I emerged through the polished, wood panel wall of the hotel’s lobby and crossed a chessboard, black and white marbled floor, following the compass needle further into the building. Finally, having made it to the top floor, I felt the compass vibrate in my hand, its needle twitching at the door of a penthouse suite.
I stepped through the door and unholstered my gun, ready to start throwing my weight around. I’d arrived in the suite’s entrance parlour (this place really was fancy). I couldn’t see the people I’d come for but I could hear them just fine. From up ahead, came the sound of bedsprings creaking and a headboard slamming against a wall. Of pig-like grunting, and high-pitched squeals that were all too familiar. I’d caught the lovebirds in the act.
I rounded a corner and found myself in a grand bedroom with a high corniced ceiling, all deep pile carpeting, soft tones, and regal Edwardian furnishings. Going at it hammer and tongs on the bed were my killer and my black widow of a wife.
‘Surprise,’ I said, levelling my pistol at the pair.
The two of them leapt into their air like they’d been cattle-prodded, Damon, angry, Sarah making a face like she’d just sent a personal email to everyone on her contacts list.
‘Bet you thought you’d seen the last of me, eh?’ I said, keeping my sights on them. I turned to Sarah, who snatched up the bedsheets to cover her modesty. She looked just like I remembered her: blonde, beautiful, and cold as a witch’s tit. ‘Why’d you do it, Sarah? Wasn’t it enough to kill me once?’
She was looking in my direction but her focus was off, like she was staring through me. Of course. She could hear me, but she didn’t have The Sight, so she couldn’t see me as a ghost. The only way she’d managed that when she sought me out at The Beehive as a brunette, was by wearing the spectroscopic contact lenses she’d had that eaves nick from Jazzer’s place.
I turned to Damon, who lay there, naked and hairy but for a medallion nestling in his chest fuzz. ‘Evening, Father,’ I said. ‘You’re looking grand.’
He was back in his old body again, which—going by the shiv wounds in his belly—was the same one he’d died in. From what I could tell, Sarah had dug up Damon’s corpse and put it on ice while she waited for me to reunite his body with his black little soul. I have to admit, when I thought of the lengths she’d gone to to get Damon back, I was begrudgingly impressed.
‘Howya, Fletcher,’ said the Irish bastard, eyes on me. Damon used to be an exorcist; Damon had The Sight. ‘Mind if I slip something on, fella? The old tadger’s catching a breeze.’
He pointed with two fingers to his semi-erect penis, which lolled stupidly on his thigh.
‘Alright,’ I said, aiming the gun at his head, ‘but no funny stuff.’
Holding up his hands in surrender, he reached slowly for a silk robe and slipped it on, putting a much-welcomed layer between me and his private parts.
I rolled my eyes back to Sarah. ‘Bet you thought you were pretty clever, huh? Playing the femme fatale, knowing I go in for all that film noir, P.I. stuff. I notice you took advantage of the family angle too. That was smart, knowing I’d have sympathy for a big sis wanting to help out her kid brother.’
Not like my sister, leaving me at the mercy of my drunk mum’s sloppy fists.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ replied Sarah, looking right through me still. ‘I can’t talk to you like this, Jake,’ she said. ‘Not while I can’t see you.’
‘What’s new?’ I said. ‘You didn't see me when we were married.’
She made a wounded face, and for a stupid, stupid second, I actually felt sorry for her.
‘Please let me put my contacts in,’ she pleaded, head tilted, doe-eyed, ‘then you can tell me off as much as you like.’
I wavered. I was going to tell her no, but I wanted her to see me. Wanted her to see the whites of my eyes as I marched her and her lover to the cop shop (I wasn’t sure how exactly I’d convince the authorities that she was guilty of a crime—let alone Damon, who’d already been convicted once for my murder—but I had friends in law enforcement and I was ready to give it a bloody good go).
‘Go on then,’ I told her. ‘Chop chop.’
She reached slowly for the dresser drawer, slid it open, and produced something from inside. Not contact lenses, something cylindrical and about a foot in length. For a moment I took it for a sex toy and wondered if Sarah was misguidedly trying to seduce her way out of this pickle, but it wasn’t that.
