‘Breakfast of champions.’
He wondered what time of day it was. There was no real light bleeding through from the tiny window high on the wall, so it must be late. He hoped a bakery close-by would still be open, he wanted to chase his lager with a nice pie. And then another lager or six at the pub. ‘Don’t wait up, dear,’ he said to the dark corners of the room and headed for the front door.
He opened it to find two people stood outside waiting. One was a young boy with thick, blonde, curly locks. The other was a tall, absurdly pale man in an almost floor-length, purple coat. The man appeared to be trapped within a chalk circle, and was not at all happy about it, though his teeth-gnashing and foam-mouthed raving had been silenced by the spells he saw drawn within the circle.
‘My name’s Liam,’ said the boy.
‘Hello Liam.’
‘The ghost inside me that isn’t a ghost wants you to kick a monster out of his body.’
Bob the exorcist looked from the boy to the silent lunatic with murder in his eyes, then back again. ‘You’d better come in then,’ he said and walked back inside.
The pie would have to wait.
Mr. Spike had done terrible things to Ben.
Rita hadn’t seen them, but she could tell from the expressions on Waterson and Formby’s faces that his killer had taken pleasure in the killing. They hadn’t needed to kill her to get their kicks. Instead, Cotton and Spike had prodded at her and found a way to get a response they could feast on. And now they had it.
As she’d stepped into that basement and seen Ben Turner’s body—so strangely small looking, like he’d shrunk in death—her mind had recoiled with anger, with fear, with horror.
Oh, they must have liked that.
They must be having a good laugh about it right now. A little revenge on her for how she had dispatched them.
Waterson sat down next to her in a booth upstairs. She was watching the last cat video Ben had sent her, replaying it over and over again.
‘Hey.’
‘What happened to his ghost, Waters? Is he okay somewhere, do you think?’
Waterson opened his mouth to speak, paused, then started again, ‘I… I don’t know. I’m sorry.’
Big Pins became blurry and Rita angrily brushed her sleeve across her eyes. Any tears she shed would only be giving Cotton and Spike more of what they wanted. She would grieve once she had beaten the shit out of them.
‘I’m really not the hugging type,’ said Waterson.
‘I know.’
‘Plus I’m a ghost, so couldn’t hug you even if I wanted to.’
‘I know.’
‘But just know that I am. In my head, I’m hugging you.’
Rita smiled. ‘Thanks, Dan.’
Waterson blinked in surprise. ‘I think that might be the first time you’ve ever called me Dan.’
‘It was weird, wasn’t it?’
‘Very weird. Stop it.’
‘Understood, Waters.’
Waterson laughed, then stopped, feeling guilty. ‘You’ll stop them, you know,’ he said.
‘I hope so.’
‘They’ll rue the day they picked on Rita Hobbes.’
‘Everyone does.’
‘And wherever Ben is, whatever’s happened to him, to his soul, it’ll be resting easy, because he knows you’re going to twat those fuckers.’
Oh, she would. Somehow she had to. She was going to be their worst nightmare.
The chalk circle slid across the floor, nudging the man within it forward, until it was stood against one wall.
‘My mum tells me off if I draw on the walls,’ said Liam, looking around at all the pictures, shapes, and words daubed all over Bob the exorcist’s living room.
‘My mum’s dead,’ said Bob, ‘so she doesn’t tell me fuck all.’
Bob peered closer at the eyes of the man trapped in the circle.
‘Who is he, then?’
‘His name’s Carlisle.’
Bob turned to Liam, eyebrows raised. ‘That so? A bloody celebrity, in my humble flat. What an honour.’
Carlisle scowled inside of Liam, he knew when he was being taken the piss of.
‘I don’t think he liked that,’ said Liam, shuffling on the spot.
‘Do I look like I give two tits what he thinks?’ replied Bob. He’d heard of Carlisle, of course. Most with any connection to the Uncanny had heard of Carlisle. Most of what they heard was not good. ‘So you went and slipped into the astral, did you? Without safeguarding your body? I thought you were supposed to be smart.’
