by Darcy Coates
Laughter echoed through the hallway, and Gary swivelled as the shock sent his heart rate up. The sounds were closer than they had been before. One of the children seemed to be singing. Gary tried to make out the tune, but he didn’t recognise it.
Suddenly uncomfortable in the deserted hotel, Gary moved back into the hallway. He glanced in each direction, and saw a flash of motion at the end of the hallway. There was a small gap between the door and its frame, and someone had darted past it.
“Hello?”
The giggles intensified, and Gary felt a flush of frustration. Their parents shouldn’t be letting them run around unsupervised like this. Where are their parents, anyway? I didn’t see any other cars in the street.
Against his better judgement, George edged towards the final room. The children whispered to each other then paused to giggle. Something was not quite right about their laughter, though. Earlier, it had been merry and bright, but the newer giggles had a malicious edge to them. Like the way children laugh when they pull an insect’s wings off.
Gary stretched out a hand and nudged open the door. The hinges groaned as the wooden board moved inwards. The room was completely empty, except for the marks of small bare feet in the dust on the floor.
Gary licked at his dry lips as he edged into the room. “Hello?”
The voices had fallen silent. Gary looked about, but there was nowhere to hide in the vacant space. Unless they got out through the window…
He approached the frame. The room was on the second floor, and he couldn’t see any way for a child—let alone multiple children—to get out without making a lot of noise.
The window overlooked the main stretch of road, and Gary saw his car waiting below. The dark-green paint stood out starkly against the red soil. Beth was no longer leaning against the hood. Gary bent forward to rest his head against the cold glass and squinted. His wife wasn’t inside the car, either. Gary’s insides turned cold. He knew his wife too well to think she had wandered after him or gone to explore on her own.
The door behind him slammed, and Gary jumped. Raucous, malicious giggles came from the other side of the door, accompanied by the patter of running feet.
“Hey,” Gary yelled, lurching towards the door. “Hey, what the hell?”
He grasped the handle and tugged on it, but it wouldn’t budge. He pulled and pushed. Then he shoved his shoulder into the door to no avail. He tried not to scream as a child’s hand, icy cold, fastened around his neck.
13
Magpie Girl
Henry lay on his back, his eyes fixed on the shadows slinking across the ceiling. It was one of the nights where he found it impossible to sleep.
Far below his apartment window, a car horn blared. Sirens wailed in the distance. Two men, their words slurred, were arguing. By the sounds of it, at least one of them would end up in the hospital.
There was once a time when Henry would have cared. He’d gone into the police force with great expectations for himself and his career. I won’t be like the others, he’d told himself. I won’t go crooked. Every move, every action, will be for the benefit of this city I love.
If it had been any other sort of night, he might have laughed at his own naivety. Instead, all he could do was watch the shadows, which looked so much like a woman’s fingers.
He’d made mistakes along his path, of course. Laziness had gotten the better of him on a few occasions and delayed justice. He’d accepted a couple of bribes. Looking back on it, he was almost certain he’d sent an innocent man to jail. But his worst offence—the mistake that haunted him into his old age—was the Magpie Girl.
He’d been on shift when she’d come into the station. One glance at her was all he needed to make an assessment. Her hoodie was old and stained. She wore leggings, even though it was winter. Her hair, bleached blonde with the brown roots showing, had been dragged into a messy bun on the top of her head. The way she held herself—slouched, her shoulders hunched and head down—and the dark circles around her eyes had earned her a damning label: druggie.
At the time, Henry had been proud of himself for listening patiently to her story. He’d heard some wild stuff in his days, but hers had taken the cake. Her boyfriend was into occult stuff, she said. “He owns a heap of those old books with weird symbols on their covers,” she’d said. “He’s building up to something bad… trying to trap a soul to its body.”
Henry had idly wondered what she was on. One of the psychedelic drugs, he’d assumed at first, but her focus and intensity made him lean more towards coke or possibly even an experimental custom brew.
Her story had gradually grown wilder, and Henry had been too fascinated to stop her. She claimed her boyfriend was a serial killer, on top of being into the occult.
“He’s been taking prostitutes,” she’d said, speaking rapidly. “He’s experimenting on them. It never works, of course, but he keeps trying. When they die, he bags them and hides them in our apartment wall. There’ve been so many of them. At least twelve in the last year.”
“Does he space them out to one a month,” Henry had asked, “or did he blow through his budget in a few weeks?”
It had been a joke. A stupid, cruel, horrible joke. If Henry were capable of going back in time, he would have slapped himself.
A range of expressions crossed the woman’s face. Henry had glimpsed confusion, then shock, then hurt that was quickly hidden behind outrage.
“You’re supposed to help,” she spat, pulling back from the desk.
“I can help you get into rehab,” Henry had said, unable to keep the laughter out of his voice.
As she’d stormed out of the station, one of Henry’s co-workers gave him a look that clearly said, “Did you have to go that far?”
Subconsciously, Henry had known he’d crossed a line. He even felt a twinge of shame as the station’s door slammed. But other matters had pulled on his attention, and the mysterious woman was all but forgotten by the end of the day.
