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.