by Lauren Algeo
He stood impatiently on the platform for a while before deciding to take a walk to kill time. About ten minutes away from the station, he became aware of a light scratching sound in his mind. He cocked his head and listened hard. He hadn’t been expecting to hear any hikers there, was this some sort of weird fate? The noise sounded different somehow, and he suddenly realised why – there were two scratching sounds. Two hikers.
He’d never seen them in a pair before; they had always been solitary. The thought of two together caused a nervous knot in his stomach. Scared but intrigued, he followed the noise for a couple of miles until he could make out the whispering. There was a male and a female voice. They weren’t whispering to a vessel though, they were talking to each other.
Brewer got close enough to hear what they were saying. He stopped near a green, with a road winding around the edge, and sat on a bench at the side to listen to them. They were arguing.
‘… angry with you. You did not fulfil your orders,’ the female said. She sounded the more aggressive of the two.
‘I carried out my duty,’ the male protested.
‘The target did not die. You failed the Grand.’ The female was furious now.
‘I followed the plan. The target was seriously wounded. I can not be accountable if he did not die.’
Brewer listened with growing interest. What was the punishment for failing the Grand?
‘You’ll be summoned to him. You must beg for forgiveness,’ the female instructed. ‘I will not be tainted by your failing.’
The male murmured something but Brewer couldn’t hear, they were on the move. He walked around the area for a while, trying to get close enough to hear clearly again. Their voices kept fading in and out.
The pair fascinated him. They sounded almost like a normal human couple when they were communicating with each other – apart from the fact it was all done in their minds, rather than speech, of course.
It began to get dark, and the temperature dropped, however Brewer stayed on the streets, his trip to Reigate long forgotten. He didn’t know how rare it was to find two of them together and he wanted to study them more. He could find somewhere to sleep later. Maybe a little bed and breakfast some…
The night was interrupted by a terrible howling sound. Brewer stopped dead, feeling fear crawl up the nape of his neck. The sound was inside his mind – it was the female hiker. He broke into a run, pounding blindly along the country roads. He could hear a buzzing sound rising rapidly.
All of a sudden, he was upon them. From the corner of the road he’d just emerged from, he could see the couple against the side of a building about thirty feet away. They were partially hidden in the shadows but he could make out the male hiker lying on the floor, with the female hiker crouching next to him.
There was an obvious struggle going on. The male was spasming on the ground, his body writhing in agony. The female was trying to get a solid grip to hold him still. The strange buzzing noise was coming from the male, and it was growing louder and more insistent. It sounded like the feedback from a microphone and Brewer winced.
He pressed himself against a fence to his left, ducking down in the dark shadows. The female was whimpering now, her desperate grappling seeming to do no good.
The noise reached is crescendo and set Brewer’s teeth on edge. It felt as though the sound was humming through his entire body, vibrating in his veins. He pushed his hands tightly over his ears, only the sound was coming from inside. He felt tears running down his cheeks, and snot flowed from his nose.
Make it stop, he begged.
Brewer fell onto his side, his legs unable to support him any longer. He curled into the foetal position, squeezing his eyes closed. He was aware that he was whimpering too.
Suddenly the noise stopped. It took a moment for Brewer to realise, and for one awful second he thought he had gone deaf. His ears were ringing as if he’d just come out of a really loud nightclub. He sat up slowly, looking towards the hikers.
The male was lying completely motionless and the female was draped over his lifeless body. She wasn’t crying – Brewer wasn’t sure if they had the ability to – but she was making a mournful keening noise.
‘Ariada.’ Came a rasping whisper.
Brewer sat bolt upright. That must be the Grand’s voice. The female lifted her head off the male’s body.
‘You understand… why I did this,’ the Grand wheezed.
Brewer could see her nodding in the darkness.
‘Yes, Father,’ she replied in a barely audible whisper.
‘I will be in contact… with new orders… soon.’ The voice was gone.
Brewer let out the breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. He stayed as still as he could on the ground, watching.
The female, apparently called Ariada, pressed her forehead tenderly against the male’s, almost like a kiss of the minds, then she rose to her feet and walked silently off into the night.
Brewer remained where he was for a while. No cars came along the road, nor did any people. The male hiker’s body stayed motionless on the floor.
When it felt safe enough, Brewer crept over to him. He regarded the body with a feeling of disgusted interest. He was glad one of them had been killed yet somehow the Grand had the power to kill them without even being there.
He pulled a small digital camera from his rucksack and quickly snapped a few pictures of the hiker, the flash bright against the night shadows.
There was a little part of him that felt pity. It had been surprising to see that hikers had bonds with each other, just like humans. Although it was a very tiny part, miniscule in fact, compared to the overwhelming hatred he usually felt for them.
This hiker looked fairly young but he could have been ancient for all Brewer knew. He already couldn’t remember what the female had looked like. He wrote some notes in his notepad before the memories of what had just happened began to fade. He only remembered past encounters with hikers clearly through these notes, a kind of false recall. The raw feeling of fear was always there to remind him though, that didn’t ever fade.
