The Imaginary Corpse Read online

  PRAISE FOR TYLER HAYES

  “A wholly original take on the lands of make-believe from a captivating new voice in the genre. Hayes takes the reader on a journey to the heart of themselves, reminding them of all that was lost and all that can never be forgotten. A book as comforting and as cathartic as your first knocked-out tooth.”

  Meg Elison, Philip K. Dick Award-winning author of The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

  “This book is messed up in all the right ways. It’s as if Pixar’s Inside Out mugged Toy Story in a surrealist Raymond Chandler novel. Weird, fun, scary, and a great mystery to boot. Hayes sticks the landing.”

  Jennifer Brozek, Author of Never Let Me Sleep and The Last Days of Salton Academy

  “This is detective noir shot through with technicolor playfulness the likes of which I haven’t seen since Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It’s pure imagination on multiple axes – with a ton of heart.”

  Alex Wells, author of Hunger Makes the Wolf

  “Combining detective noir, Toy Story, and an in-depth look at trauma, Hayes has crafted the most unlikely formula and makes it sing. The Imaginary Corpse is inventive, fun, and touching, in the most unexpected way. The world – real and imaginary – needs more triceratops detectives.”

  Mike Chen, author of Here and Now and Then

  “An immensely creative, bittersweet sugar rush of a fantasy-noir novel: Who Framed Roger Rabbit meets Paranoia Agent with a touch of creepy-cute Coraline atmosphere.”

  Wendy Trimboli, author of The Resurrectionist of Caligo

  ANGRY ROBOT

  An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

  Unit 11, Shepperton House

  89 Shepperton Road

  London N1 3DF

  UK

  angryrobotbooks.com

  twitter.com/angryrobotbooks

  Still Reeling

  An Angry Robot paperback original, 2019

  Copyright © Tyler Hayes 2019

  Cover by Francesca Corsini

  Commissioned by Marc Gascoigne

  Edited by Lottie Llewlyn-Wells and Gemma Creffield

  Set in Adobe Garamond

  All rights reserved. Tyler Hayes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Sales of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

  Angry Robot and the Angry Robot icon are registered trademarks of Watkins Media Ltd.

  ISBN 978 0 85766 831 8

  Ebook ISBN 978 0 85766 832 5

  Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Sonya

  Look, honey: We made it.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE: WELCOMING COMMITTEE

  Are you okay?

  I’m down here. Yeah, the sunflower-yellow stuffed triceratops. I know.

  It’s okay. I know you’re overwhelmed, I was too. We all were.

  Do you need anything? Food? Water? To talk about whatever just happened to you? No is fine. No is always fine here.

  You’ve got questions. Of course you’ve got questions. And I’m happy to answer them. But why don’t we start at the start, and I’ll tell you why you’re talking to a plush dinosaur.

  Here are the two things you absolutely need to know. First: In case you didn’t know, you’re an idea. I’m not sure if you’re an imaginary friend or a novel’s protagonist or a mascot or what. But if you’re here, you’re an idea.

  Second: You were loved. You were loved enduringly and unequivocally, and that made you capital-R Real. Not an idea; an Idea. A Friend.

  But then – whatever just happened to your person, your creator – it happened, and it was horrible, and it affected you. I won’t pretend to know what, and I won’t ask, but whatever it was, your person couldn’t keep you around. For most ideas, that’s it, lights out. But not you. You’re Real. So… what happens to you?

  Well, what happens is that you end up here. The Stillreal. The underside of the Imagination that nobody remembers to clean. It can be a rough place, but it can also be beautiful. Fortunately, you have me to help you find the latter instead of waltzing face-first into the former.

  The name’s Tippy: ex-imaginary friend and once-and-current detective. It’s nice to meet you.

  CHAPTER ONE

  That case? That one starts with the screaming corn.

  Every time I talk about this case, I wish it started differently: some mysterious person walking into my office, or my best friend in the whole world asking for help fleeing to Mexico, or even me trying to help my person learn her ABCs. You know, a real detective story, something that speaks to my soul. Not one where I get hired out of Mr Float’s Rootbeerium by the living incarnation of someone’s half-baked TV pitch. Of course, if I always got what I wanted, I wouldn’t be where I am, so – bigger picture – I guess this is for the best.

  The corn in question is growing on the premises of Nightshire Farms, the ‘evil’ farm down the road from the ‘good’ Sundrop Farms. The farms are two halves of a children’s television series; their person crawled into a bottle and dropped the whole place off in this lovely communal garbage heap of ours before the show got a chance to air. I’m here because Nightshire’s proprietor, arch-villain Farmer Nick Nefarious, is worried about the behavior of the crop of singing corn he’s stolen from Sundrop’s proprietor, his antagonist/sometimes friend Farmer Fran. More specifically, he’s worried about the way the ‘singing’ corn won’t stop screaming. He’s offered to clear my Rootbeerium tab as payment, but more importantly he’s given me a mystery to keep my brain occupied instead of letting it sink into the mud of my memories. (The clear tab is nice though, not going to lie.) So here I am, about to step right into a whole swimming pool of trouble.

