Turned

by David Bussell

  Even as a ghost, I still wear a scar on my wrist.

  So yeah, Mark Ryan’s not exactly top of my friends list, which is why I had zero qualms about making him my designated meat puppet; the physical form I use whenever I need to pass for living. At least this way he serves a useful function in life. Think of him as my toupee, except instead of hiding a bald spot, he hides the fact that I don’t have a blood and guts body.

  I looked over to Mark’s booth and saw him peck his side-piece on the cheek.

  ‘Back in a minute,’ he said. ‘Just going to siphon the python.’

  He squeezed past the girl and headed to the Gents for a slash. Meanwhile, I breezed by the rest of the bar’s punters unseen and phased through the bathroom wall to follow Mark inside.

  When I got there, I found him stood at a urinal, phone in one hand, cock in the other. In case you were wondering, no, his downstairs department is anything to write home about. The guy might act like a swinging dick, but he has a knob like an outie belly button.

  I sidled up and prepared to stake a pitch in Mark’s body. Believe me when I tell you that it’s no mean feat, possessing someone. It took me a long time to get the knack of that trick. For a while there I was just jumping into people and going arse over tit through the other side as they stood there oblivious. Meat is a very tricky medium. Most ghosts never get a handle on it to be honest, but eventually I figured out a way. If you asked me how, I’d tell you that my work as an exorcist gave me a qualified understanding of ghosts and their unique metaphysical properties. I’d be shitting you though. All I know for certain is that after a lot of trial and error, I finally sussed out how to inhabit the living. Well, at least for a little while. An hour, two at most, and a living body rejects me like an unwanted kidney. That’s just the way things are, don’t ask me to explain the science of it.

  I invisibly manoeuvred behind Mark and smiled. It’s funny, he used to get a big kick out of telling the kids at school that I was a “gay boy”, but only one of us was getting a man inside of him that night.

  I stepped into Mark’s body and felt him jolt and recoil. Someone had flushed the toilet on his nice, hot shower, and he wasn’t liking it one bit.

  He went into spasms, fighting me, doing what he could to resist my intrusion. He needn’t have bothered. A couple of seconds more and I was all moved in, boxes unpacked and making myself good and comfy.

  Mark’s body was mine. I sniffed the air and sighed. It smelled like piss and urinal cake, but the simple act of breathing was reward enough. I’m telling you, it’s the little things you miss when you don’t have a body.

  I zipped Mark up, washed his hands—a habit of mine, not his—and checked my reflection in the mirror above the bathroom sink. He was a handsome bastard, I’ll give him that; a swimmer’s chest and the kind of face that gets you places in life. Too bad for him that his body was a timeshare property.

  I headed through the bathroom door and back to the bar. I saw Mark’s bit of fluff there, tucked up in her booth, sipping something tall and pink. Now, a more unscrupulous ghost might, when such an opportunity was presented to them, use Mark’s body to take his chesty young bint to pleasure town. Well, not me. I may, in many ways, be a bit of a bastard, but I’m not an utter bastard.

  I strolled by her and made for the exit.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she screeched.

  ‘Out,’ I told her, and carried on walking.

  Mark was going to have some explaining to do after I was done with him, that was sure. He wouldn’t have much info to go on though. He has no recollection of what I get up to while I’m wearing him, I make sure of that. All he has is guesswork. Did he have too much to drink? Did he take a spill, knock his head and black out? Did the light from a full moon turn him into a werewolf? (those are real by the way, plus vampires, trolls and witches. No such thing as mermaids though. Mermaids are for chumps).

  And look, in case you're left with some lingering wisp of sympathy for poor old Mark—some moulded by a bad upbringing guff—you should know this: on top of being a bully, a womaniser, and an all-round subhuman piece of shit, Mark Ryan is a hedge fund manager.

  Yup.

  So, I headed for the canal to meet DCI Stronge, my conscience clean and my spirit cosy inside of my meat puppet. A dead woman needed my help. A dead woman with a curious lack of skin.

  End of Extract.

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  FRESH HELL

  Dark Lakes: Magic Eater

  Here’s a SNEAK PEEK at the first Dark Lakes book, another series set in the Uncanny Kingdom universe…

  Joseph Lake doesn’t know who he is or where he came from, and the answer might just be the death of him.

  By day, Joseph scrubs toilets and fixes broken light fittings, by night he looks into weird stuff. Local hauntings, unexplained disappearances, satanic cabals dancing naked around ancient stone circles. The usual.

  The Uncanny calls to him like a beacon, and he follows its signal wherever it leads, hoping that one day it will shine a light on who he really is.

  1

  I suppose this all started when I woke up without a single clue as to who I was, where I was, or why I was bleeding from so many different and interesting places.

