Deadly Departed: A Supernatural Thriller (Fletcher & Fletcher, Paranormal Investigators Book 2) Read online

  Deadly Departed

  Fletcher & Fletcher, Paranormal Investigators: Book Two

  David Bussell

  Copyright © 2020 by David Bussell and Uncanny Kingdom.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events, or to actual persons living, dead, or undead, is purely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Become an Insider

  Fletcher & Fletcher, Paranormal Investigators, Book Two

  Deadly Departed

  Chapter One: It’s All Downhill From Here

  Chapter Two: Remains to be Seen

  Chapter Three: The Beautiful Dead

  Chapter Four: Lights Up on Darkness

  Chapter Five: Nocturnal Safari

  Chapter Six: The Hard Stuff

  Chapter Seven: Low-Lifes and No-Lifes

  Chapter Eight: A Short, Sharp Shock

  Chapter Nine: The Ghost in the Machine

  Chapter Ten: Up Jumped the Devil

  Chapter Eleven: Ready. Fire. Aim

  Chapter Twelve: Listen to Your Nose

  Chapter Thirteen: Sprite Night

  Chapter Fourteen: Beast Infection

  Chapter Fifteen: You Show Me Yours and I’ll Show You Mine

  Chapter Sixteen: Dead Reckoning

  Chapter Seventeen: Reality Bites

  Chapter Eighteen: Fly in the Wall

  Chapter Nineteen: Crumbs From the Devil’s Table

  Chapter Twenty: The Boys in Blue

  Chapter Twenty-One: A Freudian Slap

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Off with the Fairies

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Yas Queen

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Spirit is Willing

  Chapter Twenty-Five: They Only Come Out at Night

  Chapter Twenty-Six: My Enemy’s Enemy

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Body and Soul

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Stronge and Silent Type

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Has Anyone Seen the Invisible Man?

  Chapter Thirty: The Dirty Truth

  Chapter Thirty-One: Together Forever

  Chapter Thirty-Two: The Witching Hour

  Chapter Thirty-Three: No Rest for the Wicca’d

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Getting to Know You

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Out for Blood

  Chapter Thirty-Six: This is Not a Type O

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Body Politics

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: If You’re Going Through Hell, Keep Going

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Little Man, Big Problem

  Chapter Forty: The Verge of a Breakthrough

  Chapter Forty-One: Ghost Town

  Chapter Forty-Two: There Goes the Neighbourhood

  Chapter Forty-Three: A Woman Scorned

  Chapter Forty-Four: Mad About the Boy

  Chapter Forty-Five: Wake Up and Smell the Sulphur

  Chapter Forty-Six: Fiends with Benefits

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Park Life

  Chapter Forty-Eight: Meat for Prowling Beasts

  Chapter Forty-Nine: Death Drive

  Chapter Fifty: Things Fall Apart

  Chapter Fifty-One: As Below, So Above

  Chapter Fifty-Two: The Shadow of Kingdom Come

  Chapter Fifty-Three: Painting the Town Red

  Chapter Fifty-Four: Friends in Low Places

  Chapter Fifty-Five: Pit Stop

  Chapter Fifty-Six: Schlock and Awe

  Chapter Fifty-Seven: Killing the Fantasy

  Chapter Fifty-Eight: If it’s Not One Thing it’s Your Mother

  Chapter Fifty-Nine: Tragedy Ever After

  Chapter Sixty: On the Right Track

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  Chapter One: It’s All Downhill From Here

  The house looked all right at a distance: bricks and mortar topped with slate, same as any other. It wasn’t until I pushed open the stubborn front gate and drew nearer that I realised what a wreck the place was. The porch was so run down that it looked as if it was wilting under the onslaught of the afternoon’s unsympathetic downpour. The windows were spidered with cracks and held in place by termite-infested frames. The front door had barely a few scabs of paint left on it. And then there was the low hum of menace the house gave off: the queasy vibration that seeped into my bones and got my down-belows clenching. Something was wrong with this house. Very wrong.

  I rang the doorbell. The sound it gave off was tinny and grating; simultaneously a long way away and right inside my ear. While I waited for an answer, I shook the rainwater from my umbrella and folded it up. The front door opened with a sound like a dying animal and an old woman peered out at me with rheumy eyes, her face scored with more grooves than a walnut. She wore makeup—so much makeup that if she were a passenger in the back of your car and you had to make an emergency stop, you’d have ended up with her portrait on the back of your headrest. This wasn’t your typical tarted-up old biddy, though: the kind who spunked away her pension at the bingo hall and always smelled of travel sweets. No. Despite her arthritic joints, I could tell from her surefooted stance that this was the kind of golden-ager who could wait tables in an army mess hall if need be.

