As the place turned soggy, Langford and his men roared in protest, banging their makeshift weapons against the edge of the arena and howling for blood.
Likewise, Trap Jaw didn’t seem particularly impressed by my efforts. ‘Did you think water would harm me, mortal?’ he brayed.
‘Nope,’ I replied. ‘But this will.’
Remembering my exorcist days, I performed a quick benediction, consecrating the deluge. 'Bless the Lord, all his works in all places of his dominion: bless the Lord, O my soul...'
...And so on, and so on. As someone who doesn’t consider himself one of the flock, the prayer was word salad to me. That kumbaya shit means nothing to me, but then I wasn’t reciting it for my benefit.
‘No! Stop!’ cried the monster, but his pleas fell on deaf ears.
I completed the benediction, which purified the sprinkler water, transforming it into the biblical equivalent of demon acid.
As Langford and his men looked on in horror, the blessed water tore through their champion like he was made of Alka-Seltzer. Trap Jaw’s neck opened up a fresh tear as he thrashed around under the inescapable and deadly rain, the wound growing so wide that the head barely clung onto the rest of the body. The demon wailed in anguish as the holy H2O dissolved the rotten flesh of his host all the way down to the white of his bones, which collapsed on the floor in a sizzling heap before turning into wet mush. Only then did the demon’s voice pinch off suddenly as he was expelled from his host and sent to oblivion.
Silence.
Then...
‘Jake wins!’ I roared, like the narrator at the end of a Street Fighter bout.
Everyone loves an underdog, right?
Wrong.
Instead of cheering for me as any right-minded audience would, Langford’s men booed and hurled missiles at me until their leader stilled their hands with another blow of his tin whistle.
Langford climbed down from his seat and vaulted the arena wall to land on the ground by my side.
‘Nothing changes, does it, Fletcher?’ he barked. ‘You were a dirty little cheater at school, and you’re a dirty little cheater now.’
‘If you’re referring to the time I deflated all the rugby balls and stole the air pump so we had to play ping pong in the heated gym instead, I prefer to think of that as gamesmanship.’
Langford reached into his jacket and produced my pistol.
‘Nice of you to hang onto that for me,’ I said, holding my palm out flat.
Langford smiled and pointed the shooter at my head. I had a nasty feeling that might happen. Some people are just poor losers.
I looked up to the stands to see Dizzy, who returned my gaze through the cracks of his fingers. So, this is how it ends, I thought, as I stared down the barrel of my own gun. A shabby little death in a miserable, foreign land.
I was about to close my eyes and say hello to oblivion, when a ruckus broke out among Langford’s men. Shouting, complaints, screams of terror. It was as though a fire had broken out, only it was way too wet for that.
‘What’s going on back there?’ Langford demanded, and he got his answer right away.
The gate to the arena burst open.
Stood there, framed impressively in the doorway, was a man dressed like a reject from a Clive Barker movie, his face disguised by a large, black cowl. I recognised him right away as one of the hooded figures that had been tracking me and Dizzy since I arrived in Hell.
The Eyes.
‘Oh, shit,’ said Langford, turning the sight of his gun to the intruder
The hooded figure reached up for his cowl, then threw it back to reveal not a head, but a single, giant eyeball. The oversized optic sat there on his neck, regarding us through a pupil the size of a salad plate surrounded by a big, nut-brown iris.
When Dizzy said the Devil’s footmen were called “Eyes”, I figured they’d earned their name from their keen powers of observation. Apparently, the truth was a touch more literal.
Langford thumbed back the hammer of the pistol, but just as he was about to pull the trigger, the Eye retaliated with a weapon of his own.
Suddenly, what can only be described as a death ray shot from the Eye’s pupil and hit Langford square in the stomach. The beam ripped through the ex-P.E. teacher’s guts, opening him up like a burst balloon and spilling his intestines on the dusty ground.
It was basically the absolute opposite of a Care Bear stare.
