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

by David Bussell

  A startling jolt followed by a powerful rushing sensation that left my stomach somewhere in the heights of my ribcage. It was as though the casket I was trapped in had been blasted from a cannon.

  Whoosh!

  I felt g-force pull at my face as I hurtled feet-first into oblivion, screaming the whole way there. Only when the last of the cry had escaped my lips did I realise that the ride had come to an end.

  The casket drifted gently now, floating along like a log flume returning to the station to pick up a fresh batch of riders. I lay there, mind fried, shaking like a shitting dog. Only once the horror of being shot blindly into the unknown had subsided, was there room for a new, even more frightening thought.

  Where was I?

  A sudden panic overtook me and I found myself clawing at the lid of the coffin and screaming again.

  My screams made no sound.

  I tried to illuminate my surroundings by summoning a magical flame in my palm, but when I spoke the words of the evocation, none came. My lips flapped soundlessly in the vacuum. It was as though some prankster god had pointed his remote at me and hit Mute.

  Hysterical now—in a manly way—I rained blow upon blow on the roof of my prison, until finally I felt it start to give. I managed to get my knees under it, and with one final push, pried the lid away from its nails and lifted it off.

  I expected to be greeted by light. Burning reds and phosphorous oranges; the landscape of Hell. The Devil’s territory. Instead, I only found more black. A vast ocean of bewildering darkness. An infinite night.

  And yet, there was something.

  I twisted in my floating coffin and saw something quite unexpected.

  A planet.

  I was in outer space, looking down on the cloud-blurred contours of a great, spinning sphere. Its seas and continents were a vague, swirling mottle of greys and browns. This was a dead world, bereft of life. Bereft of hope. And surrounding it, rotating in the opposite direction, was an immense ring.

  A ring that I was a part of.

  It was made up of a sum of different parts, but unlike Saturn’s great halo, these parts weren’t chunks of ice and rock.

  They were coffins.

  Coffins of all shapes and sizes, millions upon millions of them, stretching out in a great arc, as far as the eye could see. I stared at them, wide-eyed with wonder, as I drifted along with the flow of caskets, pirouetting endlessly around the giant, lifeless marble below.

  What are you supposed to do with that kind of information?

  I mean, really?

  Fucked if I knew, which is why I chose to lay down, slide the coffin lid back into place, and enjoy the rest of the commute with an uncluttered mind. There are some things in this life you’re just not meant to understand, I reckon, so why get in a tizz about it?

  But the ride wasn’t over yet. My container lurched to the left and I found myself sliding on my back toward the coffin’s foot piece. Soon the casket had tipped completely vertical, and I realised with some alarm that I was standing upright as the box plummeted towards who-knew-what.

  Horrified, I rode out the rest of the nail-biting plunge—my scream returning as the pine torpedo carried me from the sky—until it finally met the ground in a terrific explosion.

  Boom!

  The fragile casket shook hands with unforgiving matter, and when I opened my eyes I found myself lying upon a bed of kindling at the bottom of a smoking hole, spat to the ground like a chewed up wad of bubblegum.

  I was alive!

  Well, you know, as alive as a ghost is going to get.

  Concussion still ringing in my ears, I propped myself up on wobbly, toothpick legs, and clambered up the sloped wall of the crater to pull myself topside.

  I was in Hell alright, but not the Hell of a Bosch painting.

  This Hell was an urban dystopia. A post-nuke wasteland. A once-proud metropolis reduced to a godless, inner-city junkyard.

  The husks of ravaged buildings nodded to the ground like tired old men, desperate for their beds. Rivers of abandoned cars choked the roads, burned out and turned to rust. Ash swirled about my ankles, carried on the caprice of a dirty breeze.

  I inspected my immediate surroundings. The Coyote’s coffin had delivered me next to the crumbling ruins of a bombed-out train station. A sign hung crookedly from a crumpled metal awning above me, and I craned my neck to get a read of it.

  CAMDEN TOWN, it said.

  So, Hell was Camden, was it? I suppose I should have seen that one coming.