Liam listened. ‘He says there was no other option at the time. He was trapped with an Angel and Mr. Cotton and Mr. Spike.’
‘Shit does like to mix with shit,’ said Bob.
Liam peered into a darkened corner of the room. ‘How is it so dark over there? Light’s on, but I can’t see the corner. Or that corner over there.’
‘Can’t always shine a light on evil,’ replied Bob, taking a mouthful from his can and unleashing a bone-rattling burp. He scrunched up his nose and wafted a hand in front of his face. ‘Talking of evil... Christ, what have I been eating?’
‘Carlisle is saying lots of loud, rude words now.’
‘Simmer down in there, all right?’ replied Bob. ‘I’m not in the habit of helping out bastards, at least not in the past, but you’re catching me on a good day, so I’ll help you get your body back.’
‘He says thank you. It sounded like he was saying it through clenched teeth. (...) What? Well, it did!’
‘I have something I want in return though, no freebies today.’
‘What is it?’ asked Liam.
‘I know the sort of thing Carlisle offers, and I want the same.’
Liam frowned as he listened to Carlisle. ‘He says okay.’
‘So I get a promise?’
Liam nodded.
‘It better be a big promise.’
‘He says it is.’
‘Okay then,’ said Bob the exorcist. ‘Better get me tools, then.’
Bob walked from the room and through to a kitchen. The sink looked like it was giving birth to a creature made of mould and turds. It was not the most hygienic of kitchens.
Bob grabbed an old-fashioned leather bag; the kind doctors on call had used a hundred years previous. He’d been given the bag and its contents after graduating the training the Vatican had given him. It contained the tools of an exorcist’s trade: the complete apparatus for dealing with a demonic entity and deporting them from a human host.
Most in Bob’s business preferred to clean their tools regularly as they became rusted, bloodied, gore-coated. Bob did not clean his. Not ever. For one thing, he hated cleaning. For another, he believed the remnants of past jobs only amplified a tool’s potency, like a cooking pot that was never scrubbed completely clean, the chef believing it enhanced the flavour of the next dish.
‘He wants to know if this will damage his body much,’ asked Liam, keeping his distance from the thrashing, grasping arms of Carlisle’s body, despite the fact he knew it could not reach beyond the circle to grab him.
‘Hard to say, really,’ replied Bob, re-entering the room. ‘He’s got an almost thing lodged in his body, and prising those dicks out can be tricky. Sometimes they slide right out with a little levering, sometimes you’ve got to hack and hack and hack, and by the time you’ve wiped the blood off your face to take a look at things, the almost creature is gone, and you’re left not so much with a body as a pile of meat confetti.’
Bob dropped his bag on the chair and opened it, pulling out a hammer.
‘Let’s get to work then.’
Linton had closed Big Pins—something that was almost unheard of—to help Formby take Ben Turner’s body to the police. Formby knew an officer they could hand it off to who would make sure the right things happened. Make sure his friends and family knew he’d passed on.
‘I know this isn’t the best of times,’ said Waterson, as Rita poured herself a gin and tonic.
‘There was this weird thing in my dreamscape.’
‘Okay. Like what?’ Rita slumped back on to a stool and drank.
‘Well, at first, it was like you’d expect, something from my life that I was scared of, but then it changed into something else. Someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘The Angel. Your big bad, so to speak.’
Rita sat up and frowned, more focussed now on Waterson than her drink.
‘It wanted me to release the guv.’
Rita recalled her own interaction with the Angel of Blackpool. How it had come to her in a dream and asked the same.
‘Do you know what?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I think we should give It what It wants.’
‘Right. That feels like a really, really—and I’m going to add a third really here—bad idea.’
Rita stepped back behind the bar and poured herself another drink.
‘Oh, it’s the worst idea ever.’
