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Three days ago, Julie Easter went missing. The bus took her to school in the morning; it didn’t bring her home. The local papers were calling it a tragedy, another in a too-long line of potential runaways. Ten kids had gone missing in the past two months. But since her father golfed with the DA, Julie’s case escalated quickly. And it had a little more exposure on it than the others. Within two days, the superintendent was brought in, but the school had no idea what happened to her. Local authorities were chasing their tails, having no leads to follow up on.
That’s when Frank and Judy Easter hired me: Jono Swift, Private and Paranormal Investigator.
I didn’t normally take missing-persons cases. I was a father once. I couldn’t lose any more kids.
Suddenly I was getting more calls lately for disappearances and runaways than I could turn down, and there was something about Julie that I couldn’t shake. Maybe she reminded me of Anna.
Reluctantly, I agreed. And then I did what I do: tracked down some leads, followed some clues. I talked to her bus driver, her 2nd grade teacher, and all her little pig-tailed friends. When that turned up nothing, I squeezed some informants, got something out of a Satyr that owed me a solid and drew a bead on an old, dodgy Colonial house. With the boarded windows, the dangling shutters, and the shingles clinging to the roof like scattered leaves, the place couldn’t have looked worse had it weathered a zombie apocalypse.
We circled the block and approached from the rear. Hopping the fence from the neighbor’s yard, we dodged the rusted swing set built for four-year-olds. The neighborhood – if you could call it that – was on the other side of town from the Easter home, and there was no way a young girl would wander into a place like this. She’d been taken, that was for sure. By what, I had no bloody idea, and the not knowing made me nervous.
I’d been hunting beasties a long time, and the only way I was still alive was because I did my research. The number one rule of hunting: knowledge was the best weapon. The difference between success and failure was knowing what kind of ammunition to take. Iron burned the fairy kind. Rock salt was a purifier, used to dispel the undead. For the rest, silver – it didn’t always kill, but it at least burned like a bad case of hemorrhoids.
I hated going in blind.
We paused just behind a flimsy metal shed that may have been kicked in by an angry pack mule and surveyed the scene. There was no motion. Only a broken wagon – once red, now more of a rust brown laying overgrown in the middle of the lawn.
I looked over at my partner and said, “Did the Easters say anything about a missing wagon?”
Ape shushed me and said, “Stop talking. It might hear you.”
Ape was Terry Towers, my roommate and partner, but not in that San Francisco, Harvey Milk kind of way. Affectionately, I called him Ape because – well – his physique was wrought with that tight, sinewy muscle of a white rapper and the coarse, head-to-toe reddish-brown fur of a Teen Wolf.
“It, what? We have no idea what we’re up against.”
“You’re nervous. You talk too much when you’re nervous.”
“And you aren’t?”
He didn’t say anything, but the look he gave me told me that he felt it, too. Without another word, he ran the distance to the back of the house and knelt in the tall grass beside the stairs leading up to the back porch.
I took a deep breath and followed. Before I could say anything, he held a finger to his lips.
I pretended not to notice. “I’m just saying…I’d feel better if you hadn’t made me leave Glory in the car.”
His eyes went wide in disbelief. In a harried whisper, he said, “We’re in a neighborhood. Glory is a military-grade assault rifle, Swift.” He took a deep breath. “You have enough guns.”
He was referring to Grace, the pair of Glock twenty-two’s on my belt, and the twelve-gauge sawn-off Mossberg on my back.
Grace was my Russian beauty: a triple-barreled TP-82 cosmonaut pistol I kept strapped to my left thigh. She fired standard twelve-gauge shells from the two smoothbore jubblies on top and 5.6 mm rounds from her naughty bits. She was a sexy devil.
With Grace, I liked to use specialty rounds: flares, grenades…the occasional steel cable bolo. Although they’re marketed as non-lethal ammunition used more to snare a target, if you timed a shot just right, a bolo could sever a limb.
Ape didn’t use guns, didn’t believe in them. He used his brute monkey strength, which could tear the jaw-bone off a unicorn.
