Twice Damned: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Ghosted Book 3) by David Bussell & M.V. Stott

Author:David Bussell & M.V. Stott [Bussell, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Genre Reader
Published: 2017-08-03T06:00:00+00:00

14

All this running about was doing my nut in.

You have to remember that back home, as a ghost, I mostly translocated to get to the places I wanted to be, and even when I did travel by foot, being dead meant that I never wore out. Hoofing it about like this was playing absolute murder on my hammies. If it wasn’t for the added incentive of being chased, I’d have run out of puff a couple of miles back. Dieters out there take note: if you’re looking to shed a few pounds, you could do worse than being hounded by a trio of murderous, sentient eyeballs.

Only when Dizzy and I were satisfied that we were out of the Eyes’ range, did we duck into a crumbling back alley and collapse onto our backsides.

My chest felt fit to implode, as though a gorilla had reached through the bars of my rib cage and closed its fat fingers around my heart.

We sat there for a while, resting under the cloak of Hell’s permanent night, until we had breath enough to talk.

‘Bloody hell,’ I wheezed at my companion. ‘We made it out of that one on the bare bones of our arse.’

Dizzy took a gulp of air and went to answer, then stopped mid-breath as he caught sight of something behind me. For a moment I thought the Eyes had caught up to us, but when I turned to look, I saw his attention was settled on something else.

A stout wooden door on the alley wall, a little tarnished, but surprisingly intact given the devastation surrounding it.

‘What is that?’ asked Dizzy, pointing to a faded painting on the face of the door: a small, nondescript icon, barely visible under a patina of ash and grime.

A picture.

A picture of a beehive.

‘Shit the bed,’ I gasped.

‘What is it?’

I put my ear to the door and heard the familiar strains of an ancient jukebox emanating from behind it.

What the literal hell?

The Beehive had no business being where it was; not just in Hell, but in this particular locale of Hell. If the dimension we were traversing was a corrupted mirror of the world we knew, what was Lenny’s pub doing all the way out in… well, I’d lost track of where we were exactly, but it definitely wasn’t the right spot. Still, so long as it gave us somewhere to take a pit stop, I didn’t give a monkeys about the flaky geography of the place.

I pushed open the door. The scene that confronted me defied all comprehension.

There it was—The Beehive—just as I remembered it, the same place I’d been drinking at a couple of nights back, every stick of furniture the same, every stink and stain where it belonged. For a moment I wondered if I’d walked through a portal and ended up back on Earth somehow, but although the pub was a match for The Beehive I knew, its patrons were not.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying they were a different class of customer.

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