by DC Malone
“What?”
“I do love you. Man.”
“There she is.”
The walk over to the front door was more of a chore than it should have been, which may have supported Francie’s position on how much I’d had to drink, but I wasn’t going to let on.
The moment Francie snapped open the lock on the door, three loud raps sounded against it.
“How’d you do that?” My words tumbled out too slowly. She really must have been adding more gin to my drinks than usual.
“I didn’t do it, silly.”
“Meredith?” A female voice came through from the other side. “Please, Meredith. I need to speak with you.”
Francie looked at me for confirmation, but I could only shrug. I didn’t recognize the voice.
Francie pulled the door open and stepped away to make room for the figure on the other side. The woman was drenched through from the sheets of driving rain. Her pale-yellow hair was plastered to her skin just like the clothes she was wearing. She wasn’t holding an umbrella, and she wasn’t wearing a jacket.
I knew I knew the woman, but I couldn’t quite place her. That probably had a lot to do with her current state of dishevelment and my altered mental status. I squinted at her, trying to focus what faculties I had left, as she sloshed her way into the bar.
“I’ll get you a towel,” Francie said, dashing toward the back.
“God, Meredith…” The woman held my gaze with haunted eyes and as soon as she did, it all snapped into place.
I had just seen the woman earlier that day, albeit with fewer clothes on.
“Why are you out at this time of night, Maggie? You’ve got to be freezing.”
“I—I didn’t know where else to go.” Her wide, white-rimmed eyes made her look like she was in shock. Maybe she was.
“It’s Mark. He’s been murdered.”
Chapter 3
Francie returned with a towel and ushered Maggie over to the bar to sit down. I followed, trying to keep my head from swimming. And trying to make sense of what the woman was saying. I wasn’t succeeding at either.
“I’m sorry I didn’t have larger towels,” Francie said with an apologetic look. “But it’s clean, at least.”
“It’s fine. Thank you.” Maggie’s voice was far away and a little shell shocked. She patted at herself with the oversize hand towel she was given, but it wasn’t nearly up to the task of drying her off.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Francie was already back at her customary spot behind the bar.
“No—yes, actually,” Maggie said, not quite meeting Francie’s gaze. “Something strong, please.”
“So… Mark,” I said gently as Francie went to work on Maggie’s drink. The woman looked like she’d been through the wringer, and I didn’t want to add to it.
“He—” Her chest hitched, and she took a few long breaths. But she didn’t cry. From the dark circles under her eyes, I figured she’d already done a lot of that. “He’s dead.”
I took one of her hands, which was cold and damp like a dead fish, and waited for her to look at me. “I know, sweetie, but what happened? Why are you here and not with the police?”
“I—I already was. All day. They won’t do anything.”
“Wait, what?” I replied. “Why wouldn’t they help?”
“Oh, they’re looking into it.” Her eyes drifted away to look into the middle distance. “But they just think he’s run off or missing. They don’t believe he’s actually dead.”
“But you said he was murdered.”
“He was.”
I waited, still holding onto her hand. She was going to have to get there in her own time.
“It happened this afternoon while we were still at the hotel. You remember the hotel?”
“Sure.” It was going to be a long time before I forgot the hotel.
“You’d been gone for a few hours already, and Mark and I figured we’d while away some time. We’d paid for the full day, after all.
Francie slid a short glass of amber liquid across the bar to Maggie. The distraught woman sniffed at it with a scowl, then began to chug at it greedily.
“So, wait,” I said. “You say it happened a few hours after I left, right? About four or five this afternoon? And someone broke in a murdered Mark in front of you?” The sobering topic of conversation had made my head a little less foggy, but I was still having trouble tracking details.
“That’s about the right time,” Maggie replied. She had finished with her drink. “But no one broke in.”
“You let them in?”
“No, no one came to the room.”
I looked at Francie to see if any of what Maggie was saying was adding up for her, but she only raised her eyebrows.
“I’m going to brew a little coffee,” I said, standing. A glance at the clock showed that it was nearing three in the morning. “Francie, you should get home. I can figure things from here.”
Francie shook her head and waved me back to my stool. “You do your job, and I’ll do mine. I’ve got the coffee.”
As selfish as it was, I was glad for that. I was pretty crappy at brewing a decent cup of joe.
I sat back down next to Maggie and just watched her for a few moments. She seemed content to just wait in silence. The bright, pretty young woman who had come to me a few days ago with the made-up story about her cheating husband was nowhere to be seen. This traumatized person who sat across from me looked fifteen years older, and the makeup she’d been wearing had mostly washed away in the rain. The slashes of lines at the edges of her mouth and eyes looked like the scars from whatever horror she had witnessed.
Or whatever horror she thought she had witnessed.
I was perfectly willing to give the poor woman the benefit of the doubt, even at this late hour. But, so far, she hadn’t volunteered a lot of useful information, and the fact that the police were being less than helpful may have meant there was a reason they were being less than helpful.
