by Matt Hilton
He chuckled once, and I felt a squirming sensation at the core of my being, as though he was settling down in a favourite comfy chair to watch a movie. “Go for it, Bro. If you’re man enough.”
He was starting to piss me off with all that talk of tests and being man enough. Well, there was only one way to shut him up. “I’m man enough, Cash. Bring me the Skeklar and I’ll show you.”
“I can’t bring him…it’s down to you to find him. Should be easy enough. I can smell the stink of fear from here. Can’t you, Carter? Can’t you smell Janet’s piss as it runs down her legs?” Cash made a deep inhalation. “Mmmmm. It has been a while, Carter, but it’s a scent I’ll never forget. Reminds me of when Karen-”
“Shut up.”
He laughed once more, but blessedly fell into silence.
Abandoned for years, the building was anything but storm proof, and I found myself stepping through pools of scummy water. Around me was the ticking of rain that wormed its way through the structure and dripped to the floor. The stench was that of mildewed wood and rusted metal. The air stirred my hair as a gust of wind found egress to the building. All my senses were on hyper-alert. All but my vision: I could barely see my hand in front of my face.
If it had been safe, I’d have stood still. Time my breathing so that I was in sync with the building, the storm. Send out the feelers and latch on to Janet or Bethany’s essences. But to stand still would probably invite ambush from the darkness. I was no use to either of them if I died there.
Probing my way with my free hand, I kept the SIG close to my hip. If the Skeklar were lurking in the darkness, at least it wouldn’t be able to snatch the gun from my hand before I squeezed off a couple of rounds.
I was in an open space. Above me came the rattle of chains. Jerking my head up, I scanned the gloom for movement but the darkness was impenetrable. Why the hell didn’t I bring a torch? Not that I’d have used it. It would have given away my position. But if I needed it, having some form of lighting would have been comforting.
Deciding that the rattle of chains was caused by the squalling wind, I ignored it. I listened instead for something that would give a hint of life.
A wall of thick planks blocked my way. Feeling it, I found the wall stood barely five feet high. Edging along it, I discovered the wall made a right angle, then opened to a void. A livestock stall of some sort.
I considered stepping into the stall, to check if there were any trussed forms lying on the floor, but immediately discarded the idea. For one, I believed that I’d have sensed them already. Secondly, and more important, I was wary about being trapped in the enclosed space.
Turning away I made for where I believed a staircase to the upper floors was.
“Chicken shit coward,” Cash muttered.
Choosing to ignore him, I groped my way to the far right corner of the building. True to expectation, there was a doorway into a stairwell. It was still dark, but ambient light leaked into the building through a window mid-way up the next flight. The steps were preformed concrete, so didn’t echo my footsteps as I mounted them. Holding the SIG braced across my chest, I lead the way left foot first, crabbing upward.
The stairwell was haunted house creepy. Sweat trickled between my shoulder blades. Over the stink of the building I could smell my own fear. I went up the stairs as quickly as sense allowed. At the first floor, a door opened onto a landing. Stepping into the hallway I searched the shadows for movement. Dust motes sifted down through the dimness, the only movement.
What had caused the dust particles to fall? They’d been disturbed from the ceiling above. Someone - something - was moving above me.
Returning to the stairs, I mounted them. At the top the darkness was absolute. The only sounds were the tapping of rain on the roof, the thrum of my heartbeat in my ears. For the briefest of seconds I faltered.
Did I have what it took? Was I man enough?
My thoughts were cast back to that dreadful night in the watermill. When my fiancée and unborn child were torn to shreds by a monster. I was too late to save them. I couldn’t allow another woman and child to die.
Yes, I did have what it took.
But I wasn’t going to be stupid about it.
“Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a hungry lion, searching for souls to devour.”
Broom’s words of advice resonated in my skull, only this time my brother spoke them. He wasn’t warning me to be careful. Whatever the outcome with the Skeklar he told me I would forever be in danger from my most evil of enemies.
FIFTY
Inside the old tannery
An extendable baton seemed an ineffective weapon against something that had survived gunfire. But, Shelly decided, it was all she had. Given the opportunity she’d gladly accept the opportunity of putting the Skeklar and her baton to the test. Home Office procedure dictated that the baton should be aimed only at the limbs or body, but never to the head of an assailant. Under these conditions she couldn’t be criticised for ignoring procedure, though. The Skeklar had already attacked and killed another officer, and for what the bastard had done to him and to Bob she owed the monster the beating of all beatings.
She moved through the tannery with the baton clutched like a sword of vengeance, feeling like a heroine from some grim fairy tale. If she was the warrior woman, what did that make of her companions? A quick glance at Broom assured her of one thing: he shambled through the darkness like the friendly giant. Given his muscular stature and flowing blond hair, he could even be the Viking demi-god, Thor. So what would that make Carter Bailey? Staying with the fantasy scenario, she saw him as the flawed hero. He was a man of two halves; Frodo Baggins torn between his noble heart and the dark power of the One Ring. She’d accepted that - intrinsically - Bailey was a good man, but she would never shake the feeling that there was something wrong with him. Her first glance into his eyes told her. Nothing would change her opinion - what she had seen lurking in his gaze was evil.
