The Doubles

by Jacob K. Gallagher

Genres: Urban Fantasy; Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

A fast-paced, genre-bending debut from the winner of the 2023 black&write Fellowship. For lovers of thriller, crime and fantasy, The Doubles combines First Nations culture with compelling speculative fiction to create a mesmerising mystery.


'I remembered a dream I had been having: a mountain, covered in trees, swelling up out of a plain like a tidal wave. But peering out from the underbrush was a row of eyeless faces looking past me out into the endless expanse I knew was at my back.'

On the Liverpool Plains, near the town of Werris Creek, the Veil that separates the mortal realm from the Outside is wearing thin. Children have been disappearing and turning up dead. Someone - or something - is responsible; taking them from their beds in the middle of the night and sending a message no one can understand.

That's all Kring knows when she gets the case. That's all she needs to know.

Kring is no stranger to magic and monsters - her job as an Envoy for the Higher Powers is to banish Trespassers from our world. But this mission will push her capabilities to the limit, and bring back memories of a past she'd rather leave forgotten. Together with Dries, a local officer of magical law enforcement, she finds herself in a race against time to stop a demon from killing again. And once the demon finds what it's looking for, things will get a whole lot worse ...

Release date: August 25, 2026

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 368

Sample

Adelaide, South Australia.

1.00 pm, Australian Central Standard Time

On the night I arrived in Adelaide an expanse of dark clouds manifested in the sky above the city like a looming ceiling, and the three days since had been damp and dim, cast in perpetual twilight. Even now there was no sign of the afternoon sun I knew was somewhere beyond the clouds – only the gloom of another miserable fucking day.

At least for the moment, I was out of the rain, in a little covered alcove with my back to the locked front doors of an apartment building. I was bundled up inside my warmest coat, which I normally felt guilty for not needing. Now, I wished I had a thicker one.

I was here for a Trespasser – a monster from another dimension. Fae-class, based on what I had discovered so far. It had killed three people: a homeless man, an Uber driver and a jogger out too late; all after midnight, all in secluded spots with no witnesses around. It had clawed them to death, eaten some of their bodies, then crawled back into a nearby storm drain, taking a piece of bloody clothing as a trophy.

I’d seen a headline that the Vulgus authorities – in this case the South Australia Police – had written off all the deaths as unrelated animal attacks, each with a separate culprit caught, now humanely destroyed.

In reality, the Null Legion had caught on pretty early from the two-foot-wide bite marks on the victims, and they’d intercepted the story long before it got to the Vulgus news. It was the Legion’s job to keep magic hidden from the un-magical masses, which included knowledge of Trespassers, and the Covenants they kept with the Angels basically gave them carte blanche on how to keep that information suppressed: pulling political strings, deleting reports, erasing memories, whatever they had to do to ensure magic stayed hidden, and regulated.

Dealing with the Trespasser itself, though, was outside the Legion’s jurisdiction. They were human, and their concerns were human magic. Once they had suspected a Trespasser, they’d notified my bosses about the incursion, and that was how I ended up in Adelaide, watching my breath fog like mushroom clouds in the cold.

I was not in the Legion. I was an Envoy working for the Angels, and Trespassers were my jurisdiction.

Before this job, I had been on a surveillance gig in Beijing: two weeks on liaison with a local Mage, following a man suspected of colluding with a Trespasser through labyrinthine hutongs crowded with throngs of people in the heart of the city, as the suspect bounced between noodle restaurants and dive bars. I think I cast two spells all job, and never even drew my weapon. The month before that I’d been back in Australia, in the Northern Territory chasing artefact smugglers. In the Top End, they thought it was cold if it got under 25 degrees Celsius. I missed that – but not the humidity. Beijing had been hot and humid, too, though there the sun had been blotted by an impenetrable layer of smog, and it was hard to tell where exactly the heat was coming from. Like being inside a kiln. As if to taunt me, a gust of frigid wind blew past, dispersing my breath-clouds and whipping at my hair, blowing curls into my eyes.

