‘Jesus wept,’ I exclaimed as I stopped and caught the pervert’s face.
It was old B.J. himself, Boris Johnson, Ex-Mayor of London. I guess that explained why the club didn’t want any snoopers in that night.
My sudden arrival spooked Boris, but not as much as it did the magical mare, who bucked violently at my approach and caused a terrific tearing of the ex-Mayor’s rear end. The noise that issued from his guilty schoolboy face, the eyes wide with horror, mouth rigid and wide, fists clenched, nails digging into the palms of his hands deep enough to draw blood… well, it was almost enough to make me forgive him for the broken pledges and endless, smarmy, political flip-flops. Still, you know what they say, you mess with the unicorn, you get the horn.
It was just as I was contemplating this that I was rugby-tackled by the club’s doormen and sent sprawling to the ground. The Den’s floor was a surface I’d have preferred not to have touched with my shoe leather, much less my face, but there I was, kissing marble that had seen more sins than Sodom.
I fought my way to my feet and squared up to the two lummoxes.
‘Out!’ said one.
‘Right now!’ said the other.
‘Not until I see Anya.’
They sighed and rolled up their jacket sleeves in unison. What happened next looked to be a foregone conclusion, but as we’ve already established, I’m the type that rages against the dying of the light.
I gave them a little Muhammed Ali soft shoe to let them know I was game for a laugh. Tweedledum puffed out his chest and bumped tits with me. That was his first mistake. Unlike the two vampires, who I couldn’t possess on account of them being undead, these guys I could take control of.
The moment he came into contact with me I transferred to his body and took root in his brain. It was a curiously unruffled thing, small and smooth like a billiard ball. It definitely wasn’t human, but I had neither the time nor the inclination to figure out what manner of creature it belonged to. Not when his brother was coming at me with both fists swinging.
I was surprised to see Tweedledummer attack his own brother with so little hesitation, but I was even more surprised when he grabbed a hold of his wrist and tore my new arm out at the socket like he was pulling apart a roast chicken.
There was no pain though. Usually, I feel whatever the body I’ve taken hold of feels, but all I got this time was a dull note informing me that some part of my body had incurred a wound. Not a klaxon horn screaming that I’d suffered a catastrophic injury, but a gentle reminder that I might want to check out the afflicted area, so long as I could find the time. No rush.
I soon realised why when I looked down at the stump to see it growing a new limb. What the…?
And that was only the half it. When I looked back at my assailant I found he’d shifted form. He was no longer a bald man with a bovine face but a big green monster with scaly skin, a distended belly and a long nose that drooped so low it hung past his mouth. Likewise, the glamour concealing my true form had also been dispelled, revealing me as a matching monster.
Trolls.
That answered the question of what flavour of Uncanny the brothers were. Trolls were exceedingly rare, frighteningly strong, and capable of rapid regeneration. They were also dumb as muck and loved to fight, which was one of their traits I was only too happy to mimic.
I seized Tweedledummer by the forearm using my regrown appendage, tore his limb out at the root and smacked him with the soggy end.
THWACK!
Revellers looked up from their various orgies, stopping mid-stroke to gawp at the two trolls beating seven bells out of each other.
Tweedledummer jabbed me in the face and knocked my jaw clean from my head, but I’d grown another one in the time it took him to wind up another punch.
I tore a lump from his scalp.
He ventilated my chest with his fist.
I bit a nice, wet chunk out of his shoulder.
As soon as he hurt me I hurt him back, spraying the walls in oily black troll blood and littering the floor with spent body parts. We were fighting a fight that could conceivably go on forever. A zero sum game. A no-score draw on a wet Sunday afternoon.
Fortunately, the ruckus was broken up by an onlooker. Unfortunately, that onlooker was Anya, head of the succubus family and owner of the club we were destroying.
‘Stop this!’ she cried, reaching into the troll I was wearing and pulling me out by the scruff of my neck.
‘Detective Fletcher,’ she growled. ‘I might have known.’
