Serial Saturday: Don’t Look at Me by Tom Little, Chapter Eight

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.