I hauled the body over my shoulder again in a fireman’s lift, made trickier by the fact that it was encased in slippery plastic, and hoped that some of the more fluid contents of the bag didn’t leak over me. It was just shy of eight but I rarely had to worry about bumping into anyone. The only signs of the alcoholic downstairs were his nightly snore-fests, audible I would have thought to the entire block. The neighbours across the way, a posse of young men who rarely made their presence heard rather than felt before the wee small hours. As a nocturnal beast myself, that was something I could respect. I don’t think I’d seen or heard of any of the other folk with whom I shared this bower of bliss.

But normal service it seemed had been interrupted, because just as I opened my front door, a young man with long, golden dreads and a nose ring strode onto the landing about to descend the stairs when he spotted me.

“Oh, hi,” he grinned, with an Aussie accent you could cut with a knife and still have enough to balance the drinks on. “You must be our neighbour. Good to meet you. Here, let me help you with that. I’m not taking no for an answer,” he said taking the body as well, before I could tell him where to put his offer. He was tall and well built but even so I could see it cost him no little effort. Just for a second the Cheshire cat smile faltered as the big lunk realised just what I’d been hefting until machismo reasserted itself and he made his way stiffly down the stairs, trying to pretend it was no big deal.

This was definitely not part of the plan and if I could have ripped his innards out and hung them around his neck for decoration I would have.

“What have you got in here,” he said winking, “A body, by any chance?”

This was why predators like me could live in the heart of the city numbering a half million other souls whose lives intersected on a daily basis but didn’t actually connect. City folk were so wrapped up in their own lives it was highly unlikely they’d recognise a body wrapped in bin bags if they were forced to carry it down three flights of steep stairs. It simply wouldn’t have occurred to them. Each and every one cocooned in private worlds constructed with the help of ipods, the daily paper, fantasy conversations where they told there bosses exactly where to stick it, plans for the dinner that night, all necessary props cushioning them from the smother of humanity around them.

Ask Fred West’s former neighbours. Ask the numerous lodgers that had flowed through the house like water over the years. How many saw him burying the evidence in the back garden, heard him torturing young girls in the basement of the house they all shared? When they asked him if the family was getting under his feet, they had no idea that they were right on the money. The fact is you don’t know who or what you’re living next to. Hallelujah and praise the Lord I don’t believe in.

“Name’s Roy,” he said. Maybe he was from New Zealand, I could never tell.

“I’m Rose and I can manage just fine, thanks anyway. And yes, it is a body.”

“Was it an old boyfriend refusing to take the hint,” he sniggered, reaching the first floor with a hand clamped in a death grip on the handrail with me stalking behind him in two minds whether to body snatch and run.

“Don’t be daft,” I gabbled. “It was actually a nosy neighbour who wouldn’t stop bothering me. I keep my exes in jars in the living room like everyone else. Together forever as Rick Astley used to sing. Haven’t heard from him in while mind you. Maybe he’s in a jar on someone’s mantel.”

He stopped short and made the effort to turn and look at me for a moment. Long enough for me to notice some gaffer tape had come loose and a shrivelled finger poked out like a mummified worm. A dark liquid had dribbled down Roy’s vomit green chunky knit pullover. Maybe he hadn’t heard of Rick Astley.

“Sense of humour as well as sensational looks. You know you must be tired, because you’ve been running through my mind since I met you all of two minutes ago,” he said turning to give me another wink….

The club was packed with hundreds of people and the Damned’s Love Song took over from the tender mercies of Placebo. I relaxed slightly finishing my drink in one long swallow. I was standing on the edge of the dance-floor which was flooded with Goths in tight, black clothes with hair combed to the sky as McDiarmid would no doubt have had it. The effects of the alcohol, music I knew and trusted and the presence of so many people anaesthetised me further, taking me back to the times I used to come here looking for my idea of a good time.

I made for the door in search of the toilet. It was bound to be in the same place and so I took the spiral stair down two flights and walked along a darkened corridor to the end and turned left. A chill not altogether natural chill raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Something was slithering along the ceiling behind me, but every time I looked around the noise stopped and couldn’t see anything. For a moment I thought I’d made a mistake and either come down the wrong stairs or they’d moved the toilet.

