Category: Trembling With Fear

Chapter Ten

The hallway was vacant. The psych ward at 2 a.m. was as lively as the morgue, and Ferrill tried to look inconspicuous as he wandered his way to the lobby in plain clothes. He only glanced at the night staff and smiled. And then he was out into the stifling night air. It was easier than sneaking out of his own home. 

Helms’ patrol car was parked right up front, backed-in so he could tear out at a moment’s notice. Ferrill made several broad scans across the parking lot before approaching the vehicle. A jolt of excitement shot through his hands as the key turned and the lock popped. Breaking into a cop car. If only Grant could see this. Could he? Are you in there too, Grant?  

The driver’s seat felt like a jetfighter’s cockpit. Helms was a big guy and the seat was too far back for Ferrill to manage. After adjusting the seat, he instinctively reached for the mirror, but withdrew his hand and decided not to look. He slid the key in and hesitated. If he fires off the siren by accident, he might as well drive into a light pole. Don’t draw attention. You’re almost there. Don’t screw this up.

A turn of his wrist and the engine growled, then purred. He looked out each window once more, not a soul around but the one he was carrying. With a deep breath, he shifted the patrol car into drive and turned to the south side. A thought occurred to him as the city lights shimmered in the distance. He should’ve left a letter for his parents. 

***

Detective Marshall had commandeered the hospital’s chapel to work in solitude. Deep into the night, he had probed the city’s records on the Morris home and the family’s deaths. Growing cold, he revisited his naive profile of the South Street mutilator. Dull in the artificial light of the chapel’s stained glass, the false profile mocked him from the old file. A child’s scribbles. When the murders were fresh, he thought he could snag the killer on his own wit, piecing the signs together until it was whole.

He had drafted features based on the location of the killings, the victims’ similarities, and the ugly coup de gras. A true sadist, no doubt, who preyed on the poor, weak, and easy. It gave him power, superiority. There must be a haunting inadequacy somewhere in his life, maybe a physical flaw. A facial disorder that gave rise to those damned ghost stories. He didn’t like to be seen. The eye gouging could be a retaliatory act against the judging, pitying, superior looks he’d received all his life. Don’t look, don’t see, don’t look at me! 

But it was all wrong. Marshall had no clue what he was chasing. Surrounded by opaque signifiers and a bogus case file, he was lost. Sometime after 2 a.m., Marshall hid his head in his hands, his mind draining into blank space, thoughts going static. The chapel door shuddered, about to open. Marshall leaped alert and froze, watching the door. He wanted to shout them off, but couldn’t find his voice. The shuddering ceased and footsteps faded in the hall. He must’ve locked the door. With the altar to his back, he thought about praying. It was unlike him to ask for help. 

***

Nature had reclaimed the old neighborhood. Vines entangled porch bannisters and poured out through windows. Trees encroached on the abandoned homes, their roots disrupting the cracked sidewalks. Tall grass swayed as the patrol car passed. Ferrill knew where to go although he had never been here before. It was all familiar to the silver eyes looking through his pupils. It would guide him there.  

An awful pang gripped his chest when he saw the house. That’s it, a colorless Queen Anne towering ahead. He parked the cruiser and sat still a moment, trying to calm his pounding heart. This would be the end. The creature would be safely home, never to be seen again. And Ferrill would be its sacrifice. 

Trying to muster the will to act, he looked in the mirror. The thing allowed Ferrill to see himself. His own face looked tired. Dark rings around his eyes, the color drained from his skin. It was the look Grant often wore, strung out and wasted. At one time, it had seemed so glamorous.  

With one last look into his own eyes, Ferrill left the car and crossed over the home’s fallen gate. It was a grim sight in the blue moonlight, but the house must have been very nice once. Jacob Morris had amassed a fortune pioneering the city’s steel industry, and his death was widely publicized. A rotten wooden board lay at the foot of the front steps. Ferrill stopped to read the hastily carved greeting: 

The house of Jacob Morris 

Who left a corpse for us

With gold in his pockets

And silver on his sockets

Bloody rich and dead

With a bandage ‘round his head  

Splintered wood crackled as Ferrill climbed the front steps. Above him, light-blue paint chipped and peeled away from the ceiling. It was “haint blue,” a shade once thought to fend against restless spirits. Across the porch, the large door hung loose on its hinges, its brass knob stolen long ago. He felt electric eels slithering inside him as he pushed it aside. 

