The impact of his knees against the tiled floor sent shocks of pain up through his thighs and into his hips. Almost a distraction welcome enough to give him a moment of reprieve—but, no. He flung the lid and seat up and matched the violent movement, thrusting his head toward the welcoming porcelain.
Thank fuck Gran cleans this, he thought in between retches, grateful for the chemical-pine disinfectant. Only thing to make this experience more miserable was if he had to get up close and personal with the malignant scent of old urine or crusty markers of a bowel movement. His breakfast returned to the world amidst deep, primal grunts and the wet, heavy splatter of half-digested food erupting into the waiting water. He coughed to dislodge slimy, bitter pieces from the back of his throat. His nostrils dribbled sympathetic mucus, eyes leaking tears which might almost turn into full-fledged crying. Almost.
Instead, he took the rage and need for pain and slammed his fist into the old ceramic cistern, over and over, until the impact left a ribbon of hot burgundy bruising across his knuckles. The fine web of broken skin over his pointer and middle fingers painted blood, brighter on the outside.
Samuel pressed down the flusher button and sneered at the injury throbbing up his arm from the mess he had made. Another good distraction, but not enough.
He spoke aloud to the voice still crawling into his brain from the all-important Cochlear implants, the ones which questioned, Are you listening ?, and demanded, and wanted to know why he wouldn’t take up Grandpa’s rifle and pick off the crowd of workmen trundling around, nine people gathered to dig a single God-damned ditch. ‘Just shut up. Shut the fuck up.’
‘It will take away some of your pain.’
‘Bitch, please. You have lost any authority on the matter of my pain.’
Dead, car crash, same one which killed his father, because they thought it was just fine to get drunk at their company Christmas party and drive home. A grand finale to all the reasons he hated them both.
‘It’s okay, son. You’ll come around.’
He eyed the heavy toilet seat. Was it plastic ? Heavy-duty, whatever the material. If he laid his cheek against the chill edge of the toilet bowl and wrapped his hand around the seat and slammed it down again and again, driving the weight with his taut bicep into the vulnerable point of his temple, maybe he would black out. Maybe he would die.
‘Go back to hell. You’ve been dead long enough.’
‘Don’t make me tell your father, Samuel.’
***
The walls were half concrete, half glass. Windows topping a squat grey pre-fabricated panel. No hand-laid bricks for this department, no sir. Joe Rale looked around the soulless room with an echo of its bland, impartial indifference across his countenance. He served a purpose, and that purpose was to figure out what happened here, not muse over the five months left until early retirement, even when scenes like this one reminded him why the job burnt people out in a hurry, and why he had not bothered applying for a transfer when his childless uncle died and left Joe a meagre inheritance of property and money.
Blood which should have already dried made a slow trickle off one of the blinds. Even arterial spray didn’t tend to get so thoroughly behind Venetians to become a secondary curtain of tacky crimson. Joe watched a congealed droplet roll down the inside of the saturated glass from his safe distance beyond the edges of the crime scene. No one had entered the cordoned-off surveillance cubicle.
‘Once more,’ he said to himself, an old habit, a good habit. Make the facts stick. Don’t buy conjecture. Get to know the details. ‘Surveillance guy, Greg, in his twenties. Working alone. Listening to the tapes, checking for errors in the auto-transcription. Skips his break. First time ever, for the entire department ; no one ever misses the chance to get out of these boxes. Supervisor, Charles, “2IC Chuck” to the staff, returns to check. Peers through the window and has the presence of mind to radio through that he can see Greg is near-catatonic in front of his workstation. Opens the door, radio transmitter button still depressed under his thumb, everyone hears the screaming start.’
The other investigatory officials orbited the area, not approaching, everyone forbidden from entering the room.
