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 as she came tearing after me.
As she chased me up to the landing I felt her fingers snagging at my pyjamas and her hot spittle 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 after me, 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.’
I was weighing up the likelihood of my pins carrying me any further, when I spotted something beneath the shelter...
Boris bikes.
Or “rental bicycles”, for those of you living on the wrong side of the pond.
The shelter was a docking station, and from the looks of things, at least a couple of the sturdy, old two-wheelers were still roadworthy. I dug one out from beneath some rubble, and in doing so, disturbed a swarm of cockroaches the size of dessert spoon heads. Having definitely not freaked the fuck out, I climbed onto the bike’s saddle and tested the pedals. Sure enough, the back wheel span on its chain.
‘Got a goer here as well,’ said, Dizzy who’d found a working bike of his own.
And off we went.
Bicycles turned out to be the perfect dystopian transport system. Why you never see Mad Max riding one is a mystery to me. All that time spent scrounging for petrol? Just get on your bike, mate!
Dizzy and I made record time as we pedalled through the wastes of limbo London, wind whipping through our hair as we navigated the ash-covered streets. We laughed and pulled wheelies, and for a moment it was like we were two schoolboys sti
cking our fingers up at the Blitz, tearing through the war ravaged streets as we used the collapsed remains of our city as jump ramps.
Yes, things were going swimmingly... until they weren’t.
As I went to turn a corner, I saw a flash of movement in my periphery, then felt the front wheel of my bike lock. A fraction of a second later I found myself soaring over the handlebars and knocking Dizzy off his bike before hitting the tarmac, flat on my back.
Miraculously, the sudden stop came as such a surprise that my muscles weren’t given a chance to seize up, and I landed limp, taking only a minor blow to the back of my skull as I struck the ground. Dizzy looked similarly stunned, but intact.
‘What the—’ I started to groan, then lifted my head off the tarmac to see a group of natives gathering around, two dozen at least.
They were proper bad bastards. One of them held a pitchfork that he’d used to stick in the spokes of my bike and unsaddle me. The rest were similarly armed, carrying chains and shivs and whatever weapons they could fashion from the debris of this demolished world. Each of them was spray-painted with an SS, which, if history has taught us anything, is never good news.
‘South Souls,’ said Dizzy, as he rolled onto his knees.
So, these were the other lags that had escaped from the Castle, were they? I watched as they closed in on us like a pack of jackals, eager to chew the meat from our bones.
We thought we’d outrun our troubles after that encounter in Harrods, but we’d exited through a fire escape and right into another fire.
The South Souls were no beauty pageant, but their leader was pure neanderthal. A snowman made of meat with flat top hair, cauliflower ears, and a set of biceps so big they could flip pancakes, just with a flex.
‘Looks like you came to the wrong part of town,’ he grunted.
I was about to voice my disapproval when he cut me short with a single word.
‘Fletcher?’
And suddenly I recognised the bloke.
‘Mr Langford?’ I stammered.
My old P.E. teacher from school.
He smiled and showed me the familiar gaps in his teeth. ‘I might have known you’d end up here,’ he chuckled.
Me? What the hell was he doing here? Unless... I thought back to school, back to the locker room, and remembered all those “friendly”, post-shower arse-pats he liked to dole out. Yeah, that would earn you a spot in the Castle alright.
‘What do we do?’ asked Dizzy, who’d picked up a rock to throw, but, confronted with the gang’s superior numbers, was suffering an overabundance of choice.
‘What you’re doing, soldier boy,’ said Langford, ‘is coming with us. You too, Fletcher.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, drawing my pistol, ‘but my dance card’s pretty full right now.’
The outlaws took a step backwards at the sight of the shooter. I took aim at my former teacher, wanting nothing more than to show my appreciation for five years of being forced to run around a frozen rugby pitch wearing shorts and a t-shirt.
Langford smiled again. He was a cruel man, but not a stupid one. He knew as well as I did that a bullet in his forehead would end in two dozen men ripping me and Dizzy to shreds. Maybe I could squeeze off a second round before that happened, maybe even my third and final one, but after that, we’d be as dead as it gets.
I sighed and lowered the gun.
13
The South Souls took away my magic compass and half-loaded six-shooter, then handed them to their leader, along with my return tickets to the land of the living. I tried explaining to Langford that the tickets were non-transferable, but he took them all the same. I doubted he’d have used them even if he could – he was king shit of this lawless underworld, why would he ever want to go back to the place he served as a high school P.E. teacher?
Only after the outlaws were done emptying my pockets did they tie on a blindfold and cart me and Dizzy back to their lair. The journey there didn’t take long, and would have been quicker still if Langford’s goons hadn’t insisted on kicking me in the back of the knees every couple of hundred yards. They didn’t exactly endear themselves to me the first time they did it, but by knockdown number three, my piss was well and truly boiled.
The first sign that we’d arrived at our destination was a roar of music; an abrasive, black metal dirge that made my guts jump like beans in a tin. It was the soundtrack to a brain aneurysm—my kind of jam in any other setting (Iron Maiden is basically my religion)—but a bit unsettling given the situation. The second sign that we’d joined with the rest of Langford’s outlaws was a smell of sweat so rancid that I was forced to consider the notion that Barry White himself had died and somehow ended up jammed down the back of a radiator.