***

Tedious years fluttered away in an instant as Marshall shoved his open file off the chapel’s communion table. His wasted efforts came to rest softly on the carpeted floor, leaving only the psychologist’s notes. The boy shows the same signs as all the other victims. But the dreams—those are interesting. I shouldn’t have told him the house was real. “Don’t encourage belief in hallucinations,” the psych said. “Keep him here in reality.” 

“He’s watching you,” she said. “You and Helms are his grasp on the real world. He’s convinced that he’s been cursed with something awful, and may do something drastic to purge it. Show him that you’re not afraid, that there’s no need to act on fear. Avoid condescension. He’ll notice.”    

A sharp knock stole his attention. “You in there, Marshall? It’s Helms. Urgent.” 

The detective hustled up the aisle. He tightened his tie and unlocked the door. He loaded “What have you done,” but holstered his attitude. “What’s the matter?” 

The officer’s big, shaken frame filled the doorway. “The kid’s gone.”    

***

The dream, the investigation photos, it was all as he had seen before. Ferrill had brought a spotlight from the cruiser, a column of dust floating through its white beam. His sneakers padded silently over the foyer’s chessboard tile. There was a massive staircase by the door, but he imagined himself falling through it, disappearing in a burst of splinters. The churning in his gut was becoming unbearable, and looked for a place to lie down. 

Down a hall, he found the lavender parlor from his dream. Where the face was first taken. There would be a sofa here, where he could rest until the time comes. Something in him was ravenous, undeniable, more physical than ever before. He braced himself against the parlor doorway and lowered his beam to the floor. 

Ferrill was overcome with the sense of someone waiting for him in the dark. Growing weak, he raised the light to the fireplace mantel. Above it was a portrait of a young woman. Her face was smeared blank. Focused on the image, Ferrill set the spotlight on the sofa, projecting its beam upon the painting. His insides were roiling in a desperate rage. He approached the portrait and drew his knife. 

***

Marshall rocketed his unmarked car down South Street, Helms riding shotgun. He nearly lost control turning the corner into the old neighborhood, his palms slick with sweat. Let the boy live. Please let him. 

“There it is,” he growled to himself as they arrived at the crumbling house. Helms felt apart from himself as he rushed past his own cruiser, already at the scene. Ferrill had left the keys in the ignition. Two flashlight beams cut across the overgrown lawn, no sign of the boy. The front door was open. 

Helms entered first, pistol drawn and trialing the light. “Ferrill!” He called. “Can you hear me?” Marshall followed, watching the officer turn circles in a panic. “Don’t hurt the boy!” Helms shouted, the veins in his neck pounding. “If you hurt him, I’ll burn your damn house down!” 

“Cool it,” Marshall’s voice was low. He angled his light to the tile and illuminated footprints. In urgent silence, they followed down the hall. Breathless, they reached the parlor, decades of dust freshly stirred in the stale air. The cruiser spotlight lay by the sofa, casting white against the ceiling. 

Dread bathed Helms in icy cold as he shone his light upon the sofa. Ferrill lay on his back. His leather jacket was draped over his face. His shirt was shiny with blood. “Oh damn it,” Helms broke down, sobbing on his feet. 

Marshall approached and looked into the light. He stood frozen in place for a moment, then braced Helms by the shoulder. “Wait, step back.” He drew his gun and motioned Helms away. His hand shook as he reached for the leather jacket. Holding his breath, he pulled it away.