Described as hellish, demonic, he thought, but did not add to his oral monologue. No conjecture. ‘People come running. Charles has been bludgeoned to death, and Greg is found perched over the corpse, disembowelling the unfavoured supervisor. Next person to enter the room, security guy, Aaron, has a Taser. Incapacitates Greg. Then uses his pocket knife to slit Greg’s throat, and is seen holding the body and dancing. Fourth and fifth victims enter, Haverly and Robert. They were overheard saying they would pin Aaron down. Instead, Robert turns and impales Haverly through the eye with a ballpoint pen less than three steps into the room, and Aaron and Robert begin fighting, until indeterminate injuries occur and both men end deceased. Body count in this single room is five men, no prior signs of mental or physical illness, all cleared for access to sensitive materials.’
Joe glanced down at the folding pocket notebook balanced on his open palm to check for anything he forgot in the retelling. The facts were all there, and made less sense every time he rehashed them.
‘Five men all step inside this room and experience some kind of psychotic episode.’
He smoothed his hand down the tie laying silver and crisp against his chest and made a small gesture with his fingers at his side. A helpful person scurried over. Joe muttered, ‘Find out what audio the first perpetrator-slash-victim had playing at the time.’
The minion nodded and departed without a word, ready and willing to do this simple task away from the gory room.
***
Despite the system’s notification of a service disruption at Pearl Harrison’s address, Lewis couldn’t discover any legitimate issues with the wiring or hardware in the house, and phone calls to his supervisor assured him that the recent work carried out in the street had nothing to do with her phone line. Every internal test and troubleshooting he undertook came with the same “All Clear”, and yet each phone plugged into the wall in her house would illicit identical cross-chatter. The static held the obvious sibilance of speech, but the technician never deciphered any words, not like the aged resident claimed.
‘Can I ask something, Pearl ?’
‘Of course, dear,’ she said with a tone of placid acceptance. Lewis had all but been welcomed into the family by now. Even the grandson gave a welcoming, Hey, man, if you’re staying long enough, we should fire up a video game, I’ll demolish you at Formula 1, as he meandered through the house.
‘Forgive me if this is presumptuous, but how sure are you that it was the voice of your husband if he died so long ago ?’
The elderly woman took a moment to nudge her glasses higher on her nose and gave a wide-eyed expression of surprise. ‘You don’t forget some things. Surely you would recognise any of your family or dear friends who have died ?’
Lewis shrugged one shoulder and turned to connect yet another spare phone to the wall, fresh from the box with its singular plastics-and-electronics smell wafting over the technician. ‘No one I’ve known has passed away.’
Static hissed out from the brand new handset, an angry, unsettled sound, garbled almost-words and unhearable voices.
***
‘Fuck five more months, after this case, I’m fucking out,’ Joe snarled under his breath, reloading his handgun in the moment of downtime by long-practised rote. He thought all the hostiles were dead, dropped by his bullets and those of his team, but without confirmation, he was still engaged in battle.
He had lost all of the first people granted direct access to the crime scene. Moments after going in to begin gathering evidence, they went crazy. Don’t buy conjecture no longer mattered. He had watched men and women he knew, for God’s sake, step over that threshold and go bug-nuts with no provocation or warning. The memory of Shane and Inari pounding each other’s faces in with the heavy-duty lenses on their cameras, heedless of the des
truction unfolding around them burnt in deep. Some images never left a man. Joe knew that one would haunt him long into the twilight of his days. Watching those two, taking turns, smashing their co-workers’ features down to bloody pulp with the thick attachments, shattering bone and glass in equal measure.
The other investigators and forensics specialists to enter the cursed surveillance cubicle turned their uncompromising need for violence onto those nearest. Guns were unholstered, voices rose, orders flew, training kicked in without hesitation or delay by everyone on the outside. But those who had gone in were beyond rationalising with.
No option but to fire.
‘NO ONE enters that room !’ Joe roared around the corner at his team as he scuttled sideways, on the alert for rabid co-workers and friends he might be forced to shoot.
***
With Lewis gone and Samuel resting, the house seemed ominous and barren. Even the nice workmen who had been installing cables outside for the past two weeks had packed up and left, so the silence extended beyond the boundaries of her property. Pearl could almost imagine the world growing devoid of other life.