  Nightshire Farms really tries to drive the whole ‘evil’ point home, as much as something with the aesthetic of a kid’s cartoon can. The buildings are various shades of black and purple, and so lopsided they look like their architects hated the concept of symmetry. Both the farmhouse and the barn have their windows and doors positioned perfectly to look like snarling faces. There’s no detail to the horizon, just flat in every direction, and a haze of red dust that makes
the sun look like it’s dying. The soil is volcanic ash, thick and gray, and all the plants have faces: poison-red berries with wrathful little scowls, street gangs of fat green gourds sneering and looking for a challenge. And between the barn and the house, standing in military-precise rows, is the corn.

  Farmer Nick sold the situation short. When he said ‘screaming,’ I pictured hungry babies wailing, or maybe someone getting surprised in the dark. This is straight-from-the-heart, pants-wetting terror, like the world’s biggest predator is one toothy lunge away from devouring the corn and everything it loves. I understand why Farmer Nick was waiting at the Rootbeerium – I don’t want to be anywhere near this noise either – but I wish he’d told me that cotton balls in my ears weren’t quite going to cut it. I’m tempted to scream just to let out the pressure.

  I start my clue-mining on the edges of the cornrows, taking measurements, getting a summary established in my head. The corn’s yellow, but more old butter than noonday sun, and the stalks are varying shades of green, none of them healthy. There are sixty-six rows, with six stalks on each row. (If that metaphor seems heavy-handed, congratulations, you now know why this Idea never got past a storyboard.) I do a full circuit for missing or broken stalks, but nothing doing. It’s a perfect little phalanx of corn cobs, all of them screaming their darn heads off.

  Next, I check the dirt. The ground gets colder the closer to the corn I get. The color shifts, too, turning deep purple instead of choking gray. That could just be a quirk of Nightshire’s soil, but my detective stuff says it’s a clue.

  (The detective stuff is magic. Just trust me; the longer explanation for it doesn’t help much.)

  I pick up a handful of the gray dirt, let it sift through the cotton stubs I call toes. Other than the temperature, it feels like dirt, moves like dirt, smells like dirt. I pick up some of the purple stuff, and right away it’s different – it’s thinner and lighter, pouring between my toes in viscous wisps, like I’ve grabbed on to night-time mist. I have a theory fermenting.

  I look at the corn again, and I let my detective stuff speak to me. It says to check their faces, so I take a gander at one up close and personal. It’s not pleasant – this close, the screaming’s a drill pushed right up against my skull – but that doesn’t stop two thoughts from colliding so hard they burst.

  I look again at Nick’s other crops, and I look back to the corn, and I see exactly what I expect to see. I’m so excited my toes start to vibrate.

  “It’s the details,” I say, to the partner I like to pretend I still have.

  The faces aren’t like the faces on Farmer Nick’s other crops. The others are cartoonish, abstract and simple, just like every other kid-show Idea I’ve ever come across. The corn, though, has definition. There are veins in the eyeballs, contours and deformities in the teeth, and an all-around stink of compost coming off them.

  “This didn’t come from Sundrop Farms,” I mutter.

  See, the one advantage to your creator dropping you in the Stillreal: you can travel to Ideas other than the one you were dropped in. The catch is that when Friends travel to an Idea they aren’t originally from, they bring a little of their home with them. If you’re just passing through like I am, it’s pretty minor and pretty brief; the colors around here might be brighter after I leave, or a few ears of corn might look like they’re made of fabric, at least until Nightshire Farms reverts back to its version of ‘normal.’ But if something from another Idea sticks around too long, things start to go really sideways – like, say, horrifying faces on your ill-gotten crops.

  I follow the purple dirt, watching the way it blends into the gray. It was easy to miss at first, but on second glance there’s a hint of purple extending into the shadow of the barn. It’s more a general smearing of color than a simple trail, but still, my theory is putting on muscle.

  Conclusion: The corn was absolutely stolen from Farmer Fran, but something else made it change – and that something appears to have hidden in the barn, recently enough that the crops haven’t had a chance to reassert themselves.

  The doors to the barn are wide open, although given the kind of place Nightshire is, they’re probably always wide open, waiting, beckoning, hungry, et cetera. The diseased sunlight does less than nothing to light up the barn’s insides.

  The safest place in this Idea right now is anywhere but inside that barn, but inside that barn is where the puzzle is. I swallow a little knot of fear, and walk inside.

  The sunlight cuts out the second I step through the open doors. The inside of the barn is in perpetual twilight, just enough light to see the odd spooky detail you’re sure is just your mind playing tricks on you. The floor is covered in pungent, past-prime straw. To my left is a wall of hay bales. To my right is a long row of stable stalls, stretching into the endless shadows. Right in front of me is a wall full of farm implements designed to scare the poop out of people. I tear my attention away from the most barb-laden one, and remind myself to breathe.