“Maggie?” I tried.
It took her several moments to look at me and, when she did, it didn’t look as if she registered my presence.
“Maggie,” I said again, “it’s important that you tell me everything that you can about what happened with Mark. If it turns out that he is just missing, maybe I can track him—”
“No.” Her voice was no longer vacant and far away. Her words were sharp and tinged with anger. “He’s dead. Not missing.”
“Okay, sure, but I still need to know what you saw. So far, this isn’t making much sense. How could he have been murdered if no one came into the room?”
“No one came in, and no one broke in. He—it was already in there with us.”
Francie finished with the coffee and slid two mugs across the bar for us. I grabbed mine, thankful for the pause to think. I had seen plenty of unbelievable things in my time, and I had even said plenty of things that others dismissed as crazy. So, again, I needed to give Maggie the benefit of the doubt. But I also knew when things sounded too strange to be true, they often were. And I also knew that people tended to jump to the most fantastical conclusion when very often there was a perfectly mundane answer just waiting to be found.
“So, the killer was already in the hotel room,” I said. I remembered what she said about the police treating the case as a missing person. “Then he killed Mark… and took his body with him?”
“It,” Maggie said in a flat voice.
“What?”
“I’m not sure what it was…” Maggie tapped nervously against the edge of her mug. “I don’t think it was human.”
“You think it was an animal?” Francie asked. Her tone suggested she didn’t think that was what Maggie meant at all, but that she still hoped things could stay on this side of normal.
“No, that’s not… it was—” She looked back and forth between me and Francie like she needed some help with what she was trying to say.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Take your time and
describe everything you saw. And don’t worry about what we’ll think… we’ve seen some messed up stuff ourselves.”
Maggie sucked in a long breath. “Okay, then I should start at the beginning. Mark and I had been noticing things for a couple of weeks.”
“What sorts of things?”
“Sounds… mostly. Like heavy, labored breathing and the general sounds of someone moving around. We thought it was weird because it sounded like it was coming from inside our apartment, but after a little while, we were able to convince ourselves it was just a trick of the acoustics and it was bleeding through from one of the apartments next to us. Then things started disappearing.”
Maggie looked from me to Francie. I imagined this was the point where the police officers she talked with started making rude noises and rolling their eyes. When she didn’t get that from either of us, she continued with her story.
“It was just the food,” she said.
“What was?” I asked, not following.
“The things that started going missing. It was all food. Mark would accuse me of forgetting something when I went out shopping. Or I would accuse him of eating something and then lying about it. Eventually, we realized it wasn’t either of us.”
“What kind of food?” Francie asked.
“Mostly meat.” Maggie’s brow crinkled in concentration. “No, that’s not right. It was all meat, not mostly. Steaks, ground beef, bacon… you name it. A whole roast disappeared one day. We didn’t even find the packaging. It all just vanished.”
So, an invisible meat-stealing creature had lived with the Bessons for a couple of weeks before following them to a hotel, offing the husband, and scarpering with the victim’s body. Sure, I figured it pretty much had to be true.
It was too absurd to make up.
“You don’t believe me,” Maggie said flatly.
“No… I do, actually. I just don’t know what to do with what you’ve told me.” I put my mug to my lips, but the coffee had already gone cold. “Tell me exactly what happened in the hotel. What changed? And how did the, uh, invisible creature go from mooching groceries to killing your husband?”
Maggie took her time answering and, when she finally did, she spoke quietly like she was afraid of being overheard. “I had just finished showering, and I had called into the other room to ask if Mark wanted to order out for pizza. When he didn’t answer, I figured he’d already gone out to get something. I finished up in the bathroom—I was probably in there for something like thirty minutes in all—and I stepped back into the main room. That’s when I saw it.”
“It was visible?” Francie and I asked the question at the same time.
Maggie nodded meekly. “It was… terrible. Like a hollowed-out person made of shadows and sharp bones. I looked at it for a long while—it was no fleeting glimpse—but I’m still having trouble making sense of what I saw. It was grotesque, a perversion, like a scarecrow made out of a human corpse.”
“Even though I had never seen it before, I connected it with what had been happening to us at home almost instantly.”
“And you saw it kill Mark?” I coaxed.
“I didn’t even notice Mark at first. That thing was so unexpected, so wrong, that I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. It must have taken me a full minute of staring before I realized it was on top of Mark.”
“It was on him? Like standing on him?”
“He was lying on the bed, and that creature was…” She hesitated, her eyes going far away while she relived what must have been a terrifying experience.
“It’s okay, Maggie,” I said. “Take your time.”
She shuddered, then reached up slowly to the collar of her blouse. With trembling hands, she pulled the cloth down to several inches below her collarbone. There were three dark purple bruises, each about the size of a quarter, arranged in a near-perfect triangle on her pale skin.
“It was… suckling at him. The creature’s mouth was pressed right against his chest—right where you see these marks on mine—and it was drinking.”
I suppressed a chill I felt running down my spine. “When did you get those marks?”
