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

by David Bussell

  ‘They destroy them.’

  Well, that answered my next question: ‘Is it possible for a person to die in Hell?’

  The pair of us carried on through the ash-coloured mosaic of Camden’s sprawling corpse.

  ‘How did you wind up here then?’ I asked.

  Dizzy stopped, as though my question were a roadblock I’d thrown in his path. For a moment, I wondered why he’d reacted so violently, at least until I realised that I’d basically asked a convict, ‘So, what are you in for?’ which is generally understood to be something of a faux pas in the prisoner community.

  ‘I did some things,’ he said. ‘Things I’m not proud of.’ His eyes settled into a ten-mile stare. ‘Have you seen combat?’

  ‘Not like that, no,’ I replied.

  He nodded slowly. ‘War makes a monster of a man,’ he croaked.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I assured him. ‘I should mind my own business.’

  It’s not like I was in a position to judge. I’ve done things I’m ashamed of. Thousands of them. All those souls I’d annihilated… if I didn’t succeed in cancelling out my misdeeds, this is where I’d be ending up, too.

  As we carried on walking, following the compass point still, I stole a glance at my companion. I knew nothing of Dizzy’s sins, but I could judge him by his actions at least. He could have parted ways with me the moment I rescued him from that giant maggot, but instead he’d volunteered to be my sherpa and guide me to the place that he was most afraid of in this world. That showed integrity, I thought, which is something I have a lot of time for.

  I was going to keep an eye on him though. I’d been tricked before. By Sarah. By Father Damon O'Meara. And if my murder taught me anything at all, it’s to know that just because a man dresses like a good guy, doesn't mean he's on the side of the angels.

  Hell’s permanent night had turned cold now, cold enough that I could see my breath fogging in front of my face – something I hadn’t seen in a long, long time. I was experiencing other things I’d grown unfamiliar with too: aching bones, sore feet, and a need to sleep that threatened to drop me where I stood.

  ‘I’ve gotta rest,’ I told Dizzy, and he nodded in a way that told me he felt the same.

  We’d come a long way. It was hard to tell exactly where we were, being as most of the landmarks I’d grown up with had been flattened and torched in this dimension, but unless I was mistaken, we were in Knightsbridge. ‘We should find somewhere to get some kip,’ I said.

  I scanned our surroundings until my eyes landed on a grand old edifice topped by a half-collapsed dome. The outside of the building was architecturally ornate, and ringed by a series of ragged green awnings decorated with a familiar, faded gold logo.

  Harrods, it said.

  ‘That’ll do nicely,’ I replied.

  11

  Even here, half-destroyed, and in the nth circle of Hell, the luxury department store was still a thing of grotesque awe. If capitalism were ever to become a religion, Harrods would be its Vatican.

  Dizzy and I entered the building’s crumbling facade and made our way inside, marvelling at the decadence of the place. The decor shone dully now, peeking out from beneath years of neglect; a clash of the Egyptian against a spew of Art Nouveau. Everything was made of marble, or gold, or marble, or more gold. This place belonged here. It hadn’t occurred to me back on Earth, but Harrods was like Hell’s idea of Heaven.

  We headed cautiously up the steps of a broken down escalator, to be greeted at the top by a giant, stone statue of a sphinx. By which I mean it sat perfectly still and did nothing. It didn’t say “Hello” or anything. That would be mental, wouldn’t it?

  Also on the landing was a shrine to Princess Diana and her lover, and as we crossed by the framed photos of the dead pair, I felt Diana's eyes following me. I stopped to check that it was just my imagination playing tricks on me, and was relieved to find that Diana wasn’t hiding behind her picture like a Scooby-Doo villain lurking round the back of an old oil painting.

  As I stood there, regarding the picture, I wondered briefly if the ghost of the Queen of Hearts haunted the Earth still, marooned in the land of the living after her fatal limo ride. I made a mental note to look into it when I got home, then realised her phantom would be located in Paris, if anywhere, which was a bit outside of my purview.

