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  Sanctified

  A Branded Story

  David Bussell

  Copyright © 2018 by Uncanny Kingdom.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Also Available From the Uncanny Kingdom

  Become an Insider

  Sanctified

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

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  1

  Desk Babysitter.

  It isn’t actually my job title, but it might as well be.

  I work for the London Underground’s Lost Property Office, or the LPO as it’s known in the biz.

  The biz?

  Who am I kidding? This isn’t Hollywood. There’s no glitz or glamour to this job. I man a phone, I tag lost items, I enter data into a computer. Any monkey could do it. It’s a career so meaningless that the nameplate on my desk is a piece of paper folded into a Toblerone shape and inscribed in ballpoint pen.

  But you didn’t come here to hear me bellyaching about my poor life choices, did you? You came here for the vampire stuff: for the sprouting fangs and the stakes through the heart and the blood spraying phut phut phut against the walls. And spray it will. Gallons of the stuff. But this is an origin story, and you can’t have an origin story without a bit of preamble.

  I know. Boo, right?

  Don’t worry, you’ll get to meet the vampire-killing machine who strikes fear into the hearts of the undead soon enough, but first of all, say hello to boring old Abbey Beckett.

  That’s me.

  The Desk Babysitter.

  The girl who didn’t get the grades she needed for university and wound up working in a lost & found.

  I know, I know, I can already guess what you’re thinking...

  How bad can it be, Abbey? A job’s a job in this economy. Buck up and stop your whining, girl.

  And I hear you. It even sounds like a cool place to work, doesn’t it; London’s famous Lost Property Office? You’ve probably read about it in one of those whimsical articles on The Guardian, or a Buzzfeed listicle if you’re hard of reading. Maybe you’ve cycled through a photo gallery of some of the weird and wonderful things that find their way into our basement. The peculiar artefacts that people leave on the Underground, all piled up on top of each other like the treasures of Aladdin’s cave: wedding dresses and false limbs and grandfather clocks and wheelchairs and water skis and burial urns and medieval swords. Last week, we recovered a stuffed swordfish mounted on a big wooden plaque. It must be at least five feet long. I mean, how do you even get a thing like that on the train, let alone leave it behind?

  I’d taken delivery of a lot of strange stuff since I started working in that office. All day long it came my way, and all day long I tagged it, bagged it, and sent it down the chute to the basement for storage.

  Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather, rinse, repeat.

  Working at the LPO was the same as any other dull-as-dishwater office job. The kind you tell yourself you’ll stick at for a month or two before moving on to something better, then before you know it, it’s been a year, then two years, then some more. I started my stint there as a temp – a stopgap job before I retook my exams and headed off to uni. That was three-and-a-half years ago.

  I like to tell myself that everything would have been different if I’d made it into Higher Education. What a laugh. Even if I did have my Honours, I’d still have no prospects. The job market’s a joke these days, and the economy’s in the toilet. It’s not like having a few letters after my name was going to bury me tits-deep in diamonds.

  So, there I was, twenty-one years old and already feeling like nothing. Like I belonged down the chute in the LPO’s basement, stuffed to the back of some creaky old shelf, collecting dust, long forgotten.

  I know, I sound like a right cheery one, don’t I?

  As I sat at my desk, head in my hands, the new temp hoved into view. She was peppy, eager to please, and done up nicely in zingy colours and respectable footwear. In other words, she was the polar opposite of me; dressed like Halloween and wearing makeup that had been described, on more than one occasion, as looking like it was applied by a drunk mortician.

  I saw the temp mouth a sweet hello as she approached. What was her name again? Cathy? Debbie? Susan? I’d promised myself that I was going to take the time to remember it one of these days, but this was not that day.

  A middle-aged woman trailed after the temp, grossly overweight, and moving with one of those lumbering walks that looked as though it ought to be accompanied by a tuba.

  The temp spoke first. ‘Hi Abbey,’ she chirped, as she pulled up in front of my workstation. She’d taken the time to learn my name, and she’d only been there a week. That’s a level of politeness I find genuinely hostile. ‘This lady could really use your help,’ she announced, beaming a Colgate smile.

  I was about to protest, but before I could think of some other sucker to palm the woman off on, the temp was already flitting away. I tried calling after her, but like I say, her name eluded me. This is what happens when you don’t take the time to socialise with your co-workers; you end up dealing with *ugh* members of the public.

  ‘Are you who I talk to about lost property?’ the woman barked, which, given where she was standing, ranked pretty highly among the most inane questions I’d been asked that week (the other contenders being, ‘Will you be taking the full hour for your lunch break, Abbey?’ and, ‘Are you going to finish that chocolate pudding in the fridge?’).