Brewer left the male lying on the pavement. The Grand and female hadn’t seemed concerned about leaving a hiker’s body out for anyone to find. He guessed no one would be able to trace the male. He would be just another John Doe, a nobody. His DNA wouldn’t turn up in any databases, and no one would have reported him missing. There would probably be a small appeal in the local papers for information and that was it.
Brewer wondered what the post mortem would reveal the cause of death to be. That high pitched buzzing noise had been unbearable. Had it ruptured something inside the hiker?
It was too late to find any bed and breakfasts in the area, and he had missed the last trains, so Brewer spent a long night wandering the streets. He hunched down in a bus shelter for a couple of hours and tried to sleep but he was too on edge.
He didn’t know where the female had gone and he was unnerved at staying in an area where the Grand had been heard. At dawn, he took the first available train out of there and made his way back to base camp.
When he got back, he had a scalding hot shower then slept for half the day. He awoke later that evening, intending to load the pictures from his camera onto his laptop. He got a surprise when he turned it on – the photos he took were still there, however the hiker wasn’t. He’d snapped four pictures of it lying on the ground but now the images showed a white glare where the hiker should have been. As though the flash had reflected off a bright surface.
Brewer was puzzled. These were the first photos he’d taken of a hiker and now they were gone. It was another mystery he couldn’t answer. They seemed to be able to make the memory of seeing them fade from your mind, and apparently they could make themselves disappear from photos too.
He loaded the photos onto the laptop anyway and printed out hard copies, filing them away with the rest of his notes about his intriguing trip.
Armed with the knowledge that hikers could die
, Brewer decided his next mission should be to try and kill one himself. He took to the internet again, looking for anything that sounded like it would work.
He still couldn’t shake the notion that they were similar to vampires – the males always reminded him of Tom Cruise’s character in Interview with a Vampire. The thought of approaching a hiker with garlic and a mirror was ludicrous though. A wooden stake through the heart made more sense.
Poison was another option, but he’d have to get close to do it. Maybe he could wait until a hiker slept and slip some poison in its water or food, whatever it had on it.
That plan was full of holes though; hikers didn’t carry anything on them. They didn’t need money or possessions. When they wanted something, they could just manipulate people’s minds to get it. While trailing them, Brewer had seen hikers going into shops and leaving with water and food that, if asked, a shopkeeper would swear they had paid for. Poison was out.
He could always try shooting one and see what happened. Wasn’t it silver bullets that always killed demons in films? Only he didn’t have a gun. He could probably have used his contacts in the arms unit to get a gun when he was in the force, but he couldn’t do that now without raising too much suspicion. They would likely think he was going to kill himself with it. He knew some places in London he could go to get a gun in a dodgy deal, however he didn’t want to take the risk yet, and he had a gut instinct that guns weren’t the right weapons for these creatures.
He thought of other options: strangling them, trying to burn them or blow them up, trying to gas them. He settled on a knife as his first weapon to try. He would experiment with stabbing one in its sleep then go from there. Knives were easy to get hold of and simple to conceal. His plan was straightforward – track a hiker until it went to sleep then approach fast, inflict some quick, deadly stab wounds, and rapidly retreat. It sounded simple enough.
Brewer trawled local news sites, desperate to find something, anything, that could point to a hiker. Finally, after nearly a month, he was rewarded with an apparent ordered killing.
It first appeared on the morning news as a freak accident from the previous day. Just before a race at Windsor racecourse, a horse had spooked and charged at the crowd. That seemed to spark panic among the other horses and a few of them had bolted too. Four people were trampled under their hooves. One man had died at the scene and another woman was in a critical condition in hospital. The other two people had minor injuries and had been discharged from hospital.
Brewer opened up a news website on his laptop and eagerly read the details. The incident had occurred as the jockeys and horses were making their way from the parade ring to the stalls. One of the racehorses had suddenly reared up and bolted towards a group of people, who had been heading to the stands to watch the race. Several other horses had begun bucking and charging too. It sounded just random enough to be a hiker’s doing.
One eyewitness described how the horses had gone crazy, as if they were all terrified of something. Apparently the riders had clung on and tried to bring the horses under control, however Brewer bet the rider on the first horse that freaked had been in complete control of his. That he had steered the horse into those people on purpose.
Brewer didn’t know if hikers could possess animals too, or just humans. He’d heard horses were perceptive creatures, and the most likely case was that they’d been spooked by the presence of the hiker near them. They could probably sense the evil radiating from the rider of the horse.
In another article, Brewer found the name of the man who had been killed in the stampede. He was called Robert Sampson and had been at the races entertaining clients. The article noted that he was thirty-seven years old and worked for an event organising company.
Sampson had been pronounced dead at the scene, having suffered severe head wounds. Brewer dug into Sampson’s life on the internet. His Facebook profile was private but he could view his Twitter account, LinkedIn profile, and personal details on his company website. There was nothing out of the ordinary: he had a stable job, and a wife who had just given birth to their first child. His personal life wouldn’t offend anyone, and his professional life wouldn’t make him any enemies. Sampson wasn’t his target.