The pistol tumbled from Langford’s grip as he looked down dumbly at the fleshy ruins of his stomach. Then, as if catching up to the reality of his situation, he abruptly snatched up two handfuls of spilled intestines and began to stagger toward the exit. Sadly, his coordination was adversely affected by his guts hanging all over the place, and he managed to trip over a loop of his own entrails and face-plant into the floor, where he finally lay still.
Who's rubbish at jump rope now, eh, teach? I thought, then darted for the discarded gun as fast as I could.
Thankfully, the hand was quicker than the Eye.
As the agent of Satan’s death ray sailed over my shoulder, I snatched up the pistol and blasted a cap.
The gun roared and threw a flash of white light over the arena.
The shot landed right between the Eye’s… well, eye.
Like I said before, I’m not much for shooting, but at that range, and with a target that size, I made it work.
The Eye’s spherical head came apart like a blown dandelion. As he hit the ground, very much dead, I began to consider my next move.
Through the arena’s open entrance, I saw bedlam. There were four remaining Eyes as far as I could see, blasting Langford’s men with laser beams that made their blood boil out of their ears. Tearing through them like wet teabags.
I looked for Dizzy among the carnage, but couldn’t find him. I wasn’t too optimistic about his chances. It was ruddy tinted carnage out there – an absolute slaughterhouse. There were enough entrails on the floor to lasso the moon. Still, it was the only escape route I had. I reached into the jacket pocket of Langford’s ruptured corpse, fished out my compass and return tickets, and made for the way out.
I pushed through the killing floor, barging South Souls aside and dodging red-hot death rays. One of the Eyes got a bead on me, but I managed to put an outlaw between the pair of us, and he took the brunt instead. As the ray struck home, I saw the unfortunate flop to the ground like a pile of jelly as the Eye’s laser beam turned his bones into soup. What a way to go.
I returned fire on the Eye and scored a shot through his chest that put him down good and proper.
Just one bullet left now, but three more agents.
The Eyes have it.
I pushed on to the exit, struggling to stay upright on the bloody Slip and Slide pooling beneath my feet. I was almost there—just a few feet from the corridor that led out of the building—when I found my path blocked. I instinctively went to chin the bloke standing in my way, until I recognised his uniform under all the blood.
‘Dizzy!’
Against all odds, my companion was still alive, free of his captors and out of his dog collar.
‘Come on!’ he yelled over the havoc. ‘Step lively!’
I didn’t need telling twice.
As we absconded from the club, I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw an Eye with a piercing blue iris looking right at me. He was bigger than his fellow agents, and stood still and calm amid the chaos and butchery. The white of his eye was veiny, forked by red lightning, his pupil a pinhole.
I ran, but I ran knowing that however fast I went, however far I travelled, Big Blue would be watching me.
14
All this running about was doing my nut in.
You have to remember that back home, as a ghost, I mostly translocated to get to the places I wanted to be, and even when I did travel by foot, being dead meant that I never wore out. Hoofing it about like this was playing absolute murder on my hammies. If it wasn’t for the added incentive of being chased, I�
�d have run out of puff a couple of miles back. Dieters out there take note: if you’re looking to shed a few pounds, you could do worse than being hounded by a trio of murderous, sentient eyeballs.
Only when Dizzy and I were satisfied that we were out of the Eyes’ range, did we duck into a crumbling back alley and collapse onto our backsides.
My chest felt fit to implode, as though a gorilla had reached through the bars of my rib cage and closed its fat fingers around my heart.
We sat there for a while, resting under the cloak of Hell’s permanent night, until we had breath enough to talk.
‘Bloody hell,’ I wheezed at my companion. ‘We made it out of that one on the bare bones of our arse.’
Dizzy took a gulp of air and went to answer, then stopped mid-breath as he caught sight of something behind me. For a moment I thought the Eyes had caught up to us, but when I turned to look, I saw his attention was settled on something else.
A stout wooden door on the alley wall, a little tarnished, but surprisingly intact given the devastation surrounding it.
‘What is that?’ asked Dizzy, pointing to a faded painting on the face of the door: a small, nondescript icon, barely visible under a patina of ash and grime.
A picture.
A picture of a beehive.