I pulled my coat up, closing the collar around my throat.

I sensed movement through the glass doors behind me, and turned to see a tenant exiting the elevator at the other end of the lobby, heading outside to brave the weather. As I waited for him, I trod up and down on the spot, trying to get warmed up. My hand was already in my pocket, on my ID. Fifty-fifty on if I’d need it or not.

The tenant – a tall young man, university-aged, carrying a huge black umbrella – finally reached the door and pushed it open. He stepped out into the cold, and before he’d let go of the door, I turned to him, blurted, ‘Oh, thank fuck – it’s freezing out here,’ and made a bee-line straight for the open door. Startled, he held it open for me.

As I ducked past, he stuttered, ‘Uh, you’re not allowed to –’

Without slowing down I held my ID out towards him, just long enough for him to get a look, and confidently announced: ‘It’s fine.’ I shoved the ID back in my pocket, and he didn’t stop me. A moment later I heard the door clatter shut behind me, and he let me go, and went on about his day. For a Vulgus, with no magical ability, the ID was usually enough. It was just a hypnotic spell printed on an otherwise blank card.

The inside of the apartment building was white, with white walls, white tiles and slightly off-white lights. I couldn’t feel much of a psychic impression coming out of the building itself, but the structure must have been fifteen or twenty years old. No murders or suicides – those left an impression.

I started up the stairs, taking it slow. I’d barely gone up a level when I felt an odd gravity tugging on the edges of my perception: a sound inside my head like a telepathic buzz, putting pressure on my optic nerve.

The little bastard was definitely in here somewhere.

This feeling, though, wasn’t coming from the Trespasser itself. It was the energy from its Dimensional Breach, the hole the Trespasser had chewed through into our reality, when it crossed from the Outside. The hole was still open somewhere above me, contaminating the whole building with abominable interdimensional magic. Magic from the Outside was anathema to our dimension; it corroded and corrupted everything it touched, and when humans were exposed, even for short periods, they could suffer irreversible harm.

The pressure grew stronger the higher I went – like gravity was getting heavier and pulling me in. The pressure peaked four flights up, on the top floor.

I left the stairwell and entered the hallway, pausing for a moment to listen. It was quiet – a weekday afternoon. But anyone could be working from home, coming out to pick up their lunch or ducking out to run an errand.

Quietly, I started down the hallway, stopping at each unit to place my left hand flat on the door, searching for a reaction. The first few were duds. At apartment number 406, I got it.

Before I could even touch the door, a circle of blue light illuminated on the back of my hand, like a tattoo made of flaming ink. The glowing ring was made of dozens of tiny individual symbols packed so tightly together you could barely discern them, and was usually invisible, until it felt the touch of Outside magic.

A sensation followed, in the back of my mouth like the metallic tang of blood. It was pressing on my sinuses, threatening to make me sick. Like the pressure from the stairwell had concentrated itself just behind my eyes.

I placed both hands against the door and closed my eyes, projecting my psychic senses into the room beyond. The space on the other side was alive, writhing with a jagged breath, swirling and growling. The Breach was definitely in there.

I tried the handle, but it was locked. Getting inside wasn’t so much an issue as was getting in quietly. I crouched down to look at what I was working with and got lucky: the lock was old, and I’d been picking pin-tumblers since I was thirteen. I pulled a bundle of lockpicks from my inside coat pocket and worked at it for a few minutes to get the door open, still cautiously listening for any movement in the apartments around me.

I popped the last pin and pushed, swinging the door open a crack. Immediately, raw Outside magic spilled out over the threshold. It was invisible, but assaulted my psychic senses so acutely I felt like I could see it, lapping through the open door and into the hallway like waves of multicoloured smoke. They were colours I had been trained to parse, although it may have been more accurate to say I had been trained to stomach them – looking at them brought a sickening feeling, and I assumed they were normally incompatible with human comprehension.