The boy was breathing. His jaw was intact. Something was on his face. Helms recognized Grant’s bandana, tied around to cover his eyes. “He’s alive,” Marshall whispered to himself, holstering his gun. The boy convulsed once and coughed red mist. His hands were over his stomach. Marshall pulled back the boy’s shirt and discovered a deep wound under his ribs. Ferrill’s switchblade fell to the floor. “I cut it out,” the boy spoke. “But I didn’t look.” 

“Get him back to the hospital now,” Marshall ordered with a shudder in his voice. “He can make it. I think he can.” 

Helms took the boy in his arms and bolted to the door. “You’ve done it, Ferrill. You’re free.” The boy strained to breathe. “I hope you can hear me now. You were a lot braver then me.”

As they crossed the foyer, the hair on the back of Helm’s neck froze like needles. In the rising light of the doorway, he turned to look into the house. Fully manifest, the creature was standing on the stairs, gripping the banister, eager to see them leave. Its face was hidden in the retreating shadows, but Helms caught an awful look at the body. Distinctly he saw it, the blackened, oozing, burnt skin. The boy was fading, but he stood still. He could kill it. Draw his pistol now and end it. He looked for its face, the body shining in light. As the sunlight climbed the stairs, the figure faded. No claws, no face, and the house was silent.  

The morning was warm at his back. Snapping aware, Helms turned and bounded across the porch to his patrol car. He laid Ferrill in the back, fired off the siren, and burned rubber toward the hospital. He wouldn’t know how to explain the night’s violence to Ferrill’s parents, but they should know he’s a good kid. 

*** 

In the parlor, Marshall kept his coat open, a hand on his pistol. After two years, he was in the killer’s lair, and he wouldn’t leave empty-handed. “I’ve been looking for you,” he called into the dark. “Show your ugly face. I’d love to see it.” 

His anger echoed in the tomb-like quiet. He dredged his flashlight through the shadows, ready to close his case. The light found a curious thing above the fireplace. He thought he saw a portrait of a woman, her face fair and beautiful. In the blink of an eye, though, the face was gone, just a smudge on the painting. The sting of fear flushed his veins and he turned to leave. He stepped into a heaving figure, towering tall over him, its skin dark and stiff like a body bag.    

Chapter Nine

Ferrill had been waiting hours to see a psychologist. The hospital’s psychiatric department was the first to bleed when the state calls for budget cuts, and the staff had dwindled to a handful of overworked professionals. If they could determine what’s gone wrong in his head, they would wrangle a psychiatrist to write his prescription. He was invited into a common interview space in the late afternoon.  

Dr. Spurling had been briefed on Grant’s death (documented as a hit-and-run in her file), and Ferrill’s behavior following the incident. Before he arrived, she repositioned the office lamps to illuminate the corners, eliminating shadows. She had studied the brain scans and the X-rays. She observed the way he grasped his black jacket for security, the way his eyes deflected from the officer’s face before he left. 

There were several tests arranged on her desk, but she didn’t acknowledge them. She asked what was on his mind. While he was waiting, Ferrill thought he would try to explain away the haunting face, but now he was thinking of Grant. The Grant from years ago, before beer and dope and leather jackets. Before they went exploring on the south side—when his family didn’t mind the young man showing up uninvited and everything was cool with his parents. He shared his memories through tears, walking backward from their final moments. Spurling listened, watching the boy let his guard down and very gradually loosen his grip on the stained jacket. 

***

Marshall returned to the hospital that evening. Helms waited for him in a covered driveway. A late rain shower had left the air thick and stinking of asphalt. Helms watched the detective cross the parking lot, walking on a sheen of hot rain, reflecting streetlight. He hoped Marshall had come back with some new insight that could save the boy. He took so long, he must know something. Marshall greeted Helms with a shrug and asked where the boy was. Helms led him to the psychiatric department.   

Marshall knocked once, then entered the psychologist’s office. “Excuse me,” he said. “I thought this would be done by now.”

Ferrill shrugged. “We’re just talking.” He glanced at Spurling, hoping that didn’t sound dismissive. Then he turned back to the detective. “Are you taking me somewhere?”

