Ulrich wasn't fond of insects. His jobs sometimes took him to seedy motels whose reputations for illicit activities were second only to their reputations for perennial infestations, and encountering bugs had always made him squeamish. Once, when spying on a man on behalf of his suspicious wife-- a job that'd paid a pittance and had only been worthwhile due to its simplicity-- a fat cockroach had dropped down onto the back of his jacket, and he hadn't noticed till he returned to his apartment and took the garment off. The little monstrosity had hitched a ride, giving no indication of its presence until he spotted it darting across his living room carpet. He hadn't slept that whole night, had dedicated himself to capturing the thing and subsequently spending what little he'd made on the case in thoroughly fumigating his apartment, just in case there'd been some other hangers-on.
The area near the sinks had been done up with tile flooring. Those few porcelain tiles that were not broken were so awfully soiled that their designs were impossible to glean. He could tell only that the tiles had once been a whitish color, and that they'd covered nearly half of the room. Ulrich spent a bit of time scanning these with his light, cautiously tapping away small mounds of garbage with the toe of his boot.
It was quickly becoming clear that evidence would be hard to come by in this place. Short of sifting through the contents of the building with a sieve, he was unlikely to stumble upon anything of significance to the case. If his eyes were right, then the kitchen broke off into a narrow hall which was fronted by a short flight of stairs. What lay beyond them remained a mystery. Maybe he'd find something more compelling there.
While further canvassing the mess at his feet, Ulrich heard a sound that immediately saw him stagger three steps back. His heart thrashed violently in protest while one of the stairs ahead was heard to groan with a ponderous weight. His hand shot up reflexively, bringing to light the far side of the room, but from his current position there was no good view of the three or four stairs that led from the kitchen.
What he did see, a mere flicker in the light of his screen, was an impression of pale, white flesh.
An intruder?
A limb, perhaps a hand, had been glimpsed at that very moment when he'd deigned to raise his light source, and it had vanished just as quickly. The owner of that porcelain-colored limb could be heard to flee up the stairs and into some yet unexplored portion of the building precipitously. The air around him was disturbed by the pounding of heavy footfalls. The slapping sound of the soles meeting the floor seemed to indicate that the intruder, whoever it was, fled barefoot.
Ulrich's muscles seized awfully, leaving him anchored in place and shaking. He fought to brace his arms, to take up some kind of awkward defensive stance while also keeping his phone poised ahead of him. Should the individual race back down towards him, he didn't want to be caught unaware. The light danced around, illuminating the foot of those few sagging stairs. Though he focused on that spot where the figure had been but a moment ago, he found himself overwhelmed by a desire to continue scanning the kitchen around him, lest something else should materialize in the shadow and approach him from behind.
Ulrich was no fighter. He'd had his share of brawls as a kid, had crossed fists with a few drunkards in his university days, but he was far from a trained fighter. Combat was not so uncommon in his line of work, except that in most of his investigations, as in many other situations, would-be brawlers were dissuaded from aggressions by his imposing size. Though thin and lean, Ulrich was a tall man by any standard, with broad shoulders and long arms that provided him great reach. Unpracticed punches from those arms of his could build up a great deal of momentum and wreak havoc if they connected, and more often than not his opponents would opt to work things out verbally, rather than risk a stiff right to the top of the head. The investigator was not particularly confident in his abilities, however, and whenever a physical danger presented itself, he found himself running on sheer instinct.
He couldn't think, his mind dominated by the pounding of his heart and his eyes wide with apprehension. With one fist balled, he held it out in front of him and hoped it might be sufficient to ward off whoever—or whatever-- lurked ahead.
