Armageddon Outta Here

  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.

  With him gone, it was like a piece of me had been sliced away – stolen. Once Sammy was back, once my family was safe, I could afford to allow plain, boring, run-of-the-mill reality to creep back into my world view. Until then, sneaking around with Irish exorcists was the place for me.

  “Your son’s not in there,” Skulduggery Pleasant said from behind us. I turned sharply, stifling a curse, but he was already walking away. Valkyrie’s reaction was much calmer, like she knew he was there. How he had snuck up on us, though, I had no idea.

  “How do you know?” I asked, hurrying after him.

  “Because I looked.”

  “You can’t have looked. You were only gone a few minutes.”

  “A few minutes are all I need,” Pleasant said. He touched his face, kneading the skin, and I saw him frown. “We’ll have to hurry to the warehouse. We don’t have much time.”

  The warehouse was empty. It was obviously empty. Somehow I just knew it. The others did, too, but Pleasant had to make sure. Like before, I stayed outside with Valkyrie while he vanished into the shadows. He came back a few minutes later, shaking his head.

  “It’s set up, ready for a ritual sacrifice, but there’s no sign of your son,” he said. He was touching his face again. “They could be keeping him anywhere. We’re going to have to wait until tomorrow.”

  “What?” I said. “No. No, we can’t leave Sammy with them overnight.”

  “Of course we can,” Pleasant said, “and we’ll catch them red-handed tomorrow. It’ll all be very dramatic. You’ll love it, believe me.”

  “No,” I said. “We have to keep searching.”

  “It’s pointless. Even if you knew this town, which you don’t, not any more, it’d be a waste of time. Go home, get some sleep. We’ll pick you up at three in the afternoon. I’ll tell you the plan then.”

  “You’re… you’re sure? You’re sure this is the best course of action?”

  “This is the only course of action. Be ready at three.”

  I nodded, sagging against my car. I suddenly realised how tired I was. How utterly exhausted. “Can I give you a lift anywhere? To your hotel?”

  “We’re fine,” Valkyrie said. “And try not to worry, OK? Saving people is what we do.”

  I gave another nod, then got in the car. I swung round, pointing the nose back the way I’d come. I glanced in the rear-view mirror, saw Pleasant and Valkyrie standing close to each other. His arm was round her waist. My eyes flickered to the road ahead, then back to the rear-view. The road behind me was empty.

  got no sleep. My son was in the hands of a madman. Every ten minutes, I grabbed the phone, ready to dial for the cops. But I didn’t. I don’t know why I was trusting these strangers, but trusting them I was, and so I didn’t dial. I just thought about it a lot.

  Three o’clock the following day I was sitting in my car outside my old home, waiting for Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie to suddenly open the doors and get in.

  At four o’clock, I was standing in the kitchen, a mug of cold coffee in my hand, my eyes on the street outside.

  “You seen Sammy?” Felicity asked, passing behind me.

  “He’s checking out the places I used to go as a kid,” I said. The words came out quickly, spilled out like a lie I’d been waiting to tell. “I drew him a map.”

  She came up, put her hand on my arm. “How’re you doing?”

  I stiffened, and she took her hand away. Then left.

  At ten minutes to five, my phone rang.

  “Hi,” said Chrissy.

  “Oh,” I said, “hey.”

  “You sound disappointed.”

  “I’m just waiting for someone. They’re late.”

  “Oh. OK. Listen, I’m sorry if I upset you last night.”

  “You didn’t,” I said, making sure no one was around before I continued in a softer voice. “They have him. They have Sammy. You were right, Chrissy. About all of it.”

  “They have Sammy? Oh, God.”

  “Chrissy, I met some people last night. A man called Pleasant and a girl called Valkyrie. They knew everything. They said they could help.”

  There was a pause. “Be careful,” Chrissy said. “This sounds like something Pete would do.”

  “No, it’s not him. They’re genuine. I really think they’re genuine. They knew everything. They knew stuff we don’t know. They do this kind of thing for a living.”

  “I don’t like it. I don’t—”

  “Dammit, Chrissy, yesterday we said we needed exorcists, didn’t we? Well, now we have them. They took me to the warehouse where they think Moon kills the kids. They can help. Only… only they were supposed to meet me here two hours ago and they haven’t shown.”

  “And you trust them?”

  I hesitated. “Yeah. Yes, I do.”