Then just as I was about to turn round and retrace my steps, the unmistakeable depiction of the female form appeared on a dark green door to my left. It opened with a loud screech to darkness and a damp, dank smell of old mould and urine. Fumbling with my hand on the wall, searching for the switch I cut myself on something sharp and swore loudly. The place was hushed as though a silent unseen crowd was monitoring my every move fascinated about what I was going to do next. Well, in a toilet there really wasn’t that much mystery.

I finally found the switch and wished I’d gone about my business in the dark. Even with my glasses on, the fuzzed edges of the walls and door spoke of a heavy emotional detritus left behind by the pain and suffering of the living. I knew that I’d see those familiar vermilion shades were I to take them off and so didn’t bother.

The drip of an old fashioned tap was the only sound and I set about finding the cleanest cubicle. The floor was littered with toilet roll and used tampon wrappers and the stench was beginning to make my gorge rise into my throat. It hadn’t been like this in the old days. But then it wasn’t surprising that no one wanted to clean it given what had happened down here. A dark streak of misery in the corner was in all probability all that remained of one or more of the victims, more emotion than actual ghost.

I pulled down my trousers and was about to get on with it when the door was kicked open. A blur of motion and then I was hauled to my feet by a hand around my throat with a knife pressed against it hard enough to draw blood. A cloth mask with cross stitches where the eye holes should have been covered the face but couldn’t disguise the heavy breathing or the obvious excitement of my attacker. Irrationally it made me remember the little ghosts at the St Birds pad until the fact that I was in a fight for my life managed to percolate through my thick skull.

I started to choke, hands clawing at the one that held my throat in a blind instinctual fight for survival. But The Man With The Cross-Stitched Eyes wasn’t going to take no for an answer….

But that night something made me opt for Salisbury Crags, Arthur Seat’s neglected offspring, alone but for the wind tangling my hair and the scent of damp earth. Something niggled at the back at of my mind, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I had reached the Radical Road that curved around the Crags like an old scar in reptilian skin. Although the Crags were only about one hundred and fifty feet high, tell that to the poor souls who had been given the push by so-called loved ones, plunging to painful, splattering death at the bottom. My way was lit by the mauve phosphorescence of corpse candles, behind and below me the rust coloured glow of city lights, like old blood or something long dead.

As though to contradict me, a breeze carrying with it the scent of spring and the promise of another sullen east coast summer ruffled over my skin. My menagerie had gone on ahead, and a series of stimulating images of a biker gang who had come here for drugs washed down with some relaxing S and M action told me they were hot on the trail. I stopped for a moment all the better to savour what I had been sent. Even from these pictures, the weight of the gang’s murderous past and present hung around them in shreds of darkness like Jacob Marley’s chains except theirs was not one that could be unforged by some paltry good deeds after the fact. The huge and bloated elementals that had attached themselves to each and every gang member were testimony to that.

The dim glamour of the resulting darkness signalled their presence to me and mine like a beacon. But tonight there was something else hunting in the Park of the Holy Rood, something infinitely worse than a dozen Hell’s Angels painting the city blood red.

The corpse-candles were still with me buzzing around my head and wouldn’t shift when I tried to swat them. Whatever was out there would be getting a great heads up with my whereabouts all thanks to these little bastards. I remembered the old tales about them, that they lead unwary travellers to their deaths in peat bogs and over the edges of cliffs. The wind had turned chill and bitter and I focussed as hard as I could to find my monsters.

The thrum of the life force flowing through the Park, Arthur’s Seat and the Crags was intoxicating enough that I almost didn’t care that my links with the menagerie had been severed. If I could have stood there propped against the rock feeling the elemental magic surge through me for ever that wouldn’t have been a bad way to spend eternity.

And then a body was hurled from the top of the crags, landing with a bone-shattering thud not ten feet from where I stood and for the second time that night another connection was broken.

It was swiftly followed by an enormous mass I couldn’t make out although both were locked in a fight to the death the ripping of skin audible even above the frenzied snarling and snapping. The second arrival was a creature of smoke and darkness swirling in upon itself and yet at the core, a scarlet light burned as though whatever it was had caught fire. The unmistakable sickly sweet smell assailed the night and my nostrils. Demon. A huge horned head whipped round to look at me through gold-slitted eyes and I could see a skin forming all over its body as though it was being born before my eyes. The skin was blackened, blistered as though burned in a fire, with ridges and whorls of a darker matter like ulcerous growths. It was the sheer size of the thing however: in excess of fifteen feet high, golden eyes glowing through the billowing smoke it gave off as though being consumed by black flames.

