“Lady,” it said, stepping out from the dark and blocking my progress. But it turned out to be a he, huge at six seven, but there the similarity with a human male ended. A corpse candle up to no good fizzed past his face and circled him as though for my benefit. His skin was a rich moss green and two sharp, jutting horns rose from either side of his head, their base lost in the thick tangled matt of dark hair which hung down to his chest. Long legs covered in shaggy hair ended in hooves, but for all that the face was human, finely boned even, with a full red mouth that looked faintly obscene especially when it smiled as it was doing now. The chest and arms were recognisably human too: muscled and curiously hairless as though to suggest vulnerability when I knew there was none worth the name.

A ripe, animal stench reached my nostrils and I fought not to gag. He smiled wider at that, showing wickedly sharp incisors that could crack an elephant’s thigh bone all so he could suck the marrow.

More corpse candles appeared circling us in a bobbing, weaving ring of purple light and I could believe the old stories where they led unwary travellers to their death. Their beauty made the thing in front of me all the more perverse and the fear crackled along the length of my spine, forcing the hairs on the back of my neck to attention.

“How do you like your final resting place,” he said indicating Arthur Seat and Holyrood Park with a sweep of his arm.

And then he lunged.

It had lived in the cupboard for as long it could remember although it did not know quite how long that was. Given that happened to be a few centuries and then some change, a spot of forgetfulness was not perhaps surprising. What was odd however, was how the little bodach had managed to survive for so long in such a hostile environment because the cupboard was situated in the infamous Marchmont tenement, 17 Arden Street. Infamous of course only in certain circles, those you might say that were in the know. Sadly that knowledge did not extend to the poor chumps who bought the place and then fled, selling it hurriedly for a knock-down price low enough to attract the next batch of poor, unsuspecting chumps. And on and on it went.

Night time was the worst, because that was when they came out, slithering round the walls, across the ceiling and over the few items of furniture that remained. It shivered at the memory, knowing darkness was not far off and pressed itself tighter against the wall. It was hiding on the top shelf, behind the rusting tins of carnation milk to be exact. It had not always been this way, but the bodach could not remember exactly when it had changed.

It had moved into this tenement flat not long after they had been built in the 1800s and it had faithfully looked after the place and people in it, even when they had forgotten to leave little tokens of their appreciation in return for such service. But people did not recall the old ways and the bodach had been weakened by the fact. He, for it was a he, was almost translucent now and his fiery nature had been dampened by age and neglect. He had tried hard to protect the humans, but he had been beaten steadily back until this cramped, damp little space had become his only refuge and now his whole world.

But last night during the few minutes of fitful sleep he had managed to snatch in between fearfully waiting for them to discover the only living creature left in the flat, he had had an idea.

A scary, awful idea perhaps, but tonight he was going to carry it out or die in the attempt.

And then they appeared.

Perhaps not all of them, but more than enough to be going on with. Whatever ward had been holding them back from their old haunts, so to speak, it had broken like an expectant mother’s waters. A pale female ghost, Victorian maid’s outfit emphasising a pregnant belly ascended to the ceiling in front of me as though climbing stairs, which perhaps is where they had been originally before the character and heart had been ripped out of the place. She was crying soundlessly and carrying a knitting needle raised in front of her as though about to use it as a weapon echoing some fraught drama that had taken place in this abominable old house.

A young man with a sad-eyed terrier under his arm prepared to tie a noose round neck as he stepped up on a chair that was no longer there and jumped off, neck lolling at an impossible angle. In the corner, a little girl in t-shirt that she had pulled down around her knees rocked back and forth, arm extended as though warding off blows from someone or something unseen. A middle aged woman raised a walking cane high into the air again and again, bringing it down on the supine body of old man in a wheelchair who was laughing, toothless maw wide open, shoulders heaving.

There were too many of them to count and they were all silent as the grave. A milling, mindless, soundless throng unable to utter so much as a word or scream, or connect in any way with this world. The truly disturbing thing about these ghosts was that they had either met violent ends or had dealt them out. Most ghosts did something random, like walking a particular path over and over again; or performing the same innocuous actions. Not these little vignettes of hell on earth. The spell, if it was such, had been broken and I needed to get out of there. Hopefully they were attached to the house and couldn’t come after me.

Only one way to find out.

As my old mother might have said, if I’d ever met her, “It’ll end in tears” and of course it usually did, along with a rain of other less disposable bodily fluids.

My high spirits may have had something to do with the fact that Ruby and Rory were giving me a lift to a job in Gracemount, a small but perfectly formed carbuncle on Edinburgh’s backside. Scratch it and you’d find it was only just within the city limits, but from what I’d heard, no other type applied.