There were of course shades of evil.
Compared to the Skeklar, Carter Bailey hardly made the scale.
Sometimes a little necessary evil wasn’t a bad thing. Murder was the greatest sin. But if the murder of the Skeklar meant that innocent lives were spared, then she wouldn’t complain. She’d be rooting for Carter Bailey to put a few well-placed rounds into the Skeklar’s skull. After she’d battered said skull to a pulp with her baton.
These were unwholesome thoughts for a police officer, but at that moment she didn’t care. All that mattered was that the Skeklar was stopped. That Janet and Bethany were saved. Yes, a little necessary evil was in order.
Hell, she could smoke a cigarette.
Another necessary evil.
Her mother’s face flashed through her mind’s eye.
“Okay, forget the cigarettes,” she admonished herself.
Broom came to a standstill.
“What is it?” Shelly whispered.
“We have to go up.”
Broom peered into the clotted shadows of a stairwell.
“Okay, but you stay behind me,” Shelly said. “Let me get up to the first floor before you follow.”
In his large hand the radio looked tiny.
“You remember how to use that?” Shelly asked.
“Key in the code. Press the button. Pretty simple,” Broom reassured her.
“So is breathing,” Shelly told him. “But I bet before we’re finished here you forget how to exhale. You’d better switch it on now. Just in case.”
Broom complied. “What about the glow from the screen? Won’t it give away our position?”
“A necessary evil,” Shelly said, giving voice to her previous thoughts. “Any way, don’t you think he knows we’re already here?”
“Suppose so,” Broom said, but he still slipped the radio into a pocket so that he didn’t become an easy target.
Shelly moved up the stairs. She stepped into a puddle of water and to her over-active senses
the splash sounded like a rhinoceros had taken a high dive into a swimming pool. When she was safely up the first flight, Broom followed. Shelly smiled to herself: Broom was holding his breath already.
FIFTYONE
The Freezer
Standing at the threshold of hell I had to give myself another mental hitch to get moving. Hell was a long way down, but it would take me only a couple of missteps to fall there.
I faced a metal door. It wasn’t unlike the doors seen on industrial sized freezers. Probably was, considering I was in a processing plant where animal pelts were once stored. Why it would be at the highest, least accessible point of the tannery I had no clue.
To enter the room beyond meant sucking up my fear. If I was on the wrong track I could be stepping into a prison with no hope of escape. Not that I’d freeze to death: there was no power to the building. My fear was the door slamming shut and then dying a slow, torturous death starved of oxygen. It’d be like drowning on dry land. I’d already drowned once, and it was the last thing I wanted to do again.
The fear was irrational. I could already hear Broom and Sergeant McCusker mounting the stairs below me. They’d come to my rescue before I suffocated.
Grasping the handle I pulled the door towards me. Though huge, it was counterweighted so it moved with ease. Thankfully there was no sucking noise associated with breaking a vacuum-seal. Meant it wasn’t airtight. Exhaling gratefully, I moved through the doorway and into a wide, open space, two-thirds the dimensions of the uppermost floor. The ceiling was low, and I could tell even in the darkness that it was wood and not the galvanized metal of a conventional freezer unit. The floor was metal though, dimpled with non-slip studs.
After crossing the threshold, I paused.
The darkness was too deep to see anything clearly. But the smell, no amount of sense deprivation could cover that. It was the acrid stench of human waste, urine, faeces and stale sweat.
There had been people here recently.
“Janet!” I whispered loudly. “Bethany!”
No one answered, only a faint echo of my own voice.
But there was a clink! As though something metal had struck the floor. In that slowly disintegrating building it didn’t mean anything. My weight on a loose board beneath the metal flooring could easily have transposed itself to a far corner of the room, dislodging something. Anything could have fallen from the mouldering structure. But then I heard a shuffle.
Could be a rat, I reasoned, but only if it was wearing shoes.
“Janet!” I said again, this time louder.
A door banged shut.
Jerking forward, I raced through the room towards the reverberating echo of the slammed door. It was a stupid reaction. In hindsight I should have negotiated the open space with more care. I wouldn’t have run headlong into the upright steel pillar, bounced off it and went belly-down on the cold floor.
I wouldn’t have dropped my gun.
With my head ringing from the impact, I clambered up. It was like I was back on that damn ferry, the floor pitching and yawing beneath my feet, and my guts did a somersault, threatening to spill their contents on the floor. But a heaving stomach was my least concern. I had to find the SIG. If I had any hope of defending myself against the Skeklar I needed the gun.
As I’d hit the floor I was faintly aware of it clattering away from me into the shadows. Standing up I’d become disoriented and had no idea which direction the gun had slid.
Wishing again that I’d fetched a torch, I groped for the pillar I’d run into. At least it would be a starting point. From there I’d just have to make an ever increasing circle, search the floor with my feet until I located the gun.
A shriek rang out.
Janet.
I forgot about the gun. Forgot about caution. I lurched into a run towards the far end of the room.
