Wanting

Voices

WANTING

Sarah Masters

Oliver Banks took a deep breath. The call from a dead male to the warehouse had been the first time he’d been contacted in months. He’d been nostalgic from lack of chatter from spirits, even though it took him to their death sites and he saw things most people couldn’t even imagine seeing. All his life—as far back as he could remember anyway—he’d heard them, been called a weirdo by his parents, leaving home when the family taunts had finally got to be too much. He’d made it work for him, though, even assisted the police on cases, the Force finally accepting he wasn’t involved in the murders, that he really did hear ghosts.

And hearing them breaks my bloody heart sometimes.

The air was hot. Stood to reason, what with it being the wrong side of winter, summer at its finest this year with temperatures well into the nineties. But the heat was different in here, different to what it was outside or at home. Like someone had a bonfire going, a huge, raging one, relentless heat coming off it, enough to sear your eyebrows. Oliver glanced around, past the police strolling the vicinity with their diligent, looking-for-clues paces. He eyed the forensic techs doing their thing in bootied feet and white paper suits, their hands covered in creamy latex that made them appear alien. He didn’t see any reason for the heat, though. No fires on the walls, their orange-bar stripes belting out warmth, the image reminding him of the electric fire in the living room of his childhood. No new-fangled halogens, rectangles of bright yellowy orange that not only served as heaters but damn good sources of light that hurt the eyes if you stared at them too long.

Why the hell am I so hot then?

Sweat dribbled down his back, spread out over his armpits. He was uncomfortable in the extreme—and not just because he was so hot. Something very wrong had gone on here—something he sensed was more shocking than anything he’d dealt with before. He lifted his arms, put his hands on his hips casually, wondering, then not caring whether he had wet patches on his T-shirt. That kind of thing didn’t matter in situations like this. The small stuff paled into insignificance by death. The everyday worries of how good you looked, if your breath stank and whether your hair needed washing just didn’t figure for those called out to deal with the aftermath of some nutter’s handiwork. Situations like this made him realise how insignificant his problems were. Quite simply, they didn’t matter when compared to the fear the killer had inspired in his victim.

What must it be like to know you’re at the end of your life? What the bloody hell goes through your mind?

He stared at the corpse. Young bloke in his twenties, Oliver guessed. Christ, what a waste. He’d only just begun living really, possibly leaving home, branching out on his own. Did his parents even know where he was? How he’d ended up? Oliver imagined them going about their day-to-day business, thinking their son was at work, maybe, when in reality… He didn’t envy whoever had to tell them that their baby wasn’t coming back.

It might even be Langham who gets that job. And I might have to go with him.

Oliver sighed. This man would have been good-looking in life, he reckoned. In death, though, he didn’t look so good, but then who did? Even those who passed in their sleep—nothing untoward going on here, folks, move along please—tended to bloat, their orifices oozing fluid if their body hadn’t been discovered in time for the nice mortician to do his thing. The things his lover, Langham, had seen. The bodies he’d been called out to view. Oliver wondered how the pair of them didn’t constantly have nightmares.

Hank, the mortician, came to mind then, the man Oliver had had the pleasure of meeting a few months back. Pleasure seemed such an odd word given the circumstances, but Hank was a jolly man, probably having to be so due to the horrors he saw day in, day out. Hank would determine how this man had died, because although it seemed pretty obvious to Oliver that strangulation was the cause—
the chain, look how tight that fucking chain is around his neck!
—it might not be so cut-and-dried. He could have been killed first then strung up the way he had been—and Oliver knew this was a murder not a suicide. What the hell went through a killer’s mind? Did they sit at home envisaging what they’d do to their victims? Write notes?

If he’d been told years ago he’d be standing in front of some poor, dead bastards on a regular basis, he’d have shit himself.

Funny how things turned out.

It had been a long haul—fuck had it been long—but he’d got to the place in his life he’d always dreamt of. Being accepted. Having a damn fine relationship with Detective Langham. Moving in with him soon and living as a couple. Fucking off people’s opinions about it too. It didn’t matter anymore, what folks thought. He was past all that crap. He was, really.

The last case had been a bad one, a first for Oliver in that he’d trailed Langham around to every lead, had seen each dead body as they’d piled up, and really understood the hard work that went into catching freaks who had a mind to kill. An eye-opener. Yeah, the Sugar Strands case had been that all right, and now, here he was, standing in a warehouse with a corpse in front of him that left him in no doubt his eyes would be stretched even wider—
if
he chose to trail Langham again.

How could he not? The man had been his life these past few months—had been his life for the six months prior to them becoming official, too, if he were honest. The dead being silent lately had meant Oliver had had to try to live like a ‘normal’ person, whatever the fuck that was. Someone who woke up, went to work as a tea boy in a newspaper office, got through the day and finished up with making dinner and watching TV. No thrill of cases, only hearing about them through Langham, and Oliver had lost his purpose. Hadn’t realised until the voices in his head were non-existent that he’d grown used to them, that they were a vital part of who he was, that he needed them in order to feel whole.

Like he had a reason for living.

This corpse—well, it was something that could be seen all over the world at any given time. Shit that appeared on the news and internet on a regular basis—so much so that, horribly, it failed to have a massive impact. Many people saw the same thing over and over too much and got used to it. Would anyone apart from family or the police care about what had happened to this dead bloke? The thought that his death would go by virtually unnoticed made Oliver annoyed. Somewhere out there a person was walking around with knowledge of this. A person who had killed and would probably kill again.

Sick bastard.

