by Joey Ruff
Atop him was another: older-looking, grey beard, missing teeth, torn flannel shirt, holy sweatpants, a single beat-up tennis shoe. He was blood-soaked, strangling the first and clawing at his chest.
Then I realized it was me I was pitying, and I wasn’t standing on the lawn, I was riding the door, my back still to it, and looking into those feral eyes, thick strands of syrup falling from broken grey teeth.
As we hit the lawn, the door shattered to pieces under me, and the bum and I bounced together before I remembered how to use my legs and kicked him the fuck off.
I went to reach for my Glock and realized it wasn’t there.
I heard something and looked back at the house, seeing a flash of brown hair erupt from an upstairs window in a mist of broken glass and wood splinters.
With a look of intensity in his eyes, Ape landed as lightly as a gymnast on the front walk, and I heard the bum just behind me roar in protest and challenge.
Ape lifted his Glock and fired three rounds.
Out of the corner of my eye, the bum staggered and toppled over onto his side.
I struggled to my feet as Ape tossed the Glock into the grass beside him. He shot me a proud grin, and I shrugged it off. “What? I had him,” I said.
“Like Hell.”
Before I could say anything else, there was a belch of fury, a quick motion, and I was tossed back on my arse as the tramp charged past me, oozing blood and puss and flecks of white foam, running on all fours like an animal. He took the distance to the porch in a few seconds.
Ape was ready for him and caught him on the chin with a punch to make a prizefighter proud. He hit him in the stomach twice, but as he came up again, the bum head-butted him so hard that Ape staggered back.
I gained my feet and yelled, “Hang on, mate, I’m coming!”
Ape fell back against the porch steps and toppled over onto his arse. Before he could recover, a dirty, taloned hand went for his throat, lifted him from the ground and pinned him to the pillar that held up the porch roof.
Ape had both hands grappling against the man’s wrist, fighting for purchase, and his face began to blanch ashen as he managed to squeak out a strained, “Erk…Jono…”
I was already in motion.
He only had a moment to squeeze my partner and play dolly with him while I pulled Grace from her holster and chambered a couple bolo rounds. By the time my foot hit the first of those porch steps, Ape had only been in the air for a moment. With a flick of the wrist, I snapped the barrel closed. I leveled my sights on the back of the old bum’s neck, took a deep breath, and fingered Grace ‘til she came.
It was a loud and sweet sound, the way she moaned.
Ape fell in a gasp, breathing quickly and deeply, his face spattered and sprayed with warmth. Beside him, tumbled the dirty, limp bum.
“Ha!” I called.
Ape took a deep breath. “Well, that was subtle.”
“He was choking you. Grace blows his head into the dining room, and that’s the thanks I get?”
“You get off on this stuff. If I hadn’t leaned away, it would have been a two-for-one deal.”
“I saved your life. I really don’t think you should complain.”
Ape held out a hand, and I hoisted him to his feet.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Unless you want another unfinished case, we go back inside and ID Julie Easter.”
“Go back in the house?” I said. I remembered those pink fingernails, that strawberry blonde hair. “I don’t…I don’t think we’ll find anything good, Ape.”
“I’m sorry, Jono. The case isn’t closed yet, and there’s something I need you to see.”
“What is it?”
He shrugged. “No idea. But whatever this guy was doing here…It was bad. Like really bad.”
And with that, he ducked back inside.
I took a deep breath. “Bollocks.”
2
I don’t know what I expected. I guess I thought the house wouldn’t seem so ominous without the blood-thirsty cannibal hobo in it. In a way, it didn’t, but in another, it seemed just as bat-shit scary as before. It was almost irrational. Ape didn’t seem to feel it, or, at least if he did, he hid it quite well.
“I didn’t tell you,” he said, pulled a metal wand out of his vest pocket and stooped over the bloody mess next to the stairs. “Those pallets you knocked over, there’s a hole underneath that leads to the sewers.”
