Dead Bad Things Read online

  DEAD BAD THINGS

  "Gary McMahon's vision is as bleak as a Yorkshire moor, but it glows with a wintry light that illuminates the dark we live in. His prose and his sense of place are precise and evocative, and his characters are as real as you and me. He's one of the darkest – which is to say brightest – new stars in the firmament of horror fiction."

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  "Thomas Usher is a great character treading a twilight world between Manhunter and Most Haunted; conflicted by grief, haunted by blame, a 'magnet for ghosts' who sees the skull beneath the skin. In Pretty Little Dead Things, Gary McMahon nails genuine horror as few British writers can – or dare. He gets under your skin, then burrows even deeper. Terrifyingly, dangerously, hauntingly so."

  STEPHEN VOLK, CREATOR OF TV'S AFTERLIFE

  "Pretty Little Dead Things is a very disturbing read. Gary McMahon seems intent on taking readers through the looking glass and tearing down the walls between the living and the dead. He creates dark, hallucinatory images that burn in your brain forever."

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

  "Gary McMahon's horror is heartfelt, his characters flawed and desperate, and this book is a rich feast of loss, guilt, and redemption. His vivid ideas are given life in beautiful prose, and the book leaves you staring into shadows that weren't there before. His talent shines, and is set to burn brighter still."

  TIM LEBBON

  ALSO BY GARY McMAHON

  Pretty Little Dead Things

  Hungry Hearts

  Rain Dogs

  The Concrete Grove

  The Harm: Polyptych (novella)

  Rough Cut (novella)

  Pieces of Midnight (short story collection)

  GARY McMAHON

  DEAD BAD THINGS

  A THOMAS USHER NOVEL

  Dedicated to Gary Fry:

  here are some bits of my mind!

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  I have taken certain liberties with the geography of Leeds. Let's just call it artistic licence. For instance, the LGI in Leeds doesn't, to my knowledge, have a Cancer Care Unit, and even if it does I couldn't tell you what floor it's on. The city in this novel is the Leeds of my imagination – part fact, part fiction, wholly extraordinary. I hope keen-eyed readers will forgive me for transforming the place in these subtle ways, and that they enjoy the haunted landscape I've created.

  The angel came to him again, a few years later, but this time what it brought was something real, something tangible. Not some vague insight, but a thing – a lovely little thing, in fact.

  It never arrived when he expected, this angel; it always turned up when he had almost forgotten about it. Or when he had somehow managed to convince himself that it was not real – that it was nothing but a dream or an illusion.

  The angel. The beautiful bald-headed angel.

  He was sitting by the hole in the ground he'd just filled with soil, wondering how long it would take for the remains to begin to rot. Down there, beneath the packed earth, lay a small boy he'd taken from a street in Birmingham three days ago. A small, underfed boy with not much to say for himself; he was maybe three or four years old.

  He had kept the boy in the back of his van, tied up and gagged with old rags, until it was time to deal with him. By then the boy was weak, half-starved and almost unconscious. The rest had been easy, a mere trifle.

  It had been simple to let the bad things out. Even now, relatively early in his career, he had perfected the technique.

  The boy was his seventh victim. Which wasn't bad going, all things considered – he'd only been killing them for five years, since the first time the angel had visited him. The angel had told him what to look for and how to identify it. The angel had given him the gift of insight, of knowing, and nothing had looked the same since.

  "Hush now," he said, stroking the small mound of earth as if it were a downy little head. "Time to sleep. You can't cause any trouble now – not now or ever." The moon was almost full; it lit his actions, putting him under a celestial spotlight. "The dead bad things are gone." He glanced up, at the moon and the stars, and wondered if the God he had come to know and love was watching him, judging him. If so, would he be found wanting, or was he in fact carrying out the will of God, as he hoped?

  The angel had told him what God wanted, back during that first visitation. The angel told him, and then it touched him, granting him vision. Gifting him insight.

  "Hush now…" His words flowed between his lips like blood – the blood that had been shed by the boy, from his smashed lips and the holes in his head. "Sleep well."

  "Having fun?"

  He looked up, and saw the angel standing in the shadows by a clump of trees. Shadows gathered like oil in water around the angel, cloaking it in a soft, gelid darkness.

  "Well, are you? Having fun, I mean?" The angel's smile was a broad slice in the flesh of its cold, hard face. The angel's eyes were large and dark and glassy, devoid of anything that even resembled humanity. It was not of this world; it was of somewhere else, somewhere distant and untouchable. It was an angel.

  "I don't think that's the right word," he said, staring at the angel but losing sight of it, despite the short distance between them. It was as if the angel were receding, floating away or retreating into darkness. "I mean, fun implies that this is some kind of entertainment rather than work. The work of the Lord."

  "Ah," said the angel. "Him." It smiled again, but this time it was a thin black thing that squirmed across the lower half of its face. In the dark, in the shadows, it looked like a tentacle of darkness was reaching out of the angel's mouth to grope around on its hairless chin.