That left three others. Two people had only suffered minor injuries so Brewer discounted them – a hiker wouldn’t have left its target with only bumps and bruises. That meant the woman in a critical condition in hospital was the one.
He couldn’t find a name for her in any of the news articles, but he did find the name of the hospital she was being treated in. He packed a change of clothes and some supplies in his rucksack and headed for the Princess Margaret Hospital in West Berkshire.
It took him a couple of hours to get there and evening visiting hours were in full swing when he arrived, meaning he could move around the hospital quite freely.
The idea of attacking a hiker filled him with dread. He’d been well trained during his years on the police force and knew how to handle himself, only these weren’t drunk men fighting after a night in the pub, these were deadly assassins. His protection training hadn’t covered creatures that could possess your mind to control you.
Brewer followed the signs in the hospital to the second floor and stepped out of the lift to a sound he hadn’t expected to hear yet. The hiker was in the hospital and it was whispering to someone.
He hovered near the lifts and tried to listen, however the voice was too faint. It couldn’t be here to find a suicide victim with the target still alive; the job wasn’t complete. It was here to kill the woman.
He suspected the hiker didn’t want to risk the wrath of the Grand; not when its own life was on the line and could easily be saved by finishing what it had started. The Grand couldn’t punish the hiker if it hadn’t failed his orders.
Brewer walked cautiously to the entrance to the unit. Two locked sets of double doors looked back at him. He couldn’t get in without pressing the buzzer for access, or using a hospital pass. He checked his watch: 6:30pm. Handover would probably be at 7pm and it would be the only time he could try and slip in.
The whispering had grown louder. Whoever the hiker had targeted was inside. It was still quiet though, like the hiker didn’t want to alert the person to its presence too much, just coax them enough to push them into doing its will.
‘You forgot to give her the increased morphine,’ it whispered softly.
The voice was female.
‘Look, it’s not in the notes. She hasn’t had the correct dosage.’
Brewer felt rage bubbling inside him. The hiker had targeted a nurse and it was manipulating her to believe she hadn’t administered enough medication. They were gradually going to kill the woman with an overdose. He would bet this administration wouldn’t be going in the notes either so at handover, they would say the woman hadn’t been given her morphine yet. The nurse would claim she hadn’t administered any. He had to get in and stop them.
He strode back to the lift, trying to come up with a plan. He wasn’t usually one for violent methods but he couldn’t think of any other way. The hospital was gradually getting quieter as visiting hours drew to a close in most wards.
Brewer walked along the stark corridor, looking for an opportunity. His footsteps echoed ominously in the stillness. There. He saw a young man pushing an empty wheelchair along to the other lifts at the far end of the corridor. The man was wearing a porter’s uniform and had what Brewer needed around his neck.
He followed the man to the lifts and waited behind him. The man gave him a friendly smile over his shoulder as he pressed the button to call the lift.
Brewer quickly looked around. There was no one in eyeshot, and no CCTV cameras positioned near these lifts. In one swift movement, he grabbed the porter by his hair and slammed the man’s head forward. There was a loud bang as his forehead struck the lift doors and the porter’s body went instantly limp.
Brewer heaved him into the wheelchair, where he slumped to the right. The lift arr
ived at their floor and to Brewer’s relief, it was empty. He lifted up the pass from around the man’s neck and slipped it over his own head, then he pushed the wheelchair into the lift and pressed the button for floor 3. He backed out quickly, before the doors closed, and watched the illuminated number above the doors as the lift ascended away.
Hopefully the man wouldn’t be discovered immediately and it would be hard to tell which of the floors he’d come from. Brewer didn’t need long. He walked quickly back along to the Intensive Care unit. He swiped the stolen pass across the pad next to the door and saw the light flash green. Access granted. He slid through both sets of doors and looked around wearily. The coast was temporarily clear.
Through a long, glass window he could see a large ward, with four beds on either side. Some of the curtains were closed around the beds but a few were open, giving Brewer a glimpse of unconscious patients hooked up to machines. A couple of them had family members sitting with them and he could see a nurse’s station at the far end, where two nurses were gathered around a computer.
He didn’t belong there. These people deserved to be left in peace. Brewer knew all to well what it felt like to sit by the hospital bed of a loved one, unsure if they’d make it through the night, or if they would take another breath.
The hiker had paused in her whispering and she had to be somewhere in the hospital. Brewer would find the woman quickly then get the hell out of there.
There were some private side rooms lining the corridors, their doors closed against him. Brewer hurried along the corridor, checking the boards outside each door for the patient’s names. He discounted the men but there were still three women. Which one was she?
The blinds were closed on the first side room window so he went to the next one. The blinds were half-open but it was fairly dark in the room. He could make out the shape of someone lying in the bed, but no features. He tried the last window. It was fully open and the lights were on inside. The woman in this room was very old and frail. She looked as though she’d been in the unit for quite some time. She wasn’t the one.