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

by David Bussell

  Very hard indeed, as it turns out.

  I allowed my spirit to drift out of Mark’s body so I could take control of the rottweiler, but when I got there I felt an immediate sense of unsteadiness. With a dog’s brain, the toeholds I usually relied on just weren’t available. It’s like I was working with a sheer wall, with nothing there to grip. I clawed at the surface, desperate to find purchase, but it was no good.

  I was falling...

  Falling...

  And then I found it.

  A crack, just wide enough for me to get the tips of my fingers inside. Just wide enough for me to anchor onto.

  I shot out a hand and latched onto the chink in the wall.

  Having slowed my descent, I took a metaphorical breath and steadied myself. Ready to resume my attack, I pressed my forehead against the cold surface of the wall and felt my will grind up against the dog’s own. I tried to force my way in—to wrest control of its psyche—but the beast was strong. Much stronger than I’d expected. Even after I’d managed to slip through its first line of its defences, dominion remained well out of reach. The mutt was a thousand times harder to possess than Mark was, which spoke poorly of his mental fortitude.

  I did manage to obtain some level of control though, even if it was only fleeting. Instead of forcing the dog’s psyche into the passenger seat, our minds merged, filling my consciousness with thoughts of chewed-up tennis balls, walks in the park and furiously humped legs. In return, I sent the dog some thoughts of my own, chief of which was, “Let go of my arm right now and attack the fucker with the milky eye.”

  I wish you could have seen the face of the cackling dosser when his loyal attack hound unlatched from my arm, snarled like a timber wolf and went tearing off in his direction. If that didn’t delight you, you’d definitely have enjoyed the face he made when the starving dog got a big, wet bite of his ball bags.

  I know I did.

  With that message sent, I hit the ejector seat and returned to Mark’s body as the man and his mutt went scarpering off in different directions, their friendship brought to a sudden and unexpected close.

  The fracas with the dog had only lasted a few seconds, which meant Mark hadn’t been up to do much in the meantime besides scrabbling around in the dust, babbling on and on about losing his mind. Classic Mark.

  I hopped back inside and inspected his wounded arm. It was a mess for sure, but he’d live – a bit of iodine on it and he’d be right as rain. Besides, I had bigger things to worry about in that moment, starting with the disconcerting taste of tramp dick I’d been left with since my human/canine mind merge.

  As I sat there, scraping at my tongue with the rough fabric of my sleeve, I heard footsteps coming my way. I went to find out who it was with my torch, but it lay in pieces at my feet. Determined not to be snuck up on, I span around, ready to take on my next attacker, whoever they might be.

  ‘Who wants some now?’ I shouted, fists raised. ‘Come on then, let’s be ‘avin’ ya!’

  From the darkness stepped a young woman wearing a coat so big it made the tiny hands that stuck out of its sleeves look like a pair of bell clappers.

  ‘I brought a bandage,’ she said, holding up a surprisingly clean looking rag. ‘For your arm.’

  The young woman approached carefully. She was only a slip of a thing, and had the kind of eyes that belonged on a puppy dog. ‘I knew him,’ she said as she patched up my punctured wrist. ‘Fergal I mean. Is he alright?’

  My face told her all she needed to know. ‘He was a nice guy,’ she sighed. ‘Hard to come by down here. Most of the blokes who end up this way are scum. He was sweet though. Never tried anything on.’

  That’s two character witnesses who spoke well of Fergal now. It was getting to look increasingly unlikely that he’d been dragged off to Hell.

  ‘When did you see Fergal last?’ I asked her.

  ‘A couple of nights ago,’ she replied. ‘When he OD’ed down here and I had to call him an ambulance.’

  ‘How did you manage that?’ I asked. I could see the tunnel-dwellers had tapped the rail line for leccy, but it was hard to imagine getting a five bar signal down here.

  ‘I went up top and used a payphone to call 999,’ she explained. ‘Led the paramedics down here myself. Last I saw of Fergal was when the two of them carried him off on a stretcher.’

  Okay, looks like I had a decent lead to follow. Time to visit the nearest hospital. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘For the info and for patching me up.’

