Uncanny Ink Collection by David Bussell & M V Stott

Author:David Bussell & M V Stott [Bussell, David & Stott, M V]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Uncanny Kingdom
Published: 2019-01-20T07:00:00+00:00

14

As I pulled the Porsche to a stop across the road from Black Cat Ink, my thoughts were a boiling broth of anger, confusion, and self-doubt.

Why was the Long Man saying this creature didn’t exist? Why would he do that? I mean, he was a demon, he was evil—they liked to mess you up—but this was different. We were working together, and he owed me, and he’d never welched on a deal before.

‘It is nothing.’

That’s what he told me, but what did it mean? Nothing. Was it a riddle? Some kind of Uncanny creature that I hadn’t heard of before? Could that be it? A race of Nothings that fed on a child’s fear, then came back for seconds once they were fully grown. Returned to finish their meal.

I was clutching at straws and I knew it.

It was obvious what he meant. The Long Man had looked, but there was nothing to see. Uncle Scritch-Scratch didn’t exist, at least as far as the demon could tell.

I breathed long and slow, trying to calm down as my fingers flexed around the steering wheel.

I’d seen him. I’d heard him, smelled him, felt his hands touch me, and now I was being told he was all in my head.

I pulled down the neck of my top and angled the rearview mirror to look at the faded remains on my tattoos, stretching across my collar bone. I traced the lines of the symbols with my finger, the skin stinging as I did so. He’d been so real. I’d been so sure. Could they have really done that to me? Could overusing my tattoos really have damaged my mind so badly that I’d become that deluded?

I climbed out of the car and headed inside the shop, making my way down the steps to the parlour. I was halfway down the narrow staircase when I ran into a woman coming the other way; a brunette, my kind of build, my kind of age.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, turning sideways to slip past me.

As she brushed by, I felt a burr of static dance across my skin. I turned and noticed something on her back through the thin fabric of her vest top: tattooed symbols running from the nape of her neck all the way down her spine. The symbols were like mine, but not the same. They were painted by a common hand, but the runes, the markings, were of a different stripe. It was as though they’d been written in the same language, but were saying words I didn’t understand.

Weird.

I pushed through the beaded curtain at the bottom of the stairs, into the parlour.

‘Hey, Erin, that you?’ asked Parker, though we both knew it was a rhetorical question. He knew full well who’d come calling, regardless of his so-called blindness.

‘Hey, Parks,’ I replied. ‘Who’s the bird on her way out?’

‘Oh, Nadine? No one. Just a client.’

‘A client like what? A normal, or someone like me?’

I was testing him. I knew those tats of hers weren’t the sort regular folk wore, and the electricity I felt when we touched was pure voodoo.

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