Medicine For The Dead: An Occult Thriller (The Ulrich Files Book 2)

by Ambrose Ibsen

  The air, though, didn't feel right.

  He tried to tell himself that it was simply the weather, some change in barometric pressure, that had him feeling off. There's nothing awry, he reminded himself. No reason to feel spooked.

  But taking the first few steps from the door of his room felt like walking through rubber cement. Even if he couldn't see it, even if there was no visible disturbance to be found, he felt certain that something was wrong. A dread like no other welled up from deep inside of him until it came to unseat all else. His eyes shook in their sockets, darting this way and that in anticipation of something that never materialized.

  He decided to begin by walking down the concrete stairs, and took special care not to look too closely at the mural. Nothing good would come of discovering some discrepancy in it. One by one he began down the smooth steps, the sounds of his descent echoing faintly through the stairwell. He held his light steady, getting a good look at the way ahead and finding, with every step, that everything was in its proper place. No footprints on the concrete. The doors blocking off the fourth, third and, subsequently, second story hallways, remained locked. Though, as he started onto the ground level, a certain noise reached his ears and made him tense up against the bannister.

  Ulrich stopped, listening. It was not a little difficult to hear over the thumping of his heart, however.

  Speech. A muffled voice drifted through the air from somewhere below. Try as he might, he couldn't trace the source of the voice; it was too breathy, too indistinct. The longer he stood there, shaking, the less sure he was that it was a voice at all, in fact. Possibly, it was just the sound of the breeze entering the building from some gap in the front door.

  Walking at a snail's pace to keep from making noise, Ulrich reached the bottom of the stairs. He now stood in the main foyer, with the main entrance before him and the bar, its lights off and door locked, to his right.

  Curiously, the light in the foyer was out. Though it'd been on when last he'd walked through the entrance, it had since gone out, leaving the space masked in shadow. The light from his flashlight, and the sparse moonlight from outside, made it so that he could see the way ahead, however the dead bulbs overhead smacked of an ominous portent, and Ulrich took his sweet time in leaving the stairwell and approaching the main door. The last time he'd come upon a dead light fixture, he'd seen something in the upstairs hall.

  He gave the handle a little shake. It was locked. Callum had locked up on his way out, thankfully. Ulrich decided he'd have a quick look at the other exterior doors and then retreat back to his room. Idling a moment in the foyer, he sensed nothing more of the breathy voice he'd heard on the way down and assured himself with a nod that it'd been nothing but the sound of the draft.

  He was about to start down the hall across from the bar when a bit of movement caught his eye outside the building. It was brief, doubtful, but drew his gaze like a magnet.

  Some ten or fifteen feet from the door, scarcely outlined in the overcast night, was a figure. It stooped, hands buried in the pockets of a dark-colored sweatshirt and a black hood covering the head. Man or woman Ulrich couldn't say, but long tendrils of hair peeked out from the sides of the hood.

  Though startled, Ulrich steeled himself and stared back at the figure, unflinching. It was possibly a vagrant; what little he could see of the individual gave the impression of unkemptness. Maybe it was one of the gang members, returned to give him a hard time. Whatever the case, Ulrich wasn't going to play games. He pointed at the stooping figure and motioned at the phone in his hand. He'd call the cops without hesitation if the figure came any closer. A quick police drive-by would probably scare this and any other would-be intruders away from the site.

  Shutting off the flashlight app, Ulrich played around with the contacts in his phone and allowed his finger to hover over the number for the non-emergency police line. “You'd better beat it. If you stick around... don't say I didn't warn you,” he mumbled, looking through the glass door.

  The figure had drawn closer, however, and Ulrich took a step back in surprise.

  They were walking slowly towards the main entrance, shoulders still stooped, head low and features veiled by the night.

  Ulrich raised the pipe in his hand and nearly dropped his phone. What were they hoping to do? Surely this person had seen him standing there. He quaked in place for a time, wondering if it wasn't a homeless person coming to the door to beg for food or shelter.

