Personal Demons

But that night something had made me opt for Salisbury Crags, Arthur Seat’s idiot offspring, alone but for the wind tangling my hair and the scent of damp earth. Something niggled at the back of my mind and then fled, giggling, before I could catch it.

I had reached the Radical Road, the pathway that curved around the Crags like an old scar carved out of reptilian skin. My way up to the top was lit by the mauve phosphorescence of corpse candles, behind and below me lay the rust coloured miasma of city lights, like old blood on a corpse long dead.

As I climbed, a breeze ruffled over my skin, carrying with it the scent of spring and the promise of another sullen east coast Edinburgh summer. My menagerie had gone on ahead and was even now sending back images of our prey: a biker gang, lured here by the siren song of strong drugs leavened with S and M action but who were destined for so much more before the night was out.

I stopped for a moment all the better to savour what I had been sent; the weight of the gang’s murderous past and present as plain to my little dark-adapted eyes as Jacob Marley’s chains, each link a misdeed that could not be undone, an outrage that could not be forgiven. The huge and bloated elementals that had attached themselves to each and every gang member were testimony to that.

Against the darkness, the dim glamour of their crimes 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.

Something worse, even, than me.

The corpse-candles were still buzzing around my head, intent on leading me to my death over the Crags and exposing my position to whatever was out there. The wind turned chill, reminding me that I still had my own monsters to find and revenge to wreak.

After all, as my old mother might have said if I’d ever met her: “Do unto others before they do unto you.”

A Walk In The Park

A morning mist hung low over frost slimed grass. Branches of trees pierced the grey gloom like the petrified carcasses of unnameable beasts.

This was the Meadows, slap bang in the middle of a city of half a million souls that now felt as distant as the stars: an island of live greenery in a desiccated urban wasteland. Or so it must have seemed to the horned creature that had padded this way earlier on taloned feet, the old presences stirred by its passage.

My quarry was near.

In the bad old days the Meadows had been submerged under a body of water that stretched from Hope Park Terrace to Brougham Street, contaminated by raw sewage and worse. When the water had been drained it took the human waste with it, but the spiritual effluent remained, keeping me in a job and the city in fear.

I almost walked into the vast trunk of an old elm and cursed my clumsiness aloud drawing the attention of another predator out on the prowl this fine Sunday morning. A low, throaty laugh, the caress of light breath on the back of my neck and I knew I had much more to worry about than the minor demon I’d been hunting.

“About time,” it said stepping out in front of me. “I’m starved.”

The Ice Cream Man Cometh

The Ice Cream Man drove along Constitution Street, the strains of Greensleeves trailing a sweet discord in his wake. It was two in the morning and raining hard, but the Ice Cream Man had no need for lights and window-wipers. Truth to tell they disturbed his concentration and that was Bad For Business.

A muffled sob from the back of the van told him that they weren’t all dead yet. Never mind, they’d soon wish they were. The hunger was on him tonight, an appetite that was getting harder to satisfy. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure it was all worth it. In those darker moods that seemed to take him more and more these days, all he wanted was to burn the world down and him with it.

But not tonight, not yet.

A police squad car passed by, the occupants blind and deaf to the ice cream van’s siren song – unlike the unfortunates he’d caught and stacked in the back. It was too easy really and the boredom made him cruel. Take last night for instance…

He smiled to himself and began to whistle, the world beyond the windscreen a smeared blur of light and shadow. Another sob from the back but he was oblivious, lost in the downward spiral of his own thoughts.

But the instant she woke and came to the window, face a pale oval, smooth and perfect as an egg, he was roused from his reverie.

“Come on down Cathy,” he intoned through the loudspeaker. “I’ve got your favourite. Just pop some slippers on sweetheart. I’ve got a special surprise for you in the back. Best get it while it’s cold though.”

The long painted mouth sneered. She’d get it alright.