Carlisle did not like the thought of a thing being inside his body. He didn’t even like when other people wore his clothes. He once tore a man’s throat out for trying on his coat. This was, of course, much worse. He felt it on a primal level, the revulsion at someone—or to be more accurate, something—using his body as their own.
‘Jesus,’ said Bob. ‘I should leave the thing inside you, Carlisle, just to teach you a lesson. And it’s not as though you don’t deserve it, things you’ve done.’
‘Tell him to keep his weasel words to himself,’ said Carlisle.
He glanced to the corners of the room, the too-black places that had unnerved Liam so. There were things there, he could sense them. Almost see them. The price of Bob’s chosen profession, no doubt. Heinous bailiffs waiting to emerge from the shadows and claim their debt. Carlisle wondered why people like Bob willingly did what they did when the cost was so very high and so very unavoidable. Was doing the right thing really worth all that?
Bob stood in front of Carlisle’s possessed body, just an inch from the chalk circle. He pulled a rather nasty looking knife from his leather bag and raised it above his head, mumbling words that Carlisle did not understand. As Bob continued with his invocation, the knife blade began to glow, white hot.
Carlisle heard whispers. Many voices, overlapping, all seeping from the darkened corners of the room.
‘Stay where you are,’ Carlisle ordered Liam. ‘Do not get close to the dark corners.’
As Bob continued to chant his strange words, white tendrils began to weave from the corners towards Bob. Should he warn him, Carlisle wondered, or was this all part of it? Was he leeching dark magic to use as his own? Was that how this was going to play out? Carlisle had seen a lot of things in his long life, but had never witnessed a Vatican-trained exorcist at work.
The tendrils of light wrapped around Bob as the almost thing in Carlisle’s body thrashed and raged. It seemed to Carlisle that it knew exactly what was going on, and did not care for it one bit.
And then the whispers stopped, the tendrils of light disappeared, and Bob ceased his chant. All was quiet.
‘What now?’ said Carlisle. ‘Ask him.’
‘I hear you,’ said Bob, raising a hand. ‘What happens now, is this...’
Bob the exorcist stepped into the chalk circle and thrust the knife into Carlisle’s heart.
18
Nightmares can happen whatever time of day a person sleeps, but at night, when the moon is high, that is when nightmares are at their most potent. When even the sublimely crafted horrors conjured by Mr. Cotton and Mr. Spike are given extra depth.
Mr. Cotton walked the streets of Blackpool, his white-gloved hands clasped behind his back as the dark fingers of the Angel’s power writhed around him. Each house he passed he could feel discomfort within. Dreamers shifting in their sleep, moaning half-formed sentences as their covers grew damp with sweat.
‘Do you hear their cries, brother of mine?’ asked Mr. Cotton as Mr. Spike stepped from nowhere and joined him. ‘Fear. Ah yes, they are playing our song.’
Mr. Cotton licked his lips, he could still taste Ben Turner’s terror upon them. Could still hear Rita Hobbes’ anguish as she discovered the man’s dead body. Yes, that certainly wiped the smug grin off the hexed detective’s face.
‘Was that not something to savour, brother?’
Mr. Spike giggled behind his mask.
‘And yet, that is such a small morsel. What we have done to the ex-wolf. What we have created so far in this tired town. Tentative steps only. Is it not now time to throw off these self-made shackles to see what we can really do? I do believe that it is time to turn up the screams.’
Mr. Cotton began to dance.
Elaine Travers turned over in her bed, unsure if she was awake or asleep. The room around her was a warm fuzz. A perfect cocoon.
A cough.
Elaine’s muscles turned into piano wires as she realised she was not alone.
On the chair in the corner sat a man, face shrouded by the dark, his chest heaving up and down.
‘Who is it?’ asked Elaine Travers, reaching for her glasses on the bedside table. Maybe it was her brother, Simon, who had come up to stay for a few days and was sleeping in her spare room. What was he doing sat there, though?
She slid on her glasses and turned on the bedside lamp, but still the man remained in the dark.
