Kill Fish Jones (8 page)

Hanging from his branch, Grimshaw was experiencing exhilaration. He had felt a glow of satisfaction before, when some intricate arrangement had gone with the ease of clockwork, but never in his half-life had he felt such a rush of heart-stopping power as he felt now, after the explosion. It burned through him like white fire, making him tingle to his very core. It was amazing!

He opened his eyes and the devastation around him brought back that wonderful moment of BOOM. The blast had been so … so … CATACLYSMIC!

Grimshaw was certain in his heart of hearts that even Tun had never done anything quite like that, and he was the second most famous of all curse demons (the most famous being the awesome Mighty Curse). Yet he, Grimshaw, the third-rate demon of a curse thrown by an ordinary everyday non-magician, had created all that wonderful BOOM!

Squinting down the road, which was currently the sky as he was still hanging upside down, Grimshaw watched the car drive off in a hurry. He didn't need to guess who was inside. They had made a run for it, even while the ashes of Marsha's funeral pyre were still burning. He had to admit he admired their guts. Some of his past Sufferers would have just given up and accepted their fate.

Happily, Grimshaw rearranged all the hands on his watch to point to zero. Then he pressed send.

It was time he reported back to his Architect.

‘Tell me about the knives again,' said Lampwick.

Grimshaw tried not to look bored.

‘It's no good making that face. I know it means you're trying not to look bored. It's all very well for
you
.
You
can get out. I'm stuck forever in the same place.' Lampwick's voice took on a petulant note.

‘The crypt is better than the ground.' Grimshaw closed his notebook with a snap. Any minute now he was going to start with the twitching. He could feel the charge building up inside him.

‘True. True.'

Grimshaw's Architect was of average height, with brown hair and a cadaverous face, the last being due to his having died over a century ago. In life Lampwick had been full-cheeked and irritatingly rosy, and it had always annoyed him that he didn't look like the magician he pretended to be. His only satisfaction in half-death was that he had finally achieved a suitably gaunt look. Unfortunately, no one but Grimshaw was there to see it.

Lampwick folded his arms across the magician's robe he had been buried in, as per the instructions in his Last Will and Testament, scribbled in haste on the back of an arrest warrant seconds before he died. The robe was made of the best deep blue velvet and embroidered all over with stars and moons. The half-dead were technically non-physical in a substantial sort of way, like solid ghosts, but the human view of how things ought to be had a large impact on the way they looked. This meant that over the decades the non-physical embroidery on Lampwick's non-physical robe had begun to take on a frayed look. Most of the nap had worn off the velvet, leaving it threadbare in places.

‘But the point I was making,' the Architect continued, ‘had you been bright enough to follow me, is that
you
can get back
there
whenever you want. I can't. I have to stay in Grey Space!'

‘Not whenever I want. Only when I have a Litany. When they're all done, I'll have to stay here with you. Like before.' The feeling of electricity under his skin was getting worse and worse and Grimshaw couldn't stop it. He yelped, as an all-over-body twitch got him so badly that he dropped his notebook and had to scrabble to pick it up.

Lampwick sighed. ‘Why I couldn't have created a curse with more … more pizzazz, I don't know.'

‘Because you aren't a magician. You're just a common thief who pretends to be a magician.'

‘Someone I could have had a discussion with …'

‘Curse demons don't do discussions, they do curses.'

‘And that twitch is getting worse.'

‘No, it's not!'

‘Something with intelligence …'

‘I'm as clever as you are,' snapped Grimshaw, flattening his ears and flicking his tail indignantly. ‘Cleverer!'

‘… and style.'

Grimshaw shut up. He could claim to be bright, but he certainly couldn't put his hand up to style. Now Tun, he had style. Even more than the Mighty Curse, who was just the most powerful curse demon ever made. Grimshaw flipped his ears thoughtfully. On reflection, maybe the Mighty Curse won on that point too – the total annihilation of all living things did have a certain flair.

‘Anyway, tell me about the knives again. I liked that. Tell me about how they looked falling through the sky, all bright in the sun. And about how whatsisname …'

‘Jon Figg.'