  “Do you think they’re in trouble?”

  My heart became something heavy, weighing down on my lungs. “Yes.”

  I stood there in the kitchen, the phone pressed to my ear, as helpless and useless in the face of true evil as any child.

  “Then do you want to go help them?” Chrissy asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I picked Chrissy up outside her house, a small Cape Cod on what used to be called Dearson Street, but which now went by the rather more grander-sounding Eastview Drive. If they’d thought renaming the street would elevate the neighbourhood, they must surely have been disappointed. The houses stood forlorn, the spaces between them filled with coarse grasses and the rusted detritus of modern living – flat-wheeled bicycles, broken-down dishwashers, and old cars run on nothing but hope, spit and desperation.

  Chrissy was waiting for me outside the neatest of these houses, and she got in quickly, her purse in her lap. Even now, with the lines on her face and the grey in her hair, I felt a little buzz in my stomach when I met those blue eyes of hers. A buzz that I hadn’t felt with my wife for a long time.

  I felt guilty about that.

  We didn’t meet much traffic as we drove to the warehouse, but it was already getting dark as I pulled over.

  “Is this it?” Chrissy asked.

  “No, it’s further up,” I said, having learned from the experts. “We’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  She nodded. “OK, yeah. I brought something. For us. For protection.”

  Glancing at me nervously, she pulled a nickel-plated revolver from her purse.

  “It was my husband’s,” she said. “I kept it when he left. It’s loaded, I checked. This little lever here is the safety.”

  I looked at it. “I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”

  “Me, either. But I thought we might need it.”

  She held it out to me. I took it, felt how heavy it was. I kept my finger away from the trigger. “OK,” I said. “OK, this is probably… probably a good idea.”

  She gave me a smile, a thin, brittle smile, and got out. I hesitated only a moment before joining her.

  I tried sticking the gun into the waistband of my trousers, but it didn’t feel secure, so I just put it in my jacket pocket as we walked. I kept an eye out for cameras. Pleasant had said something about the security being impressive, but I didn’t see any, not even when we were peering through the chain-link fence. There were lights on in the warehouse and a few cars parked outside that hadn’t been there the day before. But I couldn’t see any guards, and still no sign of cameras.

  The gate was heavy and closed and the fence was t
wice my height. I realised that our first hurdle might also be our last.

  “How the hell do we get in?” I murmured.

  Chrissy hugged herself. It was cold out here. “Bruce Willis would just drive through the gate,” she said. “Or if he wanted to be sneaky he’d drop down from a neighbouring roof.” She craned her neck. “But how would he get up there?”

  “This is ridiculous,” I said. “We’re intelligent people. We should be able to get past a fence.”

  “We could climb it.”

  We were going to have to. Even though I hadn’t indulged in any strenuous physical activity for over six years, I was going to have to climb a fence in front of my childhood crush. I offered up a silent prayer that I wouldn’t make too much of a fool of myself, then extended my arm, my fingers curling into the chain-link. Once I had a good grip, I rattled it a little, just to get an idea of what I had to work with, and then I jumped, grabbing a handhold further up. It wouldn’t take much for my fingers to start burning, so I wasted no time. I dug my feet in against the fence, tried to get the toes of my shoes through the links. I hung there, scrabbling for purchase mere inches off the sidewalk.

  “You have never stopped being sexy,” Chrissy said in a quiet voice, and, despite the danger to ourselves and the threat to my son, I couldn’t help it, I laughed, and I laughed so hard I had to let go and stagger away from my failed attempt at being impressive.

  Chrissy covered her laugh with her hands, eyes glittering with mirth. We both knew what it was, of course. The laughter was a nervous reaction to a scary situation. It didn’t make it any less funny.

  “Boost me up,” she said. “If I can reach the top, I’ll try to pull you up after me.”

  I went back to the fence, interlaced my fingers and bent my knees, keeping my back straight. Chrissy put her right foot in the cradle my hands formed. Her hands rested lightly on my shoulders. She was taking deep breaths.

  “One,” I said, rocking slightly, “two… three.”

  On three, I straightened and lifted and she sprang, catapulting upwards. She got a hand round the bar on the top of the fence and hauled herself up quickly till she was resting on her belly. Steadying herself with her hands, she lifted her right leg up and over and sat up, straddling the bar and looking down at me.