  9

  The Devil’s abode wasn’t some fiery pit lurking beneath the Earth's mantle, though it was a touch on the humid side.

  The Hell I’d arrived in was a cracked mirror-image of my usual stomping grounds. This was a Camden turned upside down and back to front. A Camden whose lights had been turned out. Whose very air was grotty and corrupt. A Camden Town that had been torn to pieces instead of being left to bob gently on a wave of polite gentrification.

  The sky above was an ink spill flecked with a few grains of salt, a pinprick scattering of stars spread across a permanent night. It was as though Satan had unzipped his trousers and pissed out the sun.

  I took a few steps into the wasteland, feeling disorientated, struggling to find my equilibrium. My centre of gravity seemed out of kilter, as though someone had snuck into my gut and moved it five yards to the right. I took out the compass Prudence had given me and tried to get my bearings, but when I looked down at the dial, my attention was drawn to something on the ground.

  A lone shoe.

  Nothing unusual on the streets of my Camden—I pass by one most days when I’m not dodging coils of dog mess or pools of pigeon-pecked vomit—but there was something different about this discarded loafer.

  It still had a foot in it.

  Triggered by my intrusion, a cloud of flies scattered from the foot in a whine of protest. I recoiled, staggering backwards into a dilapidated phone box. Putting a hand out to steady myself, I snagged my palm on a jag of broken metal, which gouged a red split into my flesh.

  I cursed and stared at the cut in disbelief. Wounded by a phone box. Now there was a turn-up for the books. Apparently, I was solid here. Not just some thin wisp of consciousness, buffeted by the winds of circumstance; I was a man of flesh and bone again.

  As I’m sure you can imagine, this came as a bit of a surprise.

  The thought of having a physical body was both thrilling and terrifying. Thrilling, because I could feel and smell and taste everything around me. Terrifying, for all the same reasons. Being an apparition, I’ve gotten used to being bulletproof. On Earth, life’s rough edges hold no fear for me. When I walk into the road, I look straight ahead, traffic be damned. When I step into a lift, I don’t bother to check whether the shaft is empty. I dance with Death and take him for breakfast afterwards.

  But I was going to have to be careful here. Very careful. This was a world that had been custom designed to kill me. Every part of it stung my senses, as though it were expressing its indignation at my trespass. The smell of the place savaged my nostrils; a brutal bouquet that smelled like a mountain of burning corpses with an overture of human shit. Despite the breeze and the sunless sky, the air was dank and sticky, and when I licked my lips, I tasted my own sweat as it ran from my face, briny and hot. As my anxiety grew, I felt my heart pounding in my chest, brought to life as if by jumper cables.

  I focussed on the compass. On my job. On the only thing that I had any real control over.

  The needle pointed south-west now, so I waited until my heart had stopped pounding, then headed off in the direction of my target. I couldn’t pinpoint my destination exactly, which rendered my powers of translocation pretty much redundant, so I’d have to make do with my legs. Still, I attempted a trial jump to a point-of-sight location, just to make sure everything was ticking over as it should be.

  Of course it wasn’t.

  As well as losing my powers of intangibility and invisibility, I’d also lost the abi
lity to instantaneously hop distances, which made me something of a sitting duck in this place. Hell had robbed me of my every advantage, leaving me with all of the bad stuff and none of the good. Out here, in Camden’s dark reflection, all jagged and spiteful, I was just a big balloon full of blood, begging to be popped.

  As I trekked through the desolate wasteland, glancing at the needle of my compass as I went, I was overcome by the niggling sensation that I was being watched. It was a feeling that made me want to run in every direction at once, but instead I stayed the course, shaking off the blanket of dread and continuing on my way. I figured if someone or something really were tracking me, surely they’d have struck by now?

  Perhaps this was just how Hell made everyone feel. A permanent paranoia that eyes were on you and the worst was about to happen.

  Then I heard a scream, sharp and loud.

  Was that my target? The person I’d come here to rescue? Could it really be that easy?

  I looked to the compass again. No, the needle pointed the other way.

