In the Devil's Name

by Dave Watson

  Davie let out a snigger. He’d have to remember that one the next time the Sarge was giving him a roasting for playing badminton and not a real mans sport.

  “I tried phoning Kyle again before you got here,” Mrs Hook went on, “but I still couldn’t get any answer. I wondered where his boy Phil was. He’s such a nice lad. Always round here asking if I need anything from the shops, and he always takes my bins out for me on a Wednesday night.”

  “Well you did the right thing phoning us, Sophie,” Davie said, putting his notebook away. “I’m going to go next door and see what the story is. You just stay here and I’ll holler if I need some backup, okay?”

  “Aye, no bother, son. You just yell and I’ll come running with my rolling pin.”

  Davie gave her a grin in return and walked away up the garden path. She stayed in her open doorway, curiously looking on.

  “Anything, Andy?” he called to PC Cummings who was still looking through the ground level bay window at the front of the house.

  “Nobody’s home,” his fellow officer replied, turning to Davie with a shrug. “I’ll go and check the back door.”

  Davie got on the radio to the station and let Annie know they were at the scene and were about to enter the premises.

  “Roger that, Sierra Foxtrot five,” Annie came back.

  Davie liked the small town policing lark. Fresh out of the police college at Tulliallan, twenty six years old and full of ideals and desire, his first posting had been in the notorious Easterhouse area of Glasgow. He’d relished the challenge, firmly believing that he could change things and make a positive difference to the lives of those living in the rough area.

  Three years later, the crime rate in his hell hole of a section was still on the rise. The area was infested with violent ‘young teams’; gangs of knife wielding kids, some not even ten years old, who constantly ran amok, slashing and stabbing each other in a bloody and pointless, never ending territorial battle. Drug addiction, assault, murder and robbery were rife in the area, and it seemed that for every junkie, waster and bladed up ned he pulled off the street, another ten took their place.

  While trying to break up a violent pub brawl one evening, he’d been lucky to leave the bar with his life after someone glassed him in the face with a pint tumbler and several other patrons had jumped on him, stomping frenziedly on his head and body. It was a close thing, and he’d only been rescued when backup arrived in the form of several other officers in riot gear who stormed into the bar, restoring order at the end of swinging batons.

  Funnily enough, that incident didn’t bother him so much despite his extended stay in hospital, the metal plates in his head and arms and the thirty four stitches he received. That was a part of the job he’d been prepared for. Shit, when he joined the force and was stationed in one of the roughest areas in Glasgow, he’d fully expected to get glassed at some point.

  The clincher came not long after he went back to work when he’d been spat on by a seven year old girl whom he’d caught shoplifting. The gob of thick green mucus smeared on the uniform he took such pride in wearing and the torrent of foul mouthed abuse the unruly tyke had given him had affected and hurt him deeper than the severe beating he’d taken had.

  A sensitive lad, all Davie Leish had ever wanted to do was help people, but with that seemingly innocuous event, as shocking as it was considering the age of the wee lassie, he’d lost the naive conviction that he was making a difference. He’d come to the conclusion he was fighting a never ending, hopeless battle, and he handed in his transfer request later that same day.

  His superior, a battle scarred veteran who’d spent over twenty years working Easterhouse and other rough estates around Scotland’s largest city, had already recognised that Davie made a good copper, but although he was enthusiastic and well meaning, he knew the young guy wasn’t the right sort to be policing the rough area. To work in Easterhouse and similar urban jungles, a polis had to have a bit of the nasty about him, and the kind hearted boy just didn’t have it in him. And so he called his old pal Stevie Grace, who ran a quieter division down the coast in Ayrshire. Davie would do well there.

  A week later, and Davie was walking an altogether quieter beat. The town was small, with a population of under a thousand. He got to know the locals and they got to know him. He became solid mates with Ally Marshall, a young recruit who’d just joined the force, and Davie took a good deal of bemused pride in the fact that Ally looked up to him, seemingly in awe of his crime fighting exploits while stationed in the big city. Davie enjoyed telling the younger PC war stories of his previous posting. It helped him deal with the feeling that he’d failed in his first assignment and had run away.

  Barring the bloody incident back in May up at Bennane Head, his tenure in the small town had been low key when compared to his time in the city. There was the odd disturbance of course; a breach of the peace here, a case of vandalism there, but since Eddie Jannets and his two mates had perished three months ago in the horrific multiple murder, lawlessness in the small town had virtually ceased to exist altogether, and the call out he’d received this morning to investigate a break in was a regular crime spree by comparison.

  He caught up with Andy Cummings in the back garden of the Densmore house. Immediately, he saw the broken pane of glass in the upper right panel of the patio door. No broken glass lying on the ground outside, meaning someone had forced entry. His police training was paying off in spades, he thought wryly.

  Andy was a few steps in front of him as they approached the threshold, and he stopped abruptly.

  “There’s blood on the floor, Davie,” he said, pointing into the kitchen.

  Davie moved past his colleague. Through the hole in the glass, he saw a large reddish brown stain on the kitchen tiles, and he felt his senses picking up a notch. His placement in Easterhouse had finely tuned his sense of danger.