  "Isn't that what you told me before? That I was doing God's work?"

  The angel nodded. "Of course. That's right. I did, didn't I? And I have more work for you. Another important task."

  The man stood at the side of the grave, brushing down his jeans, and then walked forward to stand in the tiny clearing in the middle of the woodland glade he'd thought would hide his deeds so well. But one can never hide from angels: they see everything, through the Lord's gaze. He knew that; it was a truth he could not deny. "What is it?"

  The angel moved to the side. Just one step: a dainty little shimmy. Resting behind it, small and strange on the hard ground, was a bundle of blankets. The bundle moved. Then it began to mewl, like a kitten. But he knew it wasn't a kitten the angel had brought him. It was a baby. A human baby.

  Of course it was.

  "I want to you do something for me. Something… vital. You might not even know how important it is until after you die… but that doesn't matter. What does matter is the fact that I'm asking you, and you're going to do it. For me." The angel blinked, but the gesture looked false, faked, as if it didn't really need to moisten its eyes. Like it was a little act, a deliberate gesture calculated to emulate humanity. "Capiche?"

  "It's a baby."

  "Oh, how observant," said the angel. "Looks like all my time and effort isn't being wasted on you." The angel opened its mouth slightly, but not in a smile. It looked hungry. Ravenous.

  "Ok." He nodded his head.

  "Like you really had a choice anyway, eh?" The angel tilted its head.

  Tha man said nothing.

  The angel reached behind without turning around. Its arms stretched unnaturally, the knuckles of its small white hands scraping the ground and the fingers scrabbling in the dirt like pale insects. The angel picked up the baby and lifted it, then pushed it away from its body. "Take it," said the angel.

  The baby was sleeping. Its eyes were closed.

  "It's a girl," said the angel. "A little cunt." The angel laughed – a hard, bitter sound with far too many edges. "A breeder."

  He was curiously offended by the angel's words, but knew enough
not to voice how he felt. He took the baby and held it close, feeling its warmth bleed through the thin blankets and creep towards his heart.

  "Guard this baby. Care for it. You can do what you want with it – sniff it, cut it, bite it, beat it, fuck it if you like. I don't care. Just don't kill it. The baby needs to live. That's all I ask. Make sure it lives. Or you die." Then the angel was gone. It didn't walk away, or float or fly; it just wasn't there anymore.

  The baby squirmed in his hands, making those same mewling noises. Then, suddenly, it opened its eyes and smiled up at him, gobbets of dribble running down its chin.

  It opened its mouth and it grinned at him.

  At him: a killer of infants.

  The baby smiled again.

  He smiled back, and thought about how easy it would be to break the baby's neck.

  PART ONE

  GIVING IT ALL AWAY

  "Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak

  Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break."

  William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act IV, Scene III

  ONE

  Police Constable Sarah Doherty watched the rain as it slid like a horde of transparent slugs down the car windows, wishing desperately that the sun would come out some day soon. A little sunshine, she thought, always made things look better, even if they were dead bad…

  Dead bad: that was one of his terms, her father. He'd used it often, usually to describe his mood before turning on her, and she hated herself for even thinking the words. Hated herself for using his phrasing, even in the relative safety of her head.

  She stared at one particular trickle of rain, following the smeared trail as it wound an uneven line down the glass. Held within that single drop she saw the entire world and her inconsequential place within it. She felt small, tiny really, like a speck on the finger of a giant. One flick of that finger and she would be gone – nothing but a cosmic crumb thrown into the void.

  "You OK?"

  Sarah blinked and turned her head, staring at her partner. For a second she failed to recognise his familiar battered features.

  Benson smiled. It was not a pretty smile – not on his face – but it was something she had grown accustomed to. For such an ugly man, Benson possessed an abundance of compassion for his fellows, which somehow made him attractive. "You were miles away." He swivelled in the driver's seat, leaning forward slightly. The seat belt went taut across his broad chest. The springs in the seat creaked.

  "I was. Miles away, that is. Miles away in the past, lost with the ghosts." She shrugged her shoulders, one side at a time, trying to reduce the tension. Her back ached; an old injury caused by her father in a particularly dark moment. Closing her eyes for a second, she said: "But I'm OK now. Don't worry about me." When she opened her eyes again Benson was still smiling, but now his face looked almost handsome – almost. Not bad at all, really, for a man with badly scarred cheeks and a large dent in his forehead.

  The street outside was empty at this hour, even the most hardy of drunks and homeless people having found somewhere to curl up and sleep off whatever ailed them. The rain was heavy; it made a loud hissing sound as it pelted against the brickwork of the big Victorian terraces that lined both sides of the wide street. Not too far away, the urban greenery of Roundhay Park lay shrouded in darkness, and Sarah thought about how easy it might be for someone to slip away unseen across the grass and into the trees… someone who had been doing wrong on her watch.