  But then, a shifting of the clouds gave Ulrich his first proper look at the person's face. What the moon could reveal to him was sufficient to send him scrambling back towards the stairs at great speed.

  Two black holes, dark as pitch, where eyes should have been, were upturned to him as the figure reached out and pawed at the door. Colorless lips moving, its empty sockets settled upon Ulrich as though they could see him and unheard words snuck out in low, whispered fragments. Though nearly pressed to the outside of the glass door, the visitant's breath didn't fog up the surface. A hand's worth of grotty, malformed fingers touched the glass with something like tenderness.

  What it wanted was all too apparent.

  It wanted inside the building.

  When the fear on Ulrich's face made it all too clear he was in utter opposition of this, the light touch on the glass grew into something more fevered. A slight rapping, then a firm, open-palmed smack. The shadow of the thing extended well into the unlit foyer, its stooping form cast upon the walls and floor in nightmarish proportion. There was a change in its expression, too, as it begged to be let in. Its pale lips parted, seemed to crack at their edges like a piece of clay left to bake in the sun, and barking, discordant noises surged forth from its gullet.

  More and more it looked less like a human being to him and more like a grotesque puppet bound up in a hooded sweatshirt. Screeching at the door, its cavernous eye sockets stared hollowly on as the investigator staggered up the stairs in a crab-walk.

  It was all Ulrich could do not to lose his balance as he fled up the stairs. He haphazardly tapped at the screen of his phone but couldn't get it to turn on. Clinging to the bannister, he let the pipe drop from his hand to get a better grip and bounded up the steps two at a time. Rounding the corner and reaching the second floor, he stopped to gain his breath and succeeded in unlocking his phone.

  But, for the first time since glimpsing the visitor at the door, something occurred to him.

  Just who was he going to call?

  The police?

  What could he say to them? That some ghoulish, inhuman thing was pawing at the door to the Exeter House? If he was lucky, they'd laugh at him.

  Ulrich choked on a whimper and clutched his phone. The smacking at the door had stopped, and a strange clicking had replaced it. He needed only a moment to know the source of the sound.

  It was the sound of the lock being tried.

  Leaping down onto the landing and taking a couple of cautious steps forward, Ulrich craned his head around the corner and peeked at the front door, absently searching for the pipe with his free hand.

  Curiously enough, however, there was no longer any figure at the door. Through the glass he spied only the rain-soaked night, the waxy glow of the moon, the pavement walkway.

  Still, the clicking persisted, however.

  Marching into the foyer, intending to investigate the lock on the main door, Ulrich turned towards the bar.

  The visitor at the main door had gone, but now something else called his attention from within the unlit depths of Oliver's Bar. Dividing his attention between the door of the bar and the main entrance, Ulrich pulled the keys from his pocket and found the one belonging to the bar's door. Slowly, he slipped it in and unlocked it, stepping into the bar and shutting the door behind him quietly so that he might better hear the strange clicking.

  Sure enough, it was coming from somewhere inside the bar, and it was close.

  Turning the flashlight app back on, Ulrich gave the room a scan, his light washing over the bar,
the tables and chairs, a number of stools. He stopped as he caught sight of the closet on the other side of the counter.

  The brassy knob was jiggling like mad and the lock was being forced from the other side.

  Something was trying to break out of the closet.

  Looking behind him, through the glass entry and into the building's main foyer, he saw no trace of the frightening visitor who had been there just moments ago. They'd probably gone, perhaps to another door. A wanderer of some kind... he told himself. A kid wearing a Halloween mask, one of those punk-ass gang members or something...

  Leveling his flashlight on the closet afresh, Ulrich took a step forward and raised the pipe, ready to smack whoever stepped out. “Come out of there and keep your hands where I can see them,” he warned in as steady a voice as he could muster. He gave the pipe a shake. “I won't hesitate to knock you on your ass should you do otherwise,” he added.