‘… was right underneath. Tell me about the blood spurting all over the pavement and the bits—'

‘They weren't knives; they were saws, electric saws.'

‘Oh, electric.' Lampwick waved a hand airily. ‘That silly modern invention you're always going on about. We had gas in my day, that was good enough for us. Nothing like the atmosphere of a couple of turned-down
gaslights. Or candles! I suppose they've forgotten about candles …'

Grimshaw listened while Lampwick rambled on. He had heard it all before. Having spent over a century in his Architect's company, there was nothing that Lampwick could say that was new to Grimshaw.

Back in the days when he was alive, Lampwick had pretended to be a master magician who could see into the future. Even real master magicians couldn't do that because no human being could see into the future, they just weren't built that way. But Lampwick used a crystal ball and some clever lighting to make more than one rich woman believe him. His best trick was to ‘foresee' his poor victim's death, but claim that he couldn't quite make out the details of how it happened. The victims then paid Lampwick a lot of money to keep trying because they wanted to be able to avoid it when the time came. He wasn't called Lampwick the Robber for nothing.

‘The funniest was young Mrs Carroll. Her husband kept a tight rein on the money so she had to find other ways to pay. Did I ever tell you …'

‘Yes.'

‘… about the things she could do with a couple of carrots and a boiled potato?'

‘Definitely.'

‘Wonderful cook she was. I remember the time …'

Grimshaw flicked his ears as the sense reached him that Mrs Jones and the weird boy had stopped moving. He had been going to leave it until morning to take the
next step, but that would mean hanging around with Lampwick all night. An idea occurred to him and he almost chuckled out loud.

‘Got to stop you there,' he said quickly, holding up a claw tipped paw.

Lampwick glared at him. ‘I was telling you about—'

‘I gotta go. Mrs Jones has stopped running …'

‘I do wish I could do something about that twitch.'

‘… so I can go and do the weird boy.'

‘Ahh, yes. You never did tell me what makes him so odd.'

‘He hardly ever says anything.' Now Grimshaw came to think about it, that seemed like a really good character trait. He paused for a moment, trying to find the right words to express the boy's oddness. It was as if he was somehow more linked in to what was going on around him. Take the way he had shouted a warning to Jon Figg
almost before the chain of events had begun
. As if he had sensed or seen something … Grimshaw hunched his shoulders and gave up.

‘And he's kind of small with thick white hair and hazel eyes,' he said instead.

‘Hmm. Odd colouring, certainly.'

‘And he's called Fish.'

‘Fish?'

‘Yes! Fish. That swim in the sea.'

‘Oh! Fish! That's a funny name. Why do they call him that? Is it his real one?'

Grimshaw shrugged. Frankly, he didn't care. The
boy was just a name on his Litany. Unlike his mother, who had turned out to be quite interesting, with her admirable behaviour in the face of disaster.

‘Quite a little character! It's almost a shame … Oh well, the woman disturbed me …'

‘Good thing too! You were bored silly.' Grimshaw wrinkled up his nose disdainfully. ‘Anyway, I gotta go.'

Lampwick scowled. ‘You can retell it all when you get back then. There'll be plenty of time.'

‘You said it,' muttered Grimshaw. He twiddled the hands of his watch, hoping that Lampwick wouldn't see what he was doing and cotton on to the fact that Grimshaw wasn't going to leave Limbo just yet.

The only way for a curse demon Avatar to get into Limbo from Real Space was to set all the dials on his chronometer to zero and return to his Architect. In a way, Lampwick was Grimshaw's gateway into the grey world. But once he had crossed over, he could travel around Limbo by setting the geography hands to a place and leaving all the other hands on zero.

Mrs Jones had stopped running, which meant that Grimshaw could go and do the boy. But Lampwick wasn't to know that Grimshaw wasn't going to do the boy
right now
. Instead, Grimshaw was going to visit his friend Tun. He wanted to tell Tun all about the wonderful moment of BOOM! and how it had made him feel.

So he pressed the send button and disappeared from the crypt.