  Don’t get involved, I told myself. This isn’t your problem. You’re not here to interfere with the ecosystem. Just carry on flying under the radar and do your job. In and out like a randy chimney sweep, that’s the way to do it.

  Did I heed my own advice though? Did I, balls.

  Instead, I instinctively found myself running in the exact direction of the disturbance, proving once and for all that there’s no situation I can’t turn into a bad decision.

  I rounded the ruins of a destroyed pub and saw a young man in an army uniform engaged in the fight of his life. Literally. A giant, fanged maggot chomped at the soldier’s leg, its maw a ring of large, white teeth, mean enough to chew through granite. The only reason the maggot hadn’t made off with the soldier’s limb already was because he’d managed to get inside the thing’s mouth with a length of steel rebar, which he was using to pry its jaws apart.

  The giant maggot looked like nothing that existed in reality. It was a sickly yellow colour and covered in a thick, segmented hide that oozed with a phlegmy mucus. I’d never seen anything like it, and would have been happy for it to have stayed that way.

  ‘Help me!’ screamed the soldier, spotting me as I appeared from behind a patch of debris.

  The uniform he had on looked to be from World War Two—the Allied side, I was glad to see—and he wore a cluster of medals pinned to his chest.

  I drew my shooter and took aim at the maggot chewing on his leg, but then remembered my six bullet limit. Did I really want to use up what little ammo I had saving a bloke I didn’t know? A bloke who’d wound up in Hell? He could have been a full-blown war criminal for all I knew.

  ‘Please,’ he begged, losing the fight with his attacker, whose teeth had almost gnawed through the makeshift crowbar and torn into his calf.

  What could I do? I couldn’t just let the man die. Or re-die, considering his current surroundings.

  I pulled back the hammer of the gun and lined up a shot, but the maggot squirmed and thrashed, making for a hard target.

  I hesitated. Even though I pack a piece, marksmanship isn’t my strong suit. London’s not exactly flush with shooting ranges, and my eyesight’s never been too sharp. I’d be taking a big risk sending a bullet the soldier’s way. Still, how else was I supposed to take down that maggot? Kill it with good vibes? Talk it to death?

  I curled a finger around the trigger and squeezed off a round.

  Blam!

  A sound like a thunderclap as the gun recoiled in my hand.

  I heard the maggot squeal—a monstrous, alien noise—then watched it let go of the soldier’s leg and retreat back into the ground, disappearing beneath the tarmac and shooting off in the opposite direction.

  Nice shootin’, Tex.

  The soldier fell to his knees, spent from the struggle, and I hurried over to check that he was okay.

  ‘Thank you,’ he wheezed.

  ‘And thank you for your service,’ I replied, working on the hopeful assumption I hadn’t just saved the life of a Nazi sympathiser.

  Despite the many decorations pinned to his chest, the soldier was young; twenty-five years old, tops. But then they didn’t call WW2 the children's war for nothing.

  I saw the soldier’s eyes stray over my shoulder, and turned to see what he was looking at.

  A few hundred yards away, I saw a small group of shadowy figures, hooded and dressed in black, lining the horizon like the horsemen of the Apocalypse (minus their nags).

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked.

  ‘The Eyes,’ the soldier replied with a gulp. ‘The gunshot must have drawn them to us.’

  Whoever they were, I didn’t like the look of them. ‘What do we do?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do. They’ll hound us to the ends of the earth now.’

  ‘Sod that,’ I said, ‘on your feet, soldier!’

  And with that, we bolted, running as fast as our legs would carry us.

  10

  An exhausting sprint led us to an abandoned shell of a building, a skeleton, long ago picked clean of its flesh.

  ‘We can catch a breather here,’ panted the soldier.

  Unable to run any further, I nodded in agreement and slid to the ground, nerves like tattered shoelaces. I could feel my heart beating hard again, pounding under my rib cage like a bluebottle against a window pane.

  And I had a serious case of swamp crotch.

