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

by David Bussell

  ‘The game is afoot,’ the kid said, quoting his favourite TV show.

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied, popping the collar of my jacket theatrically. ‘The game is afoot.’

  He smiled. ‘And the man in the hood, is he your Watson?’

  I felt my blood run cold. ‘You saw a man in a hood?’ Apparently the vampires had been telling the truth about their mystery caller.

  ‘He came here after I…’ again, Mike looked to the scrap of belt.

  ‘Was he a black man?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And he’s the bad man you mentioned?’

  ‘No, he’s my friend!’

  That definitely came out of nowhere. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He said he’d make the bad man go away. Forever.’

  He explained how the man in the hood had visited him after he’d put his head in the noose. How he’d come by and talked with him, saying he was sorry for the things he’s been through and that he was going to make things right. ‘After that there was only one of me,’ Mike added.

  I was puzzled at first, until we talked some more and I realised that he was talking about his body. The man in the hood had taken his corpse, just like he had Fergal’s, leaving only his ghost behind. ‘So, how did, um, the other one of you go?’

  ‘All by himself,’ he replied. ‘The man in the hood put him on the ground, then he whispered something in his ear and off he went.’ He mimed a soldier’s march.

  So, the Hooded Man was a necromancer. Someone with the power to re-animate the dead and make them march to the beat of his drum. Who was he though? Who was this murderous puppet master, weaponising corpses? And what was his game? Why was he doing this? Had the mob contracted him to tie up some loose ends? Taken him on as their necromantic button man? And if they had, could I expect to see more walking corpses knocking people off on my patch? Both hits had been a success after all; what if this was just the start of something bigger?

  I had to move quickly before the Hooded Man struck again, even if that meant leaving a little boy to fend for himself in an abandoned breaker’s yard.

  ‘Can you be brave for me, Mike?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ he sighed, sensing what was coming.

  I told him he had to stay here, at least for a little while. ‘It won’t be for long,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

  ‘And after that?’

  I smiled. ‘After that you can go see your mum and dad again.’

  Stronge called to tell me to meet her at the stab victim’s address. She said to bring a friend, which was code for, “Wear the meat suit.”

  ‘I’m not doing that Cyrano shit again,’ she told me. ‘Besides, I prefer your friend’s face to your ugly mug.’

  That hurt, I won’t lie. Still, I did as she asked and commandeered Mark for the job. I felt kind of bad about getting so much use out of the guy, but what was he really missing out on other than banging gullible women and running up huge champagne bills with his douchebag banker chums?

  I arrived at the address and presented my ID to the constables manning the front gate. A female P.C. took my driver’s licence and checked it against an access list to make sure I had business being there. The list would classify that I was joining the team as a “psychic consultant.” There was a reason for that. Before she gained The Sight, Stronge would summon me to a murder scene for the purpose of conferring with the victim’s ghost and discovering who their killer was. Given the inevitable presence of other law officers, the “psychic” tag handily explained away my wild leaps of logic as clairvoyance, whilst simultaneously doing away with the need for any pesky “credentials.” It didn’t exactly make me the most popular kid in class though.

  The P.C. saw my name on the licence and rolled her eyes back so far it’s a wonder she didn’t get a look at her own brain. ‘That way,’ she said, thumbing the door.

  I thanked her for her hospitality and stepped inside the house.

  The smell was the first thing that hit me. The smell of animal faeces, black mould and sour milk. Then there was the state of the place. All that was left of the hallway was a thin crease of floor between two great walls of junk: cardboard boxes wrapped in parcel tape, tin cans half-filled with congealed paint, and seesawing piles of dusty old novels. Whoever the guy was that lived here, he was the Smaug of hoarding useless old shit.

  I turned Mark’s body sideways and shuffled along the corridor to the lounge, where I found Stronge among a cluster of forensics officers. Surrounding them was yet more junk: Tupperware containers of old McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, a giant, novelty whiskey bottle filled with loose change, a nativity set from who knows how many Christmases ago, and an arrangement of creepy porcelain dolls judging us silently from their seat on the sofa.