  He reached for his radio, intending to alert Annie at the station of the situation, when there was the sound of movement from inside the kitchen.

  He leaned in closer to the ragged hole in the thick frosted glass, trying to locate the source of the noise. The interior was mostly in darkness as the blinds on the kitchen window were closed. The only meagre light came through the glass patio door, dimly illuminating part of the left wall and the small section of the floor featuring the rusty stain.

  Up close to the door there was a heavy, foul odour emanating from within; a smell of burnt copper and corruption that was almost overpowering. Davie gagged. It was the small of large amounts of blood. And something else.

  The soft noise came again; a short staccato series of light thumps from somewhere in the dark interior of the kitchen. The sudden sound made Davies’ breath catch in his throat. He took the high power torch from his equipment belt and shone the beam through the hole in the glass panel, probing at the gloom. He panned the beam around the kitchen, revealing cabinets, a washing machine, and dining table. He directed the beam on the blood stain on the floor and followed it into the gloom before a row of cabinets against the wall on the right hand side of the door blocked his view. The quiet thumping sounded again, seeming to come from that unseen area.

  Davie clicked off his torch and tried the door, fearing that someone lay seriously wounded out of view behind the cabinets. The door swung open as he pushed the handle down, and a gust of freezing air tainted with a powerful, sickening sweet odour wrapped itself around him. The sudden blast of cloying, rotten air made Davie gag again, this time with such potency that he couldn’t help himself as his stomach revolted. He vomited where he stood, splashing his boots with bile.

  He stayed bent over with his hands on his knees for a second, trying to regain his composure and breathe in as little of the foul air as possible. Covering his mouth and nose with one hand, he reached inside the door and found a light switch on the wall. He flicked it on and the darkness retreated. He saw that in addition to the blood stain on the floor, more smudged red streaks adorned the white walls and bas
e cabinets, and on an interior door leading out of the kitchen, a single crimson handprint was painted.

  That soft thumping noise came again from down to the right. Davie stepped inside the kitchen and turned towards the sound.

  Davie was no stranger to bodily trauma, having seen more than his fair share of carnage while working in the city. He’d witnessed the bloody aftermath of frenzied stabbings and had seen horribly twisted bodies pulled from car wrecks on the M8, and those sights had sickened and saddened him.

  This was something else, however. Davie could not even begin to understand the thing that lay before his eyes.

  His first thought was that someone had dumped a large pile of raw meat, bones and offal on the floor at the base of the kitchen cabinets, but there were patches of what looked like hair, black fabric and denim among the twisted, shapeless mass.

  Then he saw the severed human hand clutching a carving knife lying just to the side of the thing, and became aware that he was looking at the remains of a person.

  With this realisation, the air vacated his lungs in a great gasping wheeze, as if he’d been sucker punched in the gut.

  He could discern the rough shape of a head and limbs, all flayed bare, lying haphazardly in unnatural positions amongst the jumbled red mass. One of the protruding appendages, impossible to tell if it was an arm or a leg, twitched rapidly, beating out a soft tattoo on the kitchen floor.

  Thump thump thump thump.

  Bones jutted out at odd angles, teeth were scattered randomly amid the insane, glistening mess and Davie could make out the shape of kidneys, a liver and sections of intestine.

  It looked like the victim had somehow been turned inside out. But it was more than that.

  It was like they’d been totally rearranged.

  And worse; the impossible collection of body parts moved obscenely; expanding and contracting slightly as if it were somehow breathing, but of course that was impossible, Davie thought to himself in a dislocated way.

  How can you breathe when your lungs are outside your body?

  But there they were. The two sacs of greyish pink matter were half buried in the pulsing pile, inflating and deflating. He could also see the heart, still attached to the central mass by thick ropy arteries. It was beating.

  Witnessing this, a very strange and dangerous calm seemed to settle in Davies’ mind, and suddenly he wasn’t afraid. He recognised in himself that he was in shock; that the sight of the thing on the floor had undone him, at least temporarily.

  Andy shouldn’t see this, he calmly thought to himself, turning away from the inconceivable meat puppet that somehow still lived and drummed a skinned limb on the floor.

  Thump thump thump thump.

  Screaming inside, he walked on stiff legs out of the kitchen, but Andy wasn’t there. He’d been standing behind him just a few seconds ago, but had seemingly vanished.

  How odd, thought Davie, as if he’d realised he’d put his shoes on the wrong feet.

  He looked around the garden, still precariously balanced on the verge of losing it and trying to understand where his colleague had gone. Standing there on the garden path outside the kitchen, he tried to call out, but found with no great surprise that his throat had seized up, and only a hoarse wheeze came out. His confusion was further added to as he felt a drop of some warm liquid strike the back of his neck and run down his spine underneath his clothing.

  Slowly, so very slowly, he turned around and looked up, straight into Andy’s face, which was peering down at him over the edge of the roof, twelve feet above.

  Andy’s eyes were gone, and as the blood dripping from his empty ocular cavities fell on Davies’ upturned face like warm raindrops, he could only stand there with a bemused half smile.

  A huge hand, clawed and misshapen, reared up behind Andy’s head.

