Spriggan: Dark horror fantasy

by Julius Schenk

  ‘Get out all of you’ he passed his phone key to her ‘call the ambulance ‘she was shoved out of the room, to the sounds of Ella crying.

  Vicky went into the kitchen in a daze, unlocked the phone and with shaking fingers, managed to dial, zero, zero, zero.

  By the time the ambulance and police arrived, at least three hours had gone by. She didn’t think she spoke a single word to anyone in that time. She just sat on the wooden steps of the farm house, smoking in a chain, and drinking the glasses of water that Bree, kept handing her. She was deep in shock, as was everyone else. No one talked, no one knew what to say. Her leg was aching as well, and it annoyed her that she was thinking of her own pain while they were dead.

  The police car was flashing its lights, they came up the road, blue and white flashing through the trees, but the ambulance wasn’t. She had told them, what she assumed, there had been a horrible accident, and two people were dead. There were two police in the car. An older man and a young brown-haired girl with a tight pony tail. They got out of the car, quickly. Typical Australian cops, blue uniforms, and guns strapped to their hips, English cops didn’t carry guns, but Australian ones did.

  ‘You Victoria?’ he asked, walking up to her.

  ‘Yes sir’ she managed.

  ‘Where are they?’ he asked.

  ‘In the bathroom, upstairs’ she answered.

  The man directed the ambulance crew up; they carried a stretcher with them.

  Everyone was milling around the house, and after what seemed an age he yelled out ‘can I get everyone in this room please, we’ll need to talk to you all.’

  He went up with the ambulance crew and was in the room for about twenty minutes, he came back. As they took her body with them, two men carried it down on a stretcher. In a blue bag, with someone in it. Vicky started crying, she really couldn’t believe it. They came back and took the boy’s body next and then Ella was led out by the female cop and set in the front seat of the ambulance.

  He sat the group down. It was everyone plus Roger.

  ‘ok, Ella has told me a lot, and we’ll be taking her back to town, we’ve contacted the families, and she will have people waiting for her, but I want to confirm her story.’

  ‘Vicky, you called us?’ he asked.

  ‘Roger asked me too, so I did’ she said, lighting her 20th smoke.

  ‘Ok, Roger you were in the caravan’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I was.’ He said.

  ‘They tell me everyone was in this room, you heard a scream, went up, the door was locked, broke it down, they were dead already’ he said and looked to Vicky and Bree who saw this.

  ‘we were all here except Roger’ Vicky said

  The police looked at her ‘I know, but the door was locked, but the room has a window, and hang on.’

  The young brown-haired cop came in and spoke to him.

  ‘ok,’ then, he went to where Roger sat down. ‘Roger lynch, I’m placing you under arrest, for the production of illegal videos and suspicion of murder.’ He put the cuffs on Roger.

  ‘Kim, get him out, while I explain this.’ Roger stood meekly, and she walked him out of the door, going in front of her.

  ‘so, guys, I’m Sargent Wilson, Jim, now we have some very strange deaths, we have a broken window, and scratch marks up the wall and a few dead Scorpions but most of all, I'm very sorry to say, we found a wireless camera behind that mirror. When it smashed it showed a space behind it, he was filming it seems.’

  Vicky was horrified, she’d been naked in that room, those Germans had had sex in that shower before. Roger the Perv was filming them, she knew he’d been up to something, and this was it. She knew she hated him, and once again her suspicions had proven to be true. Why were people such horrible shits?

  ‘Now we have searched his caravan and found the laptop, but we need our computer team to look over it and make sure they weren’t distributed. Also, it will show us what happened to your friends, because right now I have no idea what occurred.’

  Vicky fought the shock that this perv had her naked and maybe sold it. She’d have to see if her boyfriend could help her find out.