I flipped my coat aside and drew my dagger from its sheath at my right hip while I stretched my left hand out in front of me in the gesture of warding: with the pointer and little finger extended. A Legionary once called it the devil horns, but the ward was the name I’d been told, when I’d been taught it.

I pushed into the room, and while the magic on the floor looked like smoke, it didn’t feel like it. I felt like I was wading into thigh-high water, struggling to keep my balance.

I pulled the door shut behind me, but noticed the wood no longer contained the magic: the waves now passed straight through it and out into the hallway, like it wasn’t there. I’d stopped wondering about the chaotic nature of Outside magic a long time ago. It was as unpredictable and aggressive as most of the Trespassers born of it.

In the kitchen a thick mist had gathered, about a foot off the floor, billowing gently in lazy patterns, caught in interdimensional currents and shimmering in unearthly colours. Within it there was a thick tangle of what looked like spider webs – a dense growth of criss-crossed nets hanging from invisible anchor points, and refracting the colours of the aurora in the fog around them.

Ectoplasm. It took a variety of forms but appeared when Outside magic existed too long in our reality. It was corrosion, like rust. I waved it out of my way, before giving the room a once-over.

The ectoplasm appeared to be growing out of the next room. I followed its trail, but paused at the threshold.

There was a dead man in there. He was slumped on the ground between a couch and a massive TV, face-first, with his arse up in the air. It was hard to tell how long he’d been there – there was no smell, no bugs, and he hadn’t decomposed at all. Instead, his skin had turned a pale grey colour, and was cracked and flaking, like dried mud. The Outside magic had petrified him – transfigured all of his body into a twisted statue, even his clothes. There was thick ectoplasm all around him, coating the carpet and couch.

Even after waving the ectoplasm out of the way, I couldn’t see much of his face. There wasn’t much of it left. His head was torn open, split in a deep wedge from the middle of his nose all the way over to the top of his scalp, like he’d been hit in the forehead with a big axe. That’s where the Breach was, and where the Trespasser had come from.

Out of his brain.

On the wall in front of his body was a spell array drawn in red paint: a series of interconnected circles with a seemingly random assemblage of symbols from various cultures and time periods spiralling around each. Some of it at least was real magic – I recognised some pieces of the configuration, a number of old Norse runes and alchemical equations. But the array was gibberish. I couldn’t even guess what the artist’s intentions had been. Did he even know he was tapping into real magic?

The dead man’s fingers were still coated in paint. He had done this to himself.

The ceiling above the body was spattered with blood and brain-matter. There was also a spread of tiny holes among the viscera – like someone had fired a shotgun up through his head.

He’d been kneeling in front of the array, looking up towards it, when he’d activated the spell. It had overloaded, killed him and ripped a hole straight through the dimensional fabric, via his brain.

It was a miracle his actions hadn’t created a full Dimensional Rift, and sucked the whole apartment building through to the Outside.

Luckily, this Breach was small, but it had weakened the fabric enough for a Trespasser to sniff it out, and dig through. Like a guide-hole, punched into a sheet of wood before you drill into it. What I was looking at now was the drill-hole.

The Breach was still open, like a wound in reality, bleeding anathemic magic in seething gouts of multispectral Aetherial smoke, which seemed to gather in an ever-expanding pool at my feet, emanating out from around the body. Feeding the ectoplasm.

I almost couldn’t look directly at the Breach itself – the centre of it repelled me, my eyes sliding off like a magnet of the same pole.

The Covenants were clear on Dimensional Breaches, and my responsibility was to seal them immediately. Leaving it open created a risk of further incursions, or permanent damage to the fabric of reality. But the Trespasser was nearby, and would feel the Breach closing, and know I was here.

Fae-class Trespassers were skittish: if it knew I was a threat, there was a good chance it would bugger off before I could even confront it. The Breach could wait a little while longer.

I followed a trail of slime out of the room, down a hallway and into in the bathroom. There was a hole in the floor where the toilet was supposed to be. Shards of tiles, glass and wood chips lay all over the room. The toilet was in the shower – torn up and thrown through the plate glass. How had neighbours not reported the noise?

