I pursed my lips and swayed my head. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Not this time.’
Call it a hunch, but something seemed different here. This was new, I was sure of it.
‘Wait a second…’ said Stronge, pointing to the two bodies. ‘You said “ghost” before. Shouldn’t that be “ghosts,” plural?’
‘Not necessarily,’ I argued.
Stronge was a brilliant detective, head and shoulders above me, but she still had a lot to learn about the paranormal.
I explained how not all traumatic deaths resulted in a disembodied spirit wandering the Earth. How a real villain’s fate is decided before they die. Like I said before, the Devil claims his due with a bit more ferocity than the Man Upstairs. If someone's an undeniable piece of shit—I’m talking murderers, war criminals, 2 Broke Girls fans—they get a one-way ticket to the Bad Place. No judgment in the afterlife, no paperwork to fill out, just a trapdoor to the fiery pit. I’m surprised I never got sent south for my crimes really. I can only imagine the Big Man wanted to get a proper, close-up look at me before he pulled the lever.
‘Let’s suppose the feller with the smashed skull was a bit naughty,’ I said. ‘A real baddie. That’d explain why he isn’t around to say hello.’
‘And what about the one with the rock?’ asked Stronge. ‘If you’re saying he wasn’t dragged to Hell, where did he get to?’
‘You already told me his body’s two days dead. That means he didn’t die here. Which means his ghost could still be hanging about wherever it is that he did snuff it.’
Stronge bobbed her head. ‘Alright,’ she said. ‘That gives us something to run with.’
I bent down to get a better look at the two cadavers. The one with his eye hanging out looked to be in his mid-thirties and was a real lump of a bloke; a bald head, thick rhino neck and biceps like rugby balls. The scrawny one with the skull gavel in his hand couldn’t have been older than twenty; a mangy-looking thing dressed like a rough sleeper. Despite the chill, he was only wearing a t-shirt, and had visible track marks up his left forearm. He also had a tattoo there that read, “What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.”
‘Bit ironic,’ I muttered.
‘The big lad came with a wallet and driver’s license,’ said Stronge.
‘The scag head?’
‘Nothing.’
I nodded. It could never be easy, could it?
Stronge folded her arms. ‘We should divvy up jobs. I’ll check on one of their backgrounds while you look into the other.’
‘So, let me get this right,’ I said, ‘one of us has to rummage around the slums interviewing down-and-outs, while all the other has to do is run an ID through a computer?’
‘That’s right,’ said Stronge, wearing the thinnest of smiles.
I’ll give you two goes at guessing which job I got, but you’ll only need the one.
3
It was left to me to find out who the kid with the ironic tattoo was, and how his two-day-old corpse wound up dumped on Hampstead Heath with a bloody rock in his paw and a sprinkling of brain bits.
Just like I always do when I’m in need of answers to tricky questions, I went to see Frosty, my man on the street. And that’s “on the street” in the literal sense. Frosty’s a rough sleeper too, or was at least, before he froze to death begging one winter. These days he’s a ghost, so he doesn’t need sleep or loose change. Instead, he sits frozen to his final resting place, a patch of pavement next to an ATM opposite the square by Mornington Crescent station, draped by the shadow of Lord Cobden’s statue. You’d think he’d get bored, sat there all day and night, but he manages to keep himself amused. He mainly succeeds in this by looking up the skirts of women waiting in line for the cash point, but sometimes he doles out titbits to chancers like me that come to him looking for local lore. For a price anyway.
‘Evening, Frost,’ I said as I appeared by his side.
He flinched at the sudden intrusion. I have that effect on people. Since I’m able to arrive places instantly using my ghost powers, I often save myself the legwork of walking and translocate there instead. It’s a real timesaver, but it does have a habit of upsetting folks who don’t know I’m coming.
‘What do you want, Fletcher?’ Frosty growled.
As usual, he looked as though he’d spent a week trapped in a cold storage unit. Icicles clung to his whiskers and his skin had the pallor of old meat dipped in liquid nitrogen.
‘Looking for an ID on a murder suspect,’ I told him.