  At the sound of his voice, the shaking of the handle ceased and a wholesale thumping from the other side of the door commenced. As though it were being struck repeatedly with a sledge hammer, the wooden door bowed out towards him with every forceful blow. The hinges creaked, the frame tensed. Whoever was on the other side seemed poised to bring the thing down.

  And so went Ulrich's courage.

  He hesitated in the bar, halfway between the closet in question and the exit. From the corner of his eye he thought he glimpsed movement in the foyer outside. Though he cursed and told himself it was just a trick of the moonlight coming in from outside, that he hadn't just glimpsed the huddled form of a hooded intruder ambling around the foot of the stairs, he couldn't altogether be sure. The pounding on the closet door raged on and on, and rising in the air from its other side was a chillingly familiar noise.

  Sharp, wheezy cries. The very same he'd heard the night before in the hallway.

  He wasn't sure what to do, where to go or who to call. He might've called the police, but would've sounded a complete wreck. And anyway, his calling the police the last time this happened hadn't done him much good.

  Perhaps he'd lash out at the person on the other side of the door, would bash their skull in. The thought of doing so, of even encountering the thing that fought to emerge, made his stomach turn, though. What he really wanted was to run, to lock himself in his room and ignore the goings-on in the building till morning. But he was cemented in place all the same, forced to watch the spectacle before him unfold. Moreover, to flee the way he'd come would be to face the main foyer once more, and to possibly catch sight of the hooded monstrosity that'd beckoned him at the building's entrance.

  The door gave way, not with a crack, but a whine. The handle turned and the hinges squealed as the door swung open with unbearable slowness. It opened in such a calculated way, remaining ajar so that Ulrich's light could not fully penetrate the space without his taking a few bold steps forward.

  But before he could even think to do so, something clambered out of the inky chamber and sent him running for the exit.

  Two white, grasping hands flew from the inside of the closet and clutched at the floor. An entire porcelain-colored body soon followed, draped only in a white slip like a funeral pall, and Ulrich noticed at once the wild mane of coarse, black hair that it wore. Tearing across the floor with unnatural speed on four limbs was the horror he'd glimpsed outside his door the night before, and once it was free of the closet, it paused near one of the bar stools and looked up at him from an awkward crouch, its unseen lips parting in a soupy, unbearable groan.

  By the time it jumped out at him, Ulrich was already on his way out the door. The very suggestion of its pus-yellow eyes, of its cracked and impossibly-pale flesh, was enough for him. His fight or flight instinct had been triggered at the sight of her, but his mind had thrown every bit of fight out of the equation so that he was compelled to flee as precipitously as possible. He burst through the door of the bar into the foyer and didn't even stop to lock it, to glance over his shoulder. Out on the foyer, before clawing his way up the winding concrete stair, he glimpsed a thick, tall shadow on the floor where he stood, doubtless cast by the gruesome visitor outside. It was back, and its feeble pawing at the glass had resumed.

  Gasping for air, Ulrich pulled himself up the stairs, stumbling as he went and stubbing his toes.

  From behind there came the sound of a door opening and softly closing, followed by the slapping of bare hands or feet on concrete and a faint wheezing.

  The crawling, black-haired thing had left Oliver's Bar and was now following him.

  Ulrich was so stricken with fear that he was dazed, losing his balance. Falling onto the landing to the third floor, the chill in his blood turned to rocket fuel and he sprinted up the remaining flights as quickly as his legs could take him.

  The familiar fifth-floor hallway opened up before him, greeting him like a good friend, and he raced across its carpeted length. Stopping on his heels at the door to his room, he shoved the door open just as something flickered in his periphery.

  He shouldn't have looked.

  He cursed himself for looking, in fact.

  But before he slammed the door shut, he turned and looked at the concrete stairs he'd just raced away from.

  Two writhing, searching hands rounded the corner first as the groaning, wheezing thing arrived on the fifth level. Coming to perch at the top of the stairs and bathed in the scant light of the moon that entered from the stained glass window above, the oil-maned creature fixed its putrid gaze on Ulrich and fell into a twitchy crouch not unlike that of an enormous spider. The opaque, jagged claws on its fingers searched the lines in the carpet as it began making careful strides forward.

