Urban Occult Read online

Terry moved forward, stopping short of the man in the chair, staying out of range.

  “I don’t like this, Terry.”

  He ignored Eddie and carried on speaking to the prisoner. “What are you talking about? This wasn’t meant to happen. You’re complicating things.”

  “I was upstairs. There’s another child up there—a little girl, this time. I was preparing her. That’s where this blood came from.” He glanced down at his flabby torso, then back up again, and stared into Eddie’s eyes while he continued to speak to Terry. “She screamed a little, cried a lot, until I cut out her tongue. Then she just moaned.”

  Terry stalked over to the other chair, bent down, and picked up his gun. When he stood upright again his face was mottled and sweaty. “What the fuck are you saying? It wasn’t supposed to go down this way… not like this.”

  “She’s up there now,” said Hastings, standing. He was off balance so he swayed as he gained his feet, but he didn’t fall over. His hands were still tied behind him; his toes were still lashed together with the plastic ties. “She’s still alive… just.”

  “You fucking bastard,” said Terry.

  Eddie turned towards Terry, tried to shout out a warning to calm him down, but it was too late. Terry pulled the trigger. The gun popped. By the time he looked back at Hastings, he was already falling to the floor, the right side of his head above the ear gone, and blood spurting in a parabola. He slumped to the ground awkwardly. The sound he made as he landed was louder than the gunshot.

  “We have to go.” Eddie ran across the room and grabbed Terry by the forearms. “We have to go now.”

  “No,” said Terry, not looking at him. “I’m going upstairs to get the girl.”

  “There’s something going on, man. He had all this planned, I know it. I can feel it. None of this is right.”

  Terry slowly turned his face towards him. “What, are you fucking psychic now? You buy into all this black magic bullshit?”

  Eddie shook his head. He didn’t know what to say, what to do. He wasn’t convinced by any of it—not Hastings, not Terry, not even the supposed victim upstairs.

  “It’s your choice. You can leave and go back to your flat on that shit-hole estate or you can stay and help me. But I’m not leaving another kid behind in this house.” Terry broke away from his grip and walked out of the door.

  Eddie paused for a moment, and then followed.

  He tried to step lightly on the stairs but the boards creaked each time he lowered a foot. The wallpaper had been stripped from the staircase walls and signs and symbols had been painted there. It looked like they’d been applied in blood. Terry didn’t even notice the décor; he just kept staring dead ahead as he climbed towards the first floor landing.

  They reached the landing and turned right. It was obvious which room Hastings had been using because candlelight flickered from the open doorway, making the walls shimmer.

  “This way-just watch my back.” Terry moved slowly towards the open door. The doors he passed on either side were all closed. There was blood or ash smeared on the handles—it was too dark to see which.

  Eddie kept moving. He didn’t want to move, but he had no choice, not really. If he left Terry behind, and didn’t help the girl, then he’d have to live with his actions for the rest of his life. He wasn’t sure if he had it in him to be a hired killer; this job was meant to be his proving ground. But he damn well knew that he didn’t want to be responsible for the death of a child.

  “What did you mean down there?”

  “What are you on about?” Terry kept looking ahead of them, along the landing.

  “When you said it wasn’t meant to be like this… what did you mean?”

  Terry stopped. “I like things simple. No complications. No mutilated kids upstairs. All I was meant to do was bring along the virgin.”

  “What—”

  The door on the left opened before Eddie even had a chance to question the statement, or to cry out a warning. The door was tugged violently inwards, slammed against the wall. The bulky figure with the pillowcase over its face and the torn paper crown hanging askew on its head slammed into Terry’s side. Momentum forced him across the hallway and charging into another door, which buckled inwards. This second door slammed shut. Silence. Then the first door inched slowly towards the frame, the lock clicking softly into place.

  Eddie stood there clutching his gun. He was caught between turning around and leaving the house and moving forward, towards the flickering open doorway. There was certainly no point going after Terry. That would be inviting whatever had grabbed him to strike again.