‘Is that all?’ he asked, then cleared his throat, rolled something around his gob and hawked it onto the pavement next to my feet. ‘What’s in it for me?’ he asked as the glob of ectoplasm rolled by my brogues.
Ever the charmer, old Frost.
I sighed and reached inside my jacket for his payment. His eyes lit up when he saw it: a can of Carlsberg Special Brew, the alcoholic’s gut-rot of choice. Frosty doesn’t have use for much in this world, but even in death he was not without his vices.
‘Give it ‘ere,’ he demanded, fingers twitching for his prize.
I keep a stock of the brew in reserve in case I’m ever in need of Frosty’s services. Each tin is individually enchanted by my magician friend, Jazz Hands, a process that makes them tankable for ghosts. Without her blessing, Frosty wouldn’t even be able to be wrap a mitt around one, let alone enjoy its contents.
He snatched the can off me then pulled back the ring pull with a feculent fingernail to suck down the bruiser juice inside.
‘Ready to do business?’ I asked.
‘Still feeling a bit cloudy,’ he replied, feigning forgetfulness.
I sighed and handed him a second can, which he took in both hands like a squirrel with a nut.
‘Not joining me?’ he asked, popping it open.
‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I’d sooner lick a stripper pole.’
He shrugged and knocked back the second can as quickly as the first. ‘And a third on completion,’ he told me.
‘Fine,’ I said.
Immediately, his attitude took a steep uptick. If he had a tail it would have been wagging.
‘What can I do for you, my good man?’ he asked, wiping his mouth with the back of a mittened hand.
I don’t take pleasure in being Frosty’s enabler, but since this is the only way I can get him to open his trap, he doesn’t leave me much choice. Besides, Jazz Hands assures me that alcohol doesn’t affect ghosts, even with her hocus pocus, so whatever it is Frosty’s getting out of it is purely in his head.
‘Looking for a young feller,’ I told him. ‘Possible street kid.’
‘Gonna need a bit more than that,’ he replied.
‘Early twenties. A user. Has a Nietzsche tattoo here,’ I said, rolling up the sleeve of my jacket to show him the underside of my left forearm.
Frosty made a face like he’d just seen a hearse blow a tyre. ‘Did it say, “What doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger”?
‘Yeah,’ I replied, taken aback. ‘Bloody hell, that was quick.’
It usually took Frosty a little while to cast out his feelers and get a handle on a person, but apparently he’d nailed this one right out of the gate. Ordinarily, he gathers intel using something I can only describe as ghost ESP. Whereas I have a fairly ordinary complement of ghost powers—invisibility, intangibility, translocation—Frosty has something that’s entirely his own. As if to make up for being rooted to the spot, he’s able to know pretty much anything about his surroundings by reading the minds of those he comes in contact with, and given his permanent pitch by an ATM, that accounts for a whole lot of people. Even more impressively, he’s able to read the minds of people his targets have been in contact with, which makes him something like the Oracle of Camden Town.
‘Did you say he was a murder suspect?’ Frosty asked, shocked. ‘Ah, Fergal, what were ya thinking...?’
Now I had a name. ‘You knew him personally?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. A runawa
y he was, fresh-faced thing when I met him a few years back. Came to town from Glasgow after a row with his folks.’ Frosty shook his head. ‘I told him to go back and make good with ‘em before he got himself into trouble down ‘ere. Looks like he didn’t listen.’
It occurred to me that I hadn’t mentioned Fergal was dead as well as in the frame for a murder, so I put it to Frosty as gently as I knew how.
He cast a sullen look to the ground. ‘It’s a rotten shame,’ he said. ‘A rotten shame. He was a good kid really.’ His voice trailed slowly, like his words were unwilling to take flight.
‘Sorry to hear that,’ I said. I may not have a pulse, but I still have a heart. ‘There’s still a chance we can help him though.’
‘Help ‘im ‘ow? You said he’d done someone in. That’s a one-way trip to the Bad Place, that is.’
‘I said we were looking into the possibility that he’d done someone in,’ I clarified. ‘We don’t know for sure if he did the deed.’
‘Then ask his bleedin’ ghost!’ Frosty barked.