  My name’s Joseph Lake, or at the very least that’s what I’ve decided to call myself. Not the most inspiring of choices, I know, but I couldn’t find anything that felt comfortable, so Joseph Lake it was. The fact it stuck had made me wonder if the name meant something; like maybe it was a family member’s name, or a good friend’s, or even a good enemy’s, but I Googled that thing down to a nub and ended up with nothing. Just one of many deader-than-dead ends I’ve chased aimlessly since I woke up next to that lake.

  That was ten years ago. Right now I now found myself stalking the streets of Carlisle in the middle of the night, dressed entirely in black. This may have been my first time following a stranger from a discreet distance, but I’d seen enough movies to know the best colour for a stalking outfit. At first I’d even worn a pair of black shades, though it quickly became apparent that this was not my brightest idea. What with it being the whole night time thing. Yeah, I didn’t feel too smart as I pulled those off and pocketed them, I can tell you.

  The stranger I was following was a homeless woman who looked like a charity shop puked up over a passing Helena Bonham Carter. Or, in other words, like Helena Bonham Carter. She’d been throwing up red flags in my head for the last two months, so a good follow seemed in order, and not the friendly Twitter kind.

  Anyway, back to my origin story: I was found by a fisherman called Joseph (hence the forename), face down and very, completely naked, beside Derwent Water, which is one of several bodies of water that make up an area known as the Lake District in the far north of England. Yup, you got it, from thence derives my surname.

  Actually, that’s a lie, I wasn’t completely naked, I had one sock on. I still have that sock. It’s the only physical evidence I have of my past life and who I really am, though it is difficult to extrapolate much from a sock, other than “I wore socks.” Even Sherlock Holmes would want more to go on than that, unless I skipped Sherlock Holmes and the One-Socked Man.

  It was chilly out and I pulled my long coat tight around myself as I did my best to keep a discreet distance from the tramp, who seemed to be aimlessly wandering here, there, and nowhere in particular. The tramp had been showing up a lot recently; not just hanging out by the cash machine I always passed, or pushing a trolley around town full of tin cans. I hadn’t just happened across her on my way to work. No, she’d been turning up all over, almost as though there was some design to it. I’d look out of my window, she’d be sat across the street. I’d get to work, she’d be in the car park, going through the bins. It felt a lot like she was following me. So I thought, well, two can play at that game.

  So, here I was, following a homeless woman around the streets of Carlisle, Cumbria’s only ci
ty, in the middle of the night. No, you have too much time on your hands.

  I’m sure most would brush it her appearance off as coincidence, but when you have my kind of strange (and stunted) history, you tend to see the weird shining out from the ordinary. No, this wasn’t one of those situations where you buy a pair of red trousers and suddenly start noticing people wearing those self-same red trousers everywhere. This woman was following me. I was sure of it. Keeping tabs. For… for reasons yet to be ascertained.

  A little part of me even hoped it was because she recognised me. Maybe I’d been a tramp too, before… well… before whatever happened happened and I wound up unconscious by a lake wearing nothing but a sock and a fully-body bruise. Maybe that’s why it was so difficult to find anything out about my past; perhaps I’d been on the streets for years.

  The tramp stopped and turned, and I ducked into the doorway of a betting shop that stank sharply of piss. For a moment or two it looked like she was going to walk back the way she’d come—that she was going to walk right past me in my not too discreet hidey-hole—but then her head twitched to the left and she darted off down an alley. I counted to five then sprinted after her, coat tails flapping, heart pounding, grinning a lot more than I should have been.

  I didn’t want to bust out of the alleyway and find myself smacking into the back of my quarry, so I slowed down to a walking pace, one hand trailing along the old, crumbling brickwork that lined either side of the narrow crack between two shops.

  And that’s when the first strange thing happened.

  As my fingers trailed across the old bricks, a weird mood dropped over me like a heavy blanket. It was… fear. No, not just fear, fear mixed with hunger, mixed with pain, mixed with desire. Oh God! It felt like it was washing over me again and again, like I was pegged to a beach and the sea waves were battering against me over and over and if I didn’t get away I might just drown in all the intoxicating, terrible feelings of dread and—

  —A scream.

  My hand snapped away from the old bricks of the alleyway and my head dropped back into the here and now.

  There had been a scream; not in my head, not in whatever weird thing that was I’d just experienced, but out here, in the night. Not a fun scream, not a people playing around and being young and boisterous drunk scream. No, this was a blood-curdler. A for-God’s-sake-won’t-someone-please-help-me scream.

  I ran towards the sound.

  As I burst out of the dark of the alley into the comparatively bright square, my foot kicked something heavy and I found myself sprawling and tumbling at speed into the cobbles, my head bouncing painfully as it connected briefly with the ground.

  I lay for a few seconds, getting my breathing under control and trying to decide whether to throw up or not. I went with not. I pushed myself into a sitting position, the world tilting, and gingerly fingered my throbbing temple. I could already feel a lump rising like I was a cartoon cat who’d just been bashed over the head with a frying pan.

  Feeling stupid for not looking where I was going, I peered over to see what I’d tripped over. I was expecting to see a bag of rubbish, or perhaps a tree root pushing up from a crack in the cobbles. What I wasn’t expecting to see was the body of a woman with her throat torn out.