Someone had been there with him, he was sure of it now. His suspicion had been correct all along; someone had been watching him from the minute he'd walked in. Before that, even. He'd sensed the eyes of an onlooker before he'd even left the driver's seat. But who could it be? What were they doing all alone in such an awful place as this? Surely it wasn't a lone college student or local seeking thrills? More likely, he thought, gritting his teeth, it was someone associated with the disappearance of Dr. Klein, returned to the site to clear up some evidence that'd been left behind in the plot that'd led to his disappearance. Deciding this to be the likeliest possibility, Ulrich steeled himself, took in a deep breath, and bellowed in a loud voice. “I've seen you. Come out of there with your hands up.” It was all he could do to keep his voice from catching in his throat. If the intruder did come out as per his command, then he had no idea what he'd do from there. He didn't carry a weapon and wasn't much used to apprehending perpetrators.
There was only one thing he couldn't account for, and that was the utter paleness of the intruder's skin. Though he'd glimpsed the individual only a moment, he was certain as he was of anything that they possessed skin so fair as to be unnatural. It was the skin of someone who had never seen the sun, the skin of someone, perhaps, accustomed to lurking in the darkness.
His spine began to tingle, cold sweat wreathing his collar. He narrowed his gaze and focused on what he'd just seen. Could he be so sure that it'd been a human limb darting by? Shuddering, he assured himself it was so. To consider anything else was simply too grotesque and implausible.
“Show yourself or I'll call the police straight away!” he called, his voice a bit frailer this time. He carefully peered at his screen, noticing with a groan that he had no reception in this old building. There'd be no hope of his calling anyone from here, and it made his stomach churn. Sighing, he took a step forward. “I-I'd hate to have to rough you up!” he said, not a little unconvincingly. His knees were practically knocking together, and his eyes scanned the floor for some implement he might use as a makeshift weapon. None presented itself.
The house was still, silent. The intruder could not be heard to stir, had probably taken shelter in some dark corner where an ambush could be staged. Ulrich did his best to calm his heart, lest its pounding drown out any obvious signs of his opponent's return, but even as his pulse quieted down, he couldn't make out anything in the way of noise. The infirmary was silent as a crypt, and the air had become stiflingly still once again.
Staggering forward, he stood at the foot of the stairs and looked upward, flinching as he did so. “Don't say I d-didn't warn you!”
There was no one there. Four steps led up to a small landing from which a more substantial stairwell began towards the upper level. Shaken, Ulrich hesitated and then bounded up those four steps, turning quickly around the corner and expecting his assailant to lash out from the stairwell.
The stairwell was empty however, the space replete with a stuffy darkness. The stairs groaned terribly, the boards flexing beneath his feet and making him reach for the wall for fear that they might give out. There'd been a handrail once, but it survived only in fragments, which were tethered to the wall tenuously by loose bolts. Whether the staircase could bear his weight remained to be seen. His opponent, who'd bounded up it in a furious hurry, seemed to have done so without incident.
Ulrich's stomach turned. Carefully studying the stairs, he brought his light within inches of the nearest few and found that the dust on each board was completely undisturbed. If someone had run up the stairs just moments ago, as he'd witnessed, then they'd done so in a way that he could not fathom. There were no footprints, no indications that anyone had just tread there despite his knowledge to the contrary. This knowledge poisoned his mind with a harsher fear than he'd yet encountered, and he was some momen
ts in composing himself, biting down on his chapped lower lip and quivering like gelatin. Cautiously mounting the stairs after a time, Ulrich continued his perusal, studying each one for signs of the bare feet he'd heard stomping away from him just moments before.
There were none.
It was as though the intruder had turned the corner onto the landing and then slipped away though the wall, or evaporated into nothingness.
But that wasn't possible, was it?
Not unless he was willing to place credence in those dread fancies he'd begun to entertain since entering the Sick House; in those notions of grinning specters and horrors unnamable that Jerome had mentioned. The locals thought the Sick House a haunted place, crammed with nightmares. Surely that wasn't really the case? Ulrich knew better than to fall into such lines of thought, though under the circumstances, ideas of the paranormal were proving ever more convincing to him.