It roared, vast red maw lined with gigantic mismatched teeth that overlapped, some even protruded through the demon’s own flesh and gouts of what passed for its blood ran down into the scarred and pitted chest the size of a barn. The first arrival was tiny by comparison, the skin dark green, two horns atop the shaggy head and a disturbingly finely boned human face. Hands tipped with dagger-like claws and hooves for feet made it seem as though the god Pan come to life. Except this creature didn’t have much life left, with its slit belly and one hand clasped across it trying to keep the contents from spooling out onto the dirt road.

The roar of the demon wasn’t a respite because something was happening deep in its core: a shuddering, tearing, volcanic eruption as though it was being torn apart from the inside. But that wasn’t it either. That would have been lucky and whatever else tonight was, good fortune had no part in it.

But no one the told the green man. He mustered what final strength he had to roll clear and prepare for a final pointless assault on the demon. He didn’t have the power to get up and face his enemy so he beckoned it closer with a contemptuous flick of his hand, dark with his own blood. Most people, creatures, animals would at least try to make a run for it, even if the attempt was doomed. I don’t think the demon noticed because it was too busy giving birth to something right before my very eyes. The green man snarled in response and tried to lever himself upright, not managing because of the grievousness of the mortal wound in his belly.

“You shall not pass,” he growled.

Cliches even in extremis – you had to admire it. But life, somehow, was like that: significant events for which there were only borrowed words and hackneyed phrases.

I had no great urge to get involved in what was someone else’s beef and turned to leave before I found out just what the newborn looked like. The stench and heat became overpowering and I turned my head back in time to see an second horned head tearing itself free from the first, a process that appeared to be causing it no little effort. Flesh and bone parted with a series of ear-splitting cracks accompanied by another long drawn out bellow and then there were two, identical down to the last detail. I had no doubt that they’d soon they’d be rampaging round the city, the soft human population falling before them like skittles.

As for me, I had more immediate things to attend to.

It was only when the third head appeared announced by the now familiar crack that I realised with a bitter, sinking heart that that wasn’t true. The bastard was now splitting into three and who knew how many more. A city always had its share of devils, demons and other things that thrived in its dark places, but a creature that could reproduce itself to this extent was not something the delicate equilibrium between human and non could support. The question was: who had called it? Following hot on the heels of who was why.

The demons had turned the combined weight of their attention to the green man, so there were to be no more of their brethren at least for now. A giant head with curling, ram-like horns swayed closer to the green man who flicked his head aside in a vain attempt to avoid the eyes. With my own sunglasses firmly in place I strode towards the devil and the deep green man, ready but not willing. I a threw curse stone that had been forged in Roman times at one of the unholy trinity and it thunked it straight between the eyes. I’d bought it on the black market and had known only two things about it: people had died to make it a potent protection; and that it was priceless.

Well it was demon bait now. I just hoped it was worth the sacrifice.

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

I was sitting in the living room of a terraced house opposite Bill and Bella McKinstry, their two kids Montel and Imani running around hyper and hysterical, which from the non-reaction of their elders appeared to be the default position. Bill and Bella sounded like a comedy duo, but nothing could have been less amusing than this god-forsaken set-up.

The room itself was rectangular with two sets of windows facing the front and back gardens. Seventies décor reigned supreme complete with mustard brown swirly carpet and stone fireplace in front of which an electric fire squatted like an enormous toad. Through the window, over Alec’s shoulder, darkness routed the day and the sodium lights began their thankless vigil even though it wasn’t 4pm yet.

Bella heaved herself off the fake leather sofa muttering about putting some lights on, although that didn’t turn out to be an improvement. The kids had drawn on the walls over the peeling, yellowing woodchip and there was a mound of dirty washing spilling out of the adjoining kitchen to within inches of my feet. Bill was small, thin and wizened, dark eyes looking out soulfully from beneath a base ball cap onto a world that hadn’t been kind to him in the past and wasn’t expected to change anytime soon. He was chain-smoking roll-ups and a small graveyard of the butts lay in the large glass ashtray bearing the legend “World’s Best Dad.” She by contrast was large, blond and anxious, wearing a dirty pink shell suit, small mouth set in a permanent sneer of disgusted disbelief as though that was the only expression she had had any use for and couldn’t remember the rest. I couldn’t decide what age they were: it could have been over forty or under twenty. Poverty and nae luck tended to do that to a person.

I was about to find out how far their run of bad luck had really stretched, although the mere fact that they needed my services spoke volumes.