  ‘It’s going to take years to sort through this stuff,’ Stronge muttered.

  Something hairy scuttled by my leg and I yelped as I left the floor by an inch or two. When I looked up again I saw the eyes of the forensics officers boring into me over the tops of their breathing masks.

  ‘I don’t think they like me,’ I whispered.

  ‘Of course they don’t,’ Stronge replied. ‘They’re men of science. You piss in the eye of that.’

  Fair enough.

  I changed the subject. ‘So, what are we thinking? I asked. ‘We thinking this guy was mobbed up too?’

  Stronge was mid-shrug when a female forensics officer appeared in the doorway. ‘We’ve found something, Detective. You’d better come take a look.’

  Following her, we picked our way up a flight of shoe-covered stairs to the landing, past a mountain of old machine parts and into a bedroom that was in even more need of downsizing than the rest of the house. It looked like a jumble sale that had fallen victim to a hurricane.

  ‘There,’ said the officer, pointing to a computer sat on a desk piled high with old drink cans and plates used as makeshift ashtrays. The machine was switched on, and displayed on the screen above its cigarette-scarred keyboard, an indecent image of a child. ‘There’s a trove of it on there,’ she added, sickened.

  I turned away from the screen. I couldn’t look at it.

  Kat had a stronger stomach. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I guess that explains what the vic was doing hanging around at a kiddie’s playground.’ She snapped on a pair of latex gloves and went snooping through the computer’s hard drive. After a couple of minutes of investigation, she tapped the screen and turned to me. ‘Yep, it’s what I thought.’

  She showed me a file marked “Cherub Club.”

  ‘A colleague working for the Child Protection Unit told me about this,’ she said. ‘He’s spent the last six months chasing this dirty mac brigade as part of a special crime squad called Operation Paladin. The club had a dozen members at least, trading pictures of minors like hard cash. His squad rounded them up and and booked them with conspiracy to distribute. All but one anyway.’

  The man in the hood had dealt out a little vigilante justice it seemed. But why bring little Mike into this?

  ‘Jesus,’ said Stronge, pulling away from the computer.

  She’d found another image. An image of Mike, unclothed, posed like no child should ever be posed. The background of the photo was a match for the lounge, complete with creepy porcelain dolls.

  ‘Turn it off,’ I said.

  I hated this case. Hated it. This isn’t what I became a P.I. for. I got into this game for the Sam Spade stuff. Stalking the mean streets, swigging scotch from the bottom drawer, late night calls from double-crossing dames with long gams. Not… this. Not porn rings and child molesters and dead kids. I’d take real demons over this any time. That’s the kind of evil I want to be dealing with. The old-fashioned, biblical kind. An evil that parades around with horns on its head, stinking of brimstone, belching fire. Human monsters are so much worse. Human monsters don’t wear horns, they hide beneath the surface, silent and unseen, like snakes slithering under leaves.

  ‘Turn it off!’ I shouted.

  Finally
, Stronge pulled the plug.

  I bet Stella Familiar never had to go through stuff like this. Trawling through a paedo’s sex dungeon and looking at pictures of naked children. No, I bet she was out there tossing fireballs at some interdimensional ne’er-do-well, having the time of her life.

  I put Stella out of my mind and returned to the job at hand. ‘They were connected,’ I said. ‘Mike and this piece of shit knew each other.’

  This had nothing to do with a mob hit. The kid and the paedophile had a past that didn’t involve gangsters at all. So, the whole mobster angle, was it just a red herring? Had the ex-Bratva on the Heath had his skull caved in for reasons other than his former gang affiliations? Was he connected to Fergal somehow, the overdosed runaway? Connected in a personal way? It didn’t seem possible, and yet I couldn’t rule it out until I’d done some digging.

  I went back to Fergal with a photo in my hand.

  ‘Do you recognise this man?’ I asked, pulling him into a side street and showing him the Russian’s picture.

  He gulped. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I do.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It was just after I arrived in London.’ He took a breath. ‘I was out one night. At a bar on Old Compton Street. There was this toilet stall with a hole in it and… well, you know…?

  Yeah, I knew, and it had nothing to do with playing the piccolo.

