Armageddon Outta Here - The World of Skulduggery Pleasant (35 page)

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the man said.

“Where’s my son?” I screamed, making a grab for him. My hands were pushed down with unsettling ease and the man reached over and smacked my head painfully against the steering wheel.

“We don’t know,” he said, “but I’m sure we’ll figure it out easily enough. How’s your nose? Sorry about that, but we can’t afford to let you drive to Pete Green’s house and get yourself killed.”

“Where is my son?” I repeated, through gritted teeth.

“He could be in one of three places,” the man said, “or he could be in a fourth that we don’t yet know about. We didn’t take him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“That’s what he’s thinking,” said the girl in the back seat.

“That’s what I thought,” said the man. “But we didn’t. Take him, that is.”

I looked at the man in the seat beside me. He was well-groomed. Clean-shaven. He wore gloves and had a hat sitting on his lap. He didn’t strike me as a Satanist. I turned to peer at the girl. I’d seen her before. She smiled at me and I recognised her from the bar the previous night – she’d been sitting at the next table when Chrissy came over.

“You’re Moon’s People,” I said.

“We’re not,” she told me.

“You’ve been spying on me.”

“Only a little.” She gave another smile. “And we’ve been listening to your phone calls slightly.”

They both spoke with an accent. Irish, though his was a little less distinct that hers. Maybe he travelled a lot.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“We’re here to help,” the man said. “We’re your exorcists.”

“My name’s Valkyrie,” said the girl.

“And you can call me Mr Pleasant,” said the man.

hey made me drive to the bottom of King Hill, and left me in the car with the engine still running. I could have driven away right there and then. Instead, I turned the engine off, killed the lights, and got out.

Mr Pleasant stood looking up at Bubba Moon’s old house on the top of the hill. He had his hat on now, which made him look like an old-time private eye, the kind I used to watch on TV when I was a kid. A black Humphrey Bogart. The girl sat on the bonnet of my car and swung her legs.

“Why did you bring me here?” I asked.

Pleasant looked round. “We didn’t,” he said. “You drove us.”

“You made me drive you.”

“We asked you to and you did. We didn’t force you to do anything.”

Valkyrie looked at me. “I heard what your friend said last night about Bubba Moon. She got it right. Well, most of it. Moon isn’t a Satanist, though.”

“That’s right,” Pleasant murmured. “He’s just sick.”

He started walking up the hill. Valkyrie hopped off the bonnet and followed. I didn’t know what was expected of me, so I followed, too.

“Where’s my son?” I asked, for what felt like the hundredth time.

“I should have thought it was obvious,” said Pleasant. “The People have him.”

“Then we call the police. We have to call the police.”

“We don’t know where he is,” Valkyrie interjected, and it struck me that she was playing the good cop role in this partnership. He was allowed to be as rude as he liked, as long as she was there to smooth things over.

“If you call the police, they’ll rush in and whoever’s holding Sammy will kill him immediately and dump the body. He’s not in any danger right now. They do their killings on the fourteenth of each month. That’s tomorrow night. He’s safe for now.”

“Is he here?” I asked, my eyes flicking ahead of us. The house loomed, a dark thing in the darkness, its faded paint peeling like burst blisters, its windows blanked out by rotten wood, its roof patchy with old tiles.

“This is the most obvious place,” Pleasant said, “so I doubt it. But before we go charging in to the rescue, first we eliminate all the places we shouldn’t be charging.”

I frowned. “Rescue? You’re going to rescue Sammy? You’re going to help me?”

“Of course,” said Pleasant. “You’re only just getting that? We announced ourselves as the exorcists. How much clearer can we make it?”

“Don’t mind him,” said Valkyrie, patting my arm. “He’s just cranky. He didn’t even want to come here in the first place.”

Pleasant looked around sharply. “We are in the middle of a very important investigation. Very important. Things are happening.”

“We were in Chicago,” Valkyrie said, “doing a thing. About to go home. Then we’re asked to come here, to do a little digging if we had the time.”

“Which of course we don’t,” said Pleasant. “But your Sanctuary asked, and our Sanctuary said sure, let’s put our investigation on hold, let’s ignore the possibility of a disease that turns ordinary people into ticking time bombs and send our two best detectives to Bredon. Even though you have your own.”

I frowned. “Sorry?”

“Detectives,” he said. “America. America has its own detectives. Some good ones, too. None as good as me, of course.”

“And that’s the burden you bear with such humility,” Valkyrie said, but her voice was softer now as we neared the house.

Pleasant led the way around the full circumference. The place looked even deader than it had when I was a kid. It also looked infinitely creepier. If I had thought that adulthood meant I wasn’t going to find my flesh crawling, I was about as wrong as I could possibly be.

“You feel that?” Valkyrie said, pulling back the sleeve of her jacket and examining her arm. “Goosebumps. Skulduggery, I have goosebumps.”

Pleasant looked round. “Interesting,” he said.

“Your name is Skulduggery Pleasant?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Have you heard of me?”

“No. What kind of name is Skulduggery Pleasant? It sounds made up.”

“It is made up. All names are made up. Why are we talking about this? The basement, wasn’t it? That’s where you broke in? Through this window, I take it?”

He pointed to the narrow window close to the ground, and I realised I was standing exactly where I had been all those years ago. I nodded.

Pleasant handed his hat to Valkyrie. “Do not wear it,” he said, then crouched, prising the window open with his fingers. When it was open, he lay flat and slid through easily. It was like his body momentarily deflated, his clothes sinking to allow him access. A moment later, the window was lit from inside by a warm, flickering orange light.