  We passed beneath the shadow of a busted chandelier and carried on past a row of ruined boutique stores. As we crept by, I caught sight of a place selling luxury whiskey, looted for the most part, no doubt by the prison runaways that Dizzy had mentioned: the South Souls. The store still carried a few overlooked bottles of the good stuff though, perhaps a couple too many for the looters to carry. I poked my head inside the store and considered grabbing a bottle or two, then thought better of it. Tempting as it was to take the edge off with a wee dram, I’d already been taught an important lesson about the dangers of drinking on the job. My being here at all was proof that alcohol was not always the answer.

  On the next floor up, we found Toy Kingdom, a rainbow-hued wonderland of candy-coloured window displays, gargantuan Lego models, and stuffed animals standing six-feet tall. Face pressed against the shop window, I felt a sudden surge of juvenile excitement. As a kid, I’d always fantasised about getting locked up in a place like this, trapped overnight and having a full run of the shop until the sun came up.

  It was a dream far removed from the reality of my bruised childhood, where joy came in small doses. I recalled my eighth birthday, before Dad had played full-body peekaboo on our family (minus the “I see you” part). Mum had been laid up with the flu that week, and hadn’t been able to get to the shops, leaving Dad to take care of my present. Consequently, I woke up on the morning of my birthday to discover a single gift covered in a sheet of yesterday’s newspaper. When I unwrapped it, I found—instead of the Tonka truck I’d been promised—a dusty extension cable that Dad had fished out of the loft.

  There you go, son, have fun with it, he’d told me, reeking to high hell of scotch.

  I suppose I should have been thankful that he’d managed to make it up and down the loft ladder without breaking his neck; it can’t have been easy with all that Famous Grouse sloshing about inside of him. 10/10 for effort, Dad. Another top-notch bit of parenting.

  ‘Are you alright?’ asked Dizzy, sensing my mind had wandered elsewhere.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, casting off the gloom. ‘Let’s keep moving, shall we?’

  Opposite Toy Kingdom, and marking the final stop of our journey, was the Harrods interiors department—our shangri la—a half-acre of luxury homeware that stretched as far as the eye could see. Although this vast area of retail space was open to the heavens due to the building’s half-collapsed roof, remarkably, the shop floor remained largely intact. It had also been neglected by looters, who probably had more important things to pilfer than antique walnut nesting tables and hand-woven scatter pillows.

  We wound our way through a maze of expensive furnishings until we found what we were looking for: a selection of beds fit for a king, or, more appropriately perhaps, a sheikh. I happened across an elegant, handcrafted kingsize covered in cashmere and silk, and bounced my backside on its mattress. Dizzy found an equally luxurious four poster and did likewise, and we grinned at one another like a couple of kids at a sleepover.

  After an arduous journey, we’d finally found some respite. It was dark in that store though; a little too dark for my liking. Just in case any looters decided to make a return visit, I went looking for something to illuminate the place.

  I hunted down a fistful of candles and some matches from the kitchen department, and planted them strategically about the store.

  ‘If any outlaws come this way, I want to see them coming,’ I said.

  ‘Good thinking,’ replied Dizzy. ‘We’ll need to get some sleep though. I’ll take first watch.’

  ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ I replied.

  I enlisted Dizzy’s help to locate some thread and a sto
ck of miniature bells, which we liberated from the collars of a pride of stuffed lion cubs found in Toy Kingdom. Having sourced those, we laid a series of tripwires about the surrounding area, wrapping the lines around any vertical structures we could find and threading them with chimes. It wasn’t long before the surrounding area looked like the world’s gayest spider web.

  ‘Sterling work,’ said Dizzy, doffing his red beret.

  ‘That’s me done for the night,’ I replied, stifling a yawn. ‘Nighty night.’

  Time to grab some well-earned shut-eye. I was looking forward to this. I hadn’t slept since the day I’d died – I’d forgotten what it even felt like to lay my head on a pillow.

  I sat down on the mammoth bed, swung my feet up, and made myself comfortable. As I shifted my weight, I felt my pistol dig into my ribs, and stashed it under the pillow for safekeeping. That got me wondering. What exactly were the rules of Hell? I was solid here—a regular person to all intents and purposes—did that mean I could finally shuck my wedding ring?