“So?” I said. “What I want to know is, where did you go?”
“What are you talking about?”
“When I was getting my arse stomped by frankenhobo. Where did you go?”
“Did you want me to hold your hand? We’d split up.” He bent closer to examine something on the body, moved strands of hair that were coated in a thick, sticky syrup. “This guy’s probably been using the sewers to get in and out of the house.”
“Don’t fucking change the subject.” I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and dabbed it against the scrapes on my neck. Felt the hot-cold burn on my skin. There was little blood. “You obviously heard the gun shots. Where the fuck were you?”
“Stop being melodramatic, Jono. When you needed me, I stepped in. Most of the time, you had everything under control.”
“Damn right I had everything under control. I saved your arse.” I glanced at the head, lying there in the empty dining room. In the dim light it looked like a kicked-in watermelon. “How did you end up on the second floor, anyway? We were in front of the stairs the whole time.”
Ape looked up at me, a piece of dripping meat dangling from a pair of tweezers in his hand. “It’s a big house, Jono. There’s another staircase in the back. When we split up, I didn’t find anything on the lower floor, so I figured I’d clear the upstairs. I wanted to make sure we weren’t in for any more surprises.”
“Well, you took your sweet time,” I said.
He put the tissue in a little glass test tube, stopped it up, and placed it back in his pocket. He snipped some blonde hairs and sealed them in a little sandwich baggie. It was weird, watching him work. He didn’t look like a lab tech or a science nerd; he looked like a hairy fucking college student: black v-neck tee under a grey-plaid vest, cargo-style khaki pants, and a fedora hat.
I had to turn away after a moment; I couldn’t handle the blood.
Insane, psycho-killer hobo blood is different. I can bathe in that shit, gargle it in my mouth. Little girls, though…. I blame Tawny and Anna for that.
I was eight when Tawny was hit. We were riding our bikes. She rode off the sidewalk for a minute. The car came speeding by. Neither saw the other. But the blood…
With Anna, there was never one moment, just a cycle of pain and hospital visits strung together by sleepless nights, heartache, and the complete and utter feeling of despair and hopelessness. I’ve been a cop and I’ve been a hunter; I’ve watched people die, but…well, she was different. She was my first.
Anna didn’t bleed, but there was an awful lot of vomiting, diarrhea, and other fluids. What there was, hell, was more pain than anyone should have to endure. But she didn’t cry. If I live ‘til the end of time, I’ll never meet anyone braver than her. She was six years old. Nobody deserved that.
“What I want to show you is upstairs,” Ape said. He stood from the body and crossed to the foot of the stairwell.
“You go,” I said. “I’m tired. I’ve got blood on me, my eyes hurt, and I have to take a shit.”
“I need you, and you need to see this. Maybe you can get a reading?”
“I told you I’m tired and in no mood to sift through some soddin’ memoirs.”
“Not that kind of reading, and you know it.” He turned and climbed.
“We need to call the cops. Hell, who knows? Maybe somebody heard the shots. They could be here any minute.”
He didn’t turn to look at me. “In this neighborhood, they won’t be in any hurry, and you know that. Still, better get moving. You don’t want to be caught disturbin
g another crime scene.”
I was still a little shaky from the fight, and that bothered me. I didn’t get scared on a case. Yet as I watched after Ape, deciding whether or not I would actually follow him, I felt a tinge of real, little-kid-scared-of-the-dark, irrational terror. I couldn’t tell Ape that, but I couldn’t just stand around pissing myself either. Maybe it was the thought of Anna, maybe it was the unsettling feeling I got from the house. Either way, I didn’t feel like being alone. So I pulled out my Glock, switched on the light, and followed.
In the hallway at the top of the stairs, three rooms stood on either wall. As I followed Ape in to the first, he said, “This is it, what do you think?”