I explained that Fergal’s phantom, if there was one, was likely at the location he’d bitten the dust a couple of days back. ‘That’s where I need to be looking,’ I told Frosty. ‘Except I haven’t got a clue where to start. Maybe if I to talk to someone who’s spent time with him recently I’ll learn something.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ Frosty agreed.
‘Right. So what can you tell me about Fergal’s old…’ I almost said “haunts,” ‘...stomping grounds.’
‘You’d wanna get yerself to South Ken,’ he replied. ‘Cardboard city in the disused Underground station there. That’s where he used to bunk up.’
I nodded. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I can work with that.’
I reached into my jacket pocket for the last can of Special Brew.
Frosty waved it off. ‘Keep it,’ he sighed. ‘I’m miserable enough without it.’
4
So long as I was determined to scurry around the bowels of Camden Town questioning vagrants, I was going to need a body. Don’t get me wrong, being an apparition has its uses in the P.I. game, but when it comes to questioning witnesses, a set of lips is paramount. That’s why I always keep a spare body on stand-by.
Another of my ghost powers, besides translocation, is being able to possess the living. It’s funny, back when I was a breather there was a sign at my gym that used to say, “Take care of your body, it's the only one you get.” True enough then, but a bag of shite now. My body’s long gone, but that doesn’t mean I can’t borrow a rental from time to time.
It’s not like I’m the only one at it. Ever found yourself spacing out and looking at your watch to find a half hour’s vanished into thin air? Might be that you were the unwitting vessel of an invasive spirit. Of course, it’s far likelier that you’re just a bit of a ditz, so try not to fret about it. Very few ghosts are capable of possession, so chances are you’ve never personally been taken for a ride. Keep an eye out though... you never know.
Me, I’m an expert at possession. A couple of seconds in the company of a living body and I’ll have it dancing around like a marionette. That thing you call you is really just a container—a big old sack of blood, gristle, and bone—and I can edge you into the passenger seat like it was nothing. I’m not saying it’s a nice thing to do to someone, taking ownership of their body against their will, which is why I try to make sure the people I possess are deserving of a bit of ill treatment.
My go-to body belongs to a bloke called Mark Ryan. I’ve known him since high school, where he used to torment me on a daily basis. Mark’s a City Boy now, the type that runs with the pinstripe suit crowd. When he’s not managing hedge funds or chasing bimbos, he likes to go jogging in the most conspicuous places he can find, dressed in a pair of those five-toed sandals that only wankers wear. Mark is the kind of person who puts up a toilet roll with the paper hung underarm. I’m talking about a monster here.
Since I’ve used Mark as my meat suit so many times in the past, I have a psychic bead on him now. There’s nowhere he can go that I won’t find him, not that he’s ever hiding. I always make sure to scrub any memories of our time together, so he has no clue I’ve been repeatedly hijacking his body for the past few years.
Operating the pink blob of meat that Mark calls a brain, I marched him to a chicken shop back-alley that I’d read about online. I got the skinny from an urban explorer site on the dark web that told me there was an old ventilation shaft there that lead into the tunnels – one that hadn’t been capped off like the rest. The people living below used it to snatch supplies from the surface, dragging bits of refuse to the depths that they fashioned into their jerry-rigged shanty town.
It was getting on for three in the morning when I reached the alleyway, well past pub chucking-out time, when the streets of London were as quiet as they ever got. Checking the coast was clear, I ducked into the alley, located the unfastened ventilation fan, and pried it back to sneak into the shaft beyond. Down a grimy passageway I crept, hopscotching piles of reeking rubbish and stagnant puddles of God-knows-what. Following the instructions I’d found online, I pursued an old emergency escape route to a flight of stairs, which I carefully descended to reach the station’s crumbling train platform. Stepping onto the southbound track, I tiptoed over a steroidal rat and headed off into the tunnel’s perpetual darkness.
I used the beam of a Maglite torch to make sure I steered clear of the main rail, which I’d heard the tunnel’s inhabitants leeched electricity from to power their second-hand TV sets and hot plates. Despite being inhabited, South Kentish Town is known as a ghost station, and with good reason. Anguished howls echoed down the tunnels, bouncing from arched brick walls coated with spray-can art reminiscent of primitive cave drawings. Sinister stick figures danced besides illiterate, doom-laden proclamations, meant to ward off intruders. It was spooky as shit down there, and that’s coming from a bona fide dead man riding around in a suit of haunted meat.