  ‘You think he killed them’ Vicky asked

  ‘Probably not, it seems like a very horrible accident, maybe they saw the scorpions and freaked out and slipped, maybe drugs were involved, but Australia is very tough on privacy and porn production, sorry, so he’ll be getting a lot of time. If any of you feature in the videos, I’ll be asking you to give statements.’

  Liam spoke up ‘what do we do now? We’re volunteers, we have to leave if Roger is gone and I don’t want to be here anymore, at all.’

  ‘You’ll need to stay for at least a few days so I can contact you all, I’m sure you’ll want to know if the videos have been distributed, don’t worry we have protocol for this sort of thing, the videos won’t be used unless for evidence and then we fuzz out everything. Is there another bathroom?’ he asked.

  Vicky nodded, ‘ok, no one goes in there, it’s a crime scene now.’

  He stood up and went to leave.

  ‘Vicky stay by the phone, I’ll call you’ he said, ‘and you can call me anytime’ he said. ‘I’ve spoken to the brother, Gareth, he’ll be here tomorrow, and we’ll be back to do more investigation.’

  After the cops had left, she looked around the table, at who was left.

  Her, Bree, Liam, and the two Italians.

  ‘what do we do now’ she said

  Liam, the Irish guys spoke up ‘I’m getting drunk on his wine, and I think we should all use his phone as much as we can’ he said

  ‘That’s a good idea, I’m sure we have people we need to talk to’ Vicky said.

  She put the key to the phone on the table, ‘use it as much as you want, and if he had a wireless camera, he must have the internet not that he told us. Liam, you want to try to find the router with me?’

  ‘only if I can piss on his bed’ he said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jim sat in the front of his cruiser. The perp, Roger Linden, was in the back behind a wall of wire and had his hands neatly cuffed in front of him. He let Kim drive the two hours back to Gordonville station. He was a country cop but had dealt with this family before, and he’d talked to the gold coast cyber-crimes unit. This guy was going to be charged with as many as ten different offenses, ranging from breaches of privacy to the production of pornography and something like creating an unsafe working environment.

  He didn’t think he’d killed those kids, but he couldn’t figure it out. There were also a few strange reports of missing people, some council worker, and a girl a few years ago. He would have to watch the tape. In most cases where you couldn’t understand someone's behavior, he’d found it was normally drugs. Backpackers bored on a farm, they might have taken something. The lab would test their blood, and he’d know for sure.

  ‘So, Roger, you’re in a world of shit mate’’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t hurt those kids’ Roger said.

  ‘we’ll find out about that, but I mean the videos, did you sell them, you’ll get a lot more time if you did. Or why they just for you, private collection?’

  He seemed to think about talking, long drives we’re good, no lawyers just the guilty party and hours to think.

  ‘They were just for me’ he said

  ‘Oh, that’s fine then, you’re still sunk, and if any of those kids are under 18, you’re really in for it.’

  ‘I need to talk to my brother’ He said.

  ‘will you, need to tell him to delete some emails?’ Jim asked.

  He was glad to be arresting this arsehole, his own family were in the wine business, and he was far from a fan of the way these guys did business. They always used cheap and volunteer labor, paid unskilled Vietnamese, a slave wage to keep their profits high, now he was doing this sick shit. Jim had a young daughter too, and she was a traveler. He couldn’t imagine how these kids felt right now.

  ‘That farm is cursed, I reckon’ he sa
id, to no one.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Kim asked.

  ‘You’re too young, but one of my first cases was there, at that house, twenty years ago’ he said.

  ‘What was it’ she asked.

  ‘Mass suicide, religious family, all hung themselves’ he said.

  He remembered the events like they happened yesterday, he let his mind go back to that horrible day. It might give him some insight into what happened here. He remembered a call from the local vicar, the French family had missed church, and that was strange. Also, no one was answering their phones. This was back before everyone had a mobile and landlines were a necessity.

  He took the car out by himself. He was in his twenties, new to the force and no one thought it would be anything. The biggest cases they got were people coming from the city to steal people’s tractors and farm equipment from unlocked sheds.

