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 the 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.
A moment’s silence.
‘Well, he seemed nice,’ said Dizzy.
A longer silence after that.
15
I tried putting Vic’s words out of my head, but I just couldn’t shake them.
The seeds of doubt were sown. What was Dizzy’s deal? Was he really helping me out of the goodness of his heart? Could there even be such a thing as goodness in Hell? Or did he have some other agenda? Was he leading me down the garden path? Had he been plotting my downfall since I’d shown up here?
Having left The Beehive, Dizzy and I continued our journey to the Castle. My footfalls were reluctant now though, like a miner trudging his way to the coalface. Though the route lead straight ahead, I felt as though I’d arrived at a crossroads. A choice presented itself: would I continue to let Dizzy decide my fate, blindly following him wherever he chose to take me, or would I go it alone, ditching my guide and trusting on my compass to get me where I needed to be?
My solution to the quandary, perha
ps predictably, landed somewhere in between.
Turning quickly on my companion, I grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him roughly up against a nearby wall.
‘How about you tell me just who the fuck you are?’ I demanded, my eyes drilling into his.
‘W-what?’ Dizzy stammered, taken aback.
‘I said who are you?’
‘I’m Dizzy—’
‘Don’t give me that!’ I yelled, banging him against the brickwork again. It was an OTT display, but I had to put the willies up him. Had to know the truth.
‘I don’t know what’s gotten into you,’ Dizzy replied, ‘but I’d like you to let go of me—’
‘I bet you would,’ I said, pulling my pistol. ‘But how about first you tell me what you’re doing in Hell?’
‘What does it matter?’ he cried. ‘That’s all in the past! I’m helping you now!’
Atoning for his sins, was he? I knew something about that. Still, I was going to need details if he expected me to carry on putting my life in his hands.
‘Tell me why you’re here!’ I demanded, pressing the barrel of my gun into Dizzy’s cheek.
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you,’ and after that, the light seemed to go out of his eyes. ‘It was D-Day,’ he recalled, ‘and I was in Normandy with 6th Airborne, doing my bit for the landings...’
‘Did I ask you for a war story?’ I said, I ratcheting back the hammer. ‘What’s D-Day got to do with anything?’
‘Just hear me out, okay?’
‘Alright, but this had better get pertinent pretty bloody quick.’
He nodded. ‘We’d gotten our boots on the ground and taken the beach from the Krauts. After the shooting was over, the few of them that were left came out of their foxholes waving the white flag, so we took them as PoWs. We marched them to a confine—me and a couple of other paras—and waited on our next orders. I was ranking officer that day, so I was calling the shots. As we stood by, waiting to hear back from Command, I struck up a conversation with the prisoners. It turned out one of them had spent some time on our side of the Channel as a student, before the war broke out. Lived just down the road from my mum and dad’s place. He seemed nervous—as you’d expect—so I handed him a cigarette to calm him down. Him and the rest of his men, twenty-two in total, a smoke for each of them. Gave them a light too. “Danke,” they said as they passed the Zippo around. “Danke, Danke, Danke.”’
I wrapped my finger around the trigger. ‘I am well and truly running out of patience with you…’
Dizzy went on. ‘I waited for the last of the Krauts to finish his cigarette, then I swung up my Lanchester and hosed them all. Twenty-two men, dead on the ground, shot to bits.’
‘Jesus,’ I said, and you’d better believe I meant it.
‘I had to do it,’ he explained. ‘I'd seen too many good men die at their hands. So, I killed them. I killed them all. Said to hell with the Geneva Convention and murdered them in cold blood.’ He took a breath. ‘Two days later, I joined those Krauts. Stepped on a landmine on my way back to the front and wound up here.’ He shook his head, solemnly.
‘Dizzy…’
A tear ran through his grimace. ‘You asked me what I did to earn my place in Hell, and now you know.’
I was speechless. Well, almost...
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, putting away my gun and smoothing down the lapels of Dizzy’s jacket. ‘I shouldn’t have done that. Can you forgive me?’
He nodded solemnly, and without returning to the matter, we continued on our journey.
What was I thinking?
Listening to Vic Lords?
16
Dizzy was right, there was no clear path to the Castle.
‘There,’ he said, aiming a finger into the distance.
I could make out the tips of four smoke stacks, pointing to the sky like the legs of an overturned table. ‘Battersea Power Station?’
‘In Hell it’s called the Castle.’
How about that, huh? Every day’s a school day.
Getting to the prison would be no mean feat though, cut off as it was by a giant wall of rubble standing fifty feet high.
‘How do we get through that mess?’ I asked.
‘That’s where I come in,’ Dizzy replied.
He escorted me to a barely-standing building, half-buried in the rubble embankment. Having checked the coast was clear, he then reached down and pulled aside a sheet of corrugated iron to reveal a hole in the ground. ‘After you,’ he said.