  I opened Mark’s wallet and handed her the contents, but as I turned to leave she reached out, touching my arm to stop me.

  ‘There was something a bit… wrong, though,’ she said. ‘The paramedics. They had all the right gear and everything but they looked... weird.’

  ‘Weird how?’ I asked.

  ‘Pale. Strung out. Jittery. Like they needed a fix of something.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying they looked as much like junkies as the rest of us.’

  Jittery junkie paramedics, eh? Now there was a wrinkle in the story.

  5

  The generally accepted etymology of the word “gumshoe” describes a detective dressed in rubber-soled galoshes that enable him to creep up stealthily on thieves and wrongdoers. In reality, the trade doesn’t involve that much excitement. Most of the time, being a P.I. involves endless stakeouts and chasing leads no matter how futile they might seem, which means pounding the streets, day in day out, until the soles of your shoes are worn thin and covered in chewing gum. That’s what the word “gumshoe” means to me anyway. Hard graft and low reward.

  Locating Fergal’s ghost had proved a challenge so far, but now I had a plan. Using GMaps on my enchanted mobile phone, I plotted the quickest route to the nearest hospital and walked the journey there. In all likelihood he’d died in the emergency room, but if he’d perished in the ambulance along the way, there was a chance his spirit had become dislocated and left by the roadside. By following the ambulance’s route on foot, I’d be sure not to miss him either way.

  Having emerged blinking into the light of the back-alley, I plotted my course and made off. As I walked, I tilted Mark’s head to the sky and looked out to the smog-streaked horizon. A new day had dawned. I hadn’t realised I’d been below ground for that long, but then it’s easy to lose track of things when you don’t abide by the usual time markers like mealtimes and bedtimes. Being a ghost, I don’t need food or sleep, so the days often merge into one. It doesn’t help that daybreak in a polluted city like London is less of a glorious, peachy sunrise than a slow, murky bleed from black to grey.

  I’d been walking for about an hour when I heard a commotion up ahead. Carving a rut into the pavement was a young man, pacing up and down and wailing at passers-by. Despite his cries for assistance, he remained invisible and unheard. Hurt yet neglected. Of course, in this city that could account for just about anyone in need of help. This was different though. This man was beyond help. This man was dead.

  The ghost of Fergal span in circles, throwing his arms around the commuters strolling by him but passing through them as though he were made of smoke.

  ‘Easy,’ I told him, holding my open palms out to placate him.

  ‘You can see me?’ he screeched.

  I’m lucky I got to him in time. Fergal hadn’t been out there long, but from the looks of things he was already beginning to turn feral. That’s what happens to some ghosts—to most ghosts in fact—sooner or later they lose their marbles and become full-blooded, chain-rattling spooks. Whether it’s the loneliness or the shock of dying I don’t really know, but it’s as though a semblance of their physical form remains while their mind dissolves away, turning them from a rational person into a screaming, ghost train phantom. I’ve seen it happen too many times, which is why I decided to become a paranormal P.I. – so I could help folks pass over before they turned into malevolent spirits. That and to plug some landfill into the smoking crater I’d made of my soul.<
br />
  I told Fergal to calm down and follow me to a side street. I was inside Mark still, and didn’t want to look like a lunatic talking to himself in public. Fergal pursued me, practically nipping at my heels. He was wild and twitching and so frail that he looked as though he had the metabolism of a humming bird, except that he had no metabolism at all. Not anymore.

  ‘What’s happening to me?’ he begged.

  I hate this part. Hate that it falls on me to tell a person they’ve died, but I make it my job all the same. Mostly I do it because I remember how it was when I croaked. I didn’t have anyone holding my hand. No one told me the rules, I had to figure the ghost thing out myself. Yeah, I already knew a few things from my time as an exorcist, but there were still an awful lot of blanks to fill.

  It hurts being dead. It's not an easy transition, going from being a living breathing person to a spooky hologram. People say break-ups and bereavements are hard, but they should try snuffing it. The only reason that one doesn't make the list is because no one’s writing about it, but take it from me, dying is the worst.