“You’re no fun,” I said. “Besides, mate, in this neighborhood, nobody’s going to care.” I motioned at large to the houses on either side of us, at least one of which I was convinced was an active drug house. “Well, they might open fire on us, but they won’t call the coppers.”
“You do realize we’re trying to catch this thing by surprise, right?” he asked. “It could be listening to you whine right now.”
“Depending on what we’re dealing with,” I added, “it could have smelled us long before we even approached the house.” I shrugged. “You really know how to kill a sarding mood.”
He looked at me with contempt. “Sard?”
I just shrugged.
“I don’t think Medieval swear words can be used in a modern context like that.”
“It means the same sarding thing.”
He sighed. “Shut up and check the door.” He pointed to the loose floorboards of the back porch and the boarded window of the rear entrance.
I rolled my eyes and, with my heart beating in my throat, took the three stairs to the porch. The old boards creaked underfoot as I crossed to the door, and I stopped for a moment, listening. Hearing nothing, I tried the knob: locked. Of course, it was locked. Nobody made anything easy anymore.
“It’s locked,” I offered, a little louder than I would have liked.
The glass that had once served as a window in the little door had been broken out and a board covered most of the open hole. There was just enough of a crack for me to see into the darkened room beyond. No sound issued from within. No movement to detect.
Behind me Ape said, “Over here. There’s another way.” But he was gone when I turned around.
I found him behind the house where he’d parted the tall grass to reveal a basement window, one of those that sat even with the lawn. It was barely visible in the overgrowth. We squatted down and Ape gave it a push. With a little effort, it gave and I held it open to let him take the lead.
After he’d slithered in, he said, “It’s clear. Come on down.”
I took a knee and called toward the darkened portal. “I’m not falling for that again.”
“Swift!” he said a little louder.
I smiled as I counted to five, then I zipped my leather jacket and slipped inside, careful not to bang my merchandise on the small opening. I looked over at Ape, giving him a grin.
He ignored it and looked away. “Fall for what?” he asked.
“You remember the centaur in the children’s hospital.”
He sighed. “I said I was sorry for that.” But he was smiling and probably thought I couldn’t see his smirk in the darkness. The only light was coming in through the one window we’d just come through, and dust swirled heavy in the air.
I unholstered one of my Glocks and clicked on the high-powered flashlight that was mounted under the barrel. Then I pulled the other out and tossed it to Ape. He caught it nimbly and clicked on the light in the same fluid motion.
“Sorry, my arse,” I mumbled. “Those Red Cap gnomes broke a rib and punctured a lung.”
The basement consisted of several large, unfinished, rooms that bore the cold smell of mildew. Apart from the long-cold furnace, a carpet of broken glass, and some boxes that bulged with water damage and bore the words “Christmas decorations” in a faint, markered hand, it was mostly empty.
Ape bent to examine the boxes, and I moved through the empty door frame into a much larger, darker room. A quick sweep of my beam found a stack of wooden pallets in the corner, a utility sink, and the exposed hook-ups for a washer and dryer. Rat pellets littered the floor, intermingled amongst spilled metal cans and glossy liquid pooling at the base of a broken wooden shelf. A strong chemical odor violated my nose, forcing a cough as I turned away.
“I don’t think we have to worry about anything smelling us approach,” I mumbled.
Turning, I saw the stairs and moved instinctively for them. Ape grabbed my shoulder. I stopped and turned. His beam was fixed on something in the corner – a darkened, lumpy wad – that began to take form as we neared. My stomach soured.
Ape took a knee and poked it stoically with a finger. “A rat. Looks like it’s been eaten.”
That was more than the drive-thru breakfast in my stomach could handle. He lifted it by its tail, brought his light close, and I went and stood by the pallets. “You can see the markings of an incisor tooth,” he said. “There’s remnants of something sticky around the edges. Saliva, probably. This is fresh. Hours old at most.”
“Oh, fantastic. We may not know what’s in here with us, but at least we know it’s not hangry.”