  I painted on a smile. ‘How can I help you, Miss?’ I asked.

  She replied with a tart, ‘It’s Mrs, actually.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, measuring just how much of a shit I gave about her marital status and finding the scales tipping not one bit.

  ‘I’ve recovered a lost item that I’d like to hand in to the proper authorities,’ she went on, terribly pleased with herself.

  I’d dealt with her sort before. The type of person who considers themselves a scrupulously honest samaritan, but is really just a p
ious old shrew.

  ‘And what is it you’d like to hand in?’ I asked, clicking on the Received tab of the LPO’s computer system, which, would you believe, is called Sherlock. It’s named after the fact that our office is located on Baker Street, right opposite the super-sleuth’s fictitious residence, as though reuniting clueless members of the public with their knackered old brollies could be equated with Holmes solving some great, police-eluding mystery.

  The woman reached into her handbag and produced a wallet; one of those old-fashioned ones with the metal clasp that the elderly love to lug around.

  ‘Here you go,’ she said, digging around in its bulging depths and fishing out a single pound coin.

  I watched her place it down on my desk as if it were a solid gold nugget.

  ‘A quid?’ I said, staring at the thing. ‘You came all this way to give me a quid?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, indignantly. ‘Why, what else should I have done with it?’

  I could think of about a dozen alternatives, most of which involved shoving the thing up one of her bodily orifices, but instead of laying out her options, I settled with corkscrewing my hair in silent frustration.

  The woman stared at me, hard and unblinking. ‘You don’t seem very grateful,’ she noted.

  ‘Of course I’m bloody not,’ I thought back.

  The woman snatched up the coin. ‘Maybe I should just keep it then, if that’s the way you’re going to be.’ She said it with the intonation of a serial killer talking to a victim she was keeping at the bottom of a well.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ asked a new voice.

  It belonged to Gary, my idiot supervisor. How can I describe Gary? Can I even be arsed to describe Gary? Not really. Tell you what, if you want a picture of a bloke, just imagine a man, only smaller.

  ‘I came here out of the goodness of my heart,’ screeched the woman with the pound coin, ‘but this girl’s been nothing but rude.’

  ‘I absolutely haven’t,’ I said, and I hadn’t, not out loud anyway.

  Gary shook his head in my direction and apologised on my behalf, never once taking my side into account or considering that I might be the one in the right. He then spent the next ten minutes consoling the old bat and assuring her that no, of course she hadn’t wasted a journey, and yes, of course her pathetic donation was appreciated. He even took the lone pound coin and placed it in a Ziploc bag, like it was forensic evidence in a murder. Meanwhile, I sat there with my arms folded, listening as Gary alternated between grovelling for forgiveness and admonishing me sideways for my lack of professionalism. Only once the woman had been reluctantly appeased and had left the building, did he engage me directly.

  ‘What was that all about?’

  ‘Seems like you already made up your mind,’ I replied.

  He jutted out his chin to make himself look more authoritative, but ended up looking like he was trying to blow a troublesome fly off the tip of his nose. ‘I suggest you have a good, hard think about the way you talk to me, Beckett, because if your attitude doesn’t buck up sharpish, you’re going to be out of a job. Get me?’ The last part he said so close to my face that I could smell the vending machine coffee on his breath.

  ‘I get you,’ I grumbled, the words like tin foil in my mouth.

  ‘That’s more like it,’ he said, then did a pathetic little strut around the office, peacocking for the sake of my so-called co-workers, who sat at their desks, sniggering into their sleeves. For a moment, I genuinely thought he was going to go in for a round of high-fives. Having completed his “victory” circuit, he arrived back at my desk for round two. ‘So, since you’re obviously keen to carry on working here,’ he said, ‘I’m going to need you to step up your game. I’ve got sixteen bags of unsorted property over there that needs dealing with, and someone has to input the backlog into the system.’

  ‘I’ll make it my next job,’ I muttered.

  ‘Too right you will,’ he replied, ‘tonight. Shouldn’t take more than a few hours. And don’t make that face, you’ll get paid for the extra time. Standard rate,’ he added.

  Instead of voicing my disapproval, I bit my tongue and imagined setting him on fire a bit. ‘Yes, Gary.’

  ‘Oh, and one more thing,’ he said, holding up a finger, ‘there’s a dress code now—new company policy—so no more coming into work looking like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.’ He eyeballed my black clothes and matching nail varnish. ‘It’s morbid.’