“It would be best if you stayed here another night, kid. The house is not an option.” Marshall tensed as he realized the psychologist may have heard all about Ferrill’s dream house. “Uh, you can’t go home yet.” 

“Well, are you going to keep me here until it gives up and breaks out?” Ferrill looked to Spurling for support. “Don’t say I can’t go. It can’t know that.” 

“He’s still on about the house,” Marshall sighed, looking to the psychologist. “He’s seriously troubled about this place. It has some history to it. What do you think is going on here?” 

“We can speak about that later,” she said. “Let us finish our meeting here and I’ll be right with you.” 

The detective slid his hands into his pockets and waited outside. Ferrill stepped out half an hour later looking for Helms. Spurling followed, standing in the doorway with a handful of notes for Marshall. They described a young man with a very troubled mind. 

***

Ferrill was moved to the psych ward that evening. The psychologist recommended a sleep study, but the personnel wouldn’t be ready for another day. The boy would just have to be patient. 

Marshall arranged for Helms to stay and watch over the boy, in-part to keep him unavailable during the aftermath of Grant’s death. It was patchwork, and Helms would soon have to come up with a grand explanation for the young man’s conspicuous wounds. There would be no other witnesses. The two paramedics occupied a room across the hall from Ferrill, admitted after questioning by Detective Marshall.    

Awake in the grey room, Ferrill felt his time slipping away from him. There was a constant gnawing in his gut. An impatient tic tic repeated in the back of his mind. It was watching him all the time now. He had become so vigilant, eyes probing the shadows, fearful that the twisted figure maybe near. It always was. The perpetual alertness had given to fatigue, and Ferrill fought to stay awake. If he fell asleep, the void may open underneath. Through the green Exit light, he watched Helms nodding, tapping his foot until the head sagged and his breathing slowed. The darkness overcame and Ferrill heard pages turning all around him. 

Adrift in nowhere, he heard his mother’s voice. “It’s time to go home.” Ferrill sprang up in his grey domed cell—the pysch ward, but not quite. As his eyes strained to open, he saw that someone was standing at the foot of his bed. Grant held his jaw shut with a bloody hand. Though clenched teeth he spoke. 

“Ferrill. Take it home. You know where to go. Get up and do it tonight.” 

Ferrill could only whisper. “Will I die?”

Grant, his eyes like silver dollars, paused a moment. “It is sorry.” 

Ferrill began to cry. “Could I keep it in here forever? Does it have to come out?”

“I could not keep it. Every moment captive is misery. You feel it suffering inside, don’t you?” He opened his jacket, revealing a twisted mass of emaciated flesh. Below the ribs, he was hollow. “It will eat away at you until it can break free. Send it home and no one else well ever have to see what we have seen.”

“They won’t let me go,” Ferrill protested, hoping to bargain with his friend.

“Then I will leave you.” 

Grant’s voice deteriorated into a rasp. A familiar snap filled Ferrill’s ears and Grant’s body fell beneath the bed like a marionette, the strings cut and jaw slack. The silver eyes remained, suspended in the dark, and Ferrill discovered the face hiding just behind. Like a bat unfolding its wings, it stretched its leather-tight limbs over Ferrill’s body, the pale face following in a hateful scowl. 

It climbed over the bed, the eyes open wild and jaw agape, just above the boy’s face. It spoke slowly, to measure its words across the boy. “I’ll… leave… you…” The switchblade claws walked up Ferrill’s legs, up his torso to his lips, prying them apart. “And… the man… will see. The officer will take me.” 

Ferrill looked around for Helms, asleep in the room. It would serve him for striking Grant, but now he’s trying his damnedest to help.  

“I’ll go!” Ferrill shouted. “Wait for me and I’ll take you myself.” Eyes clinched, he felt the gnarled body’s weight ease away. “You don’t have hurt anybody else.” 

Tic tic just above his face. He opened his eyes to see its cracked palm spread. The clawed hand caressed his sweat-soaked brow. With a wave, his eyes were closed again.

“Go tonight.” 