“Hey Rose,” said Rory from the back of the car, “Must be great being such a Hell-spawn magnet. You must feel like the only booze at a Jakey street party every single day of your life.”

Glad of the distraction, I looked round at him sprawled over the back seat: eyes wide, mouth a cavernous o of horrified delight as though he had miraculously birthed a priceless pearl and wasn’t sure whether to get out the champagne or pay an urgent visit to the nearest Arse Emergency Department. My snappy come-back was a swine-like snort, triggering a vicious left hook somewhere behind the eyeballs – courtesy of the demon drink that had exorcised me good and proper last night. But that was okay, I was more than ready for a return bout tonight and then we’d see who was boss.

“Well at least that means someone loves her,” said Ruby wearily, having been dumped yet again the night before. She sighed and got back to concentrating on driving us out to the back of beyond and brooding over her latest rejection by a man almost twice as old as her, but with half her IQ: the most recent in a long, faecal string of serial shits.

Collectively, Ruby, Rory and I were the Fox-Garnet Agency, providing psychic services for the supernaturally challenged. What that really meant was we were mostly the clear up crew; psychic bin men for all manner of paranormal rubbish that no one else in their right minds would touch with top-of-the-line Haz Mat suits and a toxic waste facility the size of Brazil. Ruby and Rory were twins and the Fox part of the equation, I was the Garnet and business was out of this world.

Unbelievable as it was, there were people who touted Edinburgh’s toxic cess pit of a supernatural freak-fest to those foolish enough to dangle their nethers into it. And dangle they did, as though it was just another item on your ‘Scottish Holiday To Do List’, up alongside eating the contents of a live sheep’s stomach while being forced at gun point to listen to “Now That’s What I Call Bagpipes!” on a loop.

Given the unprecedented demand, the three of us had little choice but to go into business together because separately we just had too varied a work load and at least this way we could mostly pick the jobs best suited to our individual talents. The city was such a psychic hot spot, that if vengeful spirits and ancient grudges from beyond the grave were Olympic events, it would be prime contender for pure, spun gold. But make no mistake, the Fox-Garnet Agency got more than its share of the medals.

I had always thought that the secret to the city’s spirit-ridden success was because it had been built on seven hills; a volcanic plug spewed up as a dyspeptic offering from the belly of a bilious god, providing a vantage point more lofty than impregnable so the inhabitants got to see death coming. Instead of finding somewhere more amenable to sustaining their miserable lives, they focussed instead on the problem of how to make things worse. And they succeeded spectacularly. Edinburgh gave birth to the first slum high rises in the world ringed around by city walls just to make sure they built up instead of out. After all, no one loves a fat baby. Sheol was piled upon Gehenna as one hovel was built upon the next with the spaces in between serving as open sewers. These triumphs of human ingenuity were built so close to their neighbours, a flea couldn’t have passed in between them, but clearly some managed because the human population caught every plague and disease that fancied its chances. Whole streets were bricked up to try to contain the amorous attentions of whatever microbe that came courting. In this particular final solution, those who were about to die couldn’t even get a last hearty meal, never mind the space to salute.

And still they built up and up and up as though trying to clear the stench of the sewers from their nostrils or perhaps to get closer to a god that didn’t believe in them any more. When they had gone as high as they could go, banishing the light from the sky, they gouged at the soft sandstone ridge the godforsaken city sat precariously atop and burrowed downwards. Lo and behold, Hell on earth, above and below. The crush of the souls who had lived and died in what became a multi layered underground necropolis was like an albatross around the neck of anyone with the slightest sensitivity to such things. The weight of the world indeed.

But hey, why sweat the details of how we had come to this, because the proud proprietors of the Fox-Garnet Agency had never had it so good. So good in fact we were able to specialise. Ruby tended to do the clairvoyant work; Rory’s talents lay in exorcism and mine, well mine was communicating with the dead, but in truth all three overlapped. I was just glad that we were able to do something approaching constructive with the so-called ‘gift’. In ye olden days the church wouldn’t have rested until they had hunted us all down. And not just because they wanted to give us the usual full body massage, French-kiss and lingering pat on the backside.

But communicating with the dead was only one strand of what I did, what I was very, very good at and was yet another euphemism concealing something far worse. I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t train to do it and at times I wondered whether I was going to survive it. I often thought that any other profession would have been better than this purgatory; you name it, it would have been a step up: traffic warden; sewer rat; maybe even social worker. I must confess here and now that the sad fact of the matter was that my speciality wasn’t. While it was true I could communicate with the dead, what made me unusual was that I had the sorry ability to kill them.