Half of the room was what you would expect in a shit hole like this: peeling floral wall-paper, the brown crust of piss stains and blackened rings of cigarette burns in the old carpeting. The other half looked like the inside of a stomach, wallpapered from floor to ceiling in a slimy, milkscarlet membrane. Strands of what looked like pumpkin guts strung across the ceiling like streamers at a birthday party, flaked down the walls, and clumped in the corners like someone squatted and took a crap.
Ape had his Glock in hand, and his beam played and reflected off the surface of the wall-tissue like the sheen of a polished table. He stood at the far end of the room, turned to look at me as I entered, not moved by the complete shock and confusion on my face. “Before you ask, Swyftt, I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
I could only stare at it, wanting to touch, not sure if I should.
“Ape…”
“I know.”
“I mean….”
“I know.”
“Holy fuck.”
“Jono. I know. Shut up.”
“Are the other rooms like this?”
“Not even close.” There was a fire in his eyes, and the awe in his voice was that of a kid at Christmas in a sea of shiny paper and bows. He pulled one of those European smart phones out of his pocket and began to take pictures. He didn’t look at me when he asked, “Can you get a reading from it?”
“What am I?” I protested. “Just another of your fucking lab tools? I’m tired.”
“Jono, please. I need your help.”
“So basically, you couldn’t do this without me?”
He rolled his eyes and said, “Sure. Think what you need to.”
I sighed. “You know just what to say to a guy.”
I put my palm flat against the wall and pressed firmly. It felt like silk, warm and smooth, but with a little give, as though stretched taut over a sofa cushion, and it was transparently thin, almost like I could put my hand through it into the thick, bubbly mustard-colored puss behind it.
I closed my eyes, and for a moment, felt the slight static vibration buzzing beneath my hand. With a couple of deep breaths, I cleared my mind and waited for the sensations of audio/visual, Technicolor-dream glory. The vibration picked up, hummed faster until it felt like a river rushing just out of reach.
And then…nothing.
No flash, no scene, no memories: just the thick, milky fluid contained within swirling like the innards of a magic 8-ball.
Ape looked at me. “Anything?”
“Signs point to no.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean, there’s nothing.”
“It’s been harder for you lately. Try again.”
“It’s not like that. It’s not difficult to read. There’s nothing to read.”
“Are you sure?”
I shrugged. “I’m gonna take a look around.”
“End of the hall on the left,” he answered.
I ignored the other doors, knowing Ape had checked them, and entered the last. It was a bone garden. In the center stood a worn, white-washed, wooden dresser, about four-feet high, and on top of that, staring back at me from hollow sockets, were three human skulls, marred and chipped and displayed like trophies, each about the size of fucking cantaloupes. Piled in the corners and at regular intervals along the walls, were eight little piles of femurs and bones that looked like femurs.
I don’t know what different bones are called. Having once beat a nymph to death with the femur bone of an ostrich, I do know what a femur is. I only know what it was called because Ape saw me leaning against the club-like piece, panting. He said, “Cool femur.” It’s a thigh bone. Bones all look the same to me, they’re like…fucking Chinese people.
While I didn’t know what the bones were called, I did know they were too small to belong to an adult. And as I stood among them, I could almost hear the distant voices of children chanting in that sing-song voice, “the neck bone’s connected to the head bone.” But these bones weren’t gonna do any walking around.
I pulled myself together and took a quick look around, careful not to disturb the bones. In my line of work, you didn’t make it very long by upsetting dead things, not so much for fear of ghosts, but typically whatever had killed the thing was still lurking somewhere close, usually thought you were stealing its trophy…or dinner. In this case, someone had gone to a hell of a lot of fucking trouble to decorate the room like Mexican Halloween, probably for some sort of ritual, and it was just bad juju to fuck that formula up.
In the closet, I found a broken-in teddy bear. Normally, with its dull glass eyes, brown fur and tan belly, it wasn’t anything to look at, but in a place like this, it stuck out like a Picasso painting in a Kindergarten art room.
