Habeas Corpus: Black Womb (Black Womb Collection Book 1)

by Matthew LeDrew

  When she looked at herself again the sparkling treads her tears had left were gone, but her nose was still red. The skin under her eyes was red too, and had become puffy and pronounced.

  She huffed, unscrewing the top of her makeup and beginning to apply it methodically. In some odd way it soothed her, the way any familiar task soothed the weary. She’d been applying foundation in these same motions since she was eleven, and returning to it somehow brought her to a calm place. Not necessarily a place of peace, but a place where she could get lost in the routine of the mundane until the storm finally passed.

  By the time she finished, she wasn’t even sniffling anymore.

  She looked back down into her purse.

  There was an orange prescription bottle there that until a few hours ago had resided in her mother’s medicine cabinet. It was filled with small blue pills with a diagonal indentation on the back. She watched it for a moment, as if expecting it to do something, then picked it up and popped the top off with her thumb.

  She poured a handful of the little blue circles her mother called happy pills and her father called Valium into her hand, forming a neat little mountain in her palm. She looked at it again, wriggling her fingers and feeling the way they moved and shifted with her every motion, then poured them back into the bottle until there were only two left. Those two stared back at her like two pale eyes.

  She turned on the tap again and was about to cup her other hand underneath to get enough water so she wouldn’t have to dry swallow them, then stopped. She sighed and placed one back in the bottle. She held the other between her thumb and forefinger, hovering it over the bottle as if threatening to throw it back with the others.

  Turning back to the door again, she sniffed back hard.

  “Fuck it,” she said, then pushed the pill between her pursed lips. She bent down and stuck her mouth into the stream of milky liquid coming out of the faucet, sucking back more than enough to make the pill go down easily. Her hair got wet as she did this.

  She turned off the tap and placed the cap back on the bottle, then gave herself one last look in the mirror. She adjusted her bra strap so it wasn’t quite so visible, then nodded approvingly and stepped toward the door.

  When her hand touched the knob, her vision became hazy again. She paused, bit her lip, and forced herself not to start crying again.

  To her surprise, it worked this time. She glanced at her reflection in the cruddy mirror one last time, forced a smile onto her face, then walked out of the bathroom and back out into the Factory.

  She and Xander had decided to join Mike and Cathy that evening. They had agreed beforehand to walk home together, and nobody had blamed them. On their way there they had seen people affixing new locks to their windows, shops closing down early... and people only seemed to get more and more paranoid as they got closer to the club. Many older people gave them hard stares, following them with their eyes as they walked by.

  Xander and Mike were caught deep in battle on an arcade game, which Mike appeared to be winning judging by the curses spewing from Xander’s lips and the way he was rattling his joystick.

  Cathy sat in the driving simulator, not actually playing it. She pried her eyes from Mike long enough to acknowledge Sara’s return, but did not question her absence.

  “What do you think of Grendel?” Sara asked, looking over at the buff hockey player.

  “Ugh. I’m afraid to say. Mike’s all upset over me and Gren. He won’t accept that we’re just friends,” she tisked, pulling her hair back into a ponytail and tying an elastic in it.

  “I meant for me.”

  Cathy rolled her eyes. “Don’t you think it’s a little soon? Kinda pushing it.”

  “Oh, yeah. The mourning has begun,” she laughed. The smile she had practiced in the mirror was more natural now, and she herself did not know whether she was faking it or not.

  Cathy laughed too, but only to be polite. She didn’t see anything funny about it at all.

  “Kick ‘em! No! How’d you... argh!” Xander finally admitted defeat and stepped back from the joystick. “Dammit! How’d you do that last bit?”

  “Well, it’s all about a delicate balance of concentration, discipline, and not being a spaz. You wouldn’t understand,” Mike grinned as he straightened his collar.

  “You’re not a very good winner. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “Hmm,” Mike responded, pretending to look thoughtful. “I don’t know. You’d think I would be a better winner, what with all the practice I have.”