He’d thought he would never see her again. As he lay in his room, watching the shadows at two in the morning, as far from sleep as it was possible for a human to be, Henry would have given anything to have been right.
A week later, he’d responded to reports of a homicide in one of the worse parts of the city. He recognised the girl immediately. Her eyes were a little more sunken, and the dark hair roots a few millimetres farther advanced than he remembered, but the face was familiar. The rest of her was borderline unrecognisable.
She’d been laid out in the centre of the shabby room, her blood seeping into the cheap grey carpet, her hair spread in a halo about her head. Her killer had sliced her open with surgical precision and peeled strips of her skin back, laying it out beside her like an animal-hide rug. Henry couldn’t even fathom what had been done to her. Candles had been placed on exposed rib bones. Ink ran between her intestines, and a congealed mess of something that pathology had later identified as chicken blood was mixed in. Henry’s partner had fled from the room to retch in the hallway.
The shock had lasted for a long time. No one else seemed to remember the girl’s visit to the police station, and Henry, terrified of what the repercussions could be if his negligence made it into the papers, kept his lips sealed.
He’d tried to remember as much of the bizarre discussion as he could, but it only came back in fragments. One part that had stuck with him was the imagery of a multitude of bodies bagged and stored in the walls. He’d nonchalantly instructed some junior officers to search behind the plaster for possible hidden weapons—and, sure enough, a cascade of decaying, ghost-white, plastic-shrouded bodies tumbled from behind a fake wall.
A suspect was apprehended. The trial dragged on for years. Every time he was called up to give testimony, Henry had wanted to tell them how the girl had come to see him just a week before her death and told him about her serial-killing, occult-obsessed boyfriend. But every time, a sense of self-preservation had stilled his tongue, and he stuck to his official alibi—th
at the first he knew of the business was the day he’d arrived at the apartment.
A combination of wormy lawyers and a lack of evidence saw the suspect go free. As far as the state was concerned, it was an unsolved case; the police were still working on it, picking up tips as they came in and hoping to get lucky, but there wasn’t much hope of a resolution. The killer had been perfectly methodical with his butchering. If he’d left DNA, it hadn’t been found. The apartment had been rented under a fake name, and no one knew much of anything about the occupants, who’d arrived and left in the early hours of the morning. They never even figured out the girl’s real name. The media had named her after the apartment block: the Magpie Girl.
Henry didn’t have any doubts about the killer’s identity, though. He’d seen the way the boy had smirked when the non-guilty verdict was handed down. He wondered if the man was still free, possibly living in another part of the country under an assumed name, possibly carrying out more of his bizarre and morbid experiments. Henry had resigned himself to the idea that he would probably never hear the full story.
The shadows across the ceiling, so much like women’s fingers, twitched and quivered. They began dragging themselves across the plaster, towards Henry’s door. He always shut the door when he went to bed, but it always somehow ended up open at that terrible hour of three in the morning. The shadows slid down the walls and collected in a pool on the ground. Then came the noises: the scraping, dragging sounds that echoed unnaturally through the room. The gurgle of a breath being pulled through damaged lungs. The rasp of flesh being dragged across carpet.
Henry turned his head towards the doorway, where a dark shape was dragging itself into his room. “Leave me alone,” he begged for what felt like the hundredth time. “I’m sorry. Leave me alone.”
The corpse raised its head, as it always did, and Henry caught a glimpse of her body, sliced open, the flaps of skin dragging across the carpet. Her eyes, cold and dead, fixed on the retired policeman, and the Magpie Girl stretched a hand forward to drag herself closer to her victim.
14
Hazard Lights
Maria leaned against the car door and stared through the window at the harsh white lights spaced along the Lane Cove Tunnel. The driver kept trying to start a conversation, but she’d caught a red-eye flight and was beyond exhausted. All she wanted to do was get to her hotel and sleep for a lifetime.
The traffic wasn’t co-operating, though. It had been gridlocked for the last twenty minutes, and in the tunnel, it seemed even worse. Maria didn’t think they’d moved more than ten meters in the last five minutes.
“Bad traffic today, yeah?” The taxi driver, a cheerful man with a thick black beard beamed at her in the rear-vision mirror, and Maria mustered a thin smile.
“Uh-huh.”
“Haven’t seen it this bad in months. Must be a breakdown ahead.”
“Hmm.” Maria turned to look out of the opposite window, where she could see five other car lanes—two more going in their direction, the other three going the opposite—all forced to a halt. Every now and then, a car would crawl a few inches closer to its leader, as though that would make any sort of difference.
The radio came to life with a crackle, and Maria jumped. She’d nearly fallen asleep.
“We are currently experiencing an emergency situation,” the voice on the radio said, and Maria leaned forward to listen to it. Her driver hadn’t touched the radio, she knew, by the way his face had gone pale; however, because the tunnel dipped below ground to carry cars from one side of the harbour to the other, the control room had the ability to activate the car’s radios in an emergency.
“Remain in your vehicle,” the voice said. He sounded flustered and panicky, though he was clearly reading from a script. “Extinguish all lights and remain silent. Assistance will be sent as soon as possible.”
