by Sara Clancy
Sagging with the force of her relief, Nicole silently pulled her feet back under her and stood up. She crept up the stairs, never taking a full breath until she reached the darkness of the second floor. It didn’t take long for the shadows to shift from comforting to confronting. Since none of the businesses ever stayed open past five, the floor was completely deserted. Each one had large windows that looked out onto the street and matching ones that opened onto the hallway she was standing in. The only source of light was the glow of the streetlamps. They filtered in through the vertical blinds and sliced spurs of light across the hallway.
Her feet refused to move. Every time Nicole had seen this place, it had been awash with lights and people. There was something inherently wrong in seeing it so empty. It felt like something was watching her from the shadows, waiting for her to come closer. Her eyes searched every inch of space they could find but there were far too many hiding spots to assure herself that she was alone.
Lingering by the top of the stairs, one hand pressed against the wall, she struggled to resist turning on a light. It would be a comfort but was the exact opposite of being sneaky. The sensation of eyes upon her intensified. She tried to dismiss it, to justify it, to reason with the hair on her arms that were beginning to rise, but nothing worked. Memories of her last hiking trip were worth far more than her own assurances.
She had been hiking for half a day with the cold, constant pressure pressing against her spine. It was only after she had circled back around that she noticed the coyote tracks in the soft earth. Dozens of them. The whole pack must have stalked her for at least a mile and she never saw them. But the most primal part of herself had felt it. Had known the exact moment when she had captured a predator’s attention. It was an unmistakable breed of bone-deep dread. And she felt it now.
Aspen’s office stood at the very end of the hall, the last in the long row of identical doors. The minimal light shone off the metal handle, taunting her. Controlling her every breath, forcing them to go slower than her racing heart, she took her first tentative step forward. The desire to run was instant and forceful. She chanced a glance over her shoulder at the staircase.
“You came here to do something,” she reminded herself. “You’re not leaving until you get the job done.”
Locking her eyes onto her final destination, she bounced on her toes, working herself up until she could force herself into a sprint. She felt both ridiculous and pursued at the same time. The confliction leaving little room for logic. It was probably why it took getting her hand on the doorknob to realize that it could be locked. She spun, ready to abort the mission and race for the stairs. But the movement twisted the handle slightly and the door popped open with an easy swing.
For a moment, she could only stare at it. “Wow, our town is trusting.”
Holding tight to the reminder of where she was, her small, quaint, safe little town, was enough to ease the fear that had built up under her skin. She crept into the dark space and closed the door firmly behind her. Pulling her mobile phone out of her jacket pocket, she clicked on the flashlight app. The weak circle of light it produced wasn’t enough to chase off the shadows. It more or less just weakened them, allowing her to see shapes within it but still keeping all colors muted. Still, it was all she needed to get across the room to his desk without stumbling into anything. The charger cord for his laptop coiled across the floor like a sleeping snake but the laptop itself was gone.
“Well, that sucks,” she whispered.
She had hoped hearing her voice would be soothing. Unfortunately, the nervous tilt lingering in her words had the opposite of the desired effect. It made her want to talk all the more, to just babble until it was all out. Like an anxiety exorcism. Making any noise that wasn’t absolutely necessary was a horrible idea but she wasn’t sure how long she could hold out. The more she kept it in, the more nervous she got.
“At least Aspen is taking some steps to protect his client’s privacy,” she blurted into the darkness. “Of course, it’s that privacy that I’m currently trying to violate. I might not be the good guy here. Oh. Am I the bad guy? No. I’m sure a murdering soul-sucker is worse.”
She sunk her teeth into her bottom lip, hard, to stop anything more from tumbling out. Savoring the sharp pang, she trailed her light around the office. It only took a few moments to notice the tall filing cabinet that melted into the shadows. It was tucked into a back corner, nestled between a pot plant and a coat rack. Aspen was a man who had reluctantly embraced technology. Odds were, he still didn’t trust it enough to completely forgo hard copies of his patient records.
She rushed to the cabinet and tested the handle. The drawer remained solidly in place and gave a rattle that was way too loud for her liking. For a moment, she froze, ready for the door to burst in, her lip starting to protest the abuse she was inflicting upon it. No one came. Her nerves slowly ebbed back to their normal level of controlled chaos. Wiping her sweaty palms on her jacket and tried to think of what to do next.
“Spare key,” she decided abruptly.
There had to be one hidden away somewhere. She took one step towards the desk before a better idea struck her. Placing the phone on top of the filing cabinet, she braced her feet and pulled the large hunk of metal a few inches away from the wall. It screeched across the tiled floor. Loud enough that she instinctively dropped down to hide behind the side of the desk. The door remained closed.
“Is there no security in this building?” she whispered with indignation before catching herself. “Wait, why am I complaining?”