Exorcise This

‘Okay,’ said Rufus, ‘this is what we know. Some time in the evening of 28th May this year, Robyn Farquhar aged ten, ran out of her parent’s flat in Forrest Road into the street. They thought she was tucked up in bed with a cold and didn’t know any different until they heard the sound of sirens outside. Robyn had been found by a passer-by in a state of unconsciousness. She was taken to the Edinburgh’s Sick Children’s Hospital where she remains in a coma rated, so I’m told, as a 4 on Glasgow Coma scale. This means she can open her eyes but there’s no one home.’
‘Rufus, please, this is a child we’re talking about,’ said Ruby.
I rolled my eyes and got another drink up.
‘Just trying to cut to the chase Rubes. There is some neurological activity, but not a great deal. She’s been in that state now for seven months and doctors are not hopeful because they don’t know what has caused the coma. Also not helping is the fact that it’s a deep one and it’s lasted for a long time.’
‘Her parents Pat and Gordon got in touch with me because they’ve been, well, hearing things in their flat and they think it’s haunted,’ said Ruby.
‘What sort of things?’ I asked.
“Started off as whispers, shit where it shouldn’t be, hey, that sounds like a good t-shirt slogan for an exorcist, don’t you think? Never mind, where was I? Oh yes, banging on walls, you know the usual,’ said Rufus. ‘But then it changed. Became more heavy-duty, nastier, if you get my drift.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not unless you spell it out for me. And as for the slogan, you stole that from me when we were at Michael and Vic’s.’
‘And what a laugh that turned out to be. Okay then, voices late at night dredging up old secrets from the past, like Gordon’s affair, which Pat didn’t know about. Pat’s obsession with an ex, that Gordon didn’t know about and it went downhill from there. Things got more physical so to speak: plates being thrown and not just by the unhappy couple you understand, furniture upended, food spoiling in the fridge despite being just bought. Just you know, your classic demonic manifestations.’
‘Which is why you’re involved,’ I said. ‘So, correct me if I’m wrong but we’ve gone from a child lapsing into a coma to possible demonic possession, not of the child, but of the flat where she lived? Is that even possible?’
‘It’s not common, but having consulted the grimoires, it is possible. As you’ll know from your boyfriend Lukastor, there are many types of demon. Some possess places rather than humans. They are like humanity in that they can evolve to fit the conditions. They’re essentially parasites, arguably also like humanity. Anyway, that was the theory we were working on until Ruby did her thing and tried to contact Robyn. Take it away Rubes.’
‘Gordon and Pat gave me some of Robyn’s things,’ she indicated the objects on the table, ‘and I thought I’d give it a go even though we knew Robyn wasn’t dead. You remember that’s how I found Steph or Sophie or whatever she called herself.’
‘Oh, I think I still have a vague memory,’ I said getting an unwelcome flashback to our little showdown on the Castle esplanade with a particularly vile serial killer and pulling myself back with no little effort.
Outside something thumped against the window, a dark shape disappearing into the swirling snow.
“Brandy for everyone?’ said Ruby, pouring it out before I could stop her. The light was fading and I didn’t want to be here any longer than I had to. The photos on Ruby’s Wall of Death were also starting to creep me out. Unlike Ruby, I lived in the present and had no need of the dark, cloying weight of the past and the wants and needs of others dragging me down into it.
‘But I still don’t get why the parents wanted you to find her. They know where she is – she’s lying unconscious in the Sick Kids. If they’ve now got a haunting or possession surely that’s a separate thing? Hell it could have been triggered by events. There’s a missing link here, the one between the child and the goings-on.’
‘Pat and Gordon believe that someone, something has taken Robyn’s soul and is holding it captive,’ said Ruby.
‘Based on?’
‘Based on the fact that there is no physical explanation that can be found for the coma. Robyn hasn’t suffered a stroke, heart-attack, nor does she have a head wound. The entity in their flat knows things about Pat and Gordon that only Robyn would know.’
‘It might just be a powerful demon. It doesn’t mean something’s got hold of Robyn’s spirit.’
‘You don’t understand Rose,’ said Ruby. ‘They don’t just think the entity has Robyn, they think it is Robyn, in part anyway.’
‘That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,’ I said. ‘How could it be Robyn, partly, wholly or any other way? And where does the captivity bit fit in?’
‘Well first off we don’t have all the answers and the ones we do beg more questions. I went to see Pat and Gordon last week and it was clear to me that they were, well, scared of Robyn, there’s no other way to put it. I don’t just mean now, but before the coma too. It turns out she’s psychic and, by their accounts, a very powerful one. She always knew things she wasn’t supposed to. Can’t be easy for the parents when dead members of the family and other random spirits are spilling secrets to their ten year old who then spills them at school until pretty soon there aren’t any left. Especially when as you know most people prefer to live in denial of that sort of thing. So some of the stuff the voices were saying wasn’t so dissimilar to what Robyn used to reveal. But there was a nastier edge to the goings on that weren’t typical of their child an intent you might say.’
‘While my heart really does bleed, there’s still not enough evidence to support what you’re saying,’ I told her.
‘I’m sorry Rose, I’m not explaining this very well. What I’m trying to say is that when I tried to contact Robyn, I was successful and she…spoke to me.’
I made a circling motion with my hand. Day was bleeding into night and the flat’s interior grew gloomier with every passing second.
‘She said that she was scared,’ Ruby continued, ‘that she didn’t know where she was, that she wanted to come home but couldn’t – and that she had a message for you. For you Rose,’ she looked at me with frightened eyes. ‘Why would she have a message for you?’
‘In the name of god woman,’ I said, hand over my eyes.
‘She said was to tell you that ‘The Ice Cream Man Cometh.’ Does that mean anything to you Rose? Rose?’