  I tried to slip it off and set it on the bedside table, but, true to form, it stayed glued to my finger.

  ‘Balls.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Dizzy asked from his bed.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, laying back down. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, or whatever it is that passes for morning around here.’

  I pulled up the covers and I was out like a light after that.

  Sleep brought some comfort, at least until it brought nightmares.

  In the dream I was a boy again, eight years old, dressed in pyjamas and opening my birthday present. Instead of being wrapped in newspaper though, this gift was handed to me in a smart box, tied up nicely with a big blue ribbon. Dad beamed as he held it out to me, eyes bright and clear, like he'd just returned from a spell on a detox ward. Meanwhile, Mum stood by his side, wearing a smile that I’d only seen in old wedding photos. They were together again. Or maybe they always had been.

  ‘Go on,’ said Mum, ‘open it up!’

  Dad nodded like a Churchill dog. ‘Don’t you want to know what you got, Jake?’

  I took the gift, scraped open the ribbon, and lifted the lid—

  —only to be confronted with the fanged mouth of a razor-toothed yellow maggot, which burst from inside like a spring-loaded jack-in-the-box.

  I just about managed to swat the worm aside before it snapped its teeth shut on my face. It landed on the carpet with a squelch and slithered immediately for my bare feet, which I pulled back just in time, narrowly preventing it from making off with my toes.

  ‘What are you doing?’ screeched my mother, as I danced from foot to foot, crying my eyes out. ‘We paid good money for that!’

  Panicking, I stomped on the worm, crushing it underfoot. I felt its body split apart and ooze between my toes.

  ‘You ungrateful little shit!’ Dad roared.

  I looked to my sister, who was there too now, but she just stared back at me, hollow-eyed, like some human shrug of indifference.

  ‘Come here!’ demanded Mum, pointing to a spot of carpet just in front of her. ‘Right now!’

  It was a move straight out of the Fletcher family playbook: force the kid to come to you for his beating, a bonus bit of mental cruelty on top of the physical punishment.

  Ordinarily, I’d have done as told, but Mum looked set to throttle the life out of me this time, so I turned and ran, out of the lounge and up the stairs.

  ‘Wait until I get a hold of you!’ Mum screeched, and tore after me.

  As I bounded up the steps to the landing, I felt her fingers snagging at my pyjamas and her hot spittle sizzling on the back of my neck. Terrified, I threw myself into the boiler cupboard at the top of the stairs and pulled the door shut, grabbing hold of the back of the knob to keep her from getting at me.

  Enraged, Mum pounded her fists against the door until they were bloody, and when that didn’t work, she went for the nearest weapon she could find, a steel rod with a hook on the end that we used to open the loft hatch. She swung the rod at the door, gouging a hole in the wood, then swung again, opening up a splintered hole.

  Crash! Crash! Crash!

  Then a new sound. A musical sound. The sound of jingle bells.

  No, not jingle bells...

  Actual bells.

  I woke up with a start to see something looming over me, lit by a pale ribbon of starlight that slipped through a hole in the roof.

  A giant stuffed teddy bear wearing the uniform of a Queen’s Guard: a cherry-red coat and tall bearskin hat.

  I had to be dreaming still.

  Had to be.

  Except that I wasn’t.

  The soldier bear was very much real – so real that he’d triggered one of my tripwires on his way over from Toy Kingdom, sounding the bell that had woken me up.

  So then. Death by teddy bear. This was a new one.

  I took a quick snapshot of my surroundings...

  Of the candle on the bedside cabinet, burned down to a fried egg now.

  Of the bear craning over my bed, looking at me like I was Goldilocks, sleeping in his bed.

  Of the shiny meat cleaver in the bear’s hand, which he must have picked up from the kitchenware section.

  In case I haven’t made it clear already, Hell is an awfully strange place.

  For a moment, I wondered if the bear might be a man in a suit, but then I saw Dizzy wrestling with an impossible, giant Playmobil figure dressed like a knight of the round table.

  ‘For God’s sake, get up!’ Dizzy screamed.