On all fours, she crawled over the short distance and slipped between the side of the cabinet and the potted plant. There wasn’t enough room or light for her to properly see behind the metal drawers. So she twisted into an uncomfortable angle and slid her hand into the gap she had created. The plant leaves brushed against her face as she strained her shoulder to the point of pain, groping over every inch of cool metal she could touch. Finally, about halfway up, her fingertips brushed against a slip of sticky tape. A little more fumbling and she was able to hook her nails around the sides of the secured key.
A smile curled her lips as she pulled it free. Still celebrating her victory, she popped onto her feet and opened the lock with an unnecessary flourish. Aspen had a lot more clients than she would have guessed. It seemed like almost everyone in town had their own file. But they were all neatly organized and it only took a second to find Benton amongst the others. File in one hand and her phone in the other, she knelt down and opened it, scanning each sheet of paper before snapping a photograph with her phone. There wasn’t time to read any of it in detail but some words stood out more than others. Ones like ‘sociopath,’ ‘delusional,’ and ‘death,’ tended to grab her attention.
Taking the last photograph, she scrambled to get the room back into order. It was hard to remember exactly where she had found the key but she doubted that Aspen was as observant as her mother was. She shoved the cabinet back into place with a sharp push of her shoulder. The scraping sound was still an ear-splitting screech but she handled it a lot better than she had before. Probably because everything she had come for now fit into her palm. As the possibility to actually get away with this came closer, her legs began to shake with the desire to run. It was nearly impossible to keep herself still long enough to insure that she hadn’t left some telling sign. Cramming her phone back into her jacket pocket, she hurried through the darkness to the door. It opened smoothly but the metal clack seemed far louder than what she remembered. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t stop the door from releasing the same sound as she eased it back closed.
The second she turned to the dark hallway, the sensation of being watched hit her like a solid wall. Painfully aware of the sound of her own footsteps, Nicole inched towards the stairs, her eyes darting over each shadow. Her body protested, trying to surge forward instead of taking the slow, measured steps she was forcing it to. The stairwell was in sight when a soft whisper broke the silence
.
She froze instantly. Her brain staggering, unable to comprehend what she had just heard. Her lungs seized. Her heart skipped. A sickly sense of dread bubbled up inside her, turning her to stone from the inside out. Her father. That was her father’s voice calling to her from behind the closed door beside her.
“Daddy?” she whispered before she could stop herself.
The voice didn’t come as it should have. It rolled out like roaming fog, curling around her feet before climbing up to reach her ears. She could almost feel it against her skin. But it was his voice. She was sure of it. Swallowing around the solid lump in her throat, Nicole slowly turned to glance behind her shoulder. The hallway was quiet. Still. Shadows toyed around the thin streaks of light, shifting only when a tree outside forced it to.
She went cold as she heard the now familiar clack of a door handle turning. The sound was quickly lost under her fast, raspy breath. Feeling light headed, she watched the door open, its hinges releasing a soft rasp. Nothing stood in the threshold. There was only the empty office space shrouded with shadows. But the voice came from the space all the same.
“Over here,” it coaxed, a perfect mockery of her father’s voice. “Come closer.”
It felt like everything within her skin crashed together at once, creating a roaring swell that prevented her from doing anything. She wanted to scream, wanted to run, wanted more to somehow make sense of the world again but she stood frozen, staring into the empty air.
“Nicole,” it extended her name into a death rattle.
Long fingers wrapped around the edge of the door, nails clicking against the wood.
“Come to me, angel.”
Nicole bolted before her mind could catch up with her instincts. Her boots slammed against the floor as she barreled down the stairs. She didn’t hesitate this time. She ran into the hall, moving as fast as her legs could possibly take her. She didn’t care who saw her. All that mattered was the glass doors before her now and the chilled air of escape that lay beyond. She didn’t stop until she had hurled herself back through the window of the police station and firmly locked it behind her.
***
The sun had already cracked across the horizon, turning the sky into a flush of muted pink, by the time Benton was able to claw his way out from under the layers of hell he been buried in. He was left shivering atop his sweat-drenched sheets. Cold even, as a fever took hold. He scrunched his fingers in the waterlogged sheets, just to assure himself that they were his own. That he was back in his own body. That he was awake. He blinked and the horrors he had witnessed fell away from his sight. But each of them remained perfectly preserved within his mind.
Blood and flesh clogged under his nails. He swiped them across the sheets over and over but the sensation remained. The dozens of deaths poured across his brain like bubbling lava. It filled him until the pressure cracked his skull, seeking some kind of release, threatening to erupt and burn him alive. The pain was enough to blur his vision. It seized every cell of his being. Every inch of his mind and soul. Quaking under the assault, he reached out, trying to find his phone. He needed to tell them. Needed to warn all of them. Needed to make this stop.
As he fumbled with the buttons, memories of the creature crept into his mind. He remembered an unseen force pressing against him. The weight. The flesh like crocodile skin. The nuzzling press of its face against his neck. For a split second, his pain was forgotten under a spike of fear.