I leaned over the hole and looked down into it: the bastard had squeezed itself into the pipes, which were all clogged with slime. It stank like mould.

I stepped across the void and pressed my ear to the wall, stretching my psychic senses to follow the pipes into the building. Slime, magically conductive as it was, coated the insides of the building’s walls. The Trespasser had been spying on the people in the building – perverted little prick. Now, I was pretty sure it was a goblyn.

The Vulgus mythology of goblyns was a quagmire of medieval folklore, but goblyn-type Trespassers were aggressive and predatory, though relatively low down the food chain as far as Trespassers went. They skulked in shadows, attacking unsuspecting victims and avoiding any confrontation they couldn’t dominate. Goblyns also made permanent nests in hidden places, which they returned to daily, to sleep while the sun was up, and they liked those hidden spots to be inside human domiciles. They ate meat and Aetherial energy – both of which humans are made of in relative abundance.

The trail of slime and stomach-turning energy led down, into the dark below the apartments: there was a basement. I knew it just from the energy I could feel festering down there.

I turned and headed out of the apartment, back into the hallway, and over to the elevator. This time I knew exactly where I was going, and as the lift took me down I could feel the energy getting more urgent, like it was lashing at me. The time for quiet was coming to an end.

Fae were also prideful. If I challenged the Trespasser before it knew I was a threat, it would reveal itself. It wouldn’t be able to resist. But I’d have to finish it quickly. Couldn’t risk it escaping.

I tried to quiet my mind, visualising my stances, my guards, my offensive options. Focusing on my breathing.

The lift stopped, and the doors opened to a car park. It was dank, and claustrophobic, lit only by yellow electric lights. There was a blue sedan with Queensland plates parked directly across from me, still wet from the rain. Luckily, no owner was in sight. I was the only human down here.

A drip echoed off the concrete walls; the rain was a distant drone, interspersed by the occasional sounds of traffic.

I stepped out of the lift and looked around. There were eight cars in total, though it was mostly empty. The air smelled of petrol and mildew. Water pooled on the ground at the far end of the garage, by the exit. Poor drainage.

In the other direction, in the dankest corner of the basement furthest from the light, there was a single doorway, leading into what I could sense was a room, maybe for storage, or maintenance. There were no cars near it; there were stacks of boxes against the wall, all around it. Hidden. Out of the way. Forgotten about.

That was where the goblyn was hiding.

I got as close as I felt comfortable with, still six or seven metres from the door, and stood in silence for a few moments, listening. Thinking. Then I relaxed my shoulders, and took a deep breath, imagining magic in the air, filling my diaphragm.

‘Show yourself,’ I commanded, imbuing the words with raw energy, like a vibration that carried my voice out into the Aether. Enough energy to make me enticing; not enough to make me a threat.

The lights above me flickered.

A car alarm started blaring from behind me, a huge sound amplified by the low concrete ceiling, and I spun to look. The lights of the car the furthest away were all flashing in time with the alarm.

My hand was on my weapon, gripping it tight.

The next car along went off – the alarm honking, and blaring, and flashing – and then the next one, and the next, until the cars were all flashing and honking.

Then, all at once, they stopped. The lights above me flickered again and dimmed.

I looked back towards the door, in time to see it opening from the inside: it had already lurched a few inches, revealing an impenetrable dark through the crack. With a drawn-out groan, the door opened wider, until the black portal beyond was exposed entirely; the door continued to screech until it finally hit the concrete wall with a crack.

Immediately a voice emanated from the dark in the empty doorway, ‘You the humie what’s been lookin’ for me, eh? Pokin’ ’round?’

It spoke in a gurgling wet rasp seemingly projected from a cavernous space, each syllable punctuated with a magic that assaulted my senses.

‘Show yourself!’ I said again.

The Trespasser hissed, a long sound, like steam venting from a boiler. ‘Oh? What you want, mammal? Little mammal-meat? What-chyou telling me? Tell-ing-me?’