Dragon Act

Legend had it that an imprisoned dragon lay coiled in the rock under Edinburgh Castle and that the day it broke free and wreaked its revenge would be the city’s last. I had never been particularly interested in the story, but the supernatural critter that had wrapped itself around Maud Mulroney’s corpse in her open-casket coffin, appeared to be doing its very own winged worm tribute act.
A blob of phlegm flung by the corpse cuddler in question just missed the top of my head and that’s when it started to laugh, a rasping, guttural noise that sounded like thirty years of dedicated cigarette smoking put to good use. Its long, snake-like body curled tighter around the dead woman, so tight in fact that it pierced the bloodless skin with its razor-sharp scales.
This was Maud’s living room, or at least it had been when she was alive. She had lived in this house, a terraced affair in the village of Gilmerton, for fifty years and I wondered what she would have made of her wake. Ordinarily I could have just summoned her spirit to find that out given she had only just kicked the proverbial bucket. But not today, not here, because the fact was that this little supernatural charmer was not only holding the corpse hostage, it was also preventing the spirit from leaving the body.
The creature began to convulse, spasms running along it’s entire length before it vomited green bile all over the corpse’s head in an explosive rush. The acrid stench was overpowering and I had to fight not to add my own contribution to the gunge-fest.
Supernatural vermin extermination wasn’t my usual gig and it was beginning to show. My normal day job was hunting down and killing the perpetrators of unsolved murders but it was all I could manage after my last starring role had damn near killed me. I was, as the Fox twins kept on telling me, recuperating; which was why they had succeeded in foisting this particular no hoper on me. But it was true: I wasn’t back to anything like full strength and now it looked like I might not even be up to getting rid of this parasitic bottom-feeder.
I had to concede however that it was a bottom-feeder with a sense of humour because it had now transferred Maude’s blonde bobbed wig from her head to its own, the red glare of its eyes visible through the strands of hair. Slowly and with great deliberation it winked at me, opening its mouth to reveal rows of wicked looking teeth before settling down to nibble at the corpse’s nose.

Question was which of us had bitten off more than we could chew?

Edinburgh Dreaming

I had the dream again last night, always the same sequence of events, the same cataclysmic outcome. Except now I was dreaming it every night, proof as if any were needed that it was about to become reality.

It starts with me drying myself after a shower in the bathroom. I go over to the mirrored medicine cabinet on the wall, rooting around for something I can never find. As I open it, something catches my eye, a flash of movement, I’m never entirely sure. I slowly adjust the mirrored door knowing I’m being watched I rub the steam away and see the outline of a young woman standing directly behind me, clouds of water vapour eddying over her.

I whirl around and she puts her finger to her lips with one hand holding out the other with an odd formality as though asking me to dance. An alien thrumming through my head tells me she’s dead, although the solidity of her body belies that fact. But it’s her face that disturbs me the most: devoid of features apart from two indentations where the eye sockets should have been. What passes for skin is malleable like putty as though flattened by inefficient careless fingers, leaving bumps and ridges in their wake. She’s dripping from head to toe and her dirty white dress is torn and hanging off one shoulder.

I try to call out but my voice has deserted me and I know I’m alone. With her.