Every passing moment, every step coated in perfectly undisturbed dust, served to solidify the reality of such preternatural things in his mind. At that moment Ulrich would have been open to the existence of a great and many things that he would have been all too happy to deny on any other day of his life, such was the fear that embraced his mind.
Beside himself now with terror and doubting his own senses, Ulrich loosed a nervous little laugh. He braced himself against the wall half-way up the stairs and turned his gaze upward to the pitch-black darkness of the second story. The back of his neck was tingling and his hand was going numb from gripping the edges of his phone. Switching hands, he gradually continued his climb, but not before uttering a few curses under his breath. He wasn't being paid enough for this; the mold he'd seen earlier, maybe, had entered his system and was now inducing hallucinations. That had to be it. He'd read an article not so long ago that certain species of mold had been found to produce spores that, when inhaled, caused humans to hallucinate. The runny, tarry mold caused by water damage in the downstairs was likely of just that sort. When this investigation was through he'd see a doctor, would pursue whatever treatment was necessary to avoid any long-term damage.
And he'd be sure to stick that asshole Jerome with the bill.
In the next moment, Ulrich was forced to wonder just how it was possible, then, that a hallucination could interact with him as though it were real. Pleased with the notion that the intruder had been merely a combination of visual and auditory hallucinations induced by mold toxicity, the investigator found his nerves soothed and continued up the stairs with newfound strength.
Imagine, then, his surprise when it was all sapped away forthwith the moment he reached the top of the stairwell and elucidated the edge of the long upstairs hallway that now opened before him.
There shouldn't have been anything, or anyone, of note in the hallway, but upon his arrival Ulrich tracked something just a few feet away. It flickered as it was caught in the glow of his light, and suddenly sprang towards him from a crouched position.
It was, as best as he could describe it in that instant, a person. An inadequate description, but the only one he could furnish under the circumstances.
Full-fledged personhood was likely too great an honor to bestow upon the sickly, ghastly figure that sprang out at him from the side, grasping his arm and then vanishing in the next instant into a cloud of something like dust just as Ulrich dropped his phone down the stairs. It was a gruesome facsimile of humanity, boasting skin of brilliant, ghostly whiteness and sparse, discolored hair that gave an impression of serious disease. The encounter lasted only a moment; he blinked, gasped, and it was gone.
In that brief instant he'd noted a few firm details; though its face had been obscured, its wrinkled, sagging body had looked more or less human. A long, bony arm with vein-ridden hands gave it the look of something ancient. The whitish hair that erupted from the top of its head was sparse, and there were scabrous spots where locks had been forcibly torn from the scalp. Illness and suffering were called to mind by the frail being, and coupled with the shock of the ambush came a sense of intense disgust, like he'd just been groped by something diseased.
One moment, it'd been there. The next, it'd gone.
How was it possible? No human or animal that he knew of was capable of fleeing that quickly. No creature he knew of was able to vanish into thin air like a mist.
There was only one possibility, only one way for him to describe the thing that'd accosted him, but his turbid mind wouldn't allow it. A lifetime of skepticism burst to the fore, trying to combat the flood of terror that pulsed through his brain and infused his nervous system with all the energy it might need to stage his own flight.
A ghost. That's what it had been. A goddamned ghost. But ghosts didn't exist, did they?
Ulrich didn't stand there to speculate.
When his phone was thrust from his hand, loosened by the sudden, frigid grasp of the dreadful specter, his surroundings were plunged into a frightful darkness that he feared he might never emerge from. It was nothing to be proud of, but when the initial shock had run its course, Ulrich loosed a series of yelps and staged as speedy a retreat as was possible.