Ferrill was again bathed in green Exit light. Helms was asleep in his chair. The curtain was drawn in the grey room. Knowing his every move was under surveillance, he wasted no time rising to his feet and finding the officer’s keys. Helms had removed his belt prior to settling down to rest. It rested on a meal tray by his chair. Ferrill worked slowly to remove the keyring from its secured clasp. Quietly, carefully. A glint of silver made him flinch. It was his pocket knife. Helms had confiscated it at the curb. The boy tied his shoes and returned the knife to its worn groove.   

Chapter Eight

Maybe it was the overwhelming dread he felt that night, or a direct invitation from the thing itself, but somehow, Ferrill found himself drifting back into the void. He could hear the floor groan underneath as he stepped through the fog.   

He had never been here before, an old Victorian parlor, but it felt unexplainably familiar. Everything from the frayed furniture to the lavender walls was coated in ages of dust. The room’s only light filtered in through slits in the walls, as the windows had been boarded shut. 

Ferrill gradually became aware of another presence, someone hidden in the fog and watching. Bracing himself, he turned to face it. There was an image on the wall, but the fog wouldn’t clear. The dust wouldn’t settle. He knew it was looking, but he couldn’t see the face.   

As he approached the parlor’s mantel, the fog grew thicker and the needle-thin rays of light began to fade. Though something in him wanted to stay, the void was spitting him out. 

***

The hospital room was white with daylight when Ferrill returned. Sitting up in bed, he found Helms still snoozing in his chair. He felt a strange compulsion to slip out of bed and hide somewhere safe. He could steal the squad car. Ferrill searched his bed for the keys, but they were nowhere to be found. 

He groped frantically, yanking up sheets and lifting the mattress. No use. Now on his feet, he looked to the officer. The gleaming keys were still looped to his belt. The creature’s visit must have been a dream, he figured. 

Ferrill approached hesitantly, slow to lay his feet across the cool tile floor. He reached out to the officer, a plan forming in his exhausted mind. He laid a hand on Helms’ shoulder and shook him awake. “Hey man, listen,” he felt the sturdy frame jolt alert. “I know what it wants.” 

Minutes later, Marshall joined them, steam trailing from his foam coffee cup. “Whaddaya got for us, kid?” 

Ferrill knew that the logic of his dreams wouldn’t win the detective’s confidence, but he had a feeling that Helms would take him seriously. He watched the officer as he spoke. “It’s trying to go home.” 

“Go on,” Marshall said, flipping open his folder. 

“I had dreams,” Ferrill wrapped fingers around his head. “I think it was in there, showing me things.” He saw the detective sigh to himself. Helms watched him with earnest eyes. 

“First I saw it here in the room, while you were asleep. It took your car keys and begged to go home.” Helms stiffened and reached for his keys. Still there. 

“Then I was in a house,” Ferrill continued. “An old, old place. So musty I could smell it. All the windows were boarded up and there was something looking at me, but I couldn’t see it.” 

“Do you know where it was?” Marshall seemed to snap awake. 

Ferrill shrugged, “I didn’t take down an address.” 

Marshall scowled and swiped a sheet of paper from his folder, handing it to Ferrill. The sheet held several photos depicting the room from his dream. “That’s the Morris house, a few blocks from South Street.” 

Morris. The name churned up something deep within Ferrill, like dropping a stone in a riverbed. It mirrored the same sorrow he felt last night, crying at the thought of his parents. He studied the photographs, taken straight from his own mind. “This is the house. I was standing right there in my dream.”  

“This was the house our first victim came from before dying in the alley,” Marshall said. “A team of investigators searched it up and down, but didn’t find anything but a few empty bottles with his prints.” 

Looking through the photos ached Ferrill. He longed for the comfort of his family, and he felt that his pain had an echo. Averting his eyes, he handed the sheet back to the detective. “This must be its home,” he said. “The homeless man must’ve found the thing while he was crashing there.”