Valkyrie put the hat on and looked at me. “Your friend was right. Bubba Moon is a psychic, or what we call a Sensitive. His followers have similar gifts. The same way Skulduggery and I have gifts. Some of his followers are Sensitives, some are… other things. You don’t have to worry about any of that.”

Her phone buzzed. She held it to her ear. She wore a big clunky black ring. She listened for a moment, then hung up. “They’re not there,” she said. “He’ll be out in a sec. He’s just looking around.”

“Who
are
you?” I asked.

She hesitated. “We take care of things like this. Like Skulduggery said, we’re exorcists. Of a sort. Except instead of praying and waving a crucifix we, y’know… punch. And shoot. There’s a bit of stabbing, too. Lots of screaming. Some running.”

A gust of wind snatched the hat from her head, took it up to one of the windows, and Skulduggery Pleasant reached through the wooden boards and grabbed it.

Valkyrie glared. “He never lets me wear it.”

I wanted to drive right up to Pete’s house and hammer on the door, but Pleasant made me park a block away, and we got out and walked.

“You said Sammy is at one of three places,” I said. “Bubba Moon’s house was the first, this is the second. What’s the third?”

“A warehouse on the edge of town,” said Pleasant. “We followed one of his People there yesterday. It’s owned by a business that doesn’t exist. Fudged paperwork, not done with any degree of style or finesse, but enough to pass routine inspection. High level of security, though, for a building that, as far as we can see, doesn’t actually contain anything.”

“That sounds like it’s where they do their… killings,” I said, then frowned. “Doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Pleasant agreed. “But it may not necessarily be where they keep their offerings.”

“Shouldn’t we get back-up? Do you
have
back-up? Chrissy said Pete has over a dozen followers.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Pleasant. “Valkyrie and I have faced worse odds than this.”

“You have?”

“We have,” said Valkyrie, and then her reassuring smile slipped. “We’ve never actually
won
against those odds, but…”

“But we’ve come close,” Pleasant said, “and trying is the main thing when it comes to life-and-death situations. Or one of the main things, anyway. It’s in the top three. Well, top five. You need to stop thinking of him as Pete Green, by the way. He’s Bubba Moon now. By this stage there’ll be no trace of your old friend left in there at all, and any assumption otherwise could prove fatal.”

“But can you get rid of him? Get rid of Moon?”

“Not if he doesn’t want to go,” said Pleasant, “and not without a powerful Sensitive of our own.”

“So how are you going to exorcise him? Do you say prayers or…?”

Pleasant glanced at Valkyrie, then looked at me. “I’m going to have to kill him. Do you have a problem with that?”

I went cold, but my legs didn’t stop moving. “Pete’s innocent,” I said. “But Bubba Moon is a serial killer and… I just want my son back.”

“And even if they worked, prayers wouldn’t do any good,” said Valkyrie. “It wasn’t Moon’s spirit that possessed your friend – it was his disembodied consciousness. Apparently, there’s a difference. Bubba Moon wasn’t dead when the cops found him. He was doing some astral projection. You know what that is?”

“I think so,” I said. “Didn’t the CIA try that in the seventies? They’d have their agents go into a trance and send their minds out to spy on the Russians or something.”

“Very much like that,” said Valkyrie. “Although Moon could do a lot more than spy.”

We got to the corner. A hundred yards down the block lay Pete Green’s house. The lights were on.

“Moon knew the cops had one of his People,” she continued, “and he knew this guy was talking. So he sent out his astral self and killed his follower in his jail cell. Made it look like a suicide. It all would have worked out fine if the cops hadn’t burst in with that search warrant. When they found him, he wasn’t dead, he was comatose. The circle was keeping his body alive.”

“So when they moved him out of the circle,” I said, “his body died.”

Valkyrie nodded. “And his consciousness had nowhere to return to. It was drawn back to that circle where it stayed, trapped, until you kids came along.”

“Eighteen years of Bubba Moon seething in that circle,” Pleasant said. “He infected the whole house with his foul thoughts. That’s why you felt uneasy. That’s why the both of you had goosebumps.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Did you have goosebumps?”

Pleasant looked at me, and Valkyrie grinned. Neither of them said anything, and then Pleasant moved off. Valkyrie stayed where she was, and I stayed beside her.

“Where’s he going?”

“He’s just checking out the house,” she said.

I looked back, but Pleasant was gone. The suddenness of his disappearance alarmed me. I scanned the area. It was dark, but it wasn’t that dark. There was nowhere for him to hide, and he couldn’t possibly have jumped one of the fences in the three seconds I was looking away. I was going to ask Valkyrie where he’d gone, but I was struck by the quiet knowledge that she wasn’t going to tell me. So I stayed beside her, and we both looked at Pete Green’s house.

The street wasn’t much different than I remembered. The houses were the same. Some of them, Pete’s included, may have had an extension added on, but they were basically unchanged. There were a few tall walls where there had once been only fences. The lawns were neater.

I was suddenly struck by the insanity of the situation. Here I was, sneaking around the town I grew up in with two Irish exorcists who planned to kill my childhood friend because he was possessed by the consciousness of a serial killer.

But just as that wave of insanity hit me, another one followed, and this brought with it a cold determination to do whatever I had to do, to believe whatever I had to believe, in order to get my son back. Because behind all this madness was the reality, the only reality that mattered. I had carried my son in my arms and on my back, administered more Band-Aids than I could remember, held him when he cried, made up bedtime stories every night for ten years, and laughed with him at a thousand dumb things.