  I’d suspected Fergal might be gay. The witness I spoke to in the underground shanty town told me he’d never tried anything on with her, and I had a feeling there was more to that than him just being a gentleman. ‘Carry on,’ I said.

  ‘Okay. Well, I put it through the hole and he grabbed it. Hard. Too hard. Then he started... cutting.’

  Christ. ‘He had a knife?’

  ‘Yeah. I managed to get away though... but not before he... did some damage.’

  I remembered Fergal’s mutilated body on the mortuary slab and winced.

  ‘I wasn’t able to go after him,’ he said, ‘but I got a look at his face as he was legging it.’ He stabbed the photo with his index finger. ‘That’s him.’ Tears sprang up in Fergal’s eyes. ‘It all went wrong after that; I got on the scag, I lost my flat…’ he trailed off.

  So, I was right. Fergal and the Russian were connected after all, and not in a friendly way. And just like little Mike, Fergal had been given a chance at revenge from beyond the grave. His mutilator had been out on Hampstead Heath that night, up to his old tricks no doubt, and got more than he bargained for. The mobster angle had been a red herring after all. The connection between Fergal and the Russian had nothing to do with gang crime; it was a hate crime that joined their fates.

  So, a kiddie-fiddler stabbed in the back by a child he’d taken advantage of, and a gay-basher brained to death by a former victim. The corpses of the brutalised, reanimated and used to exact revenge. The Hooded Man was dishing out something more than justice. This was ironic justice. This was killing by design.

  14

  I told DCI Stronge to get some shuteye while I carried on the investigation overnight. She protested, telling me she could power through, but she was dog tired and we both knew it. As for me, I had to do something to keep my mind occupied, and even if I were able to sleep I couldn’t have. This case had gotten into my head, and I wouldn’t let up until the Hooded Man had answered for what he’d done.

  Before I said goodnight to Stronge, she mentioned that Dr Anand was carrying out the autopsies of Mike and his abuser that evening, so I decided to ditch the meat suit and pay a visit to the morgue for an observe and report. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t relish the prospect of watching Anand carve a giant Y into a dead kid, but if there was any chance of her examination leading me to the man in the hood, I was going to be there.

  As I’d been informed, Dr Anand was there, dressed in her scrubs and apron, burning the midnight oil. As she worked, I stood by inconspicuously in my ghost form, watching her unseen. Anand began with a cursory examination of the adult, the cadaver of which lay on its fat belly, presenting a back full of holes. She inspected the corpse visually and reported her findings into a microphone that hung above the autopsy slab.

  ‘...Multiple sharp force injuries from a rear, dropped position consistent with the witness report of a juvenile stabber. I count... eleven puncture wounds and... five chops. Cause of death at this stage seems self-explanatory.’

  She moved across to the opposite slab and began to examine the body of Mike, which lay on its back, facing the ceiling. He looked peaceful. Except for the belt mark around his neck, he might as well have been sleeping.

  ‘Come on,’ I whispered, goading Anand on inaudibly. ‘Give me something. Find me a clue. Lead me to the puppet master.’

  Anand went about her second exam with the same dispassionate professionalism as the first. ‘Without opening the body up and studying its internal organs, it would appear this death occurred due to strangulation.’ She picked one of the cadaver’s legs up by the heel and flexed it at the knee. ‘Going by the degree of rigor mortis, the time of death is estimated to have occurred at least twelve hours ago.’ She put the limb down and pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration. ‘Which of course is impossible as the deceased was seen to perform a frenzied homicide less than four hours ago by at least a dozen witnesses.’

  That part was no news to me, even if the reanimator’s motive, method and identity were an utter enigma.

  Anand went on. ‘Continuing my examination, I will now conduct an internal exploration of the cadaver.’

  She went to a tray of stainless steel instruments and selected a large scalpel. This was the part I’d been dreading. I wanted to look away of course, but I forced myself to stay focussed and remember that I was only looking at Mike’s corpse. Just a vessel, nothing more. The real Mike was over at the scrap yard, waiting on me to solve this mystery. Waiting on me to get him to the other side.