“He could have looked right at it… and internalized it,” Marshall added. “Shaken up, he then fled to the alley, taking the killer from its home…” His face furrowed in thought. “It escaped, killing him in the process. Loose on South Street, it tried to hide until someone else happened to look.”

“It’s been trying to claw its way back,” said Ferrill. “So let’s take it home.”

Marshall took a deep breath. “Well, we don’t know what it will do when we get there. Say that’s what it wants. When you walk through the door, how’s it going to get out?”

Ferrill’s eyes fell low. “Nobody’s ever lived after seeing its face, right?” 

Helms wanted to interrupt the thought. He grasped for an alternate conclusion. “No one’s ever tried taken it home before,” he said. “If you give it what it wants, it might not turn out like the others.” 

It was a pitiful appeal to make the boy feel better. The detective shook his head. “Let’s not worry about that yet,” he said. “I’m going to look into this Morris place. If this house is where it came from, I’d like to know what the hell happened there. You should stick around here until I’ve got my answer.” 

The answer was clear, but Ferrill squirmed at the thought of wasting time in the hospital room. They couldn’t help him here, and the presence in his mind was growing restless. “Why wait?” he protested. “I swear it just wants to go home. Let’s go there and get it over with.”

“I’m not driving you to your own death, kid!” Marshall thrust a finger at the boy. He held it in air as he heard the anger in his own voice. He knew it stung the boy, and he felt Helms watching him. He took a moment to disarm himself. 

In a neutral voice, Marshall dictated, “We don’t know what would happen if you brought it home. We only know what it can do. Before we do anything to provoke it, I want to dig up as much as I can. We’re waiting for your own good, kid.” 

Ferrill sighed in acceptance. “Alright, we’ll wait,” he said. “But please don’t take long.”  

***

The sun was high when Marshall left, but there was no natural light in the city archives compartment he had reserved. He was not a young man, but the discoloring glow of the microfilm reader carved severe crags into the features of his face. His work had aged him. He was only a few years ahead of Helms, but he’s earned the distance between them. Helms was the little ankle-biter with a bark like a Doberman. The tough guy who cradled his gun like his manhood, but winced at the firing range. A punk ass. He still wore his heart next to his badge. Marshall thought he should have left the force after the South Street fires.   

Helms was still green, on the beat for less than two years. In that time, Marshall had taken a knife to his side and been painted in a hostage’s arterial spray. He had also stuffed his first body bag. But he took his licks like a man. He stuck it out and made detective because he had the guts for it—the fortitude that Helms only wished he had. Marshall had opened doors on sights no one should ever see, but he choked it down because somebody had to. The images come back sometimes, but he’d always been able to fight them off. Until now, he was certain that nightmares couldn’t hurt him.  

As he scrolled through scans of old housing records, he couldn’t rationalize the boy’s story. The house was real. The murders were real. And there’s an intangible conduit between it all. 

Grainy photos of Victorian homes cycled upward until he found what he was looking for. He had never set foot there himself, but he recognized the crumbling front porch from forensic photos. Built in 1880, abandoned in 1931. Its last occupant, Jacob Morris was found dead on the front steps. His wife was later found buried on the grounds. Marshall removed the film from the projector and quickly loaded a reel of death records. 

The body of Jacob Morris was discovered on the morning of August 14, 1931, with his coat draped over his head. His jaw had entirely separated and both eyes were gouged blind. A note was found in his breast pocket:

I cannot bear another night. The nightmares never cease. I tried to endure it as Anna did, but the burden is too great. Do not enter our home, but shutter the windows and lock the doors. Let it be a tomb for our memories and nothing more. Bury me with Anna, who rests beneath the oak tree. And know that she was innocent. We did not conceive our fate. It was brought to us by some infernal inception.  

Shutter the windows. Lock the doors.

A bottle of poison was left discarded on the porch behind him. Authorities concluded that Morris ingested it prior to receiving the fatal wounds. The front door was open. His family made only a cursory inspection of the front foyer before hastily boarding the home. 