  Long spindly fingers with too many knuckles crawled across his dead face and probed into his vacant eye sockets. Andy’s head was yanked of sight. A second later, there began a loud, wet crunching from the roof.

  His tenuous strand of sanity snapped, and Davie began to laugh.

  When he was found hiding in a shrubbery at the far end of the garden some hours later, he was still laughing.

  Occasionally he would stop and scream for a while.

  Chapter 39

  “Urgent fire and ambulance services to the Jet petrol station on Girvan road,” Annie confirmed into the mouthpiece of her headset, trying to keep calm.

  The computerised telephone system showed there were another two calls waiting. The red icons in the lower left hand corner of her screen flashed at her impatiently. Annie wanted to cry.

  She rapidly clicked icons on the computer screen and a call was placed to the nearest fire station. After a moment, a small error window appeared on the screen, informing Annie that the connection had failed and to click the details button for more information. She found it hard to click the small icon; the mouse pointer trembling in sync with her unsteady hand.

  A further dialogue box appeared once Annie had managed to select the details button.

  THERE IS SOMETHING IN THE ROOM WITH YOU.

  Annie gaped at the flat screen monitor, the words burned into her mind.

  A sudden deafening screech of sound suddenly blared from the small speaker in her ear, making her jolt in her seat. She snatched off the headset in panic and threw it on the desk.

  She sat there terrified, looking at the device. From the earpiece she could hear tinny screams and an animal snarling.

  Someone’s being eaten, Annie thought.

  She’d never had the chance before to hear what someone being eaten actually sounded like, but she somehow knew with all her heart that that was exactly what was happening on the other end of the line.

  The screams just went on and on, a woman’s shrill shriek, growing in intensity and punctuated by that high pitched squealing snarl that was just wrong and made her teeth feel like she was biting tin foil.

  Unable to hear it anymore, Annie snatched the headset’s connecting wire out of the console.

  The hellish bedlam erupted a hundred times louder behind her, making her jump a clear foot from her chair and whirl around in terror.

  Nothing there but the intercom speaker on the wall, screaming obscenely at her.

  Annie clasped her hands to her ears and tried to block out the sound, but it was impossible. It ate at her ears, making her wince. She began to sob in little hyperventilating gasps, shaking her head and pleading for it to just stop.

  It didn’t.

  It’s not possible, Annie kept telling herself. It can’t be coming from the intercom. That’s not connected to the phone lines. It’s not fucking possible…

  The sonic assault went on and on. Rising impossibly high in pitch till Annie felt something give way inside her head as one of ear drums burst. A thin trickle of blood ran down the side of her face.

  She ran across the communications room in a panic, heading for the door. It was locked, even though she was the only person in the building and hadn’t locked the door from her side. She began to tug frantically at the handle with both hands. The thin inner membrane in her other ear ruptured and a second rivulet of blood ran down her jaw line. She gave up her futile attempt at escape and slid down to the floor, her back against the door, hands clasped to either side of her head and her eyes screwed shut. Pain like she’d not experienced even when giving birth to her daughter last year swept through her head as blood continued to seep from her ruined ears, (but burst ear drums don’t bleed, she though to herself) and the screaming and snarling went on and on and on…

  Then stopped.

  The sudden silence was shocking and made Annie flinch. There was now only a high pitched whine in her head accompanying the pain that throbbed in time with her rapid pulse. She opened her eyes. The communications room was still. The only movement came from her headset which dangled from the edge of her desk, lazily swinging back and forth.

  Annie got to her feet, and war
ily made her way back to her desk. She badly wanted to flee, but she swallowed her fear. She was responsible for the communications room and she knew she had to keep in touch with the officers at the multiple crime scenes of the morning. Something very bad and very strange was happening in the village, and she couldn’t abandon her post.

  The room swayed slightly as if she was walking on the deck of a boat in rough seas, and the strident ringing in her ears made her feel like she’d received a heavy blow to the head. There was a slight odour of burnt plastic in the air, and Annie noticed a thin wisp of smoke rising from the intercom speaker on the wall.

  The message was still on the computer screen.

  THERE IS SOMETHING IN THE ROOM WITH YOU.

  Just the sight of those words on the screen made her caused her throat to contract. Annie stood there, desperately trying to come up with some sort of logical explanation. Someone hacking into the system perhaps? A computer virus?

  She picked up the headset from her desk and plugged it back into the console, intending to call the Sarge to let him know about some sort of screw up with the communication system.

  Something wrapped itself around her ankles under the desk.

  Annie had time to gasp once and look down. She caught sight of what looked like several black tendrils wound around her lower legs.

  Even before she could scream, her feet were savagely pulled out from under her and she went down with sufficient force to knock her breath out. The back of her head collided sharply with the floor and before she blacked out, she got a second’s glimpse of the thing which dragged her into the leg space under the desk.

  Unconsciousness spared her the awareness of what it did to her.

  She never woke up.

  Chapter 40

  The scream coming from the flats at the bottom of the hill abruptly stopped dead. The way the high ululating sound cut off so suddenly was somehow more frightening than the noise itself.