Tun was rarely with his Architect these days. This was because his Architect thought that Tun was creepy and said that he would rather be on his own than be stared at by a mad bathrobe who'd make Death look like Santa Claus. Secretly, Grimshaw thought the description was a good one.

As a result, Tun had a habit of roving around Limbo more than curse demons usually did. This meant that it could take Grimshaw a little while to find him, and sometimes he failed to track his friend down at all. To his dismay, this was turning out to be one of those occasions. When he had nearly exhausted all the usual places, he tried the Lock-Out Club in London, Limbo. Tun didn't often go to the Lock-Out Club because he wasn't very keen on company, but it was worth a try.

Heads swivelled in his direction as Grimshaw popped into existence in the middle of a group of second-rate demons who were hanging out in the club lounge. If there had been any conversation, it died on the spot.

‘It's that odd little creature again,' said one in a voice like broken glass. ‘The one that's always in the books.'

Books in Grey Space might look dull on their outsides, but even Limbo couldn't control their insides, which had a half-life all of their own. The Lock-Out had a library, which was one of the reasons that Grimshaw liked the club best of all the curse demons' meeting places. Well, the only reason really. The Lock-Out Club chairs were like slippery rocks, having left all their squashy comfort back in Real Space, and there was never a fire in the fireplace because fire didn't work in Limbo. But the library, though small, was chock-full of adventure stories, and Grimshaw had experienced all of them at least twice.

Grimshaw sent a quick glance around the room, looking for Tun. It was always easy to pick him out because, although the Avatars who hung out in the club tended to be the sort with dark robes, cowled faces and a stare that could turn hot coals into ice cubes, Tun was bigger and more terrifying than any of them.

‘Hmm,' said another, with a voice like hissing snakes, ‘let's take him into the library. We could throw him into an encyclopaedia and see if his head explodes!'

Under the combined gaze of five Avatars, Grimshaw swallowed nervously.

‘You've already done that,' he said. ‘You know it does.'

As the demons began to drift towards him in a menacing kind of way, he spun the dials on his chronometer
and hit send. Clearly, Tun wasn't at the Lock-Out Club, which left only one place to look. The Limbo desert.

Tun hardly ever went to the desert, because he didn't get on with Hanhut, the leader of the Ancient Egyptian Avatars, who usually hung out there. At least, a lot of them actually lived in the Limbo version of the British Museum, where all the Architects had been moved to as exhibits. But it was so crowded in there these days that most of the Architects took it in turns to banish their Avatars to the desert so as to make a little space.

Many of the Ancient Egyptian demons were mere second-raters, but Hanhut was the Avatar of a first-rate curse and every bit as famous as Tun. He had been created for an Ancient Egyptian queen with the impressive words ‘Death shall come on swift wings to him that toucheth the exalted one'. As a result, Hanhut was a study in terror, tall, jackal-headed, with massive wings and eyes that struck fear into any heart. Including Grimshaw's.

When Grimshaw landed with a thunk on the sand that was sand-coloured but with a kind of grey quality about it, Hanhut turned his fearsome head and stared. Some of the other Ancient Egyptian curse demons were there too, sitting amid the dunes that rose against the grey sky like blocks of powdery concrete. In the distance Grimshaw could see the pyramids, their grey, triangular shapes jutting against the grey sky.

‘It's that odd little creature again,' said Hanhut in his low voice that seemed to have a lot of snarl in it. He
knew Grimshaw's name perfectly well, but pretended not to because he thought he was too important to address a third-rater by name.

Three over-tall figures in slightly unravelled bandages turned to peer at Grimshaw with the dark holes that served them for eyes. For some reason, second-rate Ancient Egyptian Avatars often came out looking like old horror-movie versions of revenge-crazed mummies.

‘The third-raters are all odd,' said one in a bored voice.

‘Some are odder than others, though,' said another. ‘Have you seen that weird one like a lopsided pig?'

‘His name is Wimble,' muttered Grimshaw, a little crossly. If the Mighty Curse was top of the curse-demon tree, then Wimble was the bottom – so lowly that even a demon of Grimshaw's standing could look down on him. Grimshaw was so relieved it wasn't him at the bottom, that he tried to stand up for Wimble whenever he could.