  The door through which Terry and the figure had vanished rattled in its frame. Eddie heard muffled screaming, and then sobbing sounds, from the other side. Then nothing, just the sound of his own panicked breathing and a gentle pulsing in his ears.

  “I’m coming,” Eddie whispered. “I’m coming for you.” He didn’t know who he was speaking to, the girl or the faceless figure who had taken Terry.

  Slowly, he moved forward, making his way towards the room in which he hoped to find the girl. The candlelight flickered, making shapes on the crudely painted walls. His feet thumped too heavily against the floorboards.

  When he reached the doorway he paused before entering, thinking of what they’d come here to do. He’d been trying to prove himself, to make his way in this world of criminals and darkness, but all he had really done was found a depthless darkness deep inside himself. One from which he would do anything to escape.

  He heard a mumbling from inside the room. The girl. She was in there. She was waiting to be saved.

  He stepped inside.

  She was sitting with her broad, naked back to the door, enclosed by a circle of black candles. The bare floorboards were painted in symbols very much like the ones he’d seen elsewhere inside the house. A white five-sided star had been drawn in chalk on the floor inside the candlelit perimeter, and the girl was sitting at its centre. Her shoulders were hunched; her body was shaking. Her outline was unstable because of the meagre, flickering light, but she looked strange, perhaps even deformed. She was crying. He guessed that the only reason he couldn’t hear her was because that bastard Hastings has severed her tongue.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, creeping slowly across the floor. “I’m here… I’ve come to help you.” And it was true: he had come here for that. He realised now that this was his real reason for being here, in this house of horrors. He was meant to save the little girl; it was his fate, his purpose in life. As long as she was safe, he would be saved…

  He stopped when he was outside the circle of candles. Tentatively, he kicked a couple of them over. For some reason he didn’t want to step over them. The flames went out. He breached the circle, stepping across the white chalk lines and approaching the girl, who now sat in shadow. She still hadn’t acknowledged his presence. Perhaps she couldn’t hear… maybe Hastings had also deafened her as part of his ritual, taking away her senses in preparation for whatever sacrifice she was meant to be part of.

  “Hush now… it’s okay. Eddie’s here. Everything’s all right.”

  Slowly, he reached out to touch her shoulder. He didn’t want to scare her; all he wanted to do was make her aware that he was here, that she was safe, that she could go home to her parents or whoever else loved her.

  Eddie heard the door slam shut behind him but it was too late to pull back his hand. It was already drifting down onto her shoulder, the fingers curling to exert the slightest pressure. He saw the folded tip of the paper crown as she tilted her head to the side. At first he hadn’t noticed that she was wearing a pillowcase over her face because of the poor light and the fact that her head was hanging so low between her too-broad shoulders.

  He thought about his lonely little flat back on the estate, and all the girls he’d never held, never kissed. Inside his head, things started to slot together. Terry’s last words now made some kind of terrible sense:

  All I was meant to do was b
ring along the virgin.

  And as the girl who wasn’t a girl, not really, began to turn around, her meaty arms held high, her large hands curving into claws, and her body swelling to proportions that matched those of the man who had been killed downstairs, Eddie suddenly realised that he had been the vital cog in this ritual along. That he’d been expected here tonight, and he was never meant to get out of this place alive.

  He closed his eyes. Then the darkness filled him.

  The End

  Spider Daughter Spider

  Jennifer Williams

  After they’d gone, Alan sat at the kitchen table and looked at all the things and spaces they had left behind. Resting on the tablecloth in front of him was Katie’s plastic cereal bowl, the one with a pattern of blue and yellow balloons around the rim. Milk and a few swollen flakes of cereal still clung to the bottom. A spoon lay next to it, discarded. On the worktop was the ominous space where Pamela kept all her cookery books, the ones she flicked through every day; they still bristled with the colourful sticky notes she used to make her own adjustments to the recipes. They were her pride and joy; a work in progress, and she’d slung them all in a knapsack when she’d left, her movements jerky with anger. Now there was just a space on the counter.