FIFTYTWO
In Carter’s footsteps
“Was that a scream?”
Broom’s rhetorical question floated out the darkness below Shelly. A second before it she’d heard the howl of a woman in torment. She didn’t bother answering. She’d already heard Bailey’s answering shout, then the thud-thud-thud of his feet as he raced to the rescue.
“Broom. Get on the radio and call for help,” she commanded. “Do it now!”
Then she clattered up the stairs, all caution thrust aside now there was no doubt Janet Hale was here. Her scream meant that Janet was still alive, but without immediate intervention that might not be the case for long.
Broom’s voice was an urgent bleat as he shouted demands and instructions to the police control room over in Yell. But he was running, too. He was coming to help.
Shelly came to the metal door. She didn’t stop to worry about entering the room beyond. She was beyond fear now and was wearing her police head once more. Doing her duty as befits a police officer, but more than that, doing the duty of any human being. She had to stop the Skeklar. She had to save Janet and Bethany. And if necessary she had to save Carter Bailey.
Running into the room she saw a dark figure ahead of her. She could barely make him out in the darkness but she thought from the pounding of feet that it was Bailey. She slid to a stop, listened as the timbre of his footsteps changed. He was mounting a further set of steps, wooden this time.
She briefly surveyed her surroundings. The room was windowless. But she recalled the flash of a torch or lamp in an uppermost window when she’d crouched outside. This had to be a room within a room. Bailey had obviously found egress to those outside this inner shell. In one of those rooms he’d possibly find Janet and Bethany. Likely he’d also find the Skeklar.
Behind her Broom charged in. He was still bleating instructions into the radio. The answering communications operator was asking needless questions of him. Shelly spun around and snatched the terminal out of his hand.
“Sixteen twelve to control,” she shouted. “I require immediate assistance. Now.” She hurriedly gave their location and a brief explanation of what she’d heard.
Inspector Marsh cut in.
“Sergeant McCusker. I want you to back down immediately. We have a task force en route to you now. Stand down until we have AFO’s on scene.”
Janet Hale screamed and there was a crashing noise from where Bailey had charged through a second door.
“We haven’t time to wait for Firearms to get here, sir,” she shouted back. “I have to do something now.”
“We know who we’re up against now,” Marsh said. “We’ve identified the killer. He is too dangerous, Sergeant. Stand down.”
“No,” Shelly shouted as another scream rang out - this time the high-pitched squall of a child. “I can’t stand around listening while people are dying.”
“I’m ordering you -”
“I don’t give a damn for your orders,” Shelly snapped.
She tossed the radio back to Broom. “You guide them in, Broom. I’m going up.”
“Not without me you’re not,” Broom said, moving up alongside her.
There was another crash, as if ill-stacked furniture had toppled to the ground. Carter Bailey shouted. A woman and child screamed.
Somewhere at the back of her mind Shelly was aware that Inspector Marsh was still relaying orders to her. But she didn’t give a rat’s arse. The only good thing from his constant use of the radio was the screen’s glow illuminated the way ahead.
And she saw what was on the floor.
Stooping, she grabbed the dropped SIG Sauer.
She turned and showed it to Broom.
“Shit. He’s gone in there unarmed,” Broom hissed.
“He won’t stand a chance.”
FIFTYTHREE
The Gibbet
At the end of the big room was a flight of wooden steps that lead upward to a raised platform. I took the steps in three bounds then was onto the reverberating decking. In front of me was another door. I didn’t stop, just charged forward and yanked it open, and lurched into an empty office.
J
anet’s next scream was louder.
“I’m coming, Janet,” I shouted.
At the other side of the office was yet another door and I didn’t stop to think. I sprinted across the room, almost knocking the door off its hinges as I threw my weight against it.
Sense would have told me that there was another flight of stairs at this side too, but I wasn’t thinking straight. The office was on a raised deck from where the supervisors of old could keep an eye on the workers either side of the office. As I blasted out the door, I found that I was sailing through space. It wasn’t a long drop, and I twisted in mid-air so that my back crashed into a desk, upon which were stacked a couple of worm-eaten wooden chairs. My momentum pushed the desk over, scattering the chairs on the floor, and I fell with them.
Something popped inside me: a rib cracking.
My face battered against something solid and blood instantly poured from a fresh wound on my face.
Surprisingly neither injury caused me to wince. I was beyond pain at that moment, existing on a tide of adrenalin. If I lived through the next few minutes I knew the pain would grow unendurable, but then I neither felt nor cared less about my injuries.
“Where are you, Janet?” I yelled, scrambling up and spinning full circle as I sought her.
“Look out, Carter!” Janet shouted. “Don’t come any closer.”
I followed the source of her voice.
There were windows there. Some dim light leaked into the room and I could make out an amorphous shadow towards its rear. The shape was unnatural. It was too large to be Janet. Skeklar! My mind screamed.
But then I realised, no.
The shape was made up of two forms. They were hanging from a construction that reminded me of a medieval gibbet, their feet placed precariously on a narrow cross spar.
Jesus Christ! The Skeklar planned to hang them.