  Xander sighed, fumbling around his pockets for a quarter. Finding one, he held it up toward Mike at eye level, an evil grin spreading across his face. “Play again?”

  “No way man. I gotta save some money to buy Cathy dinner.”

  Xander made a little sound like a whip under his breath.

  “What was that?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  Mike eyed his friend for a moment. “One more game.”

  Detective Carl Dent had seen his fair share of weird stuff. Sick stuff. The stuff that they leave out of even the worst horror flick, he lived every day of his life. Things that wake you up at night in cold sweats. Children massacred in hoards and piled up in men’s sheds. People half eaten by some postal worker turned cannibal. Even a guy skewered on a lamppost. But when his commissioner passed him that folder, his gut turned over inside him. All he could think of was the sick, revolting, abhorrent nature of man.

  He brushed a hand through his fast fading hair, briefly disrupting his comb-over before subconsciously putting it back into place. Flipping through the files on Jamie Dawkins, he felt himself unable to take his eyes away from the photographs or miss a single syllable written on the pages. He placed a hand over his mouth as he got to the part with close up photos of his organs, or where they should have been.

  They had been extracted meticulously, with the preciseness and care of a practiced surgeon. The organs would be usable afterward if stored properly, if that was, in fact, the killer’s intent. But the area around where the organs had been lifted was the exact opposite, slashed and mutilated and mauled. Like once the operation had been completed the person had purposely caused as much damage as possible to whatever remained, for no other reason than the pure, undiminished joy of it.

  Worst of all, autopsy tests revealed that the victim may have been alive when the operation was happening. Or at least when it had begun.

  Detective Tim White walked by Dent’s desk, taking a peek over his shoulder at his friend as he did so. He frowned, his exaggerated lips and dark African-American complexion only bringing out the emotion more. “Jeez, Carl. What’re you doing?”

  Dent did nothing for a moment, so engrossed was he in the information in front of him. He seemed to be fixated on one photo, taken of the boy’s lungs in the state they were in at the crime scene. Suddenly, his head snapped up to look at Tim, as if his reaction to his coworker’s comment had been a delayed one. “Sorry. What?”

  “Hard case?”

  Dent emitted a low growl in the back of his throat. “They’re all hard. Especially when there’s kids involved.”

  Tim nodded, prying his own eyes from the open folder. “I hear that. How old was he, anyway?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Ugh.”

  “What kind of monster could do something like this? And for what reason? There’s just no logical sense behind it. This guy had no enemies, no grudges, he wasn’t in a gang, there was nothing. He was clean.”

  “Maybe one of those idiot kids from the Cove?” Tim suggested, hating himself for saying it. “I mean, he was a star player. Maybe it’s some kinda team rivalry.”

  “Yeah,” Dent snorted. “And maybe they ate his organs to absorb his talent.”

  There was a look between them then as they both mentally examined the insanity and yet plausible validity of the comment, then brushed it aside.

  “I’m glad you’ve got this one and not me,” Tim admitted, tappi
ng the top of Dent’s cubicle wall once. “I don’t think I’d be able to handle it.”

  Dent sighed, glancing back at the file. “Look at this: ‘It is in the CS unit’s professional opinion that the victim was attacked with a large, two-edged blade with a hilt, driven directly through the victim’s right side.’ I mean, that’s a sword. That’s a sword, right?”

  “Or a machete.”

  “Who even does that? Really?”

  “Dunno,” Tim admitted reluctantly. “But I guess now it’s your job to find out.”

  He gave his friend a curt wave then threw his jacket over his shoulder and started toward the exit.

  Carl watched him go, then picked up the file again, immediately re-absorbed in the disturbing photographs.

  Sara stepped out in front of them, her shoes tapping along the sidewalk and her arms held just above her head as she turned the streetlight into a spotlight. Her jacket bobbed to the beat her feet created, flapping under her arms like the garments of some Broadway jazz dancer.