  It is true that I have a morbid streak. For instance, whenever I meet a new person, I always think to myself, ‘I wonder what I’d wear to their funeral?’ It’s just a habit really, not because I actively wish the person any ill will. With Gary though, things were different. With Gary, the thought occurred every time he opened his idiot mouth, and every time I imagined standing over his coffin I pictured myself dry-eyed and dressed in my best and brightest.

  ‘Eat a dick, Gary,’ I mumbled under my breath, the moment he’d made it out of earshot.

  2

  Seeing as my flat in Thamesmead was a whole hour’s commute away, it didn’t seem worth making the long trek home just so I could drag my skin all the way back to the office again. That left me with a big slab of time to kill between the end of my crappy day shift and the beginning of my crappy night shift. A big slab of time that I ended up spending in the staff cafeteria, gorging on high-calorie snacks while I caught up on some much-overdue reading.

  My boyfriend, Neil, is a novelist. I’d been lugging around his newest manuscript for days under the pretense that I’d finish the thing, but I was still stuck at the three-quarter point. Don’t get me wrong, Neil’s a great writer, but his stories... they just don’t float my boat. While I like to read weighty hardbacks about orphaned peasant girls overcoming historical prejudice to become successful, independent women, Neil—how can I put this kindly—Neil paints in more… primary colours. His protagonists tend to be of the fantastic variety: modern-day magicians and shapeshifting monsters and generals of Satanic cabals. I mean, I love the boy, I really do, but seriously, give me a break. Just because I dress like a character from an Anne Rice novel, doesn’t mean I want to sit down and read one.

  Anyway, this particular manuscript was book five of Neil’s W&W Investigations set, a pulpy, urban fantasy series about a warlock and a werewolf who run a detective agency in San Francisco. Maybe that’s your bag, I don’t know. To me, that’s homework. Still, I only had a few chapters to go, so I took a deep breath, knuckled down, and got to reading. Or at least I would have if I hadn’t been disturbed by the sound of a nearby conversation…

  ‘...Oh yeah, there’s all sorts goes on down there, you know?’

  I looked up from the loose pages of Neil’s manuscript to see Gary a couple of tables over. Apparently, he’d decided to take a break from getting on my case so he could chat up the office temp.

  ‘...The whole of the Underground network’s riddled with stuff that people don’t have a clue about,’ he told her. ‘Like, did you know there’s a hidden tunnel that runs off the Circle line and connects to a classified military bunker in St. James’ Park? Fascinating, right?’

  The temp’s barely suppressed sigh said exactly the opposite, but Gary continued to drone on at her regardless. Over his shoulder, the temp and I exchanged knowing eye-rolls.

  ‘If you like,’ Gary continued, flashing the temp his supervisor laminate, ‘I could take you on a tour of the tunnels some time. Show you some parts of London that the general public never get to see. My treat.’

  The temp cleared her throat. ‘That’s nice of you to offer, Gary,’ she replied, ‘but I’m afraid I can’t that day.’

  ‘I didn’t say a day yet,’ he huffed back, angrily cramming his laminate back into his top pocket.

  He turned, caught me earwigging on the conversation, and narrowed his eyes at me, as though I’d somehow poisoned his otherwise perfect pitch. Annoyed, he marched over to my table and used a pudgy finger to stab at the face of his Casio watch.


  ‘About time you got to work I reckon,’ he said, pressing his palms to the surface of the cafeteria table.

  I stood slowly and straightened up. ‘Aye aye, Cap’n,’ I replied, firing off a sarcastic salute.

  He gave me a stare that I think was meant to look tough, but only made him look constipated. ‘Enjoy your shift, Abbey,’ he said, taking his blazer from the back of a chair and tugging it on. ‘I’ll be going home and putting my feet up now.’

  And with that, he turned on his heel and swaggered off.

  What an actual prick.

  * * *

  It was getting on for half two in the morning and I still had a long way to go before I was finished doing Gary’s dirty work. I was fuming, but more than that, I was experiencing a heavy crush of disappoint. I always thought I’d be on the road to something by this stage of my life. Instead, I was stuck in a rut and slaving away in a windowless tomb until the sun came up.

  I jolted at the sound of a sharp buzz.

  The office intercom.

  Since I was the only one in the building, I made my way to Reception. I checked the CCTV monitor behind the front desk and saw a stocky man from the LPO’s collection team using a newspaper to shield himself from the rain. Pressing the button on the underside of the desk, I buzzed him in and he fired into the foyer, shaking himself off like a wet dog.