Authors: Lucas T. Harmond
“
Are you alright
?” The kid didn’t seem to comprehend.
McCalister tried a more direct approach. “What happened here?”
“I’m not going back inside,” the officer told him calmly.
“
What
?”
“
I’m not
going back inside,” he repeated in the same monotone voice.
The wind momentarily picked up and McCalister pulled his jacket closer around himself for some protection as he was pelted by the hard, icy rain. Above, the sound of thunder cracked the sky open and lightning blazed over the surrounding houses like a camera flash. McCalister found himself glancing suspiciously back at 103 and then returned to face the officer.
“What’s your name, son?”
Again no response.
McCalister lost his patience. “Listen mate—I don’t know what you’ve seen but this isn’t helping. There’s a right way to go about this
and
,” he paused wondering if any of it was sinking in. “
And
, a wrong way. Now what’s your name?” Slowly a smile began to appear on the kid’s face. It spread out and became a malicious and mocking sneer.
“Right—don’t think this is over, son!” McCalister barked and turned to make his way back to his own car.
“They’re all dead.”
McCalister turned. “What??”
The lad had retreated into the gloom of the car but his dark smile still gleamed in the light from the overhead lamp. McCalister saw it in a different way now, saw the desperation in his eyes, realised it was a defence.
Before the end of that night he would begin to understand what it was defending against.
“They’re all dead,” he repeated.
McCalister took a step back towards him. “
Who
is, son?”
The officer shook his head. “They ‘
all
’ are sir,
all of them
! They’re all dead!”
He seemed to be coming out of shock now and hysteria was creeping in.
McCalister raised his hands to calm him. “Okay, okay. Listen, is there anyone still in the house?”
“No they’re all dead.”
McCalister nodded. “Okay can you show me where?”
Now he went back to his original line. “I’m not going back in there. I’m—I’m sorry sir but I won’t.
I won’t go back in there
!” His voice was fast rising into outward terror.
McCalister took a step away. “Okay son,
okay
.” He sprinted back to his car watching the darkened house the entire way. Whether it was paranoia or not he couldn’t say, but he had the feeling of being watched from every one of those dark windows.
He opened the door and reached for the radio transmitter and stopped. He almost didn’t call in. Finally he managed to throw off whatever doubt he had and grabbed the mic.
“Karen, it’s McCalister again. Listen I’m still not certain what I’m up against but our boy here seems pretty brain-fried. Probably going to have to send someone to pick him up. Also, it sounds like we’re going to need some meat wagons.”
The voice on the other end sounded understandably concerned. “How bad is it?” McCalister shrugged to himself. “I don’t know yet, I haven’t been inside.”
“Do you need backup?”
McCalister lowered the mouth piece, silently weighing up his options. He looked over at the shaken officer and then back to the house. He was shaking his head as he began to talk into the mic. “I don’t think I’m gonna’ need it Karen.”
“
Ian are you
...”
“Yeah, yeah I’m sure. From what our boy says, anyone who is in there isn’t going to be a problem.I’ll call in once I know what’s happened here.”
“Okay McCalister.” The line went dead.
McCalister stood in the storm for a while, bracing himself against whatever he was about to see and then made his way up the wide driveway. He picked his way between the four cars which were parked there and moved towards the porch. A security lamp glared into life, temporarily stunning him. When his eyes re-accustomed, he saw the door inside was partially open. He looked up at the large grey house— ivy had snaked its way up most of the house’s left-hand side, there were three large windows on the top floor and a room built into the attic. Looking up now, he noticed the window of this room had been partially shattered. Wet glass glinted from between the borders of flower beds and lay spread at his feet.
McCalister slipped a little on a pair of white surgical gloves before opening opening the porch door, and a strange musky smell hit him instantly. He recoiled slightly as it rushed over his senses. McCalister felt slightly lightheaded all at once, and had to lean against the frame to steady himself. The initial sensation was close to being stoned. Slowly he began to recover.
What the hell was that smell
?
So thick and sweet like—incense
?? yet, there was something unpleasant about it, some kind of subtle sickness, an almost acrid quality to it;
and the way it had made him feel—was it... chemical
?
Even less certain now than he had been before, he used his foot to push the door fully open.
“Jesus,” he said and stopped short. The first body took him by surprise. The girl’s slim naked body was lying just a few metres from the door, face down on the bare wooden floor of the hall. Nail marks had raked scars down the boards and some of her fingernails had been torn loose by the force of her grip. She’d been dragged a good metre backwards. McCalister fought off the hot acid burning in his throat and stomach and let ice grow inside him as he’d learnt to do so long ago.
There’s nothing I can do for her now
, he reminded himself,
but still
...
He’d seen a lot of bodies in his time but rarely so savagely attacked.
His horror grew as he noticed a second white shape sprawled on the staircase in front of him. The teenager—probably about the same age as the girl—was also naked and draped over the wooden steps like a rag doll. His head had been torn from the neck and a flap of skin and gore half-covered his protruding spinal cord. A dark red cascade of blood was steadily running down over the steps and collecting in a puddle at his twisted feet.
“Oh god... Jesus...,” he said in little more than a whisper. He again looked at the girl. Her back had been lacerated, those deep red wounds looking all the more horrific against her icy marble skin. The frenzy of the attack was unimaginable, blood was everywhere, the walls, the floor...
everywhere
. McCalister couldn’t quite throw the impression that they looked like claw marks, no matter how hard he tried. The urge just to run from the house, just to get away from all that ugliness hit him hard at that moment, but he knew he’d seen what he had seen, that running couldn’t help him now.
He nearly reached for the light-switch, but at the last second remembered the possibility of fingerprints remaining there. Instead he removed a small torch from his pocket. He flung its powerful beam around quickly, trying not to settle on the bodies.