  The phones were always going out, and there had been some high winds in the last few days. Driving out he half expected to see a Telstra van working on a broken phone line, but didn’t.

  He remembered pulling into the farm and stepping out of his car. Their own car was there. He looked through the window, and the keys were in the ignition. Weird, he’d thought. He called out, but no one had answered.

  It was very quiet; he remembered that. He went to the front door; it swung open. He remembered drawing his gun and stepping in, feeling worried straight away. The big main room opened to him, and he saw them. It was his first bodies, and they stank. The smell of death filled his nose, and he tried not to reach. They were all there. The mother, father and three kids, Andy, Sarah and Rachel.

  He'd never seen anything like it, until today. They all hung in a neat row, by their necks from the ceiling, At the time there was a huge wooden beam that crossed the room. Around it was rough knots, that dug into their dead and blotted necks. Their slowly rotting bodies swung slightly as he looked.

  He could tell they had been there for a long time. Their bodies were horrid and swollen; it was hard to see their faces clearly. He knew these people, he’s seen them around town when they came in for a big shop. It was hard to reconcile their faces with the dead visions of pain he now saw.

  He staggered out of the house like a drunk, pushing the door hard. He made it back to his car and using the radio, called in for back up and as many ambulances as they had.

  The back-up took hours to arrive, and he wouldn’t go back inside until they got there. If he was honest with himself, he was scared. He lived in a world where the police were the friendly force that helped people, not ones that had to look at the face of evil.

  That case had always bothered him; he would find himself waking for years, in a frightened mess. The swinging family looking at him with glazed, frozen eyes, accusing him. The worst thing was he felt they never really found out what happened. They had ideas, they had suspicions and theories, but that’s all they were. They never solved it.

  The official cause of death was murder/suicide. After searching the house, they found many books of scripture and the end of times. The running theory was the man, Mr. French, snapped and killed his family, and then hung himself. It never seemed that way to him. He thought they had been murdered all of them, there was no note, and there were no chairs or tables to stand on. The man could have hung them, but then how did he hang himself?

  Also, his vicar said he indeed had a lot of end of times Scripture, even built a bomb shelter in his backyard, but he loved his family and would never hurt them, he thought suicide was a sin. He never liked that case, but he was just the one who found the bodies, no one cared what he thought.

  The strangest thing was they weren’t hanging from ropes, but rather vines. They had the vines analyzed, and they were from a fig tree. The only fig near there was a huge one, about a kilometer away in a nature reserve. He couldn’t understand why the father, presumably, went and got these vines. Hung his family and then himself.

  He’d gone out to that fig tree a few days later. He hated it, big twisted thing, that grew by drawing in other trees and killing them. He looked it all over but couldn’t see any missing vines. The case was closed, and the farm was forgotten about. It sat getting increasingly run down; the local people avoided it, never talked about it. It just sat and fell into ruin and dereliction; he would have burnt it down if he wasn’t police.

  Then, of course, the lynch family had bought it along with everything else they could get their hands on.

  Coming out of his memory he spoke to Roger ‘you guys know about the history of that place; did you know when you bought it?’ he asked.

  ‘I sure didn’t, but I don’t handle things like that, ask Gareth, he was the one that bought it, but I’m sure he did, it would have been cheaper, and it’s not like ghosts can kill you.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Vicky had met her boyfriend at a bar, of course, he was part of a new people to Melbourne group, one of the hosts. He said he liked free drinks and she assumed it was a good way to meet girls. They had first talked standing around the front smoking. His name was Daniel, and he was what she was looking for in a guy. Friendly, sweet, and confident. Also, being skinny, liking punk rock and having a leather jacket didn’t hurt.