  No, I wasn’t expecting that at all.

  2

  Pain in my head forgotten, I shuffled on my knees to the prone body laid out flat on her back before me. I swallowed, throat dry, a metallic tang invading my mouth that made me want to gag.

  ‘Hey…’ my voice emerged an arid whisper. ‘Are you… are you… okay…?’

  Yes, it was a stupid question, but if I might be forgiven in the circumstances, it’s not every day one trips over a violently murdered woman.

  She looked to be in her late thirties, her eyes still wide and staring blankly up into nothing. What was the last thing those eyes saw? At what point had she realised her life was about to be given a violent, painful full stop? I felt a fist of anger clench in my stomach.

  Now I was closer I could see that not all of the blood on the ground was random splashes and sprays, some of it had been placed in deliberate patterns. Shapes that looked almost occult in nature and made me feel strange to look at.

  Had the tramp done this to her? She’d come this way, but surely she hadn’t had enough time; but then where was she? Would she really just run away after stumbling across a dead body?

  Hand shaking, I reached out and tried for a pulse just in case I was wrong. I wasn’t wrong. I shivered, not because of the cold of the night, but because her flesh was already cold, which was, well, wrong. This had happened recently. The blood was still wet, recently spilled. She should still be warm to the touch, or warmer than she was at least. I looked at the ragged tear in her throat, blood still pooling out onto the ground, soaking her long, red hair that was splayed out around her. What could do that? A knife? Or—

  —Another scream.

  Okay, okay, this was too much. This was all much too much. Someone had just been murdered and the killer was somewhere close. This was dark and scary and dangerous and it was stupid to even think about going forward rather than back. I’m no hero, I should have been getting as far away as possible and calling the police so they could get their arses over there to sort things out. So why were my stupid feet carrying me towards the danger?

  Stupid, stupid feet.

  I crossed the little square in record-breaking time and raced down another alleyway. This time it didn’t open up, but turned left, then right, before I finally emerged onto a back street behind a row of shops. As I stepped out I had the forethought to look at the ground, to make sure I didn’t go tumbling over another dead body.

  No dead body. That was a good start.

  I looked around, eyes and ears straining for any indication of danger, my every nerve ending feeling like it was tingling, achingly alive. There were large overflowing bins and metal skips. Gates leading into shop backyards. Another alley in the distance, leading the way out. Plenty of places to hide. To lurk. To pounce on anyone foolhardy enough to investigate.

  Everything sounded quiet. It was like the back alley was holding its breath to see what happened next. I hoped it was something nice and not at all deathy.

  ‘Okay, Joe, get a hold of yourse—’

  Something moved: a shape, a dark patch of the world, something my eyes wanted to ignore.

  It leapt from the shadows and barged into me. I went down, reaching out, trying to grab hold of something; some clothing, a limb, anything. My fingers brushed against something soft and cold and—

  —Hunger, Hunger, Hunger—

  So many screams, so much blood, and Christ, the need, the need, it never stops, never decreases, it’s just there-there-there demanding more and they scream as I approach and I like that, I exist for that moment, and then the feast! The feast! I can gorge on their fear and their real—

  —It was gone as quick as it started, the terrible hunger, the taste in my mouth, the overpowering need to gorge on… on awful things. I pulled away, teeth bared, fingers digging painfully into my chest. Wincing, I pulled my hands away and sagged, panting, glad that whatever had just happened was over.

  But of course it wasn’t over. There was more horror to come.

  I looked to where the… the thing, the dark shape, emerged from… and saw two feet sticking out. Another woman. Another corpse. What the hell was happening? All I’d been doing was a little light stalking and I’d stepped into a nightmare.

  ‘Help… help…’

  She was alive! Holy, buggering, shit, she was still alive!

  I scrabbled over on my hands and knees to find her curled up, bloodied, but still breathing.

  ‘Ha ha! Fuck you, you murdering twat!’

  I must have surprised the attacker; spooked them before they finished the job!

  ‘Please… please…’

  ‘Hey, hi, it’s okay, don’t worry, it’s okay.’ I burbled these and other words at the woman, relief an
d joy coursing through my veins as my hands fluttered over her, trying to make sure she wasn’t suffering from anything immediately life threatening, like a cleaver sticking out of her neck. She flinched away at first, or at least tried to.

  ‘I’m still in me. I’m still in me.’

  ‘What? What d’you mean?’

  ‘Don’t take it, please, please, it’s mine, it’s…’

  ‘It’s okay, don’t panic, you’re going to be okay. What’s your name?’

  But that’s all she managed to squeeze out until she shuddered once and passed out. I yanked out my phone and dialled for an ambulance, hoping to God, to Buddha—to whatever those alien ghost things Tom Cruise believed in were—that she’d hang on until they arrived.

  End of Extract.

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  MAGIC EATER

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