The thought of his daughter in America hit him; she and the dead girl were about the same age, so young, but somehow he managed to control his surging disgust and rage and focused on his job, turning himself into a mechanism. It was the only thing he could do for them now.
There were four doors leading off from the long, dark hall, one to his left, two along the right-hand wall and one facing him at the end. They had all been flung open. His torch beam revealed bloody hand prints on the furthest which seemed to lead to a kitchen. McCalister stepped around the body, not wanting, but being unable not to look at the poor girl’s mutilated form.
He had to stay focused.
He cautiously moved to the kitchen door and rapidly scanned it with his beam. Most of the expensive-looking kitchen units had been torn open, their contents smashed across the tiled floor. There were hand prints everywhere. The taps of the sink had been left running and water was spilling onto the floor.
There didn’t appear to be anyone inside, but a large breakfast bar at the centre of the room was obscuring most of his view. Reluctantly he made his way around it, avoiding the debris on the floor and keeping himself as far away from the unit as he could. There was nothing on the other side except more broken crockery. “Jesus,
what
happened here?” There was a loud bump in the hall and he span the beam around. It landed on nothing. There was another thud from above and the whole house seemed to groan, a few more plates slipped from a shelf and smashed onto the floor, making him almost scream.
McCalister’s heart was racing and he was about an inch from falling into complete panic. In all his years as a police officer, he’d never seen anything like this.
The strange smell seemed to be increasing, and again he found it almost overpowering. McCalister returned to the hallway making a quick check of the rooms. The living room seemed almost undisturbed, except for the large television set which had been left on with its channel set to static. It hissed and buzzed alone in the dark. There was a collection of open CD cases, reefer skins and rolling mats on the table, a few tabs of acid, pills and a half-drank bottle of red wine. The living room ran back into a conservatory, covered in rugs and pillows. A battered looking sitar sat propped in one corner next to a gigantic bong.A few candles still burned on their shelves here and there. The table in the dining room had been turned over but nothing else seemed wrong; the other room, which held a pool table, also seemed untouched.
McCalister was left staring up the darkened stairs with a growing sense of dread. He thought he heard some faint whisper from above and he stood listening intently in the dark. Without a doubt, there was a muffled sound coming from up stairs.Lightning cast a moment of daylight brightness throughout the house and he half expected the girl’s body to jump up at him. As the steady roar of thunder exploded across the stormy sky, he again forced himself to remain calm.
He was shaking. “Come on man, keep it together, the dead can’t touch you. Come on McCalister, get up those stairs.”
As he put a foot on the first step, the antique stairs creaked menacingly. “Come on McCalister, up those fuckin’ stairs!” With that he began to ascend. The headless corpse waited for him halfway. He didn’t really want to reach it, let alone pass it. And then he found himself coming to a halt as he reached it, noticing similar cuts as the girl on the floor over the headless corpse’s back.
This time when the lightning flashed he nearly fell down the stairs.
“Jesus! Give me a break!” he cursed.
He was breathing erratically as he again began to climb.The stairs turned onto a small landing before continuing up. A vase of roses and the stand it had stood on had been thrown down there.
The wooden banisters above him were warped in a way which made no sense. The ornate oak poles had snaked and twisted as if they’d melted. McCalister was fast coming to the end of his nerves. He knew whatever had happened here was way out of his experiences.
Maybe anybody’s
. The picture frames along the hall had jumped to smash on the wooden floor. The wall itself seemed to be at the wrong angle, leaning outward. It was an old house, but even so...
McCalister had been steadily talking to himself to control his growing terror for some time, and now was no different.
“I don’t know about this, I just don’t know about this...” he kept quietly whispering to himself as he made his way along the landing. If a door was shut he made no attempt to explore it, and all the while the sickly, sweet musk was growing stronger.
He was getting closer to something
.
He knew by now he should have reported back, but some strange compulsion was driving him on. The more crazy it got the more he had to know.
Besides, how could he explain this
?
In an opened bathroom at the end of the hall he found another body. A large, dark haired girl was partly dressed and crouched up, as if in fear, in a corner between the toilet and the wall. There was a strong stench of urine coming from inside. She was staring with wide, dead eyes which held a glassy terror. At first he couldn’t see any signs of damage and he briefly considered that she might still be alive, but then his torch picked up the thick pool of blood she sat it, creeping from some unseen wound.
“
What the fuck is going on here
?”
He backed away treading on broken glass, panicking at the crunch and spinning the beam in a wide ark. A door he’d passed slowly creaked open as if by its own will. He waited but nothing came out; yet, it was in there that the full extent of how fucked up things truly were was revealed to him.
A naked pair of legs were dangling from the ceiling
.
The ceiling had warped, drooping downwards, and at the centre a girl’s lower half had slipped through. The legs hung there and the effect was as if a stone had been dropped in a plaster lake and then frozen. McCalister had pressed himself up against the wall, his beam locked on the impossible vision above him. His mind was reeling, refusing to accept what he was seeing. He was gibbering in quiet terror to himself, with no idea of what he was saying.
Something stirred beside him and he darted the torch around. A ragged looking teddy bear fell from the windowsill it had been resting on. There was a crash from the attic above. An unearthly groan shifted through the house and he heard things falling to the floor throughout the house. The dead legs swayed slightly as the house settled, and he couldn’t tear his eyes from them.
McCalister quickly re-discovered his Roman Catholic faith and made the sign of the cross over his pounding heart. What he was seeing now seemed to confirm so much of what he had long ago dismissed. Only it was clearly the other side of his belief that was being revealed to him.
“Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, this is fucked, this is so far past fucked—Jesus...,” he was babbling to himself in unending hysteria.
Despite the fact that every sense he had left was screaming at him not to, he knew he had to go into the attic. If there were answers,
if there could be
, they were there.