Anya’s office was up two flights of stairs and overlooked the action below by means of a one-way mirror (and yes, it is a one-way mirror for those of you who use the phrase “two-way,” because a “two-way mirror” would be “glass”). We entered the room and Anya pointed to a chair. I took a seat there as ordered while she sauntered around her large, mahogany desk and plonked herself down on the thick velvet cushion of an antique chair. There was stuff going on through that one-way mirror that made Eyes Wide Shut look like a Mormon courtship, but my gaze didn’t stray from Anya for one solitary second.
She was the kind of woman that women loved to hate. Anya’s was an overstated beauty that her peers would often describe as “obvious,” yet most men described with an involuntary escape of drool. Tonight she wore a form-fitting black dress that perfectly complimented her exposed ivory shoulders. Her long, dark hair cascaded down the soft curve of her back like an Egyptian queen’s. Her lips were painted cherry red and her silver eyes shone in the gloom like twin moons.
She was a beauty alright, but that beauty was strictly on the outside. Scratch a little deeper and you’d see Anya for what she really was: a monster that gorged on human emotions, a vicious, hellborn creature that fed on suffering and wicked thoughts. If you ever saw Anya feed you’d be left in no doubt of her true nature. If you saw her eyes turn black, her fingers elongate into claws, her jaw dislocate and slit down the chin, opening wide enough to swallow a man whole.
So, why was she tolerated? Why hadn’t Stella come in here and wiped Anya and her kin off the map? Why was this place allowed to operate at all?
The simple answer was that they had permission to. The regular police were blind to the club, and the forces of Uncanny righteousness—who’d once spent decades battling the succubi—had agreed to condone its presence on the condition that its owners confined their activities to within its four walls. Before The Den arrived in Soho, the succubi had stalked London, breaking into people's homes as they slept, sitting astride them and sucking them dry.
And not in a good way.
A succubus drains its victim of their every essence, leaving behind a desiccated corpse; a hollow, vacant husk, forsaken by God and the Devil besides. That’s the kind of power Anya has, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that she sent the clanging numb-nuts that let me slip into her place of business back to their post. Anya didn’t need trolls looking out for her wellbeing. She was quite capable of taking care of herself.
‘Why did you come here, Detective?’ she asked leaning back in her chair and lighting a cigarette.
‘I wanted to ask if you knew anything about the strange killings that have gone down in Camden.’
‘Of course I know about them. This is my city.’
A lot of people like to lay claim to this town, but Anya’s claim is truer than most.
‘So, who is he then? Who’s the new guy?’
‘Do you really think I’d tell you that? The privacy of my clientele is sacrosanct.’
I put my hands together. ‘Pretty please?’
She smiled. ‘Why are you interested in this man anyway?’ she asked.
‘Because he's a nutter, that’s why. A grubby little perv who gets off on killing.’
‘We all have our peccadillos,’ she said, leaning forward to place a soft, slim hand on my wrist. ‘Don’t we, Mister Fletcher?’
The room melted away.
I was somewhere else now.
The inside of my own
brain.
And I was not alone.
Anya was there, dressed impeccably in an ivory dress and long, white opera gloves.
She traced a clean digit along the dark recesses of my mind and inspected the tip of her index finger.
‘Filthy,’ she said, as she thrust the dirt into my face. ‘Absolutely filthy.’
For once it was my turn to have my brain invaded, and it was not a sensation I enjoyed. My head felt full, pressured, like I was swimming at the deep end of a swimming pool. Anya was glamouring me. Toying with my emotions, trying to get a rise from me, making me sweat.
A catwalk had appeared besides her now, the kind strippers get paid to parade along. A velvet curtain arrived with it and parted to reveal two women, who strutted out dressed in g-strings and nothing else. They began to cavort and twirl around a brass pole, thrusting their nether regions in my direction.
One of them was Stronge, the other Stella.