She moves towards me, the mottled flesh of her narrow frame discernable through the thin fabric of her dress. I press myself as flat against the wall as I can, eager to put as much space between us as possible not least because my traitorous legs are about to give way. I try again to shout, but can’t summon the breath and begin to choke as I fight for air.

My own power blazes through my bones and before I can direct it, bursts from me slashing the thing’s face and body; again and again until I lose count. Bright blood wells to the surface of the featureless face like jagged red mouths and there is a pause as though the world is holding its breath before it begins to gush onto the floor in a waterfall of red ruin. Something is moving around beneath the skin like a frightened rodent and the more I cut, the more excitable the burrower becomes. I throw myself to the left towards the bathroom door, but the bloodied figure gives me a contemptuous, almost lazy swipe that connects with my shoulders. I hit my head off the tiles, and feel a warm wetness running down my face and pooling beneath me as it cools. My vision blurs and I fight to stay conscious, but it’s only a matter of time.

I can only see the creature’s bare feet from my vantage point on the floor and now they begin to walk towards me slowly, no need to rush, not now. With a detachment born of blood loss and shock, I watch it approach, stand over me for what seems like an age and then it squats down beside me, so I can see its face. The wounds I’ve slashed into its skin gape wide and move of their own volition. Inside the raw meat, the wet flick of an eye, the extrusion of a decayed tooth roils in fevered constant motion. I whimper and try to edge away but I can’t move, can’t call out, can’t get out of this one.

Old Gods And New Tricks

I took a fast black north to Granton, a part of the city clinging for dear life onto the south shore of the Firth of Forth like a spurned lover. The landscape was flat and bleak in a city famed for its curves and vitality. It had been heavily industrialised and then left to rot like so many places in Scotland. To be truthful, it had always depressed the hell out of me: grey and abandoned as though it had been stuck onto the rest of the city as an afterthought by an absent-minded god who had promptly forgotten about it. Trust Ravi to have picked this spot.

My destination, Granton Square, turned out to be more of a circle as I discovered after being turfed unceremoniously out of the taxi by the taciturn driver.

“Watch yourself here hen,” he said through a cigarette clamped between his teeth Clint Eastwood style, “they come out at night.” And with that he roared off down the road speeding on his way to suck the fun out of someone else’s night.

Hen, indeed. Where the hell had that little generic moniker come from?

I stomped round the faux square trying and failing to establish where 1A was. It must basement but I just couldn’t find which one. In the pitch black surprisingly few lights winked out and the street lights only managed an anaemic glow. There was no one about and surprisingly little traffic as though everyone had just decided that this really was not the place to be and had left it to its fate. Rather like Ravi’s previous home in the murky depths of the Gyle.

There was the distant noise of the occasional car, but the serenity of the square absorbed it like an over-indulgent mother. I remembered from somewhere that Granton had not been inhabited by people until comparatively recently and that may have explained the wraith like creatures that stalked the place. These wraiths resembled animals that couldn’t decide what species they belonged to: feline shaped heads, with tusks where teeth should be and legs ending in human hands not paws. One was following me now, a low growling deep down in its malformed throat. I sympathised with both the sentiment and the indecision.

A door slammed and then the sound of someone young and fit on stairs and indeed it was because Ravi burst into view from the building two doors down. He bounded over and picked me up as though I weighed nothing and, swinging me round, kissed me full on the lips. The familiar clean, herbal smell of him made me forget momentarily that I had been considering kneeing him in the nuts.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” he said, putting me down.

“Well to keep me here, you’re going to have to get me a massive drink and get it now.”

“All taken care of. I made some food in case you were hungry, or in between incidents.”

He laughed and the swirl of darkness that always accompanied him hugged him tighter as though protecting him from me. I was again reminded that this man had had a violent past: maybe that was why he was trying so hard to have a peaceful, nurturing present. I hoped to the god that I didn’t believe in that nothing like ever happened to me….

Unholy Wedlock

I led the three vampires into the living room and ordered them to stand in front of a small table containing a crystal decanter foolish enough to have its top off.

“You must now bind yourselves to me by blood,” I told them. Another tip from Ravi although I don’t think he had expected me to be foolish enough to use it.