From what he’d learnt from Langham, most people shot or stabbed their victims, a strangulation here or there, but with Sugar Strands, the victims had been mutilated, arms and legs cut off, faces peeled back, stomachs sliced open and their innards ripped out. It had been evil, no doubt about it, but this corpse here? That was something else—the usual, the norm.

He felt sick to his stomach that he was viewing it that way, because this was someone’s son, brother, nephew. Maybe even some kid’s dad. Shit. That thought didn’t sit well. He couldn’t imagine being that young and trying to understand why Daddy wasn’t going to walk through the front door. Why Mummy was crying and couldn’t stop. Why Daddy had even been hurt in the first place.

But the victim might not have been a particularly nice man. Hung out with mean people. Got himself into this mess. Not that Oliver thought he’d deserved it if he
had
run in the wrong circles, but most people didn’t just end up this way.

There wasn’t any blood, wasn’t much for him to chuck his guts up about, but it was the stillness that bothered Oliver. The whole place—from its crummy, breeze-block walls to its rough concrete floor, to its metal-girder ceiling to its dirty, age-speckled windows—held a sense of desolation mixed with foreboding that told Oliver this wasn’t just a one-off.

There would be more like this.

He sensed this as the first of many and didn’t know how he knew it either. The dead hadn’t told him, hadn’t spelt it out—they never really did, just gave him snippets of information he had to work through with Langham—and he acknowledged that with Sugar Strands he’d evolved somehow, grown an extra sense. That was all very well, but he’d never claimed to be psychic, to know the future and the past, and now it seemed he might well be. He’d explained to those in the Force that he didn’t know anything until the dead told him, and they’d had to be content with that. He couldn’t go haring around shouting out into the ether that,
‘Hey, dead man there, come and have a natter because we’re stumped and I need answers’.
No, it didn’t work like that.

With Sugar Strands he’d felt different, had been able to know when something wasn’t right long before they’d seen it wasn’t. Small things, like seeing flashes of what lay behind a closed door or getting the feeling that something wasn’t right in a certain house. But having a sixth, seventh or fucking eighth sense wouldn’t aid him in helping solve crimes quicker. Knowing something was ‘off’ before he entered a room wouldn’t catch the killer. It just meant he felt funny, knew a little more than he had before. Had some kind of warning as to what they were walking into.

Like now. Death number one.

A ten-inch-wide stretch of rusty, peeling, red-painted metal went from floor to ceiling in front of him, seeming like it’d grown right out of the damn concrete and exited through the roof. He imagined the top of it poking into the sky, looking like a modern-day chimney, then blinked to clear the image. He should be concentrating, waiting for the corpse’s spirit to speak to him again, not allowing his mind to roam with irrelevant fancies.

“You got anything yet?” Langham asked quietly.

His appearance at Oliver’s side made him jump, and Oliver shook his head, turning to study Langham for signs of stress—or the alcohol they’d consumed before coming out. Earlier they’d got pissed on wine with dinner in a nice Italian restaurant, and Langham had asked Oliver to move in with him, make it official. It had been a giddy time, them leaving in a cab to go home—
home
—and Oliver finally acting on his instincts to take control in the bedroom. It hadn’t been as difficult as he’d thought it would be, courage coming because he’d felt safe and wanted, knew his future would be as bright as a gold button, and they’d fucked, slept for a bit, only for Oliver to be woken by a voice.

“The corpse’s spirit hasn’t spoken since we got here,” Oliver said. “But I… This isn’t…” He sighed. “This is the first of many.”

“And you know this how?” Langham frowned, glancing at the body then back at Oliver. “If he hasn’t spoken…”

“That feeling shit I got last time.”

“Ah. Well, let’s hope not, eh?” Langham ran a hand through his hair. “Last thing we need is a serial on our hands.”

“Yeah.”

Langham walked away, and Oliver turned to see him standing at the warehouse doorway, staring out into the night as though the darkness would give him answers. Only time would tell, obviously, whether Oliver’s intuition was right, that they’d be called out to another sight like this one. It meant another death to prove he could rely on these new feelings, so he hoped he was wrong.

He gave the body his attention again. It had been attached to the floor-to-ceiling metal beam, a chain looped around and around the torso up to the armpits so he was held there, feet off the ground. It made the pelvis level with an average man’s face, and Oliver got a flash of information—
sex crime, it’s a damn sex crime
—and he staggered backwards a little. Had this man been trussed up and used by his killer in
that
way? Goosebumps sprouted all over him, and Oliver’s ears buzzed. He was right, but damned if he knew how he was certain. He waited for more information, closing his eyes and concentrating, freeing his mind and opening himself up for data to come in.

“There’s loads of them.”

The spirit’s voice startled him, and he snapped his eyes open, gaze meeting that of the bulbous-eyed corpse.

“Loads of them?” he whispered, stepping forwards and standing directly in front of the body. “People?”

“Yes. They…did things to me.”

“What kind of things?” Adrenaline popped out of wherever the hell it resided inside him when it wasn’t needed and spread in a head-lightening streak to every part of Oliver. He swayed, equilibrium shot, and sucked in a deep breath to calm himself.

“They made me…do things.”

Oliver bit back the urge to repeat his question in an annoyed bark—it wouldn’t do to scare the spirit off. Instead, he said quietly, “Go on.”

“It’s something they’d planned, something they’ve dreamt about a long time. I’m the first.”

“Shit, so I was right.” Oliver gained no satisfaction in that. “Who are they?” It was a long shot, but he had to try.

“I don’t know.”

Oliver stifled a sigh. He hadn’t expected any other answer.

“Bald. And one of them has no hairs anywhere.”