It was the blasting sceptre.
Another of the magic items from Jazz's stolen inventory.
Sarah had come packing.
Boom!
A big red blast tore from the sceptre, arced across the room, and blew my pistol apart.
Thank Christ she was shooting blind, or those would have been my ashes drifting lazily onto the shagpile.
Boom!
A second blast soared over my shoulder and blew a hole into the adjoining suite.
That rod was not to be messed with. All this time I'd been thinking the Masque was the most valuable item on Jazz’s list, but it turned out the blasting sceptre was the big ticket item.
As I stood there, gathering my wits, Sarah managed to get her contact lenses in and adjust her aim.
‘There you are!’ she said, her voice cold as a chisel.
It was time for Plan B. Or was it Plan C? So many things had gone wrong already, it was hard to say. Anyway, the point is, I had a strategy held back in reserve, and that strategy was possession. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times already—thereby setting this bit up beautifully—I’m able, as a ghost, to take possession of the living. To step inside of their bodies and wear them like a meat suit. Sometimes I do it because I fancy enjoying a little mortal indulgence, other times I do it for survival. This was one of those other times.
I rushed at Sarah and prepared to turn her into my skin sock, but it was like running into a brick wall. I bounced from her body, knocking the sceptre from her hand and sending it ricocheting off the wall and rolling under the bed.
I’d failed to fill Sarah with the spirit.
She lifted the hem of the bedsheet, which she was wearing like a toga, and showed me a discreet tattoo on her thigh.
‘Do you like it?’ she asked.
The lines were fresh, swollen and red, and formed a symbol I recognised as a warding glyph. No wonder I couldn’t possess her, she’d used the stolen tattoo kit to protect herself from invading spirits. I should have expected as much, she always was the type to insulate herself. A decade plus of marriage, and she’d never once let me in.
I looked to Damon on the off-chance that I could possess him instead, but saw now that he wore the same symbol Sarah had, only on his bicep. Matching tattoos? These two really made me sick.
While Sarah hunted around under the bed for the errant blasting sceptre, Damon squared up to me in his robe, looking every bit the boxer. He’d brawled some back in the old country, he was always fond of telling me, back when we were partners, and spoke highly of his legendary right cross. “Won myself more than a couple of belts with this old iron”, he’d say, often accompanying the boast with a bit of Mohammed Ali soft-shoe. Well, I wasn’t a stranger to the ring either, and I was confident I could hold my own against Father Damon O’Meara, even as a phantom.
Just call me Gaseous Clay.
I let him throw the first punch, which turned out to be another glaring mistake on my part.
My teeth sang like a bell as his fist connected with my jaw. I shook my head, my surroundings spinning like a kaleidoscope, and when the picture finished rearranging itself, I picked out a detail I hadn’t noticed before.
Damon’s knuckles.
They were tattooed too. Tattooed with symbols I recognised as glyphs of wounding. They acted like knuckledusters. Like a horseshoe in a boxing glove. Not only could Damon hurt me, he could hurt me bad.
‘Think yer a hard nut, do ya, fella?’ he said. ‘Well, who's yer daddy now, huh?'
He threw another fist and hit
me so hard it felt like he’d reorganised my skeleton.
‘Is that all you’ve got?’ I said, head spinning, brain soaked in battery acid.
‘Yer getting old, Fletcher,’ he taunted.
‘I'm a ghost, I don't get old.’
He threw another punch but I managed to block it and get one of my own in.
My fist connected with his chin, sending a shock down my arm that exploded in my shoulder like a wad of Semtex.
‘Holy shit!’ I said, nursing my busted knuckles.
Meanwhile, Damon fixed me with a crocodile smile, unharmed.
He hooked a finger under a piece of jewellery he was wearing around his neck. ‘Amulet of protection,’ he said.
The magic kevlar. Another of Legerdomain’s missing items. The two of them really were getting the most out of the loot they’d stolen.
Damon threw a haymaker my way. Crack. I dropped to the ground like clothes slipping from a hanger.
‘Ya think yer hurtin’ now, lad, but you’ll be pissing blood by the time I'm done with ya.’