I motioned to them to come forward, extending my two index finger-blades. They hissed, features distorted to display a little of what lay beneath. I’d have to teach them the error of their ways and hope that I wasn’t turning into a ghoulish version of Henry Higgins in the process. If I was very unlucky they’d develop cod-cockney accents and the horror would be complete.

Sullenly they extended their wrists and I slashed each in turn, quick slicing motions that brought brackish blood smelling faintly of the sea welling up from pale skins. Like an old hand I caught it in the decanter before slashing my own wrist, taking care to do it horizontally. The wrist was probably not the best place but I only needed a few drops and the symbolism was worth it. The delicate patter as my blood joined theirs: a metallic tang, a brief spot of crimson in the darkness of the viscous fluid marked the most dangerous point of our brief acquaintance. Morgan’s cheeks visibly hollowed and Marjorie choked, drool running down her perfect chin onto her t-shirt.

They were, I realised, starving. For the first time I felt like the idiot in the tigers’ cage who had volunteered just to impress but now wished he hadn’t as they picked his limbs off like boys with flies’ wings. A brief hiatus, pregnant with the import of what I’d just done hung heavy in the room. To my knowledge no one had messed about with this particular little ménage a quatre and there was usually a good reason for that.

“To blood of thine add blood of mine, together ere we die. So mote it be,” I whispered. The spell was cast and, much like the act of flinging yourself under the wheels of a bus, there was no undoing it. No going back.

With their gaze boring into the back of my head I locked the decanter in a small cupboard by the window, noticing absently that snow was falling thick and fast obscuring the world as though some old god had wished it away. Even Fife, usually all too visible from this window, was a distant nightmare that I couldn’t see anymore. I needed to get going or I’d suffer the same fate. I threaded the key onto a chain and put it around my neck where it hung glistening dully in the meagre light. No sound disturbed the gravid silence apart from the tick-tock of the clock and the faint rumble of traffic muffled by the snow.

A marriage made in Hell, indeed. But who was going to wear the trousers?

The Ice Cream Man Cometh….

The Ice Cream Man drove slowly along Constitution Street, the strains of Greensleeves trailing discordantly in his wake. It was two in the morning and raining hard, but the Ice Cream Man had no need of such irrelevancies as lights or window-wipers. Truth to tell they disturbed his concentration and that was Bad For Business.

A muffled sob from the back of the van told him that they weren’t all dead yet. Never mind, they’d soon wish they were. The hunger was on him tonight, an appetite that was getting harder to satisfy by the day. Sometimes he wasn’t sure he wanted to keep up the effort. In those darker moods that seemed to take him more and more these days, he felt he could burn the world down and laugh as the flames came to claim him too.

But not tonight.

A police squad car passed by, the occupants blind and deaf to the ice cream van’s siren song; unlike the unfortunate specimens he’d caught and stacked in the back. Of course they had passed: only prey heard his call and having heard became his. It was too easy really and the boredom made him cruel. Take last night…

He smiled to himself and began to whistle tunelessly, the world beyond the windscreen, a smeared blur of light and shadow.

But the minute she woke and came to the window, face a pale oval, smooth and perfect as an egg, he knew. As he always did.

“Come on down Cathy,” he intoned solemnly through the loudspeaker. “I’ve got your favourite. Just pop some slippers on sweetheart. You don’t need money so you won’t need to disturb your dear old mammy. I’ve got a special surprise for you in the back. Best get it while it’s cold though.”

The long painted mouth sneered briefly. She’d get it alright.

The Ice Cream Man Cometh.

Dietary Fibre

Murder always drew the bad stuff to it: a lonely spot at the side of a road where a hit and run victim had died; the bedroom where a sadistic killer finished off his thirteenth victim; the site of a car crash engineered by a unloving husband for his unsuspecting wife. But the real jackpot were the murderers themselves, hoaching with enough raw, spiritual sewage to generate enough power to light up the city. Oh, and little old me of course.

Not being a telepath I couldn’t access the murdering bastard’s memories directly, but the evil spirits that infested them could. They literally ate into the homicidal maniac’s fond recollections and I ate them. From these memories it was possible to piece the victims final moments together and it was rarely a pretty picture. But I couldn’t deny, it was indeed a proud moment when you realised you were standing at the top of such a distinguished food chain.

And then the dreams…