Mortal Coil

They stopped at the door, and Skulduggery made a concerted effort to shift his features. His mouth twitched downwards. “Am I smiling now?”

“No.”

“Excellent,” he said, and the smile immediately sprang back up.

Valkyrie handed him his hat. “Why don’t you get rid of the face? You’re not going to need it in here.”

“You’re the one telling me how much I should practise,” he said, but slid his gloved fingers beneath his shirt collar anyway, tapping the symbols etched into his collarbones. The face and hair retracted off his head, leaving him with a gleaming skull.

He put on his hat, cocked at a jaunty angle. “Better?” he asked.

“Much.”

“Good.” He knocked, and took out his gun. “If anyone asks, we’re scary carollers.”

Humming ‘Good King Wenceslas’ to himself, he knocked again, and still no one answered the door, and no lights came on.

“What do you bet everyone’s dead?” Valkyrie asked.

“Are you just being incredibly pessimistic,” Skulduggery asked, “or is that ring of yours telling you something?”

The Necromancer ring was cold on her finger, but no colder than usual. “It’s not telling me anything. I can only sense death through it when I’m practically standing over the dead body.”

“Which is an astonishingly useful ability, I have to say. Hold this.”

He gave her his gun, and crouched down to pick the lock. She looked around, but no one was watching them.

“It might be a trap,” she said, speaking softly.

“Unlikely,” he whispered. “Traps are usually enticing.”

“It might be a very rubbish trap.”

“Always a possibility.”

The lock clicked open. Skulduggery straightened up, put his lock picks away, and took his gun back.

“I need a weapon,” Valkyrie muttered.

“You’re an Elemental with a Necromancer ring, trained in a variety of martial arts by some of the best fighters in the world,” Skulduggery pointed out. “I’m fairly certain that makes you a weapon.”

“I mean a weapon you hold. You have a gun, Tanith has a sword … I want a stick.”

“I’ll buy you a stick for Christmas.”

She glowered as he pushed the door. It opened silently, without even a creepy old creak. Skulduggery went first and Valkyrie followed, closing the door after them. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to this level of gloom, and Skulduggery, who had no eyes for this to be a problem, waited until she tapped him before moving on. They passed through into the living room, where she tapped him again. He looked at her, and she pointed to the Necromancer ring. It was buzzing with a dreadful kind of cold energy as it fed off the death in the room.

They found the first dead body sprawled across the couch. The second was slumped in the corner, amid the wreckage of what once had been a side table. Skulduggery looked closely at each of them, then shook his head at Valkyrie. Neither was the man they were looking for.

They moved into the kitchen, where they found a third corpse, face down on the floor. Were his head not twisted all the way around, he would have been looking up at the ceiling. A bottle lay beside his hand, smashed against the tiles, and the smell of beer was still strong.

The rest of the ground floor was clear of corpses, so they went to the stairs. The first one creaked, and Skulduggery stepped back off it. He wrapped his arms around Valkyrie’s waist, and they rose off the ground and drifted up to the body on the landing. It was a woman, who had died curled up in a foetal position.

There were three bedrooms and one bathroom. The bathroom was empty, as was the first bedroom they checked. The second bedroom had scorch marks on the wall and another dead woman halfway out of a window. Valkyrie guessed this woman was the one responsible for the scorch marks – she’d tried to defend herself, then tried to run. Neither attempt had worked.

There was someone alive in the last bedroom. They could hear whoever it was in the wardrobe, trying not to make a sound. They heard a deep breath being taken as they approached, and then there was absolute silence for all of thirteen seconds. The silence ended with a ridiculously loud gasping for air. Skulduggery thumbed back the hammer of his gun.

“Come out,” he said.

The wardrobe burst open and a shrieking madman leaped out at Valkyrie. She batted down his arm, grabbed his shirt and twisted her hip into him, his shriek turning to a yelp as he hit the floor.

“Don’t kill me,” he sobbed as he lay there. “Oh God, please don’t kill me.”

“If you had let me finish,” Skulduggery said, slightly annoyed, “you would have heard me say, ‘Come out, we’re not going to hurt you’. Idiot.”

“He probably wouldn’t have said idiot,” Valkyrie told the sobbing man. “We’re trying our best to be nice.”

The man blinked through his tears, and looked up. “You’re … You’re not going to kill me?”

“No, we’re not,” Valkyrie said gently, “so long as you wipe your nose right now.”

The man sniffled into his sleeve and she stood back, trying not to shiver with revulsion. He got up.

“You’re Skulduggery Pleasant,” he said. “I’ve heard about you. The Skeleton Detective.”

“Season’s greetings,” Skulduggery nodded. “This is my partner, Valkyrie Cain. And you are …?”

“My name is Ranajay. I live here with my … with my friends. It’s so nice, living next to all these normal people. We really liked living here. Me and my … Me and my friends …”

Ranajay looked like he was going to start sobbing again, so Valkyrie cut in quickly. “Who did this? Who killed everyone?”

“I don’t know. A big guy. Huge. He wore a mask, and spoke with an accent. His eyes were red.”

“What did he want?” Skulduggery asked.

“He came here looking for a friend of mine.”

Valkyrie frowned. “Ephraim Tungsten?”

“Yes,” Ranajay said. “How did you know?”

“That’s who we want to talk to. We believe he’s been in contact with a killer we’ve been tracking for five months.”

“Davina Marr, right? That detective who went bad, blew up the Sanctuary? That’s why the big guy wanted Ephraim too.”

“Do you know if Marr has been in touch with Ephraim?” Skulduggery asked.

“Oh, she has, yes. Paid him to make her a false ID and arrange to get her out of the country. That’s what Ephraim does. When people have to disappear, he takes care of it. Only this time he didn’t. I think after he realised what she’d done, he didn’t want any part of it. The detective, Marr, she came looking for everything she’d paid for after the Sanctuary fell into the ground, but he was gone. She tore this place up three times in the same month looking for him. Haven’t seen her since then. Haven’t seen Ephraim either. We all thought it’d be safer if we stayed away from him, you know? Fat lot of good that did my friends.”