  “What is she doing?” Mike laughed, walking slowly alongside Cathy and Xander. He’d been slapped on the arm by the former a few times already for walking too fast, his long legs making his strides command many more inches than theirs.

  Cathy watched her for a moment, tilting her head to one side. “Hop scotch?”

  “There’s no squares.”

  “Invisible hop scotch then?”

  “No, there’s a beat to it. Watch.”

  Sara tapped and scuffed her feet as though she couldn’t hear their critique, mouthing along to the song in her head as she did.

  Xander smiled.

  “It has a long body to it,” Cathy said.

  Mike nodded.

  Sara continued to skip, the way her shoes worked along the pavement making different sounds, like morse code. Short short short short short short short, long long!

  “Do do do do do do do, dah dah,” Mike repeated, in time with her as she started again. “What is that?”

  “It’s Spirit in the Sky,” Xander said finally, unable to keep his mouth shut any longer.

  Sara stopped, spun around, and glared at him. “Tattler.”

  “They wouldn’t have got it.”

  “Hey!” Mike spat, turning and pushing Xander with one finger. “It was on the tip of my tongue.”

  “Sure.”

  ”It was!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Cathy laughed, entwining her fingers into Mike’s as the three of them caught up to Sara and they began to walk in unison.

  Xander paid particular attention to their legs for a moment. It seemed as though Mike, Cathy and Sara were unintentionally stepping in unison, like soldiers on the march. He tried for a moment to force himself to be in synch with them but could not and eventually gave up. Still, it nagged at him.

  They walked like this often, most of the time with no particular destination in mind. On nice summer nights they’d walk from one end of town to the other, just enjoying one another’s company and making fun of anything they saw that had amused them that day and complaining about how none of them had a car.

  They turned down Xander and Sara’s street, a long stretch of road that connected Norman’s Lane to Laird Street. Their houses loomed in the distance, the lights in Xander’s house all dark. From where they were, it looked abandoned.

  All the lights were on in Sara’s house, blaring out into the night like it was on fire. Her mother’s silhouette could be seen in the window, staring out into the street like a fisherman’s wife looking out to sea.

  Sara rolled her eyes. “I told her not to wait up.”

  “It’s not even ten,” Mike drawled. “I’d lay wages she was up anyway.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “She’s just worried,” Cathy said, her voice smooth as silk. “Everyone is. Everyone should be.”

  “She’s always like this. Ever since the crash,” Sara continued, as though Cathy hadn’t spoken. “This just gives her a good reason. Now I can’t talk her out of it again.”

  “Pity,” Xander smirked at her. “You might actually have to start being respectable.”

  She punched him in the arm even as she started laughing, and continued to laugh as she did it more and more. He raised his hands to try and defend himself, but kept lowering them to clutch his sides as rolls of laughter came out of him as well.

  Cathy smiled, watching the two of them play. After a moment she leaned in and kissed Mike on the neck, the highest point she could reach without stopping in mid-stride and standing on her tip toes.

  He smiled as her hair tickled his collarbone, squeezing her hand lovingly.

  When they reached the walkway to Sara’s house her mother opened the door, bathing the cobblestone in harsh bright light.

  “Sara!” she snapped, her foot stomping a little when she did. It was a Johnson family trait, Xander had noticed, to talk with your feet. “You had me worried sick!”

  “It’s not even ten,” Sara huffed as she walked toward her house, turning back to Mike as if to quote him. “Don’t be such a drama queen.”

  “Don’t take that tone with me, not after the other night. I have every right to be worried, and you know it.”

  She turned back to the rest of the group and smiled glumly, shrugged her shoulders, then entered her house without another word.

  “This isn’t a good time to be out and about like this,” her mother continued, even as she closed the door. “I don’t know how you can be so aloof when --”

  The door closed, blotting out the light and muffling the sound of her scolding until they couldn’t hear it at all.