  He’d chased her which was nice, but he’d won her over when once he asked what she liked in a man, she’d said a beard. Next time she saw him, he had a week’s worth of growth on his normally clean-shaven face. It was sweet and funny, but he did look good with a beard. They lived together in Melbourne, their relationship was on the express road. She’d moved in after a few weeks. His logic was if she might have to leave soon, the then plan, they could at least have a great few weeks together. That was six months ago. Now she wanted to stay for another year, so she needed to do three months ‘regional work’. She now wished she’d just taken him back to England.

  She always considered herself tough emotionally. Her parents were still alive, and her life had been a good one, even if a fair share of truly awful things had happened to her when she was younger and more trusting. Still, the moment she heard her boyfriend’s voice on the other end of the phone, she started to cry. Vicky realized she’d been trying to be tough, to hold it together for the others, but she didn’t need to pretend with him.

  When she put the events of the last week in order and said them aloud, they seemed made up. Some things were too horrible to be real. They sounded like something out of a horror movie. First, a girl was just gone, some worker was missing, Bree got bee attacked, the guys just left and then finally she got to witness the truly horrible deaths of Ella and her boyfriend. She felt guilty that she didn’t even know what his name was.

  To top it all off, Her and the others staying at the house where they were being filmed by Roger the pervert. It made her sick to her stomach to think about it. She didn’t care if he hadn’t passed the videos around the fact that gross worm had seen her naked was enough to make her sick.

  The events of the last few days came pouring out, he listened to her talk and he could say at the end was ‘come home.'

  ‘I can’t come back yet, the police need me to stay a few days, they need to find out if the videos have been distributed and for us to give statements, they also need to find out what happened to the poor Germans’ she said.

  ‘That is crazy to the extreme, first, let’s put your mind at rest, it won’t have been distributed, not yet, but I can find out if anyone else had access to his feed and raw footage’ he said.

  As far as she knew, he was a programmer and played a lot of video games, but he often threatened to destroy people from her past, who had hurt her. She assumed it was with his computer, not that he talked about it. He just stayed up late a lot of nights and programmed ‘mods’ for Skyrim to make it so you could marry someone called ‘Serena.' Or have a bear as a “follower.”

  ‘what’s the guy's name and if you can get more info like his date of birth, also did he email you at all? Did you get any kind of confirmation?’ He asked.
>
  ‘yeah from a Gmail’ she said.

  ‘ok, I’ll get that and then we should know, I'm sure he’s dumb enough to talk about it or have registered the server through his email and paid with his credit card. Once I find that out I can see the feed and who else can access it, hopefully, no one.’

  She was relaxing, plans were good.

  ‘Do you want the videos of you gone, I can try to get the ones online’ he asked.

  ‘Will he still be charged?’ she asked

  ‘Australia isn’t like America, people don’t need to press charges, they do need the videos as proof, but the camera is enough and the videos of the others, I can get any videos online, but not on his computer, as I guess the cops took it and won't reconnect it to the net.’ he said.

  ‘Just do what you can, I know it’ll be ok, but it’s so gross’ she said.

  ‘It's truly horrible, and the worst thing is now you’ll be checking everywhere we travel to, I’ll have to buy you a wireless signal finder ‘he said.

  She laughed, she could imagine herself testing a room for bugs and cameras now.

  ‘Give me a day, and I’ll know, but I think you have something else to worry about’ he said.

  She could hear there was a real concern in his voice.

  ‘Well I’ve been researching as were talking and there are a few news articles about this place’ he said.

  ‘Like what?’ she said

  ‘French family mass suicide’ he said, ‘seems twenty years ago a whole family hung themselves, or the father hung them and then himself’ he said.

  ‘Bloody hell’ She said.

  ‘That’s not all.’

  What else could there be?

  ‘There is some blog post from a woman, about two years ago, trying to find her daughter, backpacker, work away, never came home. Do you know anything about that guy, Nick, who left or Bill the other one?’

  ‘Not really’ she said

  ‘Ok, I’m getting on a plane and coming, when you talk to that a-hole Gareth get signed off for the three months, or you sell your story to women's weekly’ He said.