  Ulrich shut the door and backed away into the living room, listening to the scraping advance of the intruder just outside.

  And then, narrowly missing the yowling cat, his foot caught the red inhaler and he slipped.

  Sailing towards the ground, Ulrich hit his head on a side table and loosed a great shout, landing on the ground with a thud that saw the entire room shake. His vision went in and out of focus, fading into black around the edges. He struggled to sit up, to stay alert, but the sharp pain in the back of his head very rapidly won out.

  Sputtering, splaying his legs out so that his heels were dug into the floor, Ulrich tried in vain to stand up.

  The last thing he saw before losing consciousness incited in him a flicker of despair.

  The door to his room, which he'd neglected to lock in his flight, was swinging open, and a white hand slowly came to grip its edge from the hall.

  Chapter 17

  He felt the water hit his face and awoke with a gasp.

  “Wake up, eh? Do I need to call an ambulance? You alive, fella?” came the barkeep's voice after a time.

  Opening his eyes and finding himself blinded by the light coming in through the windows, Ulrich groaned and sat up, palming the sticky wound on the back of his head. “W-what... what...” No matter how many times he tried to speak, he couldn't form the words.

  One minute he'd been cognizant, healthy. The next he'd woken up on the floor with a wicked headache and Callum in his face.

  What the hell had happened in between?

  Coughing, Ulrich sucked in a deep breath and fixed Callum in his sights. His vision was spotty, unsteady. It was like trying to focus on something in clear, choppy water, the sights undulating and glimmering unsteadily. “What happened?” he finally said, wincing.

  “That's what I wanna know, guy,” replied the Scotsman, setting an empty glass aside and motioning to the apartment. “Place is a goddamned mess, I tell ya. I came up here cuz the door to the bar was open downstairs and the damned closet was open again, and then I find ya in here half-dead, on the floor.” He shook his head, grabbing hold of Ulrich's arms and hoisting him onto his feet.

  Leaning on the barkeep, Ulrich staggered over to the sofa and fell onto it. He tried hard to focus, to remember what'd knocked him out.

  Shaking his head furiously, Cal
lum paced before the sofa. “The fuck did you get up to last night, mate? Out with it!”

  Visions of the terrifying woman with black hair flitted through his mind and Ulrich started violently on the sofa.

  He'd been making his rounds.

  Had seen someone standing outside the main entrance.

  And then the commotion from the closet in the bar.

  The thing, whatever it was... she'd followed him upstairs.

  And then he'd fallen.

  “It... it entered my room,” he muttered, glancing around and clutching at the armrest till his fingertips grew white.

  “What now?” demanded Callum. “What're you talking about?”

  Ulrich tried to wet his lips, but the spit wasn't there. “I, uh...” He massaged the back of his head. There was a decent goose egg there, and a bit of drying blood besides. He'd hit himself hard on the way down, by the looks of it. “I went on my rounds last night, walked the halls... and when I came downstairs, I heard someone messing around in the bar again. I go in there, and this thing, this... woman comes out of the closet. Long hair, real white skin...” Ulrich narrowed his gaze and tried to drive back the vivid memories of the encounter. “She didn't look right, not right at all, I tell you. And she chased me, up the stairs. Got into my room. I... I guess I fell, hit my head, trying to get away from her.”

  Callum, however, wasn't impressed. “Whew, lad, that's quite the tale. But how about we cut the bullshit and get right to the heart of things? I walk in here and find you all kinds of cut up. You been hitting the bottle something fierce, I can tell. Ain't no sense in lying to me, mate. And you're about to get your ass thrown out if you don't shape up. Just look at yourself, look at this place. If I hadn't come up here and roused you who knows how long you might've been out for.” He grit his teeth, hands in his pockets. “All of this other... gibberish you're spouting is drunken fancy, nothing more.” The anger was temporarily replaced in his expression by a flicker of whinging fear.