  I stole a glance behind us. It seemed we’d lost our stalkers, for now at least. As I sat there, bone-weary and full of dread, I felt an overwhelming urge to reverse back to the fork in the road where I’d decided that mounting an expedition to Hell was a good idea. Stupid beer. I've heard of alcohol leading people to ruin, but this was something else. Serves me right for acting like my old man, three sheets to the wind and vanishing into the night without a by-your-leave.

  ‘You saved my life,’ said the soldier, mopping his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I replied, then realised we hadn’t been properly introduced. ‘What’s your name, mate?’

  ‘They call me Dizzy,’ he said.

  ‘Jake Fletcher.’

  As I shook the soldier’s hand, I took a closer look at him. At his khaki uniform with its brass buttons and winged RAF shoulder insignia.

  ‘Airborne, huh?’

  He nodded. ‘Parachute regiment.’

  So, he was a para, was he? Probably picked the name “Dizzy” up in jump school. Maybe he had trouble deploying his chute one time, and found himself stuck in a spin. Bit of deductive reasoning there; the P.I. in me, working overtime. Speaking of which, I also noticed a bare patch among his medals, where one had obviously come loose. Torn off during his struggle with the giant maggot, I deduced. Lemon entry, my dear Watson.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I asked Dizzy.

  ‘London,’ he said. ‘Camden Town.’

  I told him I hailed from the same area, and he marvelled at the coincidence. I knew better though. See, Hell isn’t one place. There are many layers to it, many facets. Different dimensions, different circles. The Hell we were experiencing was a corrupted version of the world we knew, which is why we were experiencing it together. We were two men from North West London, born of the same place, just at different times.

  ‘What’s your heading?’ Dizzy asked.

  I showed him my compass and pointed to the needle. ‘There.’

  The soldier removed his beret and ran a hand through the top of his short back and sides. ‘Only one thing that way,’ he said, a note of consternation in his voice, ‘and that’s the Castle.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s where the souls that end up here go. It’s the landing area for anyone sent to this godforsaken place. A prison for sinners.’

  ‘Gotcha. So what about you then? How come you’re wandering around out here, free as a bird?’

  ‘I was a prisoner too until a few years back, when I managed to break
out. How about you? You don’t look like you’re from around here... and you can take that as a compliment.’

  ‘Just a visitor,’ I replied with a chuckle. ‘Booked a two-way trip.’

  ‘You’re joking?’

  ‘Nope.’ I patted my inside pocket. ‘Got a ticket to ride.’

  ‘More like a screw loose!’ he bleated. ‘Take my advice and get out of here while the going’s good, feller. I don’t know what brought you here, but nothing’s worth this.’

  ‘I’m starting to think the same, mate, but I can’t. I’m on the clock, see.’

  Dizzy shook his head in commiseration. ‘Then let me help you. You saved my bacon back there. If you hadn’t shown up, I’d be a goner for sure. I owe you for that.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  He sighed. ‘I’m saying I’ll show you the way to the Castle.’

  It's one thing knowing where the top of the mountain is, but it's another thing getting there.

  I’d need more than a fancy compass to get to the Castle, Dizzy explained. It was a long trek to get there, and the route to the Castle was anything but straightforward. There were blockades to contend with, streets clogged by fallen buildings, and absolutely nothing by way of transport

  And then there were the natives.

  ‘Keep your head on a swivel, old boy,’ said Dizzy. ‘We’re not alone out here.’

  We’d need to maintain a low profile, my guide explained. He wasn’t the only soul to have escaped the Castle. There were others on the loose too.

  ‘The South Souls, they call themselves. Lawbreakers who’ve banded together and become roving outlaws, living it up in Hell.’

  ‘And what about the other ones?’ I asked, recalling the group of hooded figures watching us from the horizon. ‘The Eyes, you called them.’

  ‘The Devil’s footmen,’ Dizzy explained. ‘They scour the wastes looking for runaways, hunting down anyone who escaped the Castle.’

  ‘And what do they do when they catch them?’ I asked. ‘I’m gonna take a wild stab in the dark and say it’s nothing good, right?’