‘Simon?’ said Elaine her heart speeding. No, that wasn’t Simon, too big for Simon. Her brother was a short man, five-foot-six on a good day; this person was much larger, much wider.
Elaine realised who it was. All of a sudden she knew. It was the trousers. She could see the trousers, poking out from the dark that hid the rest of him. The trousers were mustard-coloured cords. She remembered being six years old, covers gripped tight in her hands, stealing a look through scrunched up eyes and seeing those trousers walking towards her bed.
Remembered his hand reaching towards her.
‘Uncle Alan?’ whispered Elaine.
Uncle Alan leaned forward.
‘Hello, little one,’ he replied, a smile on his face and a hungry look in his eyes. Eyes that twitched this way and that across the covers hiding Elaine’s body.
Uncle Alan had been dead for thirty years.
‘I’ll tell mum,’ cried Elaine, as Uncle Alan stood. He had a knife in his hand.
‘Don’t worry, little one,’ he said, ‘everything is going to be fine, fine, fine.’
Elaine cowered and closed her eyes.
Mike Lewis always went to pee at least twice before he settled down to sleep. Sometimes it drove him to distraction, curled up in bed, wide awake, waiting for that familiar urge to occur so he could throw back his covers, pad down to the toilet, relieve himself for a second time, and finally get some rest.
It had been a habit of his since he was five, when his dad died. At first he’d just wet the bed, but it made his mum so cross with him that he’d taken it upon himself to make double sure he didn’t do it again. It was a comfort thing; he didn’t want to be causing his mum any more distress, and as the months and years passed, it had become a trigger that flipped the switch on his brain and let sleep take him.
Mike shook off, flushed the toilet, and went to the sink to wash his hands. As the warm water rushed out the tap and he rubbed his hands under it, he could already feel his pillow calling him.
It was as he turned off the tap that he saw that someone stood behind him in the bathroom.
‘Please, no,’ said Mike Lewis as he turned to see his mad Auntie Alice.
He’d been ten and alone in the house when Auntie Alice had turned up and let herself in. He didn’t like to think about what happened next, but the look on her face, the awful sounds she was making, that was always there.
He’d heard a family friend commenting how Auntie Alice wasn’t the first in the family to, “Lose her bloody min
d”, and from that point on, Mike had worried that one day that’s how he would end up. How he would look.
He turned away from Auntie Alice, her teeth grinding, feet shuffling, and saw his own face in the mirror, a leer of sheer insanity across his face.
He screamed and fell backwards, hitting his head against the edge of the bath as he went down. As he lay on his back, blood spreading across the tiles, he looked up to see a man in a mask, crouched in the bath.
Empty glass eyes were the last things Mike Lewis saw.
Will Devon had always had this thing about bats.
He had no idea where it came from. Did not recall any incident in his past, in his childhood, that might have brought about the deep, frantic revulsion he felt for them. He’d once asked his mum if she remembered any reason for his hatred of the things (and he always used the word “hatred” when discussing it with others, as “fear” felt so silly). His mum said she had no idea why he disliked them so much, and that they were a daft thing to get in a tizz about anyway. How often do you come across a bat?
Will couldn’t even enjoy a Batman film, his aversion to the flying rats was so all-consuming. A friend once told him he should go and see a hypnotist. One had helped her quit smoking, maybe she could do something for him too. She’d given Will the hypnotist’s details, but Will had never got around to doing anything with them. He didn’t really believe in that sort of thing. As far as he was concerned, for hypnotism to have any effect you had to actually believe that it would. It was a placebo, and without that faith he’d just be handing a wad of cash to a charlatan.
Will stopped to pull up the zip on his coat while his dog Pepper pissed against a tree. He was strolling through London Square, giving Pepper his final walk of the day before the two of them called it a night. Will enjoyed taking these late night walks with Pepper. The streets were mostly empty, just the two of them roaming around, tiring each other out.
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