The radio fell silent. Maria looked to her taxi driver, whose face had lost almost all colour. He turned the key in the ignition, powering the car down and killing its lights. Around her, other cars were also being turned off.
Maria swivelled in her seat to look behind her. She thought she could hear noises coming from deeper in the tunnel. Then the multitude of lights spaced along the concrete walls whined and died, plunging them into darkness.
Someone shrieked, and car doors slammed. A handful of headlights were still on, and Maria tried to see what was happening through the limited glow, but everything was a mess of shadows and shapes.
The radio crackled for a second time, and the voice returned. Its panic had risen to a nearly hysterical pitch, and he didn’t seem to be reading from a script any longer. “They say you should remain in your cars… but… but… they’re still finding you… don’t run. Don’t bother. They’ll catch you. They’re spreading so fast. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this before… oh, jeeze, I’m so, so sorry! Stay in your cars. Stay—”
The voice broke off with a gasp, and Maria heard a banging noise in the distance followed by what sounded like metal being twisted and torn. The radio clicked off.
Maria sat frozen in her seat as she stared at her driver. A car a few rows ahead turned on its hazard lights, and the flashing red reflected off the driver’s face as he stared back.
Then the screams started.
Maria turned to look behind them and saw shapes—people—running between the cars. It was more than panic; it was pandemonium. Several figures shoved against her taxi as they ran past, making it sway. Maria placed one hand on the car door, preparing to exit and join the crowd, but she stopped when she caught sight of other, larger shapes farther back in the tunnel.
They were barely visible in the blinking hazard light, but they were definitely not human. The shapes moved on all fours, dexterously climbing over the cars and scuttling along the tunnel’s walls. Their limbs had at least four joints each, and they were larger than an average man.
They snatched up the fleeing humans so quickly that the motions were a blur. Maria heard the crackles and snaps of breaking bones underneath the screams. Glass smashed as the creatures pounded through car windows.
“Get down!” the taxi driver hissed, shoving Maria out of her seat so that she was kneeling in the footwell. She flattened herself as much as she could, trying to breathe through her mouth to minimise the noise. The taxi driver sunk back into his seat, his eyes wide as he tried not to shake.
From her position, Maria could still see the figures racing past the windows and feel the impact as they bumped the car. Then the taxi shuddered as something large and heavy landed on it, and one of the running figures by her window was pulled from view with a gurgling shriek. Maria pressed her hand over her mouth and held her breath. They were enveloped by silence for a second, then there was a horrific crash as the windshield was broken by a long, tough limb.
The taxi driver barely managed half a scream before he was torn out of his seat and pulled through the hole in the windshield. His voice choked off, then, and dark liquid splashed across the window above Maria.
The sounds were changing as the screams faded into the distance. The human cacophony was replaced by steady, loud thuds as the creatures climbed over the cars, making snapping noises and chewing, tearing sounds. Maria squeezed her eyes closed so that she wouldn’t have to watch the shadows move past the window.
She kept still until the noises died into the distance and were eventually entirely extinguished. Her muscles ached from the cramped position. Outside, the tunnel remained dark except for the hazard lights, which continued to bathe the area in intermittent flashes of red. She was surrounded in near-perfect silence—no footsteps, voices, thudding limbs, or tearing flesh.
Maria shook as she slowly, cautiously rose to her knees. She peeked through the car’s window, between the streaks of blood, to see that the tunnel seemed empty. So did the cars. Their human occupants had been stripped from them, pulled through broken windows or holes that had been carved in the metal. Maria alone had been spared, thanks to her hi
ding place.
I’ve got to leave before those creatures come back. There should be emergency exits placed along the walls. They should be too small for those… things… to fit through easily. If I can just get to one of them…
Maria opened her door slowly and silently. The car’s interior lights automatically turned on in response, and Maria looked out, frozen in terror, as a dozen pairs of reflective, globe-like eyes turned towards her.
15
The Resident
Allie shifted the crowbar to her left hand as she glanced up and down the length of the plywood boards covering the space below her home. The crawlspace had been boarded up since before Allie bought the property. The real estate agent had said it would make an excellent storage space, though. And with another five months until the weather would be warm enough to work in her garden, Allie figured she might as well put the storage space to use and clear up her yard.
Allie approached one of the plywood boards and pressed the tip of her crowbar into the narrow gap above it. The wood had discoloured from years of exposure to the weather, but it had held up surprisingly well. It groaned, creaked, and cracked as Allie forced the gap wider, then it broke free with a loud snap. She pulled the board away and threw it aside, leaving a two-foot opening into the crawlspace.
She dropped the crowbar and picked up the torch she’d sat on the porch. Allie angled the harsh white beam into the space below. It was larger than she’d expected. While only a three-foot-high gap was visible from the outside, the ground dipped just past the entrance, creating nearly enough room for a person to stand upright.
It was hard to see with only a small circle of light, but there seemed to be items already stored in the space below her home. She saw something that looked like a broken chair, as well as a pile of bags nestled into the corner. The house’s support pillars blocked much of her view, and Allie, with a final glance at the garden, lowered herself into the crawlspace.