  All around the house, he knew, there would be similar such spaces. The side of the wardrobe that was Pamela’s would be empty, the miniature mountain range of cosmetics that covered the dressing table would have been swept away, and her favourite trashy books missing from the bedside table. Worse still would be the terrible quiet in his daughter’s room. Katie’s favourite toys and best clothes would all be gone. Pika the hamster, like Alan, had been left behind in its neat little cage, largely because Pamela had always hated the rodent. Alan wondered whether she’d hated him or the hamster the most. Silly question, really.

  It had been a mess. Less a break-up than a shattering, the fractures spread with every shouted word and angry look. It was over. She wasn’t coming back. Worse than that, Pamela had no intention of giving him access to Katie, and since she had gone to move back in with her parents, any negotiating would have to be done in the face of Pamela’s father, an ex-army man with a thick neck and no love for Alan at all.

  Alan fell into a dark despair. He signed himself off sick from work and sat indoors all day and all night, moving sluggishly from the living room to the bathroom to the kitchen and back again, never even bothering to go to bed where Pamela’s space on the mattress would be waiting to greet him. Alan spent his time drinking and flicking listlessly between TV channels. Thanks to the internet, he didn’t have to go outside at all; he ordered his groceries online and had them delivered to the front door. If he was feeling like he cared at all he put on a fresh jumper to great the delivery man, but from the vague look of distaste on the face of the driver it was clear he wasn’t fooling anyone. He did continue to dump food into Pika the hamster’s cage, more out of loyalty to his daughter than any actual interest in the animal. It would poke its nose out of the little plastic house now and then, but that was the most he saw of it.

  It was Katie he missed most of all. He’d never been much of a dad, letting Pamela take care of most of the changing and bathing and feeding, but he missed Katie’s garbled little nonsense conversations about fruit and the garden or her school friends, and he missed the sudden fierce hugs she would habitually give, digging her tiny fingers into his skinny frame like she was worried he would float away. The weight of her sitting on his lap, just looking at the pictures in a book and chattering to herself—sometimes he thought that was what he missed about her most of all; the weight of her presence in a room.

  A few weeks after they’d gone, Alan found that he wanted some fresh air. Still unwilling to show his face in public, he shuffled around the back-garden, trying not to look too closely at the brightly coloured plastic toys half hidden in the overgrown lawn. It had been raining heavily the night before and a newspaper had blown over the fence. It was lying in a sodden puddle by the greenhouse. Grimacing, he bent to pick it up and found that it had turned all to pulp, squishing wetly through his grasping fingers.

  Alan stood up and looked at it for a while. It was cold and the wind tugged at what hair remained on his scalp, but he didn’t move for a long time. Beyond his backyard he could hear the mild thrum of afternoon traffic, but otherwise all was quiet. Everyone could have just vanished, he thought, and I would never know. Eventually he bent and scooped the newspaper pulp up into his hands as best he could and carried it indoors.

  He put it in the middle of the kitchen table, and wiped his hands on a tea towel. The newspaper had been a broadsheet, one of those huge, unwieldy publications that are awkward to read and annoying to everyone else on the Tube. The amount of mush created by the rain was considerable. Without thinking too closely about what he was doing, he went to Pamela’s little store cupboard where she kept all her arts and crafts materials. She was always making stuff. If it wasn’t breakfasts, lunches and dinners, it was greetings cards, knitted toys, and animals made from clay. Alan wondered how she was getting on living with her mother, who would insist on making all the meals.

  “I bet she’s bloody hating it,” said Alan, smiling.

  There were two packs of unused clay in the cupboard. It was chalky white stuff in a foil packet that you had to add water to in order to make it malleable. Alan peeled open the packets and dumped the clay in with the newspaper pulp. After that he toured the house, picking up ash trays wherever he went. The contents of those went on the kitchen table too, cigarette butts and ash adding a sour, scratchy aroma to the mess.