  Clues will help. Clues will always help. The stalls are the place to start. I walk along the row, my head as low to the ground as I can get, checking under every door for evidence of inhabitants. Nothing; my detective stuff isn’t even kicking up. There’s no sign of anything alive in here except me and a couple of oily-shelled beetles.

  And that shuffling noise…

  It’s coming from behind me, from one of the stalls I already checked. It’s just on the edge of normal hearing, like socks on a shag carpet as heard through a thick oak door. As an experiment I turn around, and sure enough, the shuffling has moved with me, sounding out from behind again, except this time it’s closer. I turn around once more, and the sound whickers out. My sense of calm clocks out early.

  This creature has to be a nightmare. Only nightmares move that fast, that particularly, calibrated to maximize your fear. Nightmares also tend to be the most dangerous Friends; the threat of harm is vital to their sense of purpose, and it’s not like they can help backing it up if they’re pressed. On the bright side, screaming corn doesn’t seem as worrying anymore.

  The shuffle comes again, close enough to set my nerves on fire, waiting for a hand or tentacle or claw to come down on my waiting shoulder. The worst thing I could do right now would be to run. The second-worst thing would be to call out to whatever is making the noise.

  “Hello?”

  If I do the unexpected, I usually catch the bad guys off-guard.

  More shuffling. Ordinary senses wouldn’t be able to place it, but detective stuff says it’s two stalls from the end, behind another nondescript wooden door. I creep toward it, stop one stall shy, and take a long, theatrical look around, like I can’t figure out where the sound is coming from. Then I duck as a blur of shadows and drill bits comes whooshing by, gleaming talons raking the air just shy of where my head used to be.

  I blink, and the blur is gone. A silk-on-silk hiss echoes through the barn, coming from every stall at once. I hear sharp bits grating against each other, and huge, heavy things skulking around in the darkness above me. They must have gone up into the rafters, which is basically the last place I want them to be. If I’d known this thing could fly, I might have charged Nick extra.

  Some nightmares will stop and talk to you as soon as they know you won’t get scared. Some nightmares double down when you get courageous, start getting truly violent. And some are animals, knowing nothing except the chase and the pounce and the fear. And this one chose the spookiest barn in the Stillreal to camp out in, so practicality demands I assume it’s type three.

  I pivot in place, trying to bait the nightmare back out, trusting my detective stuff to keep me on the ball. There’s another rustle off to my left, and a growl of admonishment that I’m sure soaked many a bedsheet in its day. I need to get it down near the floor again, where the tighter quarters created by the stalls will limit its movement.

  “Are you a bed monster?” I ask the darkness. “Or maybe a window-scratcher?” I slather the mocking tone on thick, which a
s a bonus helps cover up my shivers. “What kind of half-scary nonsense were you before you came here?”

  The barn stays quiet, that aggravating silence you can tell is going to be filled with noise any second. This Friend has definitely been here for a while if they’ve got the acoustics down like that. There’s more movement, but nothing dramatic enough to suggest they’re coming down my way. They won’t come down without an opening. This thing is good at their job. I shrug, and start trotting off toward the barn doors, looking as casual as I can manage when my head feels like an alarm clock.

  “If you’re just going to hide in the dark, I guess I’ll go tell Farmer Nick there’s nothing to be scared of.”

  That gets a response. Unfortunately, that response is a whirring, buzzing, impossibly fast blackness diving down at me. Well, I can’t say this case is boring.

  The nightmare tries two dive-bys first, shooting past one way then the other, glowing dinner-plate eyes flashing as they cross my path. A stall door creaks open behind me, and the shadows on the wall grow long and hungry. This nightmare knows their stuff. By which I mean ‘Help me.’

  Focus. I need to ground this thing, and I need to do it fast. The blur sails past me again, close enough to blow icy wind across the fabric of my back, and my hindlegs tighten up, ready to use my last resort. I’m a detective first, but I’m also a triceratops…

  There’s a skittering noise behind me. I pretend to take the bait, craning my neck in a desperate attempt to see around my crown. A single nail pings across the floor right behind me, and I have to stifle my chuckle. The distracting surprise. This nightmare’s younger than I gave them credit for. A dropped nail, a creaking floorboard – those are tricks you use on kids to get their attention diverted.

  Another nail drops somewhere in front of me, a sound that would leave a typical victim spinning in place – so, of course, the nightmare comes at me from the side, a ragged wingspan of buzzing power tools that fills my peripheral vision. I hunker down, let them sail over me, and spring up into the air for a short-range charge. All three of my horns connect with a stumpy, buckle-laden back leg, and the nightmare bowls head over heels and crash-lands in front of me.