Night Terrors: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Hexed Detective Book 3) Read online

  ‘Oh, Ashton! Be careful! Go get your mummy! Ashton, don’t come in here! Don’t!’

  But the boy didn’t listen. He wriggled and squirmed and breathed in hard as he struggled to make it in through the cat flap. Finally, he twisted just right, something in his body cracked, and he slithered in like a snake.

  ‘No, Ashton! Run! Can’t you see the…’

  Joan stopped. Something was wrong with Ashton. She could see it in the way he held himself. Like something else was wearing an Ashton disguise. Something frightening. There was a cracking sound and two rabbit ears forced their way up and out of the child’s skull.

  The boy wandered over to Joan, his gait strange, disjointed. As he reached her, he crouched low on his haunches and looked into her eyes.

  ‘Please don’t, Ashton.’

  The boy stood and made his way over to the cutlery drawer. He pulled it open and retrieved a large carving knife. It looked so large in his tiny hand that it was almost comical.

  The cats shuffled closer to watch.

  ‘Please don’t.’

  Ashton placed a small, cold hand on Joan’s right arm, holding it tight.

  That’s the thing with cat flaps, you see. It helps my cats get out and about, but it lets other things get inside.

  Joan tried to go elsewhere as Ashton and his knife went about their business. She was dancing with Frank the night he asked her to marry him. She was holding Celia for the first time, her eyes so large and full of trusting wonder. She was in that hotel room with her old boss, just that one time, just that one mistake.

  ‘It’s okay, Ashton. It’s okay. Don’t you worry none. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.’

  As her head fell to one side, she saw two men in old-fashioned suits and animal masks watching. They raised their white-gloved hands and began to applaud.

  9

  Formby liked to think he heard all of Blackpool’s stories. All of its secrets. One way or another, anything worth knowing, and a whole lot not worth knowing, found its way into his ears. Sometimes, amongst all the endless babble, one clear story rang out. This was one of those times.

  The story was fear.

  He was waiting in the car park behind the offices that contained, among other things, the psychiatry practice of Alison Parks. Formby knew a lot about Alison Parks. He knew she was forty-five years old and carried more weight than she was happy about. That she had grown up in Burnley, but moved to Blackpool when she was fifteen, when her parents relocated for work. He knew that she had never been married, and had no desire ever to be, although she did wish someone would actually ask her, just so she could turn them down. That way everyone else would know it was her own choice, rather than through a lack of opportunity. He knew she liked eating apples, and hated the taste of butter.

  He knew all of these things and more, as he’d spent quite a bit of time over the years in her company.

  He knew she was a good psychiatrist, and also a very, very bad psychiatrist.

  She was a good psychiatrist because she was excellent at her job. She knew how to listen, how to make people feel heard, how to help them unburden, accept, challenge, move on. Patients would recommend Doctor Parks to their friends.

  She was a very bad psychiatrist because she broke her clients trust once a week in return for a taste of magic.

  Formby looked up as the fire escape door slammed closed, and Alison Parks, in a grey pencil skirt and pink blouse, her dark blonde hair back and pinned into a bun, scurried across the car park and joined him on the wall he was sat upon.

  ‘Morning,’ said the eaves.

  ‘Morning. Absolutely dying for a fag,’ replied Alison, pulling out a pack of cigarettes, lighting one, and placing it between her red-painted lips. ‘Christ, that’s better,’ she said, head tilted back, eyes closed, as smoke seeped lazily from her mouth and nose.

  She was in the grip of more than one vice, Alison. She went through at least one pack of cigarettes a day, often more, depending on how stressed she was. She liked a drink too, usually starting with two large glasses of wine with lunch, and she kept a hip flask in her purse for the occasional pick-me-up nip between clients. More nights than she’d care to admit she would find herself falling asleep in front of the TV, having slipped into an alcohol-assisted stupor.

  Then there were the painkillers. And the gambling, mostly on football. Yeah, Alison Parks had a taste for a lot of things that were bad for her, and magic was just another on the list. One that she happily ignored her hippocratic oath for.

