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

by Matthew LeDrew

  Cathy sniffed, then nodded quickly.

  There was a loud thud at the door to the bedroom and Sandra turned to face it, both girls backing up until they were against the far wall. The room was dark and black except for the edges of the king-size bed that Sandra and her husband had shared for more than forty years and the smooth pink wall, turned a weird eggplant color when mixed with the light from the window. There was a square panel on the wall that Cathy didn’t recognize but wasn’t even really looking at, her eyes glued to the door.

  Sandra took a step forward.

  There was another thud, shaking the door as well as the room.

  She backed back against the wall, swallowed, then repeated the same step again. Grabbing Cathy by the wrist, she pulled her toward the square frame on the wall. “Come on, child!” she said in a hushed voice.

  Cathy stepped along with her. The square looked like a picture frame at first in the low light, though there was no picture in it. There was a small knob at the bottom that Sandra grabbed now and thrust upward, revealing a small compartment with two lengths of rope coming out of the ceiling and passing through the floor. It was a laundry chute.

  “Get in, Catherine,” Sandra whispered, motioning her head toward the hole.

  Cathy shook her head, almost letting herself laugh. “It won’t matter,” she said in that same, dead voice as before. “Not against him.”

  “Who, child?” Sandra asked, squinting as she tilted her head to one side.

  “Black Womb,” Cathy answered, her eyelids rising and then falling again when she said the name. “Xander.”

  Sandra shook her head in confusion, motioning towards the chute again.

  Relenting and getting some of her energy back, Cathy grabbed both sides of the frame and pulled herself in. Her chin was down past her knees by the time she got herself completely inside. Sandra leaned forward and kissed her softly, then slammed the shaft shut.

  For what seemed like an eternity, Cathy listened intently to the silence that surrounded her, almost surrendering herself to it. Then after a forever of eavesdropping, waiting, knowing what was coming even though it never seemed to, it happened. The heavy thuds of a large frame tossing itself against a wooden door as it gave way under the pressure. The sound of heavy feet on carpet floors.

  -thump-

  -thu–thump-

  She could picture it, standing in the middle of the room and looking around with those opaque eyes like swamp-water, waiting for something in the room to move so that it could pounce on it.

  There was a heavy thunk followed by hundreds and squeaks all in unison as the killer turned over the mattress, staring down at Sandra through the bars of the bedframe.

  She stared back, her eyes first filled with intense fear and then anger as she stared into the emotionless eyes of her killer. “You fucking tart,” she said bitterly.

  Cathy didn’t think she’d ever heard Sandra swear before in all the years she’d known her. It had always been ‘sugar’ or ‘fudge’ in place of more offensive language.

  There was a sharp sound, followed by a squish. It was the all-too-familiar sound of flesh giving way under pressure. It continued for a moment, its wet sucking sound filling Cathy’s head with an all-too-accurate image of what was being done to Sandra just a few feet away.

  The footsteps started again, their heavy thunks moving further and further away from her. Smiling weakly, Cathy allowed herself a sigh of relief.

  The footsteps stopped.

  Cathy put her hand over her mouth, realizing her falter.

  Now the footsteps came closer again, faster and heavier than before. They sounded determined and ready, more sure of themselves then they ever had.

  Cursing, she moved forward to brace her hand against the chute’s door, hoping she could stop it from being opened. The thumb of her right hand brushed up against something rough and tight. She stopped, grabbing onto it. It was one of the ropes dissecting the box. A lightbulb went off in her head, her eyes glimmering with hope as she gripped the rope with both hands and pulled.

  The entire box slid up in the shaft half a foot, the pulleys screaming from use but working all the same. She smiled, sticking her tongue out one side of her mouth as she pulled again, moving even further and more freely this time.

  She heard the swift -shunk!- as the chute’s door was slid open again down below her. She could almost see the Womb’s emotionlessly shocked expression now, its head tilted to one side as it found the empty shaft. It made her grin.

  -shhhaut-

  It was a quick sound, lasting little more than half a second and so faint she barely heard it, but it made something in the back of her head twitch.

  -shhhaut-

  She pulled the rope again, feeling its fibers burn red marks into her palms and not caring. She could see a line of light at the top of her box coming from the second floor window. She pulled upwards again and the room came into view, dusty and dank.

  -shhau- -tick!-

  Too late Cathy realized what the sound was as the rope vibrated in her hands and then became loose. There was a split second where she felt weightless, reaching towards the opening with every ounce of speed she could muster. It lasted only moments before the compartment lost its battle with gravity, the rope slicing through the middle, and she began to plummet back down the chute. She screamed as the box shot downward, the draft catching her hair and whipping it up around her head. She braced both palms against either wall as she plummeted past the master bedroom, continuing down for another few seconds until she crashed into its base, creating a mushroom cloud of dust and mold. Her tiny form rocked about the small space as violently as a dice in a cup. Her head slammed against the top of the box at the same time her butt beat against the bottom, making her entire form feel squished as she bit down on her tongue so hard she felt her teeth connect with one another. Blood oozed from the soft flesh into her mouth as she jolted forward, mashing her nose against the door and twisting her arm the wrong way, hearing the bone break easily. The sound echoed off the closed-in walls and made it ten times worse than it actually was. Pain shot up and down her spine like fire. She couldn’t think, couldn’t move. Her head throbbed along with everything else in her body as warm urine trickled from her crotch onto her leg, then into a small puddle in the center of the shaft.