‘Interesting,’ said Anya, licking her lips. ‘An Uncanny and a normal. You have broad tastes, Mister Fletcher. Let’s broaden them some more…’
The fantasy versions of Stronge and Stella embraced and went at each other like a couple of piranhas in a feeding frenzy. Then suddenly I wasn’t just a spectator, I was part of it, a man sandwich, naked and wedged between the two of them while Anya looked on with lascivious eyes. It was some real 18 certificate stuff. Pure gonzo.
Pulling myself out of that fantasy might be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Nevertheless, I gave it everything I had and succeeded in pushing Anya out of my brain. Or maybe she decided she’d had her fun and left the insides of my skull of her own free will. I very much suspect the latter.
We were back in her office now, sat across from each other, her dressed in black again, me with my tackle safely tucked away. It felt hot in there. Was it hot? It sure felt hot.
For a moment Anya’s eyes were all black, then the whites returned like milk poured into two buckets of pitch. ‘I like ghosts,’ she told me, taking a casual drag on her cigarette. ‘So much fun.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, hoping she didn’t notice the quaver in my voice.
‘You exist in the in-between,’ she continued, ‘on the cusp of pleasure and pain, straddling life and death, a human stroke and choke. Tell me, phantom man, what is that like? How does it feel to walk with one foot on the primrose path? Are your sensations intensified? Your thrills heightened? I must know.’
‘I have my fun,’ I told her. ‘You should have seen me the other day, I absolutely murdered a tube of Pringles.’
Her lip curled and she slumped back in her chair, disillusioned.
It was as good a time as any to bring the conversation back on track. ‘If you won’t tell me who the hooded perv is, at least help me catch him.’
‘He’s no pervert,’ Anya snapped. ‘He kills for justice, not for pleasure. It’s not about kinks or taboos with him, it’s about black and white. Good and evil.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Because I’ve studied his needs, Mister Fletcher, and found his tastes to be strictly vanilla.’
She certainly looked disappointed. ‘What’s the matter, Anya, murder not dirty enough for you?’
She snorted. ‘There’s nothing carnal about this man’s desires. He doesn’t do what he does to get off, he does it because he’s working to a plan, and there’s nothing less sexy than a plan.’
‘Fine,’ I said, ‘but how is any of this going to help me catch the bloke?’
‘I don’t recall saying I’d help you,’ she said, firing a plume of smoke above her head.
I was wasting my time. I pushed back my chair and stood up. ‘Thanks a lot, Anya. As usual, you’ve been absolutely no help at all.’
I was almost at the door when she called after me. ‘Let me give you a piece of advice, Detective Fletcher. This world is made up of submissives and dominators, of those who take, and those who give. It’s time you asked yourself this: are you a top or a bottom?’
I pushed open the door, but she wasn’t done.
‘One last thing before you go, Detective.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Darken my door again I'll torture what remains of your raggedy little soul until the end of days.’
18
Anya couldn’t be seen to be helping the law, but she’d done just that. It was in her own interests after all. The Hooded Man killing perverts on her patch was shrinking her client base, and that was bad for business. No wonder she’d offered me the veiled advice.
She knew what I had to do, even if I didn’t. She knew I had to take control of the situation. To climb on top of things. The whole time I’d been on this case I’d been thinking I was being proactive, but the truth was I’d been following the Hooded Man’s lead from the start. If I was going to get this guy I’d need to wrest control from him, and since I already knew what his game was, I knew how to intercept it.
I had a plan.
Now all I needed was the means.
I was able to visit Jazz Hands at her usual hangout since the angel Adonael was no longer snapping at my heels.
‘Well well,’ she said as the shop bell tinkled. ‘The prodigal son returns.’
I didn’t have time for pleasantries, so I skipped straight to the point. ‘D’you have it?’ I asked.
I’d phoned ahead with a special order. Something to help me put the Hooded Man out of commission once and for all.
‘Perhaps,’ she teased. ‘But first, what’s in it for me?’
‘Well, for one thing you’ll save yourself an absolutely shocking Yelp review for that dodgy grenade you lumbered me with.’