  ‘Beginning dissection,’ said Anand, and brought the gleaming blade to Mike’s shoulder joint in preparation of the first cut of the Y. ‘Making the first incision now...’

  The tip of the knife was pressing into the boy’s dead flesh—

  —When his hand struck out and seized Anand by the wrist.

  The body’s eyelids snapped open to reveal two gleaming white orbs. His mouth cracked apart and launched a scream like a baby born without skin. It was the kind of sound that made you want to stab out your eardrums.

  Anand cried out in terror, jerking back her arm to break free of the corpse’s grip, her face knotted with panic. She scurried into the corner of the theatre and slumped to the ground, dread taking hold and leaving her catatonic.

  Meanwhile, the corpse raised its arm and turned to point at me accusingly. ‘You,’ it said in a voice like two rough stones being ground together.

  It was far too deep a voice to belong to a child. It seemed I was finally meeting the wizard behind the curtain. The Hooded Man had made himself known.

  ‘Who are you?’ I demanded.

  ‘That is no concern of yours,’ he replied. The voice issued though the corpse’s mouth, which hung open and slack, jaw unmoving.

  ‘Oh, it’s well within my bailiwick,’ I explained. ‘I’m a P.I.’

  ‘You’re no Private Investigator,’ the voice mocked. ‘You work for the man.’ He turned the body’s white eyes to the heavens. ‘For the ultimate “The Man.”’

  ‘You’re wrong, pal. My bosses are the ones you’re leaving trapped in limbo while you turn their bodies into murder puppets.’

  ‘Lies!’ he boomed. ‘You do what you do in the hope that it will save you from His wrath. You are nothing more than a servant. A toady. A miserable boot-licker.’

  Okay, I thought, I got the message with “servant,” no need to put a hat on a hat. ‘And what about you?’ I shot back. ‘What’s the man with the pitchfork and the pointy tail paying you to express deliver him those rotten souls?’

  The mystery man twisted Mike’s face into some approximation of a smile. ‘I do not c
ome from Hell,’ he said. ‘I come from another place. A place I was sent in exile. A place I have languished for decades, waiting for my time to come again.’

  His constant deflections were really getting on my tits. ‘Enough with the chit-chat and tell me who you are.’

  ‘You already know who I am,’ he replied. ‘My name has diminished in power I’ll grant you, but now, in this time of strife and uncertainty, with the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight, it is on the tip of everyone’s tongues.’

  ‘Not mine, mate. I don’t know you from Adam.’

  The corpse made a gurgling sound that I guessed for a chuckle. ‘It humours me that you should mention the First Man. He lived for many hundreds of years, so he did, but the day still came that he had to pay the ferryman.’

  The bloke was making no sense. Was he telling the truth when he said he’d been held prisoner for decades? Was forced confinement the reason he was acting mad as a bag of spiders? ‘At this point I don’t really care who you are,’ I told him, ‘I just need you to pack in the murdering and fess up for the damage you’ve done.’

  ‘And how do you plan to punish me exactly?’ he asked. ‘Are you going to “run me in,” Detective Fletcher? Hand me over to the authorities?’ He raised Mike’s dead, feeble arms, wrists pressed together, daring me to take him away. ‘You have no power over me, phantom. This game is far too rich for your blood. Take your chips and cash out now before it’s too late.’

  ‘Listen here,’ I said, squaring up to him. ‘This is my patch, and I’m not going to let some jumped-up Dr. Frankenstein run around butchering people.’

  ‘What do you care?’ he asked. ‘Were my victims not deserving of their fates?’

  Now it was my turn to deflect. ‘What about the people you didn't send to Hell? What about the two innocent souls you left trapped here on Earth?’

  ‘That is not my will, that is God’s will.’ The corpse’s head cocked to one side, as if paying me special attention. ‘The Devil claims his own, and yet the Almighty is content to let his flock linger here on Earth instead of bringing them home to their final reward. Have you ever asked yourself why that is, Detective? Why He allows the spirits of the innocent to remain trapped between this world and the next? The victims? The waifs and strays? The wretched refuse? The people like you?’