He snapped around, flailing madly, his arm smacking against the mattress. Every sense told him he was alone. But he couldn’t bring himself to believe that something unseen was lurking nearby, hunting him, ready to strike. The heat in his head became a firestorm as he clawed his way onto the carpet. He only managed to scramble a foot from the mattress before his shivering limbs gave out and his spine smacked against the floor. On instinct alone, he had kept his tight grip on his phone. Every second that passed pounded like a cathedral bell against his neck, growing until his body rocked with the blows.
There were too many. Too many names and deaths and monsters screaming in his ears. A new wave of agony bore down on him like a tidal wave. It crushed him against the floor, his teeth rattling with the impact as his fingers clutched the phone. It was his lifeline. His only chance for survival. The names rose into a ghastly howl, each one tripping over the other, becoming a snarling beast all of its own. Demanding that he tell their story. Demanding that he speak. He longed to scream. To release some of what was festering within him. But the last traces of the drug still hugged him tight, smothering each attempt to summon his voice into a meek whimper.
With whatever control he had, he furiously clicked his fingers over the keys. An unseen boulder pressed down on him until his bones bent with the force. Each one of them became a branding iron, roasting the flesh and muscle wrapped around it. He could almost feel the smoke pouring into his blistering lungs. Writhing against the onslaught, his thumb made the final tap and the email was sent. Benton knew the very second his mobile had completed the task. It was marked with the sensation of ice thrown upon him, a moment of relief that quickly deteriorated into stifling scorching steam. But it was enough. Just enough that he could keep his thumb moving over the key pad, forming the next warning that his mouth couldn’t voice.
***
Nicole sat on her bedroom floor, her laptop in front of her. Sheets of papers and odd books covered every other available surface. Her library had proven to be exceedingly lacking in books about mythology. But then, she wasn’t even sure it was mythology that she needed to be looking up. Monsters might have been better. Or demons. Or a thousand other things that people around the world have taken to calling the unknown. And that was the problem; she had no idea where to even start researching Victor’s ‘girlfriend’. And typing in ‘monsters with creepy hands’ into a web search didn’t exactly produce helpful results.
As for the second problem, the ‘what on earth is Benton’s’ problem, his medical records had proven more fruitful. His past therapists mentioned time and again that Benton’s problems began when he attempted to contact the people that he saw in his dreams. It didn’t matter how many times he was told not to, or even who told him not to, he always found the future victims and told them what was coming. But even as they all mentioned the dreams, no one seemed all that interested in finding out how he knew how to contact the victims. Benton always knew their names and at least one contact detail. A number. An address. An email or social media page. That wasn’t information that a child should readily know about a stranger.
Nicole had waited anxiously for her mother to go to sleep. The second she was sure that enough time had passed, she snuck downstairs and found her mother’s work laptop. She also checked for the hundredth time that all the locks were firmly in place. Back in the safety of her own room, she booted up the laptop and returned to the police files. With them, Benton’s records, printouts of Google maps and a lot of coffee, she had set about marking down what she thought was a good representation of their daily routines.
Any place Benton would have gone to, she marked with gold star stickers. Glittery love hearts of different colors marked the victims’ home, friends, workplace, and known hangouts. Or at least the ones that the investing officers had made note of. She used smiley faces for Benton’s father and unicorns for his mother. The end-result looked inappropriately pretty and made her head hurt more. The points of overlap kept dwindling.
With the first cases, the children from his neighborhood, there had been plenty of common points. Same school, same friends, same hobbies. But the older he got, the less chances there were for him to even learn of the victim’s existence, let alone know how to contact them. They were big cities. She had checked the population density from the censor’s bureau and had hardly been able to wrap her mind around those kinds of numbers. Staring at the maps until her eyeballs ached hadn’t helped to resolve the problem as much as she had hoped it might.
When she couldn’t deal with one of t
he mysteries for another second, she would switch to a different one. Hours passed with her printing, highlighting, and organizing her growing information into two files. The first, dedicated to Victor’s love interest, was steadily filling with options but very little answers. A succubus was the first thing to go in there. She didn’t know much about mythology but even she had a vague awareness of the sex demon. After that, she found psychic vampires who feed off life force instead of blood and a Hungarian legend about a Liderc, who seemed to like going after both.
She found tales about demons and ghosts that destroy a person through obsession and madness. It had been a little disheartening to learn how inaccurately pixies and fairies had been depicted in her beloved childhood cartoons. Knowing how they were originally thought to be cruel, and sometimes deadly pranksters, left her feeling a little odd about having dressed up to look like them. They went into the file too. Also from Ireland was something called a Leanan Sidhe. Like the psychic vampire, it appears to its victims as a beautiful woman and seduces them while feeding off of their energy. But they differ when it came to what they gave back. According to the legends she found, their victims of choice were normally artists. Victor couldn’t draw a stick figure, but it went in anyway. Maybe they had expanded their menus.
Pishacha, a monster that drives people mad while they made them sick, was placed just above stories of ghostly hitchhikers that attach themselves to whoever picks them up. There were even a few stories about witches and medicine men who enjoyed making people self-destruct. Each segment was organized neatly and clearly defined with color-coded tags.