I passed by the warnings and pressed on through a rubble-strewn no-man’s land to arrive at a cluster of shacks made from lumber and cardboard. The air was thick and heavy, and I felt eyes crawling over me as I passed along the shanty town’s thoroughfare. I saw a couple of raggedy men crouching by a fire, roasting a rat on a spit, and thought back to an Attenborough documentary I’d seen about an ecosystem living at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean. Giant worms, thriving somehow in the poisonous warmth of volcanic vents. I saw the same thing in the eyes of these men, a Darwinian drive to endure even this most hostile of environments. To survive, no matter the odds.
A figure stepped from a doorway as I passed by his makeshift shack. ‘Clear off, ya fooker,’ he barked.
Not exactly the reception I’d been hoping for, but it was a start.
I didn’t want to dazzle the man, so I kept the beam of my torch pointed at the ground as he shuffled from the gloom. As he drew closer I got a look at his face, lit by the flames of the nearby fire. His pallid skin was charcoal-smudged, his features decorated with a single, milky eye.
I held up my hands in surrender. ‘Don’t mean to bother you, feller,’ I said. ‘Just looking for some info on a kid who used to live around here. Went by the name of Fergal.’
I saw now that the disgruntled resident had brought a friend with him; a malnourished rottweiler on a threadbare length of twine.
‘And ‘oo are you to be askin’?’ the man demanded.
‘A friend.’
‘A fookin’ queer are ya?’
Not the most enlightened outlook I’ll admit, but given the bloke’s circumstances, I was ready to let that one slide. ‘I’m not looking for a dust up,’ I told him, ‘so why don’t you go back to your hut and let me get on?’
‘Why don’t you get ta fook?’ he enquired.
His dog growled and strained at the bit of string wrapped around its neck.
‘Let’s put a pin in that for now, shall we?’ I suggested.
He leered at me, expos
ing a set of teeth like the tombstones of a half-demolished graveyard. ‘That’s a fancy suit yer wearin’. Did it come with a fancy wallet?’
I stood my ground. ‘So long as you’re willing to talk, we can do a deal.’
‘Ahm not here ta deal,’ he explained. ‘Ahm here to take yer fookin’ money.’
I sized him up. Without the pooch he was nothing to get in a tizz about—more skeleton than man, really—but that dog of his definitely looked hungry.
‘You sure you wanna do this, mate?’ I asked.
Whether I was bluffing or giving him one last chance was hard to say. Either way, the outcome was not the one I desired.
‘Sic ‘im, Tyson!’ the tramp yelled, setting the rottweiler free.
The dog’s hair stood up along the ridge of its spine and it came at me, jaw snapping and foaming at the muzzle. I was hoping to get an arm around its neck as it leapt at me; instead I got its teeth in my wrist.
I screamed as the dog’s fangs sunk into the flesh of Mark’s forearm, sending a jolt of pain straight to the brain I was borrowing. I took a quick inventory of my situation and arrived at the following course of action: “If in doubt, give it a clout.” I raised my Maglite and thumped the dog on the top of its head as hard as I could muster.
Crack.
The torch shattered to bits.
The dog yelped but remained firmly attached. I balled a fist and landed a punch, but the dog refused to budge.
I’d need to employ a change of tack quickly before the fanged bastard managed to chew through to an artery. My punches were doing nothing to penetrate its thick skull, and besides, I didn’t want to be bashing the thing over the head. I knew it wasn’t really a bastard, it was just hungry and poorly-treated, a victim of circumstance really. I know, I know, I’m a real bleeding heart. Well... bleeding arm in this case.
Just then I landed on an idea.
What if I could possess the dog and get it off me that way? I’d never tried taking the reigns of an animal brain before, but how hard could it be?
Uncanny Kingdom: An Eleven Book Urban Fantasy Collection (Uncanny Kingdom Omnibus 1) Page 55