  Cathy sighed, then started walking again, towing Mike along with one hand.

  Xander continued to watch the spot where Sara had disappeared for a moment, then stepped quickly to join them.

  “Why do people say it like that?” he asked to no one in particular as they walked across the threshold into his yard. “I mean, we all know what happened. It’ll probably even make the national news tonight. So why is everybody acting like it’s some kind of a secret?”

  “Because,” Cathy explained, her silky voice singing through the cold night. “People don’t like to know things like that. So they pretend they don’t. Nobody likes to walk down the street, wondering what’s behind them. But we do. Because if we don’t... well...”

  “Well, look what happened to Jamie,” Mike finished, his eyes cast downward.

  Xander paused, his head looming downward as he pondered that for a moment, then reluctantly accepted it as fact. He gave a curt wave goodbye to Cathy and Mike when they reached his door, then walked into his house and up the stairs toward his room, not saying a word to wake his parents.

  When he got to the top, he got a sharp pain in his right side and nearly fell, but caught himself on the rail. The pain went away as quickly as it had come over him, but even after it was gone there was a steady ache as he entered his room. It reminded him of when people lost their limbs in wars yet said they could still feel them, even though they were gone. Pausing for a second while he leaned on his desk to make sure that it had passed, he shrugged it off, thinking nothing of it beyond the moment. He wasn’t terribly athletic and he had been walking for a while. Usually he’d get online after getting home, but tonight he felt tired. He could barely keep his eyes open, and Cathy had caught him yawning more than once on the walk home. He got to his room and was about to lie down when he thought he heard something off in the corner of his room, and suddenly he got very scared.

  It’s just the house settling, he told himself, but still he turned on the light and looked around. He checked under his bed and around the room. He found nothing, but then he heard the sound again behind him. He turned sharply.

  The light bulb on his ceiling went out with a sudden flash and he was left in the dark, his eyes seeing spots everywhere.

  His heart skipped a beat. He tried to swallow but it got stuck in his throat as sweat began to bead on his brow.
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  The sound, now that he actually listened, was like a long shuffle. Like someone trying to find something while scuttling about in the dark. There was the slight flicker of paper.

  He stopped breathing to listen hard. He couldn’t hear anything now, not even the usual sounds that the house made. He turned on the computer screen to give himself a little light, bathing the room in an eerie green glow. He stopped again to listen hard and heard it a second time, in the corner. He went over, pulled away a box and revealed... an old computer magazine flapping against his air conditioner.

  He laughed at himself, breathing a sigh of relief. He walked over to his door and locked it, then got in his bed and slipped into a long, deep sleep.

  As Xander Drew slept, Cathy and Mike walked down the street toward her house. They hadn’t said much since leaving Xander’s place. They both knew what was on each other’s mind.

  Jamie.

  He had been Mike’s friend, not Cathy’s. So it was okay for Cathy to talk about it, but not okay for Mike to hear about it. What resulted was a weird sort of silence that made them both uncomfortable, and yet left them no way to escape from it.

  There was a thick mist of fog rolling onto the streets.

  Cathy stopped him on the corner by touching his arm and forcing him to face her, then leaned in slowly and kissed him. He kissed her back, only for a moment, and then they resumed walking across the road.

  “So can we talk about it now?” she asked, the words coming with a sigh of relief that they had finally found their way free.

  He took her hand in his own. “Not yet. It’s still... too early.”

  “When then?”

  He sighed, thinking ahead a little more than he usually liked to. “Um, how about at Grendel’s party Saturday?”

  “Three days?” she whined, pouting her lower lip. She didn’t like holding things in. She was the type of person who said whatever was on her mind whenever she wanted. Not that she was a flake. Actually, she was the exact opposite. Those who knew her knew that she took responsibility for everything. She probably even blamed herself for Jamie’s death in some way.