  Formby, as an eaves, liked to gather all the secrets he could, and who hears more secrets than a psychiatrist? It hadn’t taken him long to sniff out Alison Parks and her compulsive bad habits. A free taste or two and she was on the hook. No, it wasn’t entirely ethical on Formby’s part, but since when had an eaves ever worried about ethics?

  Alison Parks had her addictions and he had his: information.

  ‘Have you stories for me?’ he asked.

  Alison opened her eyes and nodded her head eagerly. ‘And have you got a little something-something for me?’

  Eaves used magic for nourishment, and to build impossible mazes to conceal their dens, to keep themselves and their clan safe from reprisals. They do not, as a rule, hand over their hard-earned magic to others, but this was a special case. Alison was so juicy with secrets that it was worth giving away a weekly taste for all that she provided.

  ‘I do,’ replied Formby. ‘Secrets for main course, magic for pudding,’

  Alison licked her lips and began telling him anything and everything she remembered from the sessions since last she’d met Formby.

  She told him of the man who would fish his own poo out of the toilet, seal it into little plastic bags, and then store it in a giant chest freezer in his basement.

  She told him of the woman who was abused by a relative when she was young, and how, now that the relative was dead, she wished she’d been the one to send him to his early grave.

  She told him of the six-year-old girl whose parents had found her more than once holding a pillow over their newborn child.

  Most of all, she told him about the nightmares.

  Over the last week, more and more of her patients had been enduring terrible nightmares, and some of them claimed they had not been asleep when they were experiencing them. That they had been suffering a sort of waking nightmare, their unconscious mind bleeding into their waking hours.

  There was the woman who claimed, after a date, to have seen her dead little sister. Actually, to have seen numerous copies of her dead sister, floating out at sea.

  There was the little boy who believed that a ghost pretending to be his dad, only with a headful of birds, was visiting him at night.

  More and more patients pushing aside their normal litany of worries and fears to talk about nightmares—daymares—and, more often than not, about a pair of men in old dusty suits and tatty animal masks.

  There was a lot to take in, and Formby took it all.

  Rita grabbed a packet of crisps from behind the bar at Big Pins then poured herself an orange juice. Yawning, she shambled her way across the room to the table where Waterson was sat.

  ‘Morning, Waters, still dead?’

  ‘Afternoon, Rita, still an annoying old tart?’

  ‘You know it, brother.’

  Waterson smiled and watched as Rita began her cheese and onion crisp breakfast-slash-lunch. He really, really wanted to taste food again. Taste anything, really. He’d contemplated trying the trick the Angel had made him do. Jumping into living people’s bodies and trying to control them, just so he could pop down to a cafe and gorge on a giant, greasy full English Breakfast, washed down with numerous cups of tea. His sense of right and wrong wouldn’t let him do it though. It didn’t matter that, if it worked, he wouldn’t be hurting the person he briefly inhabited, he was still making them do something against their will. Taking ownership of their body, their life.

  Maybe if he found someone willing to let
him hop inside for a while, though…

  He wondered if he could find someone who might agree to that. Then that would be all fine, right?

  ‘What’s with the face?’ asked Rita, noticing the rumanative expression weighing heavy upon Waterson.

  ‘Just, you know, thinking.’

  ‘Right. It’ll give you wrinkles, that.’

  ‘I think I might be a little past wrinkles, but thanks for the concern.’

  ‘Good point, one of the perks of being dead.’

  ‘Oh, one of many.’

  ‘So what did you get up to last night?’ Rita asked.

  ‘Just a little bit of slowly going insane, wandering the streets on my own for hours, wishing I could go to sleep for even a quick half hour to numb the relentless horror of constant awareness.’

  ‘Oh, nice. As long as you’re keeping yourself busy.’

  Waterson sighed, then laughed, and shook his head.

  ‘The Angel of Blackpool paid me a visit last night,’ said Rita, matter-of-factly.

  ‘What?’ replied Waterson. ‘Is It out? How did It get out of the prison?’

  ‘It didn’t, I don’t think. Not properly. It just came to speak to me in a dream.’

