders, the only question was, which one? Since no one was else was asking, I decided to make the investigation my own and find out.

  I had a sniff around. Looked into certain private records, questioned dealers and gallery owners, greased the right palms. And one name kept coming up (well, not a name exactly, a face; the buyer was smart enough to make his purchases using aliases). Picture a London-based artist who died an untimely death in the last ten years and this guy, whoever he was, owned a piece of their work. Their masterpiece in most cases. The guy was making money hand over fist, and something told me he was more than just a canny investor.

  If all of this sounds like some tin foil hat, swivel-eyed-loon conspiracy theory, I promise it only
gets worse from here. Why wouldn’t it? After all, you’re reading the words of someone who’s witnessed actual demons and visited the nightmare realm of an interdimensional being that steals children’s souls. Oh, and I’m a ghost too, as in a real life, walking the Earth, honest to goodness, phantom. I guess what I’m saying is, don’t expect the needle of your internal Bullshit-O-Meter to sit too still on my watch.

  Anyway, back to my art assassin case. Seeing as I didn’t have the killer’s ID, I figured the best chance I had of rounding him up was to catch the guy in the act. Ordinarily I’d lay some bait—cast out a line and see if any sharks came biting—but since I didn’t have anything in my chum bucket tasty enough to attract one, I had to go a different way this time.

  Instead of waiting for the killer to come to me, I went straight to the source. I found the hottest artist in town, glommed onto the guy, and became his invisible protector. Since the police didn’t have the resources to play bodyguard for some gadabout artiste, I made it my job to keep an eye on him. It wasn’t an easy gig, but being a ghost means I don’t need sleep, so I was able to monitor him around the clock. Without the artist knowing about it, I’d been on him for the past eight weeks, glued to his tail while he swanned about town like he owned the place. A typical day in his company would involve me traipsing around after him as he went from brunch to lunch to elevenses, interspersed every few days with a flying visit to his studio to ensure that his assistants executed “his” work according to something he had the brass to call, “My vision.”

  Eight long weeks of that I’d suffered, hoping like mad that the artist’s would-be killer made a show, and caring less about whether he succeeded in slaying my protectee each passing day. Just being in the guy’s presence was torture. Not only was he an utter prat of a man, he picked his nose, sucked his thumb, and ate an apple so loud that I twice thought about offing him myself.