  ‘Just the one of you then, is it?’ she asked, her voice a rusty hinge. ‘The ad said Fletcher and Fletcher.’

  ‘My partner’s not feeling his best,’ I replied, ‘but don’t you worry, I can manage. I’m a real one-man band.’

  The old woman scratched her thistly chin. ‘Come on in before you catch a death, then.’

  She beckoned me inside with a bony finger. I instinctively went to wipe my feet on the doormat but found nothing underfoot across the threshold but rotten floorboards. The hallway in front of me was dim and uninviting and appeared to be held together by cobwebs.

  ‘Sorry about the mess,’ said the old dear as she led me deeper inside.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. All this place needs is a lick of paint, a spritz of Febreze, and a direct hit from a short-range ballistic missile is the part I didn’t say.

  We arrived in a lounge that was empty except for a threadbare floral sofa. There was no other furniture in the room, no pictures on the wall, no TV set.

  ‘I’m guessing you don’t do a lot of entertaining,’ I said.

  She snorted. ‘Everyone I know is dead.’

  There’s a cheery thought.

  ‘So,’ I said, moving things along, ‘what is it you need my help with exactly?’

  The old woman dumped her wide behind on the sofa, which responded with a great belch of dust. ‘I need something gotten rid of.’

  ‘I see. And what’s
that exactly?’

  She cast a furtive look to the Artex ceiling. ‘Something up there.’

  It was obvious what she was getting at. I felt it before I stepped through the front door. ‘You think this place is haunted.’

  ‘I know it is, and I need you to put a stop to it.’

  ‘Stop it how?’

  ‘I don’t bloody know, do I? You’re the expert. Get out your holy cross and tell it to bugger off.’

  ‘Miss, there’s been a misunderstanding. I’m an investigator, not an exorcist.’

  I didn’t tell her that an exorcist is exactly what I used to be, back before I got a tag put on my toe.

  She showed me a folded-up piece of paper torn from the Yellow Pages. ‘Says here you’re a paranormal investigator.’

  ‘Correct. Meaning I look into unexplained phenomena. The transmundane.’

  ‘Nothing mundane about the thing lurking up there.’

  ‘Maybe not, but that doesn’t give me the right to destroy it.’

  The old woman sat forward. ‘No one’s asking you to destroy anything. All I want is for you to shoo the thing away and send it off through the pearly gates.’ Her voice cracked and her eyes took on a watery sheen. ‘Please, Mister Fletcher, I’m begging you. I can’t carry on like this. You have to help me.’

  I was under no illusions. I knew full well that she was playing the “poor old dear” card, but knowing it didn’t make it any less effective.

  ‘Okay, don’t get yourself all wound up, luv. I’ll take a look, but I’m not making any promises.’

  She returned a dented smile and deflated back into the sofa. ‘Thank you, that’s all I’m asking.’

  I patted down my pockets to make sure I had everything I needed.

  ‘Before I get to work, why don’t you tell me exactly what’s been going on up there?’

  ‘Lots of things. Footsteps that don’t belong to anyone. A weird voice whispering through the walls. Saw a white figure just floating there one time, bold as brass.’

  She sounded genuine enough.

  ‘One last thing. I’ve seen these things get dicey fast, so before I go, are you absolutely sure you’re telling me everything I need to know?’

  ‘Dead sure,’ she said.

  ‘Nothing missed out?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Okay then. I’ll have a shufty and let you know what I find. You wait here, all right?’

  Two quick head bobs. ‘The room you want is at the top of the stairs, first door on your right.’

  I followed the line of her crooked finger to the source of the supernatural presence and felt an icy tickle along my spine like a key dropped down the back of my shirt. Leaving the old woman behind, I trudged up a flight of creaky steps and pushed open the door she’d directed me to.

  The room was small and meat-locker cold. Dubious fingers of daylight clawed through a gap in a ragged set of curtains but didn’t make it far before they recoiled from the darkness like a hand from a flame. The only furnishings on display were more cobwebs and dead flies littering the floor. Even the slimiest of estate agents would have struggled to make this room sound aspirational.

  Compact design! A blank canvas! Great flow!

  I closed the door behind me, held my breath, and waited a few seconds to make sure the old lady hadn’t followed me up. Certain she was downstairs still, I stepped out of the body I was occupying and became two people.

  For those of you playing catch-up, let me colour in the details. Reader’s Digest version: I’m a ghost who works with, and is able to inhabit the person of, my own reanimated corpse. Yeah, that old cliché. Jake and Frank—that’s me and my corporeal counterpart—twin halves of the intrepid Fletcher & Fletcher super-team. Two dead folks who co-run an investigation agency. Together, we put the P.I. in R.I.P.

  ‘Thanks, big man,’ I told my partner. ‘I know it ain’t easy, lugging me around in your noggin.’