  ‘...Okay.’

  Rita gave Waterson the same middle finger she’d offered up to the Angel.

  ‘Classy,’ said Waterson.

  ‘Look, I dunno how It did it, or how, or, you know, whatever. But It did.’

  ‘Fine. Why then?’

  ‘It wanted me to release Jenner.’

  ‘Well, sure.’ Waterson frowned and sat back, shaking his head. ‘So it just came to you and asked?’

  ‘Yup,’ replied Rita, taking a sip from her orange juice.

  ‘So this bastard, evil Angel just popped into your dream to politely request that you release the crazy person who is in Its control, murdering women, and who, by the way, also murdered me?’

  ‘That’s the long and short of it, yeah. Weird, right?’

  ‘Very weird, yes. Did It think you were just going to say, “Oh, all right then, if you like,” and that would be that?’

  ‘They do say God moves in mysterious ways. Maybe Angels do, too.’

  ‘Most of what you do has always mystified me, and you claim to be part angel, so that sounds about right.’

  Rita laughed and waved at Ben Turner, emerging bleary eyed from the steps that lead down to the basement where he slept. He ignored her.

  ‘What’s up with wolf boy?’ asked Waterson.

  ‘Hey! Don’t call him that.’

  ‘All right, you touchy bitch.’

  The entrance to Big Pins opened and Formby shuffled in.

  ‘It’s like that man has a radar for when people are eating,’ said Rita.

  Formby hustled over and sat at the table, hands fretting, not once attempting to grab any of Rita’s crisps.

  ‘Spill it, Formby,’ said Rita. ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Death. Bad dreams and death.’

  Rita and Waterson looked down at the kitchen floor where Joan Barnett had been found dead. There was blood where the body had been removed, and forensics officers were slowly going about their hunt for clues, unaware of the ghostly man and the hexed woman who had joined them.

  Rita crouched down to get a closer look at a drawing of a pair of rabbit ears that had been finger-painted on a cupboard door in blood.

  ‘It was definitely them,’ she said. ‘Has to be. Can’t be any doubt now.’

  Formby had told them all the things Alison Parks had told him, about her clients bad dreams. The bad dreams that were happening even while they were awake. Of the many sightings of scary men in animal masks. And then he’d told them about this. An elderly woman found dead by her visiting daughter.

  ‘We already knew it was them,’ said Waterson as Rita stood back up.

  ‘We assumed so, but now we know for sure. And this is a step up in their activity. They’ve been scaring people, but now it looks like they’ve moved on to killing, too.’

  She knew Cotton and Spike fed on fear, and when would the fear be sweeter than when a person knew for sure they were dying?

  ‘A lot more people are going to end up dead if we don’t get our arses in gear,’ she said.

  ‘So what do we do now exactly? We’re on the back foot as far as I can see.’

  Rita walked out of Joan’s kitchen, out of her house, wishing she didn’t feel quite so powerless.

  Alison could still feel the magic in her system. The soothing warmth that made her brain gently crackle with pleasure.

  She wished Formby would visit her more than once a week, but he said he didn’t want to give up more than one taste every seven days; that it would be irresponsible. He just wanted to keep all the good shit for himself, that’s what Alison thought. Well maybe she’d find another of the, well, whatever it was he was. There must be more of them. Little, ugly, pointy-eared people with sharp teeth and bad breath. She knew he had a family nearby, or a “clan” as he called it. Just as he’d snaffled up information from her, she’d made sure to coax the odd thing out of him. If he wouldn’t supply the amount of magic she wanted, then she’d find someone in his clan who would.

  ‘You’ve been telling tales on us,’ said a man Alison had not realised had entered her office.

  She sat up, shaking herself out of her thoughts, out of her beautiful, numbing stupor. It was work time. Who was it she was supposed to be seeing next?

  ‘Uh, sorry, away with the fairies there,’ she said, then looked for the first time at the man stretched out on the couch in front of her. He wore an old-fashioned brown suit with a waistcoat and pocket watch, his hands in dirty white gloves resting upon his chest. On his head he wore a decaying rabbit mask.