Hey, doll. Hey, doll.
Would George’s voice still be there ? Left alone in her living room, she had lifted the receiver twice more but her limbs trembled and the fear settled into her chest and crept slowly into her throat, so she couldn’t quite bring the handpiece to her ear and listen for coherency behind all that static.
Marco curled over her slippered toes and ruffed in his sleep, a warm, quivering bundle. Her late husband was the only reason she had kept dogs, and when George’s last pet died years after his own passing, she went ahead and adopted this spaniel almost from habit more than a genuine desire to have four-legged company. Pearl did care for the small creature. Still. Dogs had been her husband’s joy.
I miss him so much.
The thought drove her to pick up the telephone and press the cool plastic against her ear. She waited for the hissing to part and reveal another message from her beloved. Haunted, demonic, whatever the explanation, Pearl received a rare opportunity to hear her husband’s jovial nature once again. Despair at being by herself swallowed her fear of the supernatural and the ungodly.
‘I was wondering if you would come back, doll.’
She heard the smile in his teasing and could picture the way his moustache would shift when he spoke. Her mind wasn’t always clear any more, but that memory rose bright and shiny, drawing forth a tearful sigh.
‘Oh, George.’
‘How’s my sea treasure ?’
Pearl’s answer swirled around her head, trapped behind her dry mouth and wetted cheeks. After her silence trickled over, her husband’s shade gave a chuckle through the line. She had heard that laugh daily for their whole married life whenever something obvious occurred to the good-humoured man.
‘Are you listening ? I have something important to tell you, doll.’
‘Yes.’ The aged woman leant forward and let her fingers twine through the spiral of the phone cord as though she were back in her twenties and falling in love. A coy movement which accompanied his voice washing over her.
She didn’t notice her torso dropped farther forward and stretched the tight curls of rubber-wrapped wire in her hand. Pearl closed her eyes to bask in the longed-for love of her husband, the precious gift of his company, heedless as her body moved. She never realised her arm extended downward, or her hand wound the cord tight around Marco’s thin neck.
She had no idea her frail arms held the makeshift garrote while George’s cherished voice lulled her mind away until her dog stopped squirming.
She didn’t know her fragile heart stopped beating.
***
‘Samuel, dear.’
‘Yeah, Gran ?’ He tried to force his exhausted eyes open. It didn’t occur to him that her voice was too close and clear. He thought she stood on the other side of his door, as she often did. His tired mind didn’t connect the voice to his Cochlear implants, to the whispers of his mother.
‘Are you listening ? I need your help.’
He felt no reason to question the particular phrasing. ‘Yeah, I am. Sure. What’s up ?’
They didn’t always agree on things, and as an old woman, she could harp on about the most inane concerns, resting her reasoning on qualities Samuel didn’t value, yet he still loved his grandmother above all others, living or dead. She had been his primary caregiver even when his parents were still breathing. His mother and father had earnt his hatred.
‘Samuel, in your grandfather’s gun cabinet, there are some things for you. Go along and fetch them, will you ? Then I need you to run an errand down at Baker High School.’
He rolled out of bed and pulled his shoes on, hardly awake. He fought to keep track of her words. Gun cabinet. Something for him. Errand. ‘Yeah, okay, what do you need ?’
She didn’t answer. Must have wandered off.
Grabbing a fistful of his own hair, Samuel hauled his lolling head up by the force of his arm and staggered out of his unlit room. Who knew what his grandmother would want at the nearby school, maybe she got the bright idea to volunteer again, like she had done four years back. Passing the time, she called it. One hand dove down the back of his collar to scratch at the persistent itch between his shoulder blades.
‘Hey, Gran ?’ he yelled toward the living area.
‘Yes, dear ?’ came her voice, oddly dissonant. More like a whisper in his ear than her crying back from half a house away.
‘What do you need me to do ?’