From the black doorway, the goblyn emerged, crawling out into the light like a great heaving toad – a crawling mound of murky slime and glistening mucus. Its arms and head took shape, inflating up and out to get a look at me, elongating the rest of the body beneath it. I took a few steps back, keeping distance.

‘Ooh, pretty meat, eh?’ it said. ‘Little blonde meat?’

It inflated up to its full four feet, and lifted its chin, like it was sniffing. Its bulging yellow eyes had pupils like horizontal black bars – like a toad’s pupils – and they were darting around, planning, looking for a way out, looking to see if I had backup. Looking for any advantage. ‘What you want wif’ me, blondie?’

‘Your presence on Earth is unauthorised,’ I announced. ‘You are a Trespasser here, and you are hereby commanded to exit this dimension immediately. If you are unable or unwilling to create a Dimensional Gate for yourself, I will create one for you.’

I had hold of my dagger, prepared to draw; my other hand was ready to cast a ward. I knew how this would go. I’d never met a Trespasser who took the chance to leave willingly.

‘Oh, oh,’ the goblyn tutted. ‘Un-aww-for-eyesd? Says who?’

‘The Heavenly Host.’

‘Oh? Not heard of ’em.’

‘Whether you’ve heard of them or not, the Host are the guardians of this world, and I am their Envoy. They have Covenants with the human race, and you have violated them. Least of which, by murdering three humans.’

The goblyn laughed – a horrible sound, like broken glass going through a grinder. ‘Is’at what you call it, mur-dur? I just call it eatin’. I didn’t realise eatin’ was a fucking crime, over here.’

‘It is when you’re eating people.’

‘Really?’ It scoffed. ‘Meat is meat, is meat. Nah. Fink I’m a-stayin’ right here.’

The goblyn’s eyes, which had been wildly darting around the garage looking for an escape, suddenly settled directly on me, and I saw it look me up and down. A chill ran down my spine, and I knew it was time.

My body tightened, bracing itself. ‘This is your last warning,’ I said. ‘Leave now, or you will be banished.’

‘What? Pretty little blondie, gonna ban-ish me?’ Its grin spread wider, its face folding unnaturally. ‘Gonna kill me? You know what, meat? You look pretty tasty. Fink I’ll just eat ya!’

The goblyn’s grin split, suddenly, and it opened its mouth – in two movements its jaws cracked and stretched wide open, becoming a flat void, almost a metre across, surrounded by tiny fangs, with a long, drooling tongue lolling in the centre. Then, ignoring the laws of physics entirely, it exploded off the ground, flying, surging through the air towards me mouth-first, with its body sloshing along behind it.

I drew my dagger and, throwing my left hand out in front of me, pushed magic into my ward at the same time. A glowing shield of pale blue light manifested beyond the prongs of the ward, just in time for the goblyn to smash into it; the force heaved me backwards, but I had repelled the attack, and the Trespasser recoiled, screeching, then writhing back into a shapeless mess. It shot upwards towards the roof, jamming itself as an amorphous blob in the shadows above the thick pipes below the ceiling, darting back in the direction of its nest.

I closed my left hand into a fist, dispelling my ward and conjuring a growling cloud of blue plasma that launched a barrage of destructive bolts like gleaming arrowheads arcing through the air in flashes, hissing and sparking –

My projectiles bombarded the goblyn’s hiding spot, exploding against the ceiling in a small detonation that rained concrete and steel debris down. The Trespasser smacked onto the ground again in one big disgusting globule, burning and writhing. It oozed over itself, screeching. It looked like fetid toad-spawn: a frothing, bubbling, oozing mess.

In the heat of the moment, I’d forgotten about the potential for collateral damage, and my attack had cut a pipe or two – a jet of water was spraying sideways in an arc, like a horizontal waterfall from one of the open pipes.