Anna Morris was disinterred under the home’s oak tree, as the note indicated. Six months after the home’s construction, she was rendered bedridden with illness. Jacob allowed no visitors to their home. Though severely decomposed, Anna’s body was examined prior to burial with her husband. There was a deep tear running the length of her abdomen. Authorities suspected that Jacob Morris murdered his wife, but never named a suspect for his own death. 

Marshall read their medical reports with learned disinterest, harshly familiar with Morris’ wounds. A prototype South Street mutilation, decades before the first drifter turned up. He ran through reels of death records looking for similar reports, anything to set a precedent for a modern-day copycat. There was nothing of the sort from 1931 until his current case. Not a trace of the vicious modus operandi until someone entered the Morris home two years ago. 

Marshall stepped back to gaze at the gap in time, searching for a murderer that claimed its first years before he was born. Someone who hides in dreams. In the long shadow of an ageless killer, he felt small.      

Chapter Seven

Marshall shut the door behind him and laid his old folder on Ferrill’s bed. “Don’t open that.” He turned to the door and looked out the peephole. He thought a long moment before he began. “Your friend wasn’t the first to die that way.” 

“His name was Grant,” Helms corrected. He glanced to Ferrill. The boy was indifferent.  

“Over the last two years, we’ve found five other bodies, each with the same wounds. They were all recovered around South Street. The most recent was just this week.”

“I uh, found a homeless man in the alley,” Helms added. 

Ferrill turned to the officer. “We were in the alley the other night. That’s where Grant saw that thing. I thought he had lost his mind.” 

“Erratic behavior seems to follow the encounters,” Marshall said. “Witnesses say the victims would start to unravel in the days before their deaths. They would often see figures in the corner of their eye, or hallucinate threatening faces in the mirror.”

“I think Grant was seeing things, too.” Ferrill chose not to mention the face he saw in the window earlier. “How long did the hallucinations last before they…” he thumbed at his eyes, “ended?”   

Marshall tapped at his folder. “We spoke with friends of the victims. Four of them lived the apartments on South Street. One only lasted a night after claiming to see a ghost in the basement. Another suffered hallucinations for a week. That one started a big fire.” 

Helms sat quietly, recalling the smoke-covered night and the row of bodies carried out in red dancing light, one with a face cut to hell. 

“What about the other two?” Ferrill asked. 

“Drifters,” Marshall answered. “One is still cooling in the morgue, yet to be identified. The other was our first case of facial mutilation on South Street.”  

“He was a part of that big vagrant camp that used to fill up the alley,” Helms added. 

“Yeah, but he wasn’t a fulltime squatter,” said Marshall. “He’d only come to the camp when he needed a fix. Otherwise, he’d take up shelter in the abandoned homes on the edge of the neighborhood.” The detective stopped to ponder a moment, rolling his tongue behind his teeth. “The night he died, they say he showed up spooked.”

The detective’s eyes were aimed into space. He didn’t see Ferrill reaching for his folder. When he opened it, the dead face didn’t scare him. It was like starting up a home movie somewhere in his mind. The hospital bed fell away into a void. Helms and the detective were gone. Through a rolling fog, he could see the first victim, the drifter, alive and terrified, looking up from a dusty wooden floor. He heard a pained scream all around him, and he felt as if he were being pulled down a drain. The fog grew thick until there was nothing but a soft, distant sobbing.

Then a wash of light cleared the fog and there was Helms over his bed. The detective was watching behind him. “Ferrill! Can you hear me?” the officer shouted. His grip on Ferrill’s shoulders was shaky. The boy looked around, now back in the hospital, no sign of the drifter.

“Yeah I’m fine,” Ferrill answered, his mind slow to return. 

Marshall slid his folder from the bed. “You left us for a minute, son. It looks like you may have found a bad trigger in there.” 

Ferrill strained to understand what he saw, but hoped he wouldn’t see it again. Thinking about it made it seem near, like he could fall back into the void if he lingered too long on the edge.  

“Try to get some rest,” Marshall said. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me. Helms here will be by your side all night,” he turned to the officer, “so don’t worry.”  