  She sat still for a long moment, focusing on her own breathing as though without her concentration it would stop completely. Something sharp dug into her side that she didn’t want to think about, bringing even more blood out and mixing with the yellow liquid in the middle.

  A black arm burst into the chute, grabbing at her neck with its sharp, bony fingers. They wrapped around her carefully and fully as she yelped in fright, then pulled her through the wall. She screamed as shards of molding and plaster ripped at her skin, the sound muffled by the pile of clothes she was thrown into face first. Crying and whimpering like a beaten pup, she tried to scramble to her feet. She lay her hand against the floor to brace herself. “Agh!” she winced, feeling the bone break even more as it scraped against itself. The monster stepped into the small of her back just as he had John Davis, pinning her down with his foot as something sliced across her arm and drew blood. She screamed and sobbed all at the same time, the type of sound only those new to this world and those about to leave it can make.

  The same sharpness touched the right side of her stomach, pressing into the tender flesh just over the appendix and denting it inward until it was just beyond the breaking point.

  She sobbed again, long and hard. “...please, don’t...” she begged, her voice a whisper. Her shirt and arm were cut, revealing the bruises left by Grendel and other men like him. They would fade eventually, but the emotional bruises would stay for years. She cried as this, her friend’s touch, brought back those memories in ways she didn’t think it ever could, his fingers hungry for her flesh in a way much the same yet very different from those that had hurt her before.

  The killer began to lean in, ca
using the skin to puncture.

  He withdrew it before it went in any great distance, then began to walk back toward the basement door and into the night air. As he did, he turned and looked at her.

  “You’re not even worth the trouble,” he said, in a voice so angry that it wasn’t human.

  Cathy turned to face the Womb, to look Xander in the eyes after what he’d just said. There was nothing there but darkness and moonlight, and the stench of blood that was already seeping down from the two dead bodies upstairs.

  She turned back into the pile of dirty, sweaty, flower-printed laundry, crying as she finally heard the sirens approaching the house.

  Don Smith clenched both his hands in his hair as he stared down at the stack of papers in front of him, pulling until he could feel the tug against his roots.

  The rest of the halls and offices of Beach News Daily were dark that night. He was the only staff member working late, something he’d gotten used to in his years of service.

  It was a small office located in Coral Beach’s lone strip mall, with its own glass-door entrance that was shattered on a monthly basis by idiotic teens looking for cash and finding only bound copies of old newspapers. Once they’d taken a computer. The space had three offices and four employees, making it constantly obvious who resided at the bottom of the pecking order. The editor, the ad salesman and the head reporter, Drake, each got their own.

  Drake had the corner one with windows that opened up to the forest behind the mall. Don had a cubicle-sized storage room with a computer made in 1991 and a printer that constantly spewed toner.

  On the wall were small-press awards the paper had won, along with many empty spots for more plaques and certificates to go. They had not been filled in some time, something the editor made them aware of constantly.

  Don worked day and night trying to find that one good story that might point his career in the right direction. Then, he and his son could move out of that junk house in the crap part of town and into the city, where he could get the big stories, lead a real life and make his son proud of him for the first time since his mother died.

  He brushed a hand through his thinning brown hair, displacing the comb over he’d long since stopped believing was anything close to convincing. Staring down at the pile of papers, contacts and photos on his desk, he saw the stories that had consumed his life and career. ‘Mayor cuts ribbon at new hospital wing.’ ‘Summer Games in Full Swing.’ ‘Less Youth Voting.’ Stories that he thought proved the theory that if you put enough monkeys in a room with a typewriter, eventually they would produce Shakespeare... or at the very least, reasonably competent journalism.

  A month ago, he thought he had written that ticket with a series of stories on the ‘Midnight Massacre’. Detective Carl Dent had given him full access to police files and profiles that had been worked up on the murderer. What he’d found in them had sent chills down his spine and brought a smirk to his lips as he thought of the public’s reaction to such a story. Dent’s forensic psychiatrists had the killer pegged as being somewhere in his late teens to early twenties, around his own son’s age. In fact could have been one of his son’s friends, a notion which he’d forced himself not to consider at the time. They were male and Caucasian, most likely from a broken home (although Dent had focused on an adoptee as a good candidate). They were non-smokers and had real upper-body power. More than that, they had control. Up until each victims last breath every strike had been perfect and pristine. There had been no hesitation lines along any of the wound tracts. It was only after each person died that they got the attention that had turned them each into grotesquely mutilated works of anger. The killer never seemed to really cut loose until after the kill had been made.

  The material had spoken for itself. It almost needed no work or dramatization. He could have simply stuck a by-line on it and sent it to the editor, but instead he had worked it into a piece of journalistic gold then started planning his vacation to Cuba.