All but leaping down the stairs, the investigator clumsily navigated the pitch darkness, tripping and burying one of his knees in the wall. Bits of plaster fell away onto the stairs as a result, interfering with his traction as he continued. Ulrich began to tumble, catching himself only narrowly and reaching the landing with such a thud that the boards beneath his feet were heard to crack. Dropping to his knees, one of which was too sore to support his full weight, he sought out his phone on the floor with wide, blind swipes. The flashlight had gone off, though he was relieved to find that the screen still functioned when finally he recovered it. Murmuring, he tapped frenziedly at the screen until the flashlight came on, and then, without looking back, darted through the kitchen, through the short hall, through the stubborn metal door he'd managed to open and, finally, into the front room. The door to the infirmary was still open, and outside the rain was coming down in sheets. Day had fled and dim evening was seated firmly in its place.
It didn't matter. Without hesitation Ulrich raced out into the early evening, the field rendered in growing darkness and only the faintest vestige of the sun still visible above the imposing line of trees. His boots were caught up in the mud, and he fell into one of countless puddles that now teemed throughout the field. Icy water soaked into his slacks, covered his jacket, splashed his face. Clawing his way up, Ulrich gasped and sputtered, running back the way he'd come.
He ran past the dark side of the building, then the rear, where the swollen bodies of brown birds were trampled underfoot and still others floated in over-gorged puddles as though in leisure. The investigator fell no less than three times, the mud sucking one of his boots off of his foot and sending him to the ground, hard. He felt himself on the verge of a breakdown, thrusting his hands into the mud in search of his missing footwear.
When finally he made it back onto the road, which was so hideously sodden that it could scarcely be called such, he fought his way into the SUV. Neglecting to shut off the alarm, he used the key and jumped into he driver's seat, the security system blaring over the rain and the distant sounds of thunder. He slumped in his seat, slamming the key into the ignition as hard as he could, and taking only a moment to gasp for breath.
As soon as he was able he wiped the mud and rain from his eyes and punched the accelerator. The SUV made a terrible noise as the tires dug into the mud. For a moment he feared it wouldn't budge, that the mud had become too thick and the vehicle had been stranded. Subsequent efforts to advance proved fruitful however, and before long Ulrich was coasting recklessly down the other side of the hill that had brought him to the Sylvan Infirmary, hydroplaning down a waterlogged street that led him he knew not where.
His body ached, he could scarcely see for the rain that slammed the windows and his heart refused to slow down. His lungs were burning so that it was hard to breathe and the only thing he could manage was to stomp on t
he accelerator, putting as much distance as was possible between himself and the accursed Sick House.
The tingling on his arm where the thing in the house had gripped his wrist had not subsided. Despite the passage of some several minutes and his intense focus on staging an escape, his flesh felt sore, tampered with in a peculiar way. Still hyperventilating, he drew up the mud-slick sleeve of his coat and discovered, on the pale swath of skin just above his wrist, a perfect impression of a handprint. It was captured there in dark hues like a serious bruise or burn, and each of the thin fingers were distinct against the milk-colored canvas of his flesh as he blanched.
Surely the thing hadn't grabbed him that hard, had it? And, for that matter, it had been a hallucination, right? No hallucination could actually mark his body in this way. He rubbed at it softly, his gaze darting between the road and the mark on his arm. He recoiled as he did so, recalling with entirely too much clarity the thing that'd left it. Before finding himself so marked his harried mind had been in the process of a shambling recovery. He'd begun to revisit his earlier mold hypothesis, was actively seeking explanations which might help his fevered mind to disregard the incident at the top of the stairwell and which, with any luck, would inject into the situation enough reason for him to feel reassured in his own sanity.
The mark on his forearm was not the product of mold. That much was certain. Something corporeal, or at least semi-corporeal-- if such things even existed-- had taken hold of his arm. He'd not only seen it with his own eyes, but had this little memento now to show for it.
Ulrich wished he'd never set foot in the Sick House. To go there alone, without informing anyone of his whereabouts, had been incredibly reckless. He'd put his life on the line and gained nothing for it.
The Sick House: An Occult Thriller (The Ulrich Files Book 1) Page 6