  Next, Alan started on the bins.

  He felt far away, as though his mind were tethered to a balloon that floated some distance from his body. His mind watched as his body rooted through the bins, looking for anything mushy or soft. There were old noodles from a takeaway, partially dried-out teabags, an egg box that had sat at the bottom of the bin and absorbed all kinds of suspicious liquids until it had gone squishy. All these things he moved to the kitchen table, which soon sported a small mountain of dire-smelling materials.

  It was early evening by that time, and outside the grey sky had blackened at the edges.

  “There’s something else.”

  When he realised what it was Alan hissed through his teeth in frustration. There was plenty of that, of course there was.

  He went out the backdoor and returned a few minutes later with a shovelful of dirt. Rich and peaty, it was the only clean smell in the house. He dumped it on the table with the rest, and set to work.

  Alan couldn’t have said at what point he knew what he was making. At first there was just the queer joy of moving the materials through his fingers, feeling the way they changed and responded to his urgings. He pushed them together, forming clumps, and then a large mass with smaller clumps attached to it. The muck and the earth and the pulp and the ashes, the food and the teabags and the dirt moved together in ways that strictly speaking it shouldn’t have, until it all became like clay in his hands. Eventually a little shape began to form on the table, a small figure perhaps three or four feet long. There was a torso with arms and legs branching off, and a head with gouged holes for eyes. At the ends of its limbs were approximations of hands and feet. Little ones. Katie was small for her age, after all.

  By the time he finished it was the early hours of the morning, and his hands and forearms were encrusted with filth. Alan stood looking at the little shape on the table unsteadily, feeling his mind float higher and higher, until he wondered if it might just float away.

  For a time he left the kitchen and wandered the house. He’d made something. Something to fill up the space. But what was it?

  Katie’s room was mostly how she had left it. The covers on her little bed were rucked up from the evenings Alan would spend there, sometimes crying, sometimes staring into space. Her posters of fairies and princesses grinned out at him from the walls, and he thought that these days he couldn’t tell them apart from
the wicked witches.

  As he watched, a tiny dark shape scurried across the face of one of them, so that Snow White looked as though she were dropping him a sly wink, but it was only a spider, some refugee from the rose bushes in the back garden. With lightning reflexes he didn’t know he possessed, Alan scooped the spider up into his closed fist, holding the creature carefully so it didn’t get squashed. Legs the thickness of hairs tickled at his palm.

  “Gotcha,” he said. Deep inside his head, new doors were opening.

  Shadows gathered around the small figure on the table, like pools of dark treacle leaking from its uncertain body. Its surface was sticky, brown and grey, with the occasional smudge of newsprint showing through. As it dried, it started to turn shiny too. Alan supposed that was strange, but he decided not to think about it too closely. Using his fingers he poked a narrow but deep hole into the main bulk of the shape (or the torso, as he was beginning to think of it) and then opened his fist above it, gently tipping the spider down into the recess. The creature immediately tried to scramble back out again but Alan smooshed the edges of the hole together, sealing the spider within its tomb. The materials he’d used shouldn’t have held together so well, but when he was done, he could hardly tell there’d been a hole there at all.

  Once this was completed, it was as if a light switched off within him. The weight of sleep pressed heavily against his eyelids and Alan found he could barely stand upright. With the filth of that night’s work still covering his hands and shirt, he went straight to his own bed and fell gladly into a dreamless sleep.

  When he came down the next day, he stood in the kitchen regarding the figure on the table warily. In the cold morning light the thing looked even more improbable, like a cherub made of garbage. The time sitting out in the night air seemed to have solidified it, forming a shiny carapace over the slim chest and slightly bulbous head. The thing looked so complete and of itself that when it sat up and looked round at him, he almost forgot to be surprised.