‘Shit the bed,’ I gasped.
‘What is it?’
I put my ear to the door and heard the familiar strains of an ancient jukebox emanating from behind it.
What the literal hell?
The Beehive had no business being where it was; not just in Hell, but in this particular locale of Hell. If the dimension we were traversing was a corrupted mirror of the world we knew, what was Lenny’s pub doing all the way out in… well, I’d lost track of where we were exactly, but it definitely wasn’t the right spot. Still, so long as it gave us somewhere to take a pit stop, I didn’t give a monkeys about the flaky geography of the place.
I pushed open the door. The scene that confronted me defied all comprehension.
There it was—The Beehive—just as I remembered it, the same place I’d been drinking at a couple of nights back, every stick of furniture the same, every stink and stain where it belonged. For a moment I wondered if I’d walked through a portal and ended up back on Earth somehow, but although the pub was a match for The Beehive I knew, its patrons were not.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying they were a different class of customer. Oh no. I’m just saying they were a different Petri dish of scum. Instead of the usual mix of magicians, witches, and creatures of folklore, there were demons of all shapes and sizes: pit fiends of every colour and creed. Out of habit, I looked to the table where Razor usually sat— the eaves I’d implicated in the Mystery of the Purloined Masque—but he was as absent as the rest of the locals. In his place sat a two-headed demon with hooved feet, a peacock tail, and a name that sounded like something from an IKEA catalogue.
One fixture was still in place though. The pub’s gargantuan proprietor, Lenny, who stood, arms folded, behind the beer pumps, just as he always did.
‘Fletcher,’ he growled as I entered. ‘You’ve got a tab that needs paying.’
‘You two know each other?’ asked Dizzy.
Instead of answering, I approached the bar, leaned over the counter, and gave Lenny a poke in the ribs to make sure he was real. I found him to be as real, not to mention solid, as granite.
‘What are you doing here?’ I stammered.
‘Well,’ Lenny replied, swatting my hand aside with one of his Andre the Giant mitts, ‘seeing as it’s five o’clock on a Tuesday, I was about to call happy hour.’
‘No!’ I cried. ‘What are you doing here? In Hell!’
‘You think I only have the one boozer? In this economy?’
I was having trouble wrapping my head around this. ‘So you’re telling me The Beehive is some kind of… interdimensional franchise?’
‘If you want to call it that.’
‘What about you though? How can you be here and there?’
Lenny shrugged. ‘I get around.’
So, Lenny was capable of existing in multiple dimensions at once, was he? One of these days I was going to have to find out exactly what kind of Uncanny that man was.
‘Sorry to interrupt, gents,’ said Dizzy, elbowing his way to the bar, ‘but I am absolutely gasping.’
He spread a fistful of coins across the counter and began to tally up his change, arranging a pile of pound coins into a stack of ten. ‘Two pints, please, landlord.’
Lenny grunted and placed a pair of foamy ales on the bar. ‘You’ve still got a tab to settle, Fletcher. Twenty-percent interest.’
‘I thought it was ten-percent?’
‘That was before you showed up in my pub again empty-handed. Or maybe you’re not thirsty after all…?’
He went to take the beers away, until I promised to pay his extortion money on my next visit, and he handed them over.
Dizzy and I retired to my favourite booth, the one at the back of the saloon under the stuffed unicorn head.
‘Cheers,’ I said, clinking my companion’s glass and making a mental note not to get too deep into my cups this time.
I put the pint to my lips, and was just about to take my first sip, when I saw a familiar figure enter stage left.
Vic Lords.
My ex-employer and present-day nemesis.
Vic bloody Lords.
Another Camden local, inexplicably bobbing up in the netherworld like a turd that wouldn’t flush. Was everyone I knew from back home going to drop in on me today? How about my ex-wife or the priest who killed me? Honestly, by this point Channing Tatum could have flown in on a Pegasus and I'd have shrugged it off.