As Ferrill watched the detective leave, he couldn’t ignore the faint, mournful sobbing that lingered in his mind.

***

The night refused to end, and Helms struggled to stay awake. Sometime after midnight, the boy rolled over and said Helms could turn out the light. The officer complied, but opened the curtains to allow streetlight. He didn’t want to sit quiet in pitch dark.   

The same thoughts had been running a circuit in his head for hours. Grant’s next of kin. The horrible legal mess that will follow. His career was doomed. And then shame would set in, shame for worrying about himself when the boy had a monster in his mind. Helms had caught only a shade of the killer, but he understood the fear that followed. The poor kid was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, tagging along with a bad apple. 

Fatigue took hold and Helms found himself nodding off. The bounce of his head would jolt him awake long enough to start the circuit again. To distract himself, he would tap his foot to a mental beat. Tap tap tap tap like a metronome. It became an absent-minded motion as his thoughts ran together, growing weaker until the rhythm was lost. 

***

Lying awake, Ferrill wondered if Grant was below him, down in the morgue. Silently screaming in a cold coffer. He imagined that he would be taken down there too before long. Following blindly to the very end. It shouldn’t be a surprise, he figured, that Grant would be the death of him.  

He pictured his parents, standing over his body, with his eyes and mouth stitched shut. I told you that boy was dangerous! He hoped they wouldn’t see the awful thing too, freed from his corpse to lurk in the morgue. The thought made his eyes water. He was a threat to everyone around him, a time bomb ready to release something evil into the world. He didn’t want to unleash the devil on some hapless bystander, not even the cop. 

Ferrill sat up in bed. He strained through the dark to see Helms, asleep and slumped in his chair. You did what you could, he thought. He was surprised—if not embarrassed—that Helms had bothered to stay. The officer had been tapping his foot for what seemed like hours, but now the room was uncomfortably silent. The yellow light from the lamp outside cast black shadows on Helm’s face, like deep dark sockets. Ferrill would rather see nothing at all, and reached to close the curtains.

But he stopped. His eyes were fixed on Helms, and he was afraid to move a muscle. He knew, without a doubt, what he would see in the window. It would be there, waiting for him to look. As it had been there in the rearview mirror of the squad car, and the TV screen. Now as he sat up in his bed, arm out and frozen still, it must be watching, aware of his fear. 

Like driving past a car crash, he caved to temptation and looked. The face stared back from the window, deathly white, with bitten, grimacing lips. It couldn’t be, though. Ferrill’s room was on the fourth floor. 

In the room, Ferrill heard a sound, tic tic. He looked to Helms. Fast asleep, his foot was still. Tic tic, just behind him. Ferrill whipped his head around and found the misshapen body standing by his bed. In the lamplight, its skin was like leather wrapped around long bony limbs. 

Its deep red lips quivered like it wanted to speak. Not breaking eye contact, it reached an overstretched arm across itself. Over its shoulder, the creature pointed a switchblade finger to the door. “H-h-home…” it struggled to vocalize, raspy and weak.    

Ferrill felt his fear give to fascination as he fought to understand. He watched as the creature crossed the room, its movement like bare tree limbs in a winter wind. Its face appeared over Helms. Ferrill felt the urge to shout as glints of streetlight danced across slithering claws, down Helms’ torso. His voice had given up, though. He couldn’t wake the officer as the wicked blades played across his belt like a spider. Tic tic as they walked across his body. Until they found what they were after.

The thing slipped its claw through the loop of Helms’ keyring, and raised the shining pieces into the air. The creature shook the keys with a jingle, then tossed them onto Ferrill’s bed. “H-huh-home,” it pleaded. 

Ferrill took the keys in hand and studied their emblem. They were keys to Helms’ squad car. He looked back to the creature. Still watching, it covered its face with switchblade hands, disappearing in the dark. 

Ferrill sat stiff upright for as long as he could. He moved only his eyes from Helms to the window until he could no longer keep them open.