  The radio crackled – a sharp, staccato echo of the rain outside. Benson reached out and turned down the volume. "You ready?" he stared at her, as if he were looking for something – some sort of clue to her wellbeing – in her eyes.

  Sarah nodded. "Let's go. It's probably a fucking hoax call. You know what they're like round here – I'll bet it's just some snotty accountant getting his own back on a neighbour who's in a higher tax bracket."

  Benson laughed as he opened the door, but the sound of the rain drowned out his mirth. Sarah got out of the passenger side, hunching her shoulders in an instinctive protective gesture. It didn't work; she was soaked through in a few seconds. The rain was cold. The chill went right through her.

  "Fuck," she said, tilting her checkerboard bowler down over her forehead. "I need a coffee."

  "What's that?" Benson was leaning over the roof of the car, his head cocked to one side. He looked like an inquisitive rottweiler.

  "Nothing," said Sarah, shaking her head. Then she walked around the car and joined him, resting one hand on her hip, near the ASP expandable baton which hung from her belt.

  The moon was a smudge in the black sky, and there were very few stars clustered around it. The rain seemed to be in the process of erasing everything else from the sky, as if it were trying to drown the world. The thought chilled Sarah even more than the low temperature and she tried to bury it. The last thing she needed when she was out on patrol was to spook herself like this. It had been happening more and more lately, her mind creating phantoms from thin air, and she had to put a stop to it.

  Nobody would trust a scared police constable, particularly a scared female police constable. It was something she had been forced to learn quickly, this type of casual prejudice: a simple harsh fact of life on the modern police force.

  She followed Benson – who was the senior partner, despite having only three months more experience than Sarah – and watched the roll of his shoulders as he swaggered through the rain. Sometimes he seemed like an unstoppable force, a clenched fist on two legs.

  The rain churned angrily in the gutters, forming foaming streams along both sides of the road. Litter swirled in the black water – a ripped cardboard coffee cup, a stained fast food carton floating like a little boat, and several sodden pages from a discarded newspaper. Sarah could just about make out the name Penny Royale printed in bold text at the top of one of the pages. It was a case she had not been directly involved with, but six months ago, when the torn and battered body of the young girl was found in bed at her parents' home on the Bestwick estate, the child's death had sent shockwaves through the entire community.

  Sarah's Achilles heel was cases involving murdered children, and she found it particularly difficult to remain in control of her emotions when, as in the Royale case, it seemed like the parents (both still missing) had been responsible for the killing. She wished that someone would find them, preferably dead. The world would not miss such shoddy, murderous parents. The world mourned dead children, not scumbag adults. And it mourned them far too often.

  Benson pulled up abruptly outside one of the terraced houses. He raised a big, knuckly fist and rapped briskly on the wide wooden door. Then, realising that the heavy rainfall might make it difficult to be heard, he knocked again but harder this time – like he really meant it, she thought.

  Benson, Sarah knew, had his own weaknesses. She had no idea what they were, but had glimpsed them rising above the surface on a couple of occasions, like a shark's fin breaking water for a moment before vanishing again beneath the waves.

  Slowly the door opened and a small, pale face peered out through the gap between door and frame. "Yes?"

  "It's the police, madam. Did someone make an emergency call?" Benson took a step back, off the doorstep, as if aware of his naturally intimidating presence.

  "Oh, yes. Yes." The door opened wider to reveal an elderly woman standing in a narrow hallway, her dressing gown pulled tight around her hefty frame. "I'm sorry… my husband works nights. I worry." She smiled, as if this explained everything.

  "That's OK, madam. Was it you who made the call? Are you a Mrs Frances Booth?" Benson took out his notebook and flipped it open, ducking into the doorway to keep the paper dry.

  "Yes. That's right. I was… well, this might sound a bit daft, but I'm concerned about the old dear next door. Mrs Johnson." The woman stepped back, into the hallway. "Would you like to come in?"

  "Thank you." Benson stepped inside and Sarah followed, remaining silent. She smiled and took off her hat,
inspecting the interior of the house as she did so. Expensive wallpaper, quality carpets, framed prints of good quality art on the walls. It was a nice place; a place where money dwelled.

  "I really hope I'm not wasting your time."

  "Oh, I'm sure you're not – it is Mrs Booth, isn't it?" The woman nodded, almost eagerly. "We were in the area, anyway." Benson's tone was light, friendly. He excelled at putting people at their ease, despite his bulk and the scars on his cheeks. Sarah always found it strange that the public warmed to him so quickly and easily, but then she usually remembered that he had the same effect on her. Two days after meeting, they had jumped into bed together. The occasional sex was something they were both slightly wary of taking any further, but she always thought it a good example of how he was able to take a person off guard and slip in behind their defences. She frowned at the memory, but then suppressed it before Mrs Johnson noticed.