It wasn’t a real threat. I knew I’d get what I wanted from Jazz Hands for one simple reason: because behind that moth-eaten jumper she wore was a heart the size of a family hatchback.
‘Here,’ she said, sliding a slim metal box across the counter. ‘I won’t ask what it’s for.’
‘Probably best you don’t,’ I agreed, taking the box and slipping it into my inside pocket.
‘Is that everything?’ she asked, eager to return to her copy of Hello! Magazine.
‘Just one more thing,’ I said, pointing to a nearby vase of wildflowers.
I visited DCI Stronge at the nick. We had a rule about that. The rule was that I didn’t do it. Consequently, it came as no surprise when she angrily ushered me into her office and whipped down the venetians.
‘What are you doing here?’ she hissed.
It was after hours, so besides herself there were only a couple of cleaners doing the rounds, but Stronge wasn’t one to take chances.
‘I need your help,’ I whispered.
Her face didn’t soften one bit, which only made her look sexier somehow. I blamed Anya for that. It was hard to look at Kat the same way after those images the succubus had planted in my head... hard being the operative word.
‘What’s changed?’ Stronge asked, folding her arms.
‘I know how to get him now. The Hooded Man. He's working to a system, one that we can disrupt.’
‘We?’
‘Come on, Kat, help me take this guy down. Help me ruin this guy.’
She stared at me, eyes made of flint. ‘Well, if there’s one thing you’re good at, Fletcher, it’s ruining things.’
‘You’re right. You’re right and I was wrong, okay? I shouldn’t have shut you out of this. The truth is, I need you just as much as you need me.’
I wasn’t lying. I needed her cooperation to pull this off, and though Adonael had forbidden me from getting any backing from Stella, he hadn’t said anything about getting assistance from a normal.
I produced a bunch of flowers from my pocket. ‘So, what do you say, Kat? Can we be partners again?’
‘Where did you get those? A graveyard?’
‘As a ghost, I find that notion offensive.’
She took the flowers and pitched them into the closest thing she had to a vase; a half-full mug of coffee. ‘So, go on then,
what's this big plan of yours?’
Thank Christ, she was on board. I did what I could to stop a great big smile from spreading across my face, but only half succeeded. I took a chair and suggested she did the same. ‘Tell me this: have you ever hated someone so bad you thought about killing them?’
‘How about every ex I’ve ever had?’
‘I’m serious. I need to know if you’ve ever thought about actually sticking a knife in someone.’
‘No,’ she said, matter-of-factly.
‘Come on, Kat. Everyone has at some point. I know there’s not a day goes by that I don’t dream of pipping my killer to the post.’ I passed my phantom hand through her desk for effect.
‘There is… one guy,’ she said, making a face like she was experiencing a bowel movement. ‘We met at college. He got me drunk one night and... well.’
I almost asked, “Well what?” but the look in her eyes made everything click into place. ‘Oh, Kat, I’m sorry, I—’
‘He didn’t get away with it. He might have though, if I hadn’t stuck my house keys in his face.’
Figured she’d fight back. The woman had a real set of ovaries on her. ‘Well, did they do him for it?’
She laughed. It was a beaten, sad little laugh. ‘No. They actually came after me for it in the end.’
‘What?’
‘His daddy was some big deal lawyer, and he knew the best defence his son had was a good offence. So, instead of waiting for me to press changes, the piece of shit had me written up for assault. Told the police we’d gotten into a verbal and that I’d gone at him with a knife. In the end it was my word against his, and he took me for every penny I had. Well, every penny my parents had. That’s why they live out in Gravesend and I send them the best part of my pay packet every month.’
Same old story, the rich trampling the poor, skirting their way around forfeits and penance.
‘I’m starting to see why you ended up in law enforcement,’ I said. ‘Any idea what happened to the fucker? Since you graduated, I mean?’
Uncanny Kingdom: An Eleven Book Urban Fantasy Collection (Uncanny Kingdom Omnibus 1) Page 64