  I let Fergal down as easy as I knew how. I have a bit of boilerplate I use to bring new ghosts up to speed and let them know how things work down here. I explain how they’re stuck between worlds like a penny in a sofa, but that they can still cross to the other side, just so long as they help me finish up their business on Earth. To that end, I disclosed to Fergal how his body had been found on Hampstead Heath with a murder weapon in its hand.

  He was shocked to say the least.

  ‘Any idea how you wound up there?’ I asked.

  ‘Not a clue,’ he replied. ‘I nodded off underground and the next thing I knew I found myself up here.’

  That seemed to confirm my suspicion that he’d died en route to the hospital, but not how his body had arrived on the Heath two days later.

  ‘Why do you want to help me anyway?’ he asked, lip curled. ‘What’s in it for you?’

  I could understand the suspicion. Living on the streets makes a man tough – it’s no wonder Fergal wasn’t too trusting of a stranger offering free salvation, particularly when he dressed like a door-to-door salesman.

  ‘The truth is, saving your arse is as much for me as it is for you,’ I told him. ‘I made some mistakes when I was still among the living, and helping you out offsets some of that. That’s how it works: your wayward soul goes to the Great Beyond and I earn some Brownie points for my trouble. Win-win.’

  ‘So, you’re sort of like a… spirit guide.’

  ‘If you like, yeah, but not in the dreamcatcher, crunchy granola, beat poetry sense.’

  A sudden thought crossed Fergal’s mind. ‘Do my mum and dad know that I'm… you know...?’

  ‘I’ll make sure the police pass on the message,’ I told him, and he nodded grimly.

  That could be Stronge's job – payback for giving me this shitty little number.

  Before I left, I asked Fergal if he knew anything else. Anything at all about how he wound up a suspect in a murder case. Did he have any enemies? Anyone looking to do him harm? Anyone he wanted to do harm to? All my questions met with a big, fat nothing.

  I was going to have to look for clues elsewhere.

  I had planned on going to the hospital to ask some questions about those two paramedics, but DCI Stronge had other ideas. I was told to meet her at St. Pancras Mortuary and to come alone, which was code for, “Leave the meat suit at home.”

  Not a problem. Mark was about to reject me anyway, so the sooner I cut him loose the better. I can stay inside a living body for a while, but I always get the boot in the end. A body isn’t made for two souls, that’s just the way it is. I can squat in one for a time, but sooner or later I get my eviction notice and have to toddle on. After that it’s hours, sometimes days before I can set up shop again. Don’t ask me why it works that way, I don’t write the rules.

  I dropped Mark off at his apartment, an upscale bachelor pad near Regent’s Park with a dedicated beer cooler in the kitchen and a lounge decked out with a speaker system powerful enough to loosen bowels. I sat Mark down on his oversized sofa and went to work scrubbing the events of the last few hours from his mind.

  Mark’s never been too strong between the ears, to the extent that I’m now able to not only format his memories, but to replace them with new ones. It's a skill I’ve developed to make my possessions a bit kinder on the lad. I’d been getting a fair bit of use out of him lately, and the recurring gaps in his memory were making him anxious. He’d gone to his therapist about it and been referred to a doctor, but the PET scans they gave him showed nothing abnormal. Still, Mark was convinced he had something wrong with him. He was worrying so much about a non-existent brain tumour that he was going to give himself a very real stomach ulcer. So, being the very milk of human kindness, I figured out a way to fill the potholes I’d been leaving in the poor bugger’s head.

  Thanks to my jiggery pokery, when Mark replays the events of the last few hours, instead of seeing himself getting into a fight with a derelict’s attack dog, he’ll remain convinced that he stayed in and binge-watched three seasons of Entourage (I wanted to go with something classy like The Wire, but the memories I create have to be halfway realistic for them to stick). Oh, and as for the bandaged wound on his wrist, he got that when he was slicing a block of artisanal Parmesan and the grater slipped. Not a great deception I realise, but the best I could come up with in a hurry.