I reluctantly got to my knees and crawled into the hole with Dizzy at my rear. It lead to a tunnel that quickly opened out into a large, murky auditorium.
We were inside the ruins of an old theatre.
I took a couple of wary steps across the rotting floor boards, pacing the aisle between two rows of rotting seats. My footsteps echoed all around, bouncing from walls that had shed their paint like moulting snakeskin. Fat motes of dust hung in the air, illuminated by stripes of starlight that squeezed through the building’s sagging rafters.
I didn’t recognise the place, but then I’ve never been much of a theatre buff.
‘Used to be a hospital back in the day,’ said Dizzy. ‘Before it was turned into a playhouse.’
‘How’s this our way to the Castle?’
‘There’s a tunnel,’ he explained. ‘They stored old props down there in the theatre days, but back when the place was a hospital they’d use it to transport bodies privately to a nearby morgue. The tunnel goes right under the wall and comes out on the other side. I came through here going the other way: it’s how I got away from the Castle.’
‘Alright then, let’s do this. Show me the way.’
‘I have to open the stage trapdoor to get us into the tunnel. The lever’s up there.’ He pointed behind us to an elevated control booth. ‘Wait here a mo and I’ll take care of it.’
While Dizzy went to work, I made my way to the front of the theatre and vaulted onto the stage. As I waited for my companion to pull the lever, I trod the boards, pacing between the wings to pass the time, and performing a couple of turns and bows for my imaginary audience.
The red velvet stage curtain hung ragged and torn, clinging tenaciously to the proscenium, despite years of neglect. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to pull aside the curtain and take a peek backstage, curious as to what I might find. What I found came as some surprise. Instead of set dressings or stage furniture, the first thing I saw was a dead body.
The carcass of a middle-aged man with a knife buried in his chest, right up to the hilt.
The corpse was fresh, a few days old at the most.
On the wall behind it, scrawled in the body’s own blood, was a word.
LIAR.
‘What the fu—’
I was just about to call out to Dizzy when I noticed the corpse had something clutched in its fist.
I slowly reached down and pried open the fingers to find—
—a medal.
A military medal.
The one missing from Dizzy’s uniform.
So what did that mean?
I was struggling to put the pieces together, when—
A cacophony.
A deafening operatic number blared from the theatre’s speaker system, a crescendo so loud that I was forced to clasp my hands over my ears. So loud that I couldn’t even hear the sound of my own swearing.
A racket like that was sure to draw the Eyes to us.
I rushed out onto the stage and looked up to the booth to find Dizzy stood at the sound board.
‘What are you doing?’ I screamed.
He stood there, looking down at me with maudlin eyes, then turned the volume even higher.
‘Shut it off!’ I demanded.
Instead, Dizzy simply mouthed back the words, I’m sorry.
I was about to sprint up there and shut the noise off myself, when at the back of the auditorium I saw the silhouettes of three figures.
The E
yes.
The same Eyes that had been tracking me since the moment I got here, drawn to Dizzy’s signal like Gollum to his Precious.
There were three of them left now, three Eyes, two brown, one Big Blue.
Dizzy shut the music off and slinked down from the sound booth, head hung low, face drawn.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
But Dizzy wouldn’t meet my accusing gaze. ‘I had to do it, Jake. It’s the only way they’d let me out of that hell hole.’
I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. Vic was right. Dizzy was a fink. A stool pigeon. A dirty fucking grass. He never escaped the Castle, he was let go on the proviso that he helped the Eyes track down loose souls. From the moment I’d met him, he’d been scattering a trail of breadcrumbs in our wake, leading death to my door.
‘I don’t get it,’ I spat. ‘Why didn’t you just stab me in my sleep?’
‘I’m not a murderer.’
‘Oh, yeah? Tell that to the carcass laying back there with this in his hand…’
I held up the war medal.
‘That was an accident,’ Dizzy insisted. ‘I was waiting on the Eyes to show up, but the bloke got wise at the last minute and came at me. I only did what I did in self-defence.’
I’d heard enough, and apparently the Eyes had too. Big Blue dismissed Dizzy with a nod of his oversized peeper.
‘I’m sorry, Jake,’ Dizzy pleaded, ‘I really am.’
Then he slipped away into the wings like the coward he was.
Stabbed in the back by my own partner. I suppose I should’ve been used to it by this point. I’d been betrayed by Father O’Meara after all, back when I was alive. By my own wife too. By my sister, my mum, and especially my dad. By everyone.
The Eyes took to the stage and surrounded me.
Stood there on my own, I felt like the star of a West End show, soaking in the spotlight, ready to bring the house down with my closing number.
Three Eyes.
One bullet in the chamber.
Should I take one of them down with me, I wondered, or should I plug my own skull and deny them the satisfaction of rubbing me out? Not a great selection of choices, I’ll grant you, but I was only working with what I had.
Twice Damned: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Ghosted Book 3) Page 9