  I rolled out of bed just as the bear’s cleaver came down and carved a cleft into my pillow, revealing the pistol I’d stashed beneath it. I snatched the gun through the hole, levelled it at my attacker, and put one right between his beady, plastic eyes.

  Blam!

  Done in one. The bear went down, but was swiftly replaced by a six-foot tall stuffed Welsh dragon and a Lego astronaut. There were others behind them too, more toys, come to life and dealing death. We were becoming overwhelmed. It was time to get gone, and fast.

  I squeezed the trigger again and put a hole through Dizzy’s Playmobil knight.

  ‘Come on!’ I yelled, and the pair of us went for the exit like shit off a shovel.

  We legged it out of the interiors department with the killer dolls snapping at our heels, but we only made it as far as the escalator before we found our escape route blocked.

  The stone sphinx.

  The statue had come to life, climbed from its faux-marble plinth, and now sat guarding our only way out of the building. I readied for the sphinx to pounce, but instead of attacking us, it stayed squatting on its haunches, regarding us coolly as it drummed its claws on the tile floor.

  Seeing as we weren’t going anywhere fast, Dizzy speedily constructed a barricade behind us, keeping our pursuers at bay with a couple of knocked over display cabinets and filling any holes with junk from the Diana shrine. The barrier succeeded in slowing the toys’ progress, but it wouldn’t hold for long.

  I turned back to the sphinx. Since it hadn’t gone on the offensive yet, I decided to chance my arm. ‘I don’t suppose you want to be a sport and scooch over, do you?’

  Of course the creature stayed rooted.

  I considered giving it the runaround by bypassing the escalator and vaulting the handrail to the next floor. The fall would have broken my ankles for sure though, which would have been pretty disastrous. Still, I had to wonder if disaster would have been a step up at that point.

  ‘What do you want?’ I begged the creature.

  ‘I want you to solve a riddle,’ the sphinx replied, in voice that could make windows rattle.

  Jesus Christ. I considered emptying a gunshot into the bastard, but I couldn’t see a bullet having much effect on the sphinx’s granite body.

  ‘Well?’ said the sphinx. ‘Would you like to hear my riddle?’

  No, I absolutely would not. ‘Go on then!’ I screamed over the sound of the angry toys, who smashed at Dizzy’
s barricade like my mother at the boiler cupboard door. ‘Riddle me!’

  ‘Very well,’ the sphinx growled. ‘Answer me this, traveller… what is brown and has a head and a tail, but no legs?’

  Fucked if I knew. Like I say, I’m no fan of riddles. If I wanted to make life more challenging for myself than it already was, I’d learn Swahili.

  I turned to Dizzy to see if he knew the answer, but he was preoccupied by propping up the barricade, or what little remained of it.

  It all came down to me.

  Soon the murder dolls would be upon us, and there would be nowhere left to run.

  Another few seconds passed, each of them as long as the reign of Charlemagne.

  Brown with a head and a tail, but no legs.

  Brown with a head and a tail, but no legs.

  Brown with a head and a tail, but no legs.

  It wouldn’t be an animal, I knew that much. It never was with these things, the answer was always some smart-arsed solution, like… like… like...

  ‘...A penny,’ I blurted.

  The sphinx offered a thin smile. ‘Correct,’ it replied.

  The creature climbed back up onto its plinth, moving aside to grant us safe passage.

  ‘Let’s go!’ I called to my companion.

  Dizzy threw himself forwards just as the makeshift barricade came crashing down, and side by side we bounded down the escalator, two steps at a time, out of the building and never to return.

  A penny.

  Of course.

  In a place of avarice, the answer is always money.

  12

  We chased pavement for a half mile until we’d put a healthy distance between ourselves and that ungodly place.

  Finally, after we could run no more, we slid to a stop at a ruined shelter and caught our breath. ‘Bloody hell,’ I wheezed, looking to Dizzy. ‘Is it always like that around here?’

  ‘No, sometimes it’s much worse,’ he replied.

  I pulled out my compass and caught my bearings. ‘How far do we have to go till we get to the Castle?’

  ‘A fair way yet, I’m afraid.’