I was on the ropes as far as he was concerned, but I'm scrappy when I’m cornered. I waited for him to get in range, then launched the toe of my shoe up the skirt of his robe and into his genitals.
He didn't so much fall as he did deflate, collapsing slowly to the ground like a punctured air mattress.
Apparently, the amulet’s powers of protection didn’t extend to the crotch area. Bit of an oversight on Jazz’s part, I’d say. I could only hope she was planning to sell the thing at a discount rate.
As Damon lay there, nursing his manhood, I went to snap the amulet from its chain and plant a fist in his face—
—When suddenly Sarah was there, blasting sceptre in hand, spitting scarlet wrath.
I managed to roll aside just in time, evading the bolt, which hammered a hole through the exterior wall of the hotel and rained rubble onto the street below. With nowhere else to turn, I leapt through the breach and into the building’s forecourt. It was eight storeys straight down, but that was okay, I could handle the fall. As a ghost, I land like a cat, no matter how far the drop.
On the street now, I looked up to the smoking hole I’d leapt out of and saw Damon following suit. He landed hard, leaving twin craters under his feet, his body armoured by the amulet of protection.
‘Where do ya think yer going?’ he enquired.
All around us, incredulous civilians gathered around to watch the display, phones appearing in their hands, all set to video.
There would be proof of this moment—cast iron proof of the Uncanny—but the world wouldn’t change. In time, the onlookers would rationalise the things they’d seen. Discount it. It couldn’t be actual magic they were witnessing. No, it must be a street performance. A happening. An advertising stunt for a new movie. Anything but the truth. The conscious mind would continue to filter out any events that challenged the status quo. Cloak them in cynicism to protect its self-preserving world view. It’s how people get through their day.
Damon caught up to me and the two of us engaged in some more fisticuffs—him swinging, me ducking—until Sarah joined us on the ground with her blasting sceptre.
Civilians scattered and fled as Sarah employed a scorched earth policy, shooting indiscriminately, wrecking architecture, destroying infrastructure (all to later be explained away by gas leaks, or fundamentalist terrorism).
One blast went high, questing off into the distance and streaking through the night sky like a bloodied hand dragged across a chalkboard. The next one found its way to a living target, a blind man’s guide dog, which suddenly went from being a pet, to a mess of flying ground beef.
Not good.
Sarah aimed the rod at me, nose upturned, like I was something she didn’t want to catch a whiff of. ‘You messed up again, Jake, just like you mess up everything.’ She joined Damon’s side and the two of them padded toward me like a pair of wolves, closing in for the kill. ‘You’re weak,’ she went on. ‘Weak and feeble. You never had a real job. Never knew how to provide. You’re a loser. A piss artist, just like your old man was.’
‘Don’t you dare talk shit about my dad,’ I said, surprising myself. I’d never in my life felt an inclination to stand up for my father before, and yet there I was, ready to defend him to the last.
I felt my lip curl. I had to stop Sarah. Had to put an end to her and Damon, right now. And I knew how to do it too. The only question was, what was it going to cost me?
I guess sometimes you just have to roll the dice.
I reached into my jacket pocket for the gift Vic Lords had given me.
‘What have you got there?’ Sarah asked, mockingly.
In my open palm I held a small, bone die.
As Sarah went to activate the blasting sceptre, I sent the die skittering across the pavement to her bare feet, which caused her to instinctively jump backwards.
It landed on a one. A single, black dot. Snake eyes, pirate style.
For a moment, the two of them just stared at the die contemptuously, sitting there on the ground before them like a dud hand grenade.
‘Looks like you crapped out,’ said Damon, but his wilting expression soon changed when the single black dot began to expand.
The dot grew and grew, moving fast, opening up beyond the limits of the die. Soon the aperture had opened up to a sizeable black hole, big enough to encompass the ground beneath my assailants’ feet.
For a moment, Sarah and Damon seemed to hang in the air like a couple of Wile E. Coyotes, then they lost their case against the law of physics and went tumbling through the portal.