Vic made a beeline for our booth. He was dressed in an ill-fitting black suit with so much dandruff on its shoulders that it looked as though he was wearing white epaulets. The sallow, pudgy skin of his head ballooned out of the top of his jacket, and on top of that, capping the look off, was a rug of black hair so thick that he could have survived a blow from a sledgehammer. The man looked as though he belonged in a mason jar with a tall drink of formaldehyde.
Vic had been on my tail ever since I left his employ. Ironically, dying only raised my stock as far as he was concerned. It was my becoming a ghost that really piqued his interest. I’d been valuable to him before as an exorcist—evicting ghosts from haunted properties that he’d bought at bargain basement prices and sold on for a profit—but having a phantom on his books could really open up some new avenues. Ghosts are invisible, able to walk through walls, and capable of possessing the living; skills that transfer very nicely into Vic’s racket.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m out of that game. I have a ledger to clean, and no amount of honeyed words from Vic Lords were going to stop me from earning the Brownie points I needed to get into the Good Place. Despite my constant rebuttals though, he’d expressed a keen interest in bringing me back into the fold. Still, following me through the gates of Hell? That was some next level persistence.
I wasn’t about to give Vic the satisfaction of looking surprised though, so when he sat down and slid his gut into our booth, I played it off like I’d been expecting him all along.
‘Vic,’ I said, knowing very well how much it rankled him to be called by his first name, ‘no surprise seeing you here. Anywhere the sewer leads, eh?’
‘Hello, Fletcher,’ he said, faking a smile. ‘Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: a ghost, a soldier and an astral projection walk into a pub…’
‘What do you want, Vic?’ I said, cutting him off.
I could see now that Vic wasn’t all there, and I don’t just mean upstairs. He’d projected a psychic imprint of himself into this dimension, while his body remained elsewhere. For once, I was solid and someone else was the apparition.
Vic looked to Dizzy, who politely supped on his pint, then back to me. ‘I'd like a word.’
‘How about “Plinth”,’ I suggested. ‘That's always
been a favourite of mine. Plinth. Really glides off the tongue, doesn't it?’
‘Very good,’ replied Vic, a father's reproof to his tone, ‘but I didn’t travel this far south for your dubious sense of humour.’
‘Then what did you come to Hell for, Vic? I heard you sold your soul to the devil, but that he keeps begging you to take it back.’
His face quirked, betraying his annoyance. ‘No, Fletcher. As always, I came to help.’
I chuckled. ‘I don't want to laugh in your face, mate, so would you mind turning around?’
He ignored me and continued with his pitch. ‘I know the person you came here looking for, and I have some information on the subject.’
‘Thanks, but so do I,’ I said, gesturing to Dizzy, who’d stayed quiet throughout our conversation. ‘My man here already volunteered to take me to the kid I’m looking for, so why don’t you leave me alone and piss off back to Camden?’
‘Your “man”?’ Vic mocked. ‘What do you even know about this tour guide of yours? You won’t accept my assistance, but you’ll take the help of a bloke doing bird in Hell, just because he’s dressed up in a set of shiny brass buttons?’ He laughed like a drain, which was a phrase that actually applied to Vic Lords, who gurgled like he was swilling sewage. ‘For a smart feller, you can be a right old mug, Fletcher.’
I won’t lie, that got to me. I mean, what did I really know about Dizzy after all? I’d trusted my life to the bloke, yet I’d barely spoken ten sentences to him the whole time I’d been here. I wasn’t about to let Vic know that he’d rattled me though.
‘Just because I came to Hell, doesn't mean I'm getting into bed with the devil,’ I told him.
Vic smiled and rose to his feet. ‘One of these days I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse.’
‘Not likely,’ I replied. ‘Get in bed with Vic Lords? I'd sooner spoon a stegosaurus, mate.’
‘Goodbye, Fletcher,’ he said, as he made for the exit. ‘Do be careful out there.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I called after him. ‘Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.’
‘Oh, it won’t,’ Vic replied, as his astral form passed phantom-like through the pub’s solid brick wall.
Uncanny Kingdom: An Eleven Book Urban Fantasy Collection (Uncanny Kingdom Omnibus 1) Page 74