  Less than forty-eight hours after the story had gone to print, Genblade had been arrested. Not in his late teens or early twenties. Not from a broken home. Not anywhere close to his profile. The editor had almost torn him a new asshole... and Drake had gotten the story of Genblade’s capture –a story that had attracted national publicity and been run on almost every news outlet, all of which Drake had received royalty checks for.

  He glared past the old-fashioned typewriter he kept on his desk for show and at the computer screen, its harsh artificial glow stinging at his eyes. It was the page that the editor had asked him to lay out and no matter what he did, he could not make the Blockbuster ad fit with his story. Which meant, incidentally, that the story would probably have to be cut down. He thought briefly that he could add some space by removing his by-line. He didn’t particularly want his name on anything he wrote lately anyway.

  Out in the lobby, he heard the fax machine buzz to life and start to churn out paper. Frowning, he looked at his watch, shaking it twice to make sure it was right.

  “The hell sends a fax at this hour?” he grumbled, stepping out into the main office and switching on the light. After a moment’s pause, the lights hummed to life and burned his eyes. He stopped at the receptionist’s desk to rub them, gazing over it at the fax to see if it was another offer to win a free trip to Hawaii.

  It was an All Points Bulletin, to all media outlets.

  He hopped around the desk and snatched the paper off the press, just as it finished printing.

  Across the top in big, bold letters were the words ‘Midnight Massacres Return’.

  He stared at it for a long moment, his face moving from horror to shock... and finally to something resembling glee. He walked back into his office, paper in hand, and opened up the file folder that had been collecting dust on his desk for almost a month now. Inside was the profile he’d printed. If the killer was back... so was the profile.

  Don couldn’t hide his smile.

  This was it.

  He could feel it.

  He was going to break this story wide open.

  Lance Berkshire felt a chill that had nothing to do with the air conditioners as he entered the basement level of the Coral Beach Police Department.

  The metallic room shone a dull blue, its sad sterility making him feel sad and emotionally impotent. The walls of the room were lined with drawers and cabinets, some large and some small. Roughly half the drawers on the wall still had names taped lazily to them from when they had been the final home to so many people weeks ago. In the center of the room were two identical steel tables, each standing at waist height and bolted down to the floor. He walked over to them in a daze, his head swimmy with thoughts he kept trying to force out. There was a body on each table, their mulched flesh ruining the otherwise clean environment. Their skin was white and powdery and even though he had seen it a million times before, he felt his gloved hand move up to touch it. His fingers shook violently, the nervous quakes felt all the way up to his shoulder.

  “Coral Beach Precinct Morgue. My name is Harry Ford. I’ll be your mortician for this evening.”

  Lance Berkshire looked up from the two corpses lined on the tables. He hadn’t even noticed that Harry was there. Snapping out of the trance he’d slipped into, he lowered his hand and swallowed hard to try and get his bearings.

  “Lance? You all right?” Harry asked. It was moments like this that Harry wondered if his job had desensitized him to gore and death. Looking down at the bodies laid not two feet away, fighting off vomiting, he was almost glad. Glad that he wasn’t desensitized. “You up for this tonight, pal? We can reschedule...”

  “Naw, Harry. I’ll be fine,” he lied, staring at the slain people once more before turning his attention to Harry again. “Besides, the papers are already on our backs to release statements about the deceased…”

  It was obscene, referring to them as merely ‘deceased.’ It made it sound like a heart attack, or maybe some word some grieving widow might use to calm he children.
These people were dead, plain and simple. You don’t see people with holes in them that big that are alive.

  “Which one do we start with?” Harry asked, breaking the silence.

  “Um, the male, I guess,” Lance replied, lifting the cloth over the body’s head, revealing its torn face. He turned on his recorder. “Name: John Davis. Weight: 170 lbs. Height: 5 feet 11’’. Cause of death:… stab wound through the trunk.” He clicked off the recorder for a moment, then continued. “Subject’s blood was found throughout the scene of the murder, indicating it came from behind as he was sitting at the time. To add to this theory, we have found traces of leather from the recliner he was sitting on, embedded into his body cavity next to his left lung and kidneys…”

  CHAPTER THREE:

  POWERLESS

  Warm red light shone in through Xander’s eyelids as his mind slowly seeped back to reality, the soft fuzzy feeling of sleep slowly fading from him. Even though the sunlight on his face was warm and bright, he still shivered from head to toe, making the springs of his mattress cry out from the sudden effort. Moaning, he turned over and opened his eyes. It took considerable effort, the lids feeling like they were swollen and fused shut with gook. Grumbling, he reached up and rubbed them with the knuckle of his right hand. It stung fiercely. When he opened his eyes and looked at it, the skin across all four knuckles had been ripped off.

  Across the room his curtain billowed and flailed in the midmorning draft, the cold fall breeze taking away some of the rank stench left by the whiskey and the fire. The odd scent of burnt air still lingered though, refusing to go away like the last guest of a party that went dreadfully wrong.

  He rose up and sat on the edge of his bed for a moment, stretching both of his arms back until he felt the stiff vertebra in the center of his back pop, releasing the pressure that the night’s activities had stored there. It radiated over his entire backside for a second before shimmering away in a hail of gooseflesh encouraged by the chill on the air, the wind feeling good against his naked skin.