Almost immediately when I touched it, I could feel the vibrations thrumming, tearing at every strand of fur, every fluff of stuffing. My head began to throb at the temples and my pulse raced just behind my burning eyes. I stumbled to the side, scattered bone across the floor, and grabbed for a handhold. I steadied myself against the wall and took a deep breath before it overcame me.
There was a sudden whoosh, and everything around me became hushed and dull and black. Then slowly, softly, I heard a faint humming, but distorted as if underwater. There was something very pleasant about the sound, something warming in the scant, breaking melody.
I realized I was sitting now, though I didn’t know where, just that it was soft, and when I tried to move, couldn’t.
A small, pink table lamp clicked on, horses danced around the base. Little glass beads dangled and twinkled from the edges of the lacy purple shade.
The humming grew louder, became a series of la-la-la’s and tongue flicks, and I could make out the voice of a little girl. Something in her carefree inflection made me smile. Warmth swept through me, filled me with a familiar peace I hadn’t known for a long time. It felt…like home. “Anna,” I wanted to say, but couldn’t speak.
The girl looked my way, cried, “Muffins!” and squeezed me, lifted me, rubbed my face against hers with determination. I was shifted and jostled before the girl pushed me away, held me out at arms’ length.
I saw her: big blue eyes, soft curly blonde locks tied out of her face with pink ribbons. She had the sweetest smile and a mischievous twinkle. I’d seen her before, in a picture, but she wasn’t my Anna.
She flashed her teeth at me and said, “I know what we can do today. A tea party!” She giggled.
I closed my eyes and felt my head throb again. Felt the wall beneath my weight, realized I was standing. I could taste the blood on my lips.
I hadn’t expected the reading to come so suddenly. Didn’t invite it, didn’t prepare for it. Automatic readings like that didn’t happen often, and it was strange when it did. The bear’d been waiting for me like an excited child waits for its parent, waiting just to tell me about its day.
I’m not psychic. The technical term is psychometry: seeing the history of an object simply by skin contact. I’d been doing it as long as I could remember. Some people sing well, I was just born with a different kind of gift.
I stuffed the bear’s head into the pocket of my leather jacket so its feet dangled out and went back into the hallway where I met Ape.
“Found the Charnel house, I see,” he sa
id.
“That’s not all I found. There was a Teddy in the closet.”
“And? Did you get a reading?”
“Bear belonged to Julie Easter.”
“Fuck.” He turned away. “I was hoping that wasn’t her downstairs.” He grew quiet.
“This fucking job…”
Ape managed to look up at me, and his voice sounded broken. “I guess that’s it then. We can get out of here when you’re….Are you crying?”
“What? No. Piss off.”
“You are crying.”
“You’re crying. My eyes are burning, and I have a fucking migraine. The reading was stronger than expected.”
I walked past him and started down the stairs. I could feel him behind me, following. “We done then?”
“Yeah. We’ve got what we need.”
At the bottom of the stairs, I stopped at the headless body that had fallen across the threshold of the open doorway. Ape stopped with me, and we studied the body together for a moment in silence. “So what was he?”
Ape shrugged. “Apart from the fingernails, the skin condition…? Near as I can tell, he was human.”
“You sure about that?”
“Why, what are you thinking?”
I crossed to the head, bent to it. “I’m thinking he was too tough to just be some random tramp.” I lifted the calloused lips. Fresh red juices stained the gums. I parted the jaws, ran a finger along the crooked line of his teeth. They were spotted and grey, chipped, that white gunk built-up around the edges. I checked the roof of his mouth, pressed in places to no effect.
“What are you doing, checking for vampire fangs?” Ape said. “Did you hit your head? Outside of the movies, when have you ever seen a vampire?”
“No,” I said.
Hunter 101: Vampires don’t exist. That was the main thing that separated my life from the shit you see in the cinema. That and the pain: my life has a lot more fucking pain than a bloody movie.