I ducked under the stream and in the second that I was vulnerable, off-balance and blinded, the goblyn suddenly reared up from the ground, re-forming into its hunched humanoid shape and lurching towards me with long, lanky arms, tipped with sharp talons.

I dodged one blow, deflected another with my ward and counterattacked with my dagger, slashing through the goblyn’s arm and carving it off, leaving a glowing green line in the air like an after-image.

The goblyn screeched again, recoiling as its severed limb dissolved into nothing, and this time I could hear fear in the sound; it had realised I was a match for it, and it didn’t want to risk a fair fight. It deflated into a gurgling mound and started crawling away, like a person-sized slug made of sewage.

I pointed my dagger tip-first and fired a bolt of magic. The blade flashed with a coil of green light, which burst from the tip like a muzzle-flash, and struck through space like lightning, visible all at once for only an instant. It blew the goblyn apart in a two-metre arc of slime, which splashed, bubbling across the concrete like a writhing, living shadow. It stank like actual sewage, now, and the smell was more nauseating to me than its magic had been.

Surviving that blast had used up most of the Trespasser’s energy – it no longer had the power to keep its form fully together. Even as the sludge in the centre rebuilt itself, rolling over and over like a boiling tar pit, its outer edges were dissolving into wisps of small black bubbles, which floated up into the air for a moment before they disappeared entirely.

I started towards the Trespasser – what was left of it – with my ward and dagger up and ready, green fire licking along the edges of the blade.

‘What I done?’ the goblyn gasped, from the ground. ‘I swear I ain’t done nuthin’ – nuthin’!’ Then its grin reappeared, drawn across the expanse of formless sludge. ‘I swear I’mma pick your fuckin’ bones out my teeth, pretty meat – your pretty fuckin’ bones, fuckin’ cunt –’

Smoothly, I stepped forward, kneeled and plunged my dagger right above the Trespasser’s grin. The blade went in easily, with a squelch, and the goblyn screeched; then, a blast of green lightning discharged inside the fucking thing, and it wailed as I cooked it from the inside.

I hadn’t thought it was possible, but the smell got worse.

I pulled my dagger out and watched to see if that had been enough. The Trespasser was now rapidly dissolving, and a row of fungus-looking gills started flexing open across every remaining globule, as if it were struggling to breathe. It was gasping, too, and groaning, its once confident voice now ragged and small.

Looking down into what was left of its face, contorted in pain, I felt a moment of pity. ‘You can still leave voluntarily,’ I said. ‘If you have the power left.’

It didn’t answer, but started crawling away again – so slowly it was almost comical. Its tattered front edge pulled it along on a battery of grotesque boneless fingers. It barely had the power to move, let alone cut itself a Dimensional Gate. But still, it crawled.

I sighed and stood. ‘Well, I tried.’

‘Fuck you,’ the goblyn said between gasps, ‘fascist bitch.’

That made me smirk. ‘You’re not exactly on the moral high ground here, you little prick.’ I used the tip of my dagger to draw the banishing spell, and the instant it was complete there was a snap as the air split open into a pulsating wormhole: a one-way door back to the Outside.

The goblyn began screaming; its gaping mouth was distorted grotesquely across three small bubbles, and that was the last I saw of its expression as I used my left hand to manoeuvre the Gate over the top of the creature. The black sludge was sucked up into the portal, like water being sucked into a drain – globule by globule, atom by atom, until there was a thunderclap, and it was gone.

I stepped back and dispelled the Gate. The magic remained in the air for a few moments more, fading away like the last embers in a dying fire.

It was quiet again – relatively. I turned, slowly, still holding my dagger out, and my ward ready.

The source of Outside magic was gone. I could feel its absence, now, with only the trace amounts in the walls, and the Breach in the apartment, remaining. I brushed myself off, then had a look around.

Through the goblyn’s dark door was a storage room. I flicked the light on to reveal a row of wire cages mostly filled with bikes, and presumably surplus furniture. The goblyn’s nest was up on top of a big cabinet in the back corner: a slimy but surprisingly odou. . .