Samuel stepped into the old study, thick with the almond and vanillin smell of old books and deeper leathery scents to tickle down his nostrils. His hand ran over the studded armchair as he passed, then the polished mahogany desk. He mashed the code to unlock the tall safe with his thumb and stood for a moment before the steel door as it swung open, spacing-out in his exhaustion.
‘Take it all, Samuel,’ his grandmother murmured.
With the gentle order, he stopped thinking and began emptying the cabinet of firearms and ammunition.
***
Lewis set down his tablet computer on the table beside his plate of eggs and toast, disregarding the article filling its screen in lieu of tracking his eyes to the television beside his breakfast nook. The suburb name had pinged his attention. The same place he had visited, trying to help Pearl Harrison fix her phone connection. According to the bulletin, the most recent spree shooter had lived in the same town.
His mouth dropped open with brutal horror when the news report flashed to a picture of the long-time home of the murderous young man.
The wide pair of date palms which stood sentinel on either side of the path leading to the green-painted front door were all too familiar to the technician. Lewis squashed his finger on the Volume Up button, sending it rising as if being louder would help him better understand the shock of what he witnessed.
‘Not the kid . . . ’ he muttered at the exact moment an old school yearbook style photo of Pearl’s grandson was added to the upper corner of the bulletin, overlaying their live feed of the Harrisons’ residence. The well-kept white awnings and neat azaleas held the same evident sweet attention of the elderly woman through the news cameras as he remembered from his attendance. Someone reported in morbid detail the number of dead, and how many firearms were found on his person.
And none of it made a lick of sense.
‘He wasn’t like that,’ Lewis whispered, as if he could have known after his brief meeting. As though he could undo the facts being reported by incredulity alone. All the stereotypes he had complacently believed about the kind of psycho who would do something so terrible, so very atrocious, were unmet, unrealised in Samuel. He had been cheerful, direct, pleasantly mannered, and enthusiastic. He had invited Lewis to join him in a video game Formula 1 race, of all things !
What makes a person break ?
Lewis felt a cold rush of uncharacteristic superstition. A bleak belief, nay,
certainty that this had something to do with the unfathomable sounds trickling through the phone line at the Harrison house. He swiped across the surface of his tablet’s screen and navigated to composing a new e-mail, batting his fingertips rapidly against the glass to write an urgent message to his boss.
***
Mr. Black peered at the notifications leaping up on his mobile phone. An e-mail had been flagged. There was now some confusion through the hierarchy as to whether or not the telecom people were already accounted for. Higher-ups needed to know the new system would not be compromised, not when the first round of testing was already producing such remarkable data.
Sure, the operation needed a few tweaks here and there. Figure out how to insulate the system to prevent further unplanned contact with the public. Establishing if and how they could utilise the unique qualities of this program as a targeted weapon. But overall, their experts were calling the new listening lines a complete success. Confirmed. They were getting intelligence from the dead.
His sleek monochrome vehicle accelerated out of the underground carpark of his nondescript office block and headed to the headquarters of the local telephone service provider, where he would have a fine little talk about national security, the integrity of the government’s vigilance, and one Lewis Carlisle.
***
Lewis nearly dropped his disposable cardboard cup of coffee as his car pulled up the quiet semi-rural street. Ahead on the left, where the charming house had sat amongst its happily tended garden, now lay a thick dirt wasteland and the looming yellow machinery responsible for its demolishing.
It had been less than a day.
‘There’s no way . . . ’
He pulled his sensible four-door sedan into the nearest neighbouring driveway and parked in front of the metal and wire farmer’s gate. Pearl’s paved driveway was gone. Torn up by a great excavator, the debris somehow already removed, carted away in the back of some absent dump truck. He had watched the live coverage at 7:00AM, and now, glancing at the dashboard clock reading 4:08PM, there was little-to-no evidence that a full three-bedroom house, garden, manicured lawns and decades-old trees had been standing in the lot some nine hours earlier.
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