  ‘My brother and I do not mind, you understand. We are not trying to hide ourselves away from the detective, are we, brother mine?’

  A grunt from behind caused Alison to turn and find a man in an identical outfit, only wearing a hedgehog mask.

  ‘Who are you? What’s going on?’ she said, worry starting to worm its way past the soothing effects of the magic.

  ‘We’re much too strong for her to do anything about, thanks to the effect of our Angel friend, but still. Nobody likes a tattletale, Doctor.’

  The man in the rabbit mask swung his legs around and slowly rose to his feet.

  ‘I said who are you?’ She reached for the phone on her desk but a gloved hand slammed down against hers and pinned it to the desk.

  ‘I believe you know who we are, Doctor. I am Mr. Cotton, and the man causing your wrist some amount of discomfort is my fine, fearsome brother, Mr. Spike.’

  Alison was shaking. ‘No, that’s not… those were just…’

  ‘Your clients’ nightmares? Yes, that is us.’

  It was impossible. Some sort of shared psychosis. It was rare, but it happened; whole communities experiencing the same delusion.

  ‘I’m afraid we must punish you now,’ said Mr. Cotton. ‘Loose lips sink ships, after all.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything!’

  ‘Oh, I’m afraid you said everything, you little piggy. And now, I do believe my brother would like to show you his face.’

  Mr. Cotton gestured to Mr. Spike and bowed. Alison could hear Mr. Spike’s excited breathing as he began to tease off his mask.

  Alison Parks’ next client was a young boy. His name was Liam, and he sat in the waiting room alongside his mum and dad. His parents were worried about their boy’s increasingly strange behaviour, not least of which was a recent incident that involved him going missing in the middle of the night, only for Dad to find him walking home in his pyjamas, barefoot.

  When Alison’s receptionist tried and failed to raise her on the phone, she knocked on the door instead. ‘Hello? Doctor Parks? Your two o’clock is here. Doctor Parks?’

  The receptionist opened the door, Liam and his parents stood just behind her. Inside the office they found Alison Parks, her body splayed out on the fl
oor, eyes wide and terrified, a hair band with rabbit ears atop her head.

  Liam stared at the dead body as the receptionist screamed.

  10

  Reality was a spooked cat trying to wriggle free of Carlisle’s desperate grip and dart off into the bushes.

  ‘Stop squirming,’ said Carlisle, as though the universe would nod its head and settle into his arms for a nap.

  The boy on the beach had been an anchor point, something that Carlisle had been able to latch onto to prevent his form drifting apart, but that did not mean what happened next would be easy.

  He needed an ally. Someone he could trust who could help him escape from Cotton and Spike’s clutches. This presented a few issues. One, Carlisle was not the sort of person who had nurtured warm relationships over his long life. There was, to be blunt, no one with the ability to help him who would do so out of the kindness of their own heart. Why help a fiend like Carlisle twist free of his trap only to put their own ankle in its rusty jaws?

  This forced Carlisle to do something he preferred to avoid wherever possible; to make a promise. A promise to help whoever helped him in whatever manner they pleased. It put him in a weak position, and Carlisle hated to be in a weak position. To be in someone’s debt. Then again, Carlisle also hated being in an about-to-be-very-deceased position, so a promise would be made.

  First things first though. Although the boy had anchored Carlisle to some extent, had stopped his violent spiral towards the mountainside, he was still not practiced in the art of astral travel. He could not walk, or fly, or catch a bus to his desired location. There was a knack to it, to moving from one place to another, and it was a knack that seemed to change with each new attempt.

  Carlisle’s first thought had been Giles L’Merrier, the mighty wizard and master of the dark arts, who currently lurked within his antiques shop in Soho, London. But chances were that L’Merrier would not lift a finger to help him, even if he offered up a thousand promises. L’Merrier was the very definition of mercurial, and was as likely to delight in Carlisle’s comeuppance as he was to assist his release. Carlisle was glad that his actual stomach was elsewhere, otherwise it would be clenching painfully as he pictured the smug look spreading across L’Merrier’s face as he told him of his situation.