  It’s ironic, Mark ending up with a wounded wrist, seeing as he once gave me one of my own. It was a long time ago, back when we were in Year Nine. He’d managed to lay his hands on a pair of handcuffs and used them to manacle me to a classroom radiator. It was a shitty thing to do, but the humiliation was only half of it. While the teacher was out of the room, Mark and his dickhead friends stood around laughing as the handcuffs heated up, until they finally got so hot that the one attached to my wrist cooked me. Even though I don’t have a working nose, I can still smell the burnt hair. The sizzling meat.

  Any other kid would have been expelled for doing something like that, but Mark's dad was a big deal round our way—a lawyer with a lot of money and a lot of clout—and he made sure the Headteacher saw things his way. Whether he paid him off or threatened him legally I don’t know, but it was decided that a stain on his son’s record at such an early age could wreck a promising future career, so Mark was allowed to carry on at the school unpunished.

  I want you to remember that any time you question the ethics of me borrowing another man’s body. Since I died I’ve done everything in my power to walk the path of the righteous, but Mark Ryan… Mark Ryan deserves all that he has coming to him and then some.

  Anyway, enough of the boo-hoo, and back to the job at hand. As instructed, I met Stronge at the mortuary, where an examination of the cadavers found on Hampstead Heath was taking place. The two bodies had been laid out side-by-side. The slab on the left bore the weight of the rhino-necked victim with the cratered head and the dangling eyeball, while the other was draped by Fergal’s gaunt, pockmarked frame. Each of the bodies had a small piece of printed card tied to its toe by a bit of string, which made them look like morbid Christmas tree presents, gift tagged to God.

  I stood to one side and observed while the resident mortician, Dr Anand, inspected the corpses and related her findings to Stronge. It always felt strange, the three of us being together in that room. It wasn’t so long that I was there with them looking down at my own body, scattered across a ceramic slab in four big chunks. It wasn’t an experience I’d recommend, in case you were wondering.

  Dr Anand was excellent at what she did, a total pro with a talent well beyond her thirty odd years. Nothing slipped by her. She was smart, capable and dependable; as true blue as the ultramarine apron she wore to keep blood spatter from her hospital whites. Which is not to say she was all sweetness and light. Anand enjoyed a gallows humour considered distasteful even by her peers. I once heard a story about her time as a medical resident working th
e graveyard shift at the Royal London Hospital. The story went that her and a group of fellow residents had ordered a 2am pizza, only for the delivery boy to wind up delivered himself, on a gurney. He’d been involved in a serious collision on the way to the hospital, a real axle-plaiter. When the surgeons failed to revive the boy, she was reported to have shrugged and asked, “So, what happened to our pizza?”

  As Doctor Anand went about her work, entirely unaware of my presence, I examined the toe tags on the bodies. Neither had a name on it, just case numbers, which meant the police were still chasing an ID on the big feller. Stronge must have thought she was quids in when she pulled the licence from his wallet, but I guess it had turned out to be bogus.

  ‘TBI,’ said Anand, suddenly.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Stronge, who’d spaced out after another fifteen-hour shift.

  ‘Popeye here,’ replied Anand, aiming a finger at the corpse with the dislodged eyeball. ‘Cause of death: Traumatic Brain Injury. Lethal blunt force injury to the parietal lobe.’

  ‘I see,’ said Stronge. ‘And is the injury consistent with the rock that came in with the other body?’

  ‘I can’t say for certain without further examination,’ Anand replied, ‘but I’ll bet you a bag of chips it is.’

  Stronge nodded. ‘And what about the other one?’

  Anand made a whistling sound like a car mechanic about to deliver a devastating repair fee. ‘Again, I’ll need a bit more time to get into the hows of it, but I can give you my cursory findings. There are three things that stand out right away. First of all, the genitals have been mutilated, but that’s really just a side note.’

  I stole a look. I hadn’t been checking hard enough the first time, but now I inspected Fergal’s body properly, I could see that his old chap had taken a bit of a blow, and not in a good way. From the looks of things, the tip had been removed, leaving him with little more than a stump. It was an old wound though, and well-healed.