Maggie shook her head. “I don’t know. They were just there one morning.”
It was clear to me that the creature had been doing more to the Bessons than just snacking on their cold cuts, but we’d have to circle back to that later. “What happened next?”
“I screamed,” she said, still in that whisper of a voice. “I screamed as loud and hard as I ever had in my whole life.” She swallowed. “That shadowy thing turned to look at me, its cold black eyes boring into mine for only a moment, and then it was just gone.”
“And so was Mark.”
Chapter 4
I ended up spending the night at the bar. We had already converted one of the back rooms into something of an office for my PI business, so it was only a matter of pulling out a cot and passing out from exhaustion.
Part of me simply hadn’t wanted to return to my apartment. It seemed like I would be more alone there than at the bar. And after Maggie’s story, I wasn’t exactly jumping at the chance to spend the night in my creaky old apartment.
I had agreed to take her case, of course. How could I not? That kind of creepy was right in my wheelhouse, and even if the Congregation didn’t put me on to it, it seemed very much like the kind of thing they’d want one of their own investigating.
That is, if I was one of their own. The lack of communication was starting to grate on me, and I had never been a fan of being kept in the dark. Or of being manipulated. But on the plus side, I was going to keep doing my thing and they seemed content to keep paying me… maybe that’s a win-win.
It was around ten the next morning and I was sitting at the desk in my office. Aside from the chair I was sitting on, and the cot that I had already folded away, the desk was pretty much the only thing in the room. Decorating wasn’t my strong suit, and it wasn’t likely the little office would be getting all that much action anyway. If I wanted to meet with somebody, there was a perfectly good bar in the next room over, and it came with booze.
The plan was for me to poke around at Maggie’s apartment later that afternoon. She was going to stay with her sister in Boston—a smart decision, given everything that was going on—and she had given me the key so I could look around her home. I figured it was the logical place to start. If the creature really had been hiding out in her home for weeks, there might be some kind of clue as to why it was there and where it might have gone.
But I had to tend to the tedious part of sleuthing first. Homework. And that meant consulting the only real source I had for this kind of stuff.
I tapped the contact icon on my phone, toggled speakerphone, and listened to the line ring. I hated talking on the phone. I hated phones, really. If I had to talk to someone, God forbid, I’d just as soon do it in person. It seemed to me that phones stripped away all those subtle communication cues you get from looking another human being in the eyes, and I always came away feeling like I spent the time talking to myself.
With Hiram, though, there weren’t a whole lot of options. The guy nearly lost his lunch every time I stepped into a room with him. And while his proximity didn’t have the same sickening effect on me, watching him hurl did…
He picked up on the second ring. “Meredith.” From his mouth, my name sounded like a curse, but I had learned to hear the affection there—or maybe that was only something I made up in my head. Either way, he had risked his life to save me, so he had to care a little.
“Mind if I pick your brain some? I promise it’ll be interesting.”
“Would it matter to you if I said no?”
“Sure,” I said. “It wouldn’t stop me from asking my questions, but it would cut me to the core knowing my dear friend Hiram didn’t want to make time for me.”
“A bit dramatic, don’t you think?”
“Too much?”
He sighed. “Alright, pose your questions, baby Necro. Just don’t m
ake it too long. I get cranky when I’m kept from lunch.”
“It’s barely ten o’clock…”
“That’s just wonderful,” Hiram snarked. “I always needed someone to schedule out my meals for me… I’ll have you know that I have a fast metabolism. If I don’t eat every two and a half hours I get—”
“I know, I know,” I interrupted. “You get cranky. I won’t keep you long. Though, I’m not sure how anyone would know the difference if you were cranky.”
Hiram’s response was a huff that distorted my phone’s speaker.
“Okay, so I have a case. A weird one.”
“Something from the Congregation? It’s about time.”
“No, this one just kind of fell into my lap. It’s from a Norm.”
I could hear the sneer in Hiram’s voice almost before he said anything. “Oh, well then, I can solve the mystery for you before you go to any trouble. Your Norm is making it up or they’re delusional. That’s pretty much always the case when they think they’ve stumbled into something close to the paranormal.”
“I don’t think that’s the—”
“Trust me, Meredith. You put one of them alone in a dark room for half an hour, and nine times out of ten they’ll come out swearing they saw a ghost… or bigfoot. Or both. It’s just how they work. I think it’s because their view of the world is so small and boring.”
“That’s a little harsh,” I replied. Hiram had a way of making pessimists seem downright cheery at times.
“I don’t mean it as a criticism,” he said, still making it sound like just that. “If I had to spend my days steeped in the mundanities of sports matches and tax returns, I too would probably start making up fantastical stories to entertain myself.”
“Uh, don’t you still have to do your taxes, Hiram?” The last I checked, being one of the Gifted didn’t grant any kind of tax exemptions.
“Yes,” he sighed. “But I also get to commune with the denizens of the afterlife. You can see how that might strike a balance.”