The pallets were piled waist-high and stacked loosely at best. As I leaned against them, they gave way, four or five pallets – BAM – over onto the hard concrete. In the darkened, empty basement, it sounded like a gunshot going off.
Immediately, floorboards creaked above us.
Ape snapped to attention, his gaze fixed on me with a look that seemed to say, “Swift, wait….”
I was in motion before he could get a word out, taking the stairs two at a time. I could see the halo of daylight from the closed door above me. In one motion, I holstered the Glock and unslung the shotgun from my back, clicked the safety off and kicked the door in without missing a beat.
I entered the room like a SWAT agent in a television program, clearing the left and then sweeping right, seeing no one. It was an old instinct that lingered.
I quickly surveyed the room: a kitchen, broken and chipped linoleum flooring, fridge and stove missing their doors, dirty lavender wallpaper, broken bulb in an exposed socket overhead. There was a table built for two to my right, but it looked like someone had bled a horse out on top of it. The untreated wood was spattered with Rorschach ink blots in that same deep red juice that oozes out of raw hamburger meat. Bloody stains spiraled down two of the legs, and the floor below it was thick with a sticky, reddish-black paste. In the centre was a severed human finger.
For the span of a heartbeat, I froze. And as I did, fear crawled across the floor and tugged at my pant legs like some black, oily octopus. Every hair on my body stood on end.
I didn’t see anyone, but felt a presence. My gaze lingered on the table and its macabre dye job for a moment, and then I spun, catching the faintest glimpse of something moving at the far end of the hallway. I fired. Glass frames hanging loosely on the walls in the little corridor shattered loudly. Drywall dust hung heavy in the air.
“You can do this the easy way or the hard way,” I called, hoping whatever it was spoke English – or even spoke at all: something I could reason with and not some overgrown animal. The last thing I wanted to do was back some Bonnacon into a corner and unleash the full flaming fury of its irritable bowel syndrome.
There was no reply, of course – I wasn’t Batman; the things I hunted didn’t taunt me with verbal quips.
When there was no movement in the darkness around me, I started down the hallway, careful to avoid the glass bits underfoot. The doorway on my left opened into an empty, formal dining room. I swept the area, saw nothing, heard nothing. There was a wider door at either end, the left leading to the back of the house – possibly a bedroom or an office – the right leading to the front door and the walk-in foyer.
Peripheral vision registered movement behind me, and I spun with the shotgun toward the kitchen.
Ape stood there, wide-eyed, hands in the air.
He shot me an annoyed look and shoved the gun barrel down and to the side. “Would you quit playing around?” he said.
“What?! I saw it.”
He looked past me into the gloom. “Did you see what it was?”
“Yeah. I took a bloody Polaroid.” I sighed. “Of course not. It moved too quick.”
He said nothing.
“You go around that way.” I pointed him to the back of the house. “And I’ll go to the right. Whatever it is, maybe we can trap it.”
He stared at me for a moment and said, “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid this time.”
“This time?”
“As opposed to every other time.”
I flashed him a grin. “You know I can’t promise that, love.”
He shook his head, and I watched him disappear around the corner before stepping into the dining room.
I listened for a moment and as I took a step, the oily octopus began to climb up the legs of my trousers and wrap itself around my belt. I was surprised to find my hands shaking and sweating a bit.
I shook my head. It wasn’t fear I was feeling. It couldn’t be. I’d been in far worse situations than this one, far scarier locations. I’d been hunting the things that “go bump in the night” for two decades. Fear wasn’t logical. This wasn’t fear. I was being cautious, maybe. It was just the nerves from not feeling prepared. That was all. Cautious people had sweaty palms.
Remembering the other first rule of hunting – always appear confident – I shrugged it off as best I could. I took a deep breath and with meditated steps I entered the foyer, swept the gun up and to the left at the grand staircase there, and then quickly to the right where a formal den sat. It was empty, too.
Empty, except for the sound. A faint yet distinguishable rhythmic ticking sound echoed through the room for a few seconds before dying away. I waited and listened, and the noise started again.