Sarah tried and failed to make a grab for the rim of the hole, letting go of the blasting sceptre as she did so and sending it rolling across the hotel forecourt. As Damon fell, his fingertips grazed the interdimensional shelf, but he too succumbed to gravity.
The pair of them sang a wolf-wail duet as they plummeted, until they landed on the other side, crashing down hard enough to knock the air from their lungs.
I stilled the discarded sceptre with the tip of my shoe, picked it up, and placed it in my jacket pocket. The breach had ceased expanding now, so I stepped up to the lip of the yawning black mouth and looked down. I recognised the realm beyond at once. It was Hell. The same Hell I’d just left behind.
‘Please!’ Sarah called up to me, realising where she was, her hands clasped together in prayer, ‘please don’t leave me here!’
‘Ah, c’mon,’ said Damon, affecting a friendly tone as he called up to me, ‘I was just coddin ya, fella. Pull us outta here and we’ll head down the pub for a pint of the black stuff, just like the good auld days.’
Sarah gave him a dig in the arm. ‘He’s the one you want!’ she cried. ‘He’s the one who pushed you under a train! I’m sorry, okay. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop him. Let me make it up to you, Jake.’
‘Ya feckin’ snake!’ roared Damon, showing her the back of his hand.
I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘You two belong together,’ I said.
There’s a place for bad people, and they were already there.
The portal began to shrink as the black hole closed. Sarah made a face like a smacked arse. Damon did his nut, raging and frothing at the mouth. I was about to turn away and leave the pair of them to it, when a third figure arrived by their side.
The man was dressed in black and wore a hooded robe. Oh, and his head was a giant eyeball.
Big Blue.
Seeing me hovering above, peering down at him from the land of the living, his pupil swelled almost to the size of his iris, making it look like an eclipsed, sapphire sun.
He looked to my two tormentors, then back to me, and even though he had nothing in the way of eyelids, I felt him wink.
Two souls for the price of one, a fair trade if ever there was one.
I watched as he cuffed the wrists of his new prisoners, then the black hole snapped shut.
24
I don't know how I pulled it off exactly, but some
how I managed to pick the sweetcorn out of that turd.
There were only a couple of loose ends left to tie.
I returned to Legerdomain to reacquaint Jazz Hands with her stolen inventory of course, thereby solving the Mystery of the Purloined Masque. The only item I hadn’t been able to recover was the set of spectroscopic lenses that Sarah had been wearing when she went tumbling into Hell, but Jazzer enjoyed hearing that story so much, she happily wrote the loss off.
While I was there, I had her enchant me some banknotes, which I used to pay off my tab at The Beehive. I expected Lenny to be happy about it, but instead he simply took the money and gave me a look that suggested I should pay my balance quicker next time if I didn’t want to talk through a ouija board for the rest of my life.
I returned to the Coyote with a mind to have him help me get my dad out of the Bad Place, but when I arrived at his establishment, I found it vacant. The Coyote had gone out of business, or more precisely, he’d been shut down. I found a calling card in the basement, left there by an angel I knew, an apple-polishing, jobsworth named Adonael. He worked for the Big Man, who’d evidently cottoned onto the Coyote smuggling villains into the Promised Land, and decided to liquidate his little operation. Can’t say I blame him, I’d planned to do the same once I’d had my use of the rancid little hunchback. Don’t get me wrong, I was glad to see justice had been served, but it was a bittersweet kind of glad so long as my dad stayed trapped in damnation.
And then there was the die; the one Vic Lords had given me. I wondered what using that thing was going to cost me. Sure, I’d employed it in an unconventional way—delivering souls to Hell rather than using it as an escape hatch to Earth—but I knew Vic would make me pay for it somehow. One way or another, accepting that ghoulish fucker’s help was going to come back and bite me on the arse.
I stood in an industrial lift as it climbed the five storeys to my detective agency, pleased that I was heading up for a change, instead of down.
I knocked a couple of cobwebs aside and pushed through the door of my office to find the place exactly as I’d left it. The morning sun fell slanting through the window, lying on the linoleum floor like a pool of warm honey.
Uncanny Kingdom: An Eleven Book Urban Fantasy Collection (Uncanny Kingdom Omnibus 1) Page 79