  Frank gave me a lopsided grin and made a sloppy OK sign. ‘S’allriiight,’ he slurred.

  His speech was really coming along. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m rubbing off on the feller. Since he showed up, the two of us have been closer than two bollocks in a ball bag.

  ‘Let’s get cracking, shall we?’

  Frank lumbered off and I parted the curtains, burnishing the room with amber. Even lit up, there wasn’t much to look at. The only features present were a cheap mirror splotched black and dotted with greasy fingerprints, rusted staples on the walls pinning ripped corners of torn-down posters, and a tatty white nightdress hanging from a hook on the door. No sign of an otherworldly presence. No disembodied whispering. No eerie footsteps.

  I started to wonder if maybe I’d been mistaken; if the frigid, sinking fear I felt earlier had been in my head. Was I imagining things? Her downstairs, too? Could be she was just a bit batty from old age, saw a white nightdress hanging on the back of the door, and mistook it for a phantom. Or maybe her brain was addled some other way. Back in the day, I dealt with more than one ghostly manifestation that turned out to be nothing more sinister than a knackered boiler. A carbon monoxide leak combined with a screaming radiator can easily get your mind running. Next thing you know you’re hallucinating tortured spirits and voices from nowhere. No shame in it, just a chemical reaction.

  I turned to my partner. ‘You smell gas?’

  I couldn’t, seeing as I don’t have a physical body, but my other half had the nose of a bloodhound and the drool to match.

  Frank gave the air a sniff and shook his head, dislodging a cloud of dead skin cells that briefly caught the light before drifting lazily to the ground. But his nose caught something besides gas. Something that had him circling the room like a dog looking for a place to take a dump. After a couple of circuits he lurched to a stop and pressed his face against the wall decorated with the old mirror. With rigor mortis hands he began to paw at the faded wallpaper.

  ‘What is it, Lassie? Did little Timmy fall down the well?’

  Whatever was going on inside that wall, it had Frank’s undivided attention. Maybe the old lady was right. Maybe she was on to something when she said she heard voices coming through the plaster.

  I was about to poke my head through and take a look inside the wall cavity (a doddle when you’re a phantasm) when Frank growled, raised his fists, and put them both through the brickwork. He tore into the wall as if it were made of shortbread, bringing down a door-sized chunk of masonry with an apocalyptic crash.

  ‘What the bloody hell is going on up there?’ the old lady cried from downstairs.

  ‘Mirror came off its hook, that’s all,’ I said, feeding her some flannel. ‘Bit of a mess but nothing to worry about. You can deduct it from my bill.’

  I was about to shoot Frank a filthy look, but my eyes had already settled upon something poking out of the jumble of bricks spilt across the floor. Breaking up the powdery mess of orange and grey was a shiny white dome: the crown of a skull—a human skull—sat atop a pile of assorted bones.

  Chapter Two: Remains to be Seen

  ‘What the hell happened here?’ I asked.

  Frank didn’t have any answers, but then I don’t really look to my partner for his penetrating insight. Frank’s the guy I go to when heads need bashing in; I’m the brains of this operation.

  I dropped to my haunches to get a better look at the skeleton. Was the person those bones belonged to hidden in the crawlspace post-mortem, Fred West style, or were they bricked up alive? More importantly, would desecrating their grave stir up the lingering soul of an angry bogeyman welcome in neither Heaven nor Hell?

  From the dread gloom of the exposed cavity came my answer. Creeping through the demolition cloud came curling silvery wisps accompanied by a sound that no living thing could make. A sickly dread furred my tongue as the immaterial tendrils tangled and solidified to form a pair of arms that gripped the cratered edges of the wall and hauled through a body. A creature rendered from pain and malice sprang from the hole, a m
onstrous dead thing that existed only to plague the living. This wasn’t a ghost like me: the earthbound imprint of a former person concocted from ectoplasm. This was a wailing horror movie banshee, a revenant, an unquiet spirit who refused to go softly into the night.

  The ghost shot forward like a film strip skipping its sprockets—over there one moment and right on top of me the next. I felt its anvil weight across my ribcage and realised I was on my back, feet pedalling air. The revenant leered over me, eyes burning like hot coals, its mouth hung open in a silent scream. It raised a pair of gangly arms, sending golden razors of sunlight filtering through its oversized claws. I was about to get my face raked off when a confused expression crossed the creature’s face, then off it went, reeling back like a fish yanked away on an angler’s line.

  Frank hoisted the revenant up by its neck and slammed it into the deck beside me. It thrashed around like a mammoth sinking into a tar pit, but Frank wasn’t taking any shit. With the no-nonsense efficiency of a tired mother dealing with a toddler’s supermarket tantrum, he bundled the creature into a manageable shape and pinned it to the ground.