As I moved around the base of the staircase, I saw the blood pooling on the floor. Then I saw him: all hair and matted dirt, smelling like spoiled beef and rotten eggs. I tried to breathe out of my mouth, but could almost taste it, hanging palpable and heavy in the air.
It was a man. Kind of.
He looked up at me with tense, wide eyes, that glimmered like a cat’s caught in a beam of light. Blood was all around him, and he squatted atop a mound, something like a corn cob held between his hands -- if you could call them hands. His fingertips were pointed as if he’d stuck them into a pencil sharpener, and exposed pink and red tissue enflamed each digit. His face dripped with thick, sticky red, and his teeth were bared, not feral, but rat-like. Whatever it was he held, he’d been gnawing on it.
“Look,” I said. “I’m just looking for a little girl. If you tell me where she is, you can get back to your…what, I…I don’t even know what that is. It looks tasty.” I thrust my tongue out to the side.
He stood, his eyes never leaving me. His skin was extremely pale, almost transparent in places. Red and blue veins stood out starkly around his face that was framed by a mountain man’s beard and hair like Moses if he’d been struck by lightning. His ragged clothes – shredded flannel and broken denim – were stained with dirt and mud and the same deep red that haunted the kitchen table.
He lifted his hand and showed me the little piece of meat that he had been gnawing on. Then he tossed it at my feet. I wasn’t about to pick it up, but at first glance, I knew it wasn’t a rat this time. It was a human hand, or at least, what was left of one. Most of the muscle and skin had been peeled back and eaten. The fingernails were painted hot pink.
For a split-second, I was a father again. My mind went immediately to Anna, and the rage and pain and anguish and revulsion I felt was all-consuming. I wanted to yell, to scream, to unload the seven shells still in the shotgun. But I didn’t.
I couldn’t.
I saw what still lay at the man’s feet: strawberry blonde hair, long and beautiful, a turquoise skirt mottled with a camouflage I knew could not be finger-paint, and a heap of tissue, flashes of red, and other things I’ll never be able to forget if I live a thousand lifetimes.
He stepped forward, but I wasn’t paying attention.
He sucker-punched me: a hard, jarring pain once between my eyes, and then again. Hard. Much too hard for a guy who’d been getting his meals second-hand or starving to the point he’d turn to cannibalism. He should’ve hit like an Ethiopian kid, not a prizefighter. I wasn’t expecting it, and it spun me.
Before I could rebound, he was on me. I could feel those jagged nails tearing against my neck, pulling on my jacket. I tried to fight, but the shotgun had been tossed from my hands, and he had my shoulders pinned.
“Ape!!” I yelled.
No answer. Where was he?!
I was able to move my hands. Not enough to throw a punch, but enough to reach my belt. I squirmed and writhed and wriggled. He was heavier than he looked, and it was all I could do to keep him from biting my face. I tried to head-butt him, but the angle was awkward and I just gave myself a headache instead. I had to keep blinking as he spat on me like a rabid dog, but from the colouring, I could tell it wasn’t just spittle.
All the while, my fingers fumbled at my belt, and I finally found what I was after. Gripping tightly around the handle of my Glock, I pulled it free and fired five, six, seven rounds blindly, but connecting. I don’t know where I hit, or even how many times. Maybe an enema or two he wouldn’t soon be forgetting. He writhed on top of me, flailing back, and it was enough of a change to pull my arm out from under him. My hands were shaking so badly with rage and pain – certainly not fear – and my vision went blurry and red. I blinked and it burned, but I managed to squeeze off a few more rounds to send him tumbling.
I stood quickly, wiping my eyes, and looked to see the man shaking and spitting at me, but getting back up. I’d hit him in the stomach, the shoulder, the arm. He was bleeding from his neck. Damn my shaky nerves; I’d been aiming for his head.
He charged, faster than he should have been able to, and I couldn’t move in time. He hit like a linebacker. And as we collided with the front door, we didn’t stop.
Then everything slowed.