I was led down a flight of steps, and when the blinkers finally came off, I found myself in what looked like the basement of an old rock club. Forced down a dark corridor between two walls of Langford’s men, I felt like the straight girl from an ‘80s movie; the bookish virgin who ought to know better than to have visited that backstreet punk club, squeezed through a crush of freaks, leered at in her preppy white outfit by leather-jacketed headbangers with incomprehensible band names on their t-shirts, and sweaty, lesbian skinheads doing microdots off of each other’s tongues.
The corridor opened out into a dance hall heaving with even more of Langford’s soldiers. The South Souls’ hideout was grungy and foreboding, full of dry ice and fierce artillery drumming. Ultraviolet lights illuminated gaudy murals of plucked eyeballs and severed heads. Here in the refuge of their den, the gang had music and they had lights. Somewhere, somehow, a generator must have been running.
It was hard to imagine thrash metal being Mr Langford’s scene, but then they do say that rock and roll is the Devil’s music. This was Hell, after all – larging it to an Ibiza club banger just wouldn't cut it. Still, something told me that Langford wasn’t in this for the tunes. He was in it for blood and guts.
I watched helplessly as Dizzy was bridled and forced into a humiliating dog collar attached to a thick chain, which Langford wrapped twice around his wrist. Meanwhile, I was thrust towards a walled off circle in the centre of the club’s huge dance floor. The wall was twenty feet high and built from speaker stacks held together by Gaffa tape and coils of razor wire. Despite my struggles, I was brought to heel at a heavy-duty iron gate that provided an entrance to the ominous structure.
‘What are we doing here then, lads?’ I asked. ‘Having ourselves a bit of a mosh?’
Langford sneered. ‘Still the class cut-up, eh? Let’s see if you’ve still got a smile on your face after you’re done in the arena.’
Great. Apparently, I was going to be made to fight for their amusement, gladiator style.
‘I'm a P.I.’ I cried. ‘Not Russell fucking Crowe.’
Langford offered a sadistic grin as one of his men threw the bolt on the arena and swung open the gate. Of course the ruthless bastard got off on watching folks sweat. Nothing had changed since high school.
With the application of a size-twelve boot, I was unceremoniously sent sprawling to the floor of the arena, which was then bolted shut from the other side.
I stood up and dusted down my suit as Langford and his men clambered for their seats to witness the forthcoming spectacle. Hooting and stamping their feet in excitement, they began to chant…
‘Trap Jaw, Trap Jaw, Trap Jaw, Trap Jaw…’
On and on they went, until finally, Langford brought the racket to a close with a single blow of the regulation P.E. whistle he kept about his neck.
I stood there for a moment in the deafening silence, staring intently at the gate to the far end of the arena, when suddenly it swung open to reveal my opponent.
How to describe the bloke? Put it this way, if you were to pull a Pictionary card that said “hideous”, you'd draw him.
My opponent was a large, naked man; toothless, contorted and rotting. He looked like Shane MacGowan from the Pogues, if he were to watch the tape from The Ring,
then gave it a second viewing, just to see what all the fuss was about. He was punctured from the torso down by sharpened poles, which had seemingly been rammed through his body to provide him with a set of industrial-strength quills. And yet still, somehow, that was the least of his hideousness.
Having arrived in the centre of the arena, the porcupine man threw back his head and opened up a giant slash in his neck. Looking like Hell’s own Pez dispenser, he then proceeded to talk from the grisly Muppet mouth that had appeared in his throat.
‘Who dares stand before me?’ he demanded, in a voice that sounded as though it were coming from the bottom of a deep well.
A terror grew inside of me that started in the sphincter and worked its way up. I took a couple of deep breaths, rationalising the creature in an effort to bring myself under control. What exactly was I facing here? A demon, I supposed. My best guess was that it had possessed one of Langford’s men and somehow wound up trapped inside of him. That would explain how the man had managed to stay standing despite being covered in mortal wounds, and could communicate even though its vocal chords were obviously slashed. I briefly wondered what kind of demon was trapped in there—a lamia, a crossroads lurker, one of those elder demons with too many apostrophes in its name and not enough vowels—but this was no time for academics. This fucker was going to eat me alive.
Langford blew his whistle again and the demon began to twitch towards me.
‘Listen, mate,’ I said, holding out my hands defensively, ‘I’m not looking for any aggro.’
‘I'll harvest your soul!’ shrieked the demon, so loud it made my teeth hurt.
Negotiations had broken down fast. ‘Okay then,’ I sighed. ‘I guess we've got aggro.’
The outlaws watching from above hollered with blood lust and continued their chant. ‘Trap Jaw, Trap Jaw, Trap Jaw, Trap Jaw…’
And look, I get it. In a place like this, you take your fun where you can get it. I mean, it’s not like these guys had HBO or anything. Surely there were other options worth considering though? What’s wrong with a relaxing cup of tea, or a game of whist, or heading outdoors for a nice, jumpers-for-goalposts kickabout? Why go straight to the ultraviolence?
Twice Damned: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Ghosted Book 3) Page 7