I must have had an out-of-body experience because I swear the next thing I remember is standing outside the house on the lawn, amazed as the front door blew off its frame and careened through the air. Atop the busted door, as if surfing it on his back, was a handsome devil: long brown hair, black denim pants, the coolest leather jacket I’d ever seen, a pistol falling from his grip. He had a look of pain on his face, blood trickling along the corner of his eye and his forehead. I pitied the man.
Atop him was another: older-looking, grey beard, missing teeth, torn flannel shirt, holy jeans, a single beat-up tennis shoe. He was blood-soaked, strangling the first and clawing at his chest.
Then I realized it was me I was pitying, and I wasn’t standing on the lawn, I was riding the door, my back still to it, and I was looking into those feral eyes, thick strands of syrup falling from broken grey teeth, his breath like boiled cabbage and tuna fish.
As we hit the lawn, the door shattered to pieces under me, and the bum and I bounced together before I remembered how to use my legs and kicked him off of me.
I went to reach for my Glock and realized it wasn’t there.
A noise drew my attention, and as I looked back at the house, an overgrown hairball burst from the upstairs window in a mist of broken glass and wood splinters. Ape landed as lightly as a gymnast on the front walk. Behind me, the bum roared in protest and challenge.
Ape lifted his Glock and fired three rounds.
The bum staggered and toppled over onto his side.
I struggled to my feet as Ape tossed the Glock into the grass beside him. He shot me a proud grin, and I shrugged it off. “What? I had him,” I said.
“Like Hell.” He laughed.
Before I could say anything else, there was a belch of fury, a quick motion, and I was tossed back onto my arse as the tramp charged past me, oozing blood and puss and flecks of white foam, running on all fours like an animal. He took the distance to the porch in a few seconds.
Ape was ready for him, and he caught him on the chin with a punch to make a pugilist proud. He hit him in the stomach twice, and as he came up again, the bum head-butted him so hard that Ape staggered back.
I gained my feet again and yelled, “Hang on, mate, I’m coming!”
Ape fell back against the porch steps and toppled over onto his backside. Before he could recover, a dirty, taloned hand went for his throat, lifting him from the ground and pinning him to the pillar that held up the porch roof.
Ape had both hands grappling against the man’s wrist, fighting for purchase, and his face began to blanch ashen as he managed to squeak out a strained, “Erk…Swift…”
I was already in motion.
He only had a moment to squeeze my partner and play dolly with him while I pulled Grace from her holster and chambered a couple bolo rounds. By the time my foot hit the first of those porch steps, Ape had only been in the air for a moment. I snapped the barrel closed, leveled my sights on the back of the old bum’s neck, took a deep breath, and plucked Grace gingerly.
It was a loud and sweet sound, the way she moaned.
Ape fell in a gasp, breathing quickly and deeply, his face spattered and sprayed with warmth. Beside him, tumbled the dirty, limp bum.
“Ha!” I called.
Ape took a deep breath. “Well, that was subtle.”
“He was choking you. Grace blows his head into the dining room, and that’s the thanks I get?”
“You get off on this stuff. If I hadn’t leaned away, it would have been a two-for-one deal.”
“I saved your life. I really don’t think you should complain.”
Ape held out a hand, and I hoisted him to his feet.
“Now what?” I asked.
He walked out onto the lawn, saying, “Unless you want another unfinished case, we go back inside and ID Julie Easter.” When he reappeared, he was holding the discarded Glock.
For a moment, the black octopus coiled around my waist and began to squeeze at the thought of going back into the house, but as I looked down at the headless body at my feet, the fear slowly began to uncoil and loosen its grip. In its absence, I felt something else, something more crippling than fear. “No,” I said. “That mess in there…” I remembered those pink fingernails, that strawberry blonde hair. I suddenly fought the urge to vomit as a million scenes of Anna flashed through my head in an instant. “I can do monsters and blood all day…but that in there…you’re on your own for that.”
“I’m sorry, Swift. The case isn’t closed yet, and there’s something else I need you to see.”
“What?”
He shrugged. “No idea. But whatever this guy was doing here…It was bad. Like really bad.”
And with that, he ducked back inside.
I took a deep breath. “Bollocks.”
