by James Hunter
“Harvey,” she spoke softly as she moved around the room. “What else can you tell me about the suspect?”
Harvey shifted behind me. “I told you everything.”
“No you didn’t—I’ve been in this business long enough to know when someone isn’t being honest with me. What’d you leave out?”
Harvey hesitated for a second, which told me Ferraro had hit on something.
“It’s nothing relevant to the case, but the get-up he was wearing … we’ve got a local legend around here. An old urban legend about a guy that used to have a farm around about these parts—years and years ago, mind you—who dressed like that and would hunt down unruly kids. He’d catch ‘em, butcher ‘em, and hang their bodies in his barn. My older brother used to scare the pants off me with those yarns. But it’s coincidence. That was ages ago, and as far as I’ve found, no such man ever really existed. Just an urban legend. Probably every county in America has a story like that one.”
Shit, that might not have meant much to Ferraro, but it sure as hell meant something to me.
“You said there were two perps. Why?” I asked, the cogs twirling away in my head. “Did someone see something downstairs, something that didn’t look anything like the Butcher?”
We moved from the office into the adjoining hallway—Ferraro pulled open the door, and made a quick sweep before stepping through.
“What’s it to you?” she asked, still creeping forward, slow and steady without even a backward glance over her shoulder, intent on the hallway intersection coming up before us.
“Look, I know you think I’m full of horse crap from my eyes to my toes, but I’m not making any of this up. I can do magic—those people who went missing were supernatural monsters, real as you or me, and we’ve got another one on our hands right now.”
The radio squawked at Ferraro’s hip:
“This is team one, all accounted for, no sign of the perp. Adams is working on the fuse box—should have power back any minute, over.”
“This is team three, received, out,” Ferraro said. The second team followed suit, reporting in before falling silent.
She glanced at me. “For what it’s worth, Adams swore he saw some kind of werewolf clown—fuzzy face, sharp teeth, long claws—but dressed up in some kind of circus clown outfit.”
To Officer Harvey, the attacker had appeared as a local legend, straight from his nightmares. And if I had a chance to gab with Officers Adams, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that he had a real childhood fear of both clowns and werewolves. The thing I’d tossed out of the window wasn’t a spirit, nor was it an actual pig-mask-wearing serial killer. It was a metus. You could fit what I knew about the metus onto the back of a restaurant napkin, with plenty of room to spare. But what I knew for sure was this: they could shape shift into your worst nightmare.
The lights went out completely—even the emergency power died—propelling us into darkness.
Something rustled behind us, the sound of fabric flapping in the wind.
FOURTEEN:
Nonna Nicci
A moment later, the lights flickered back to life, team one must’ve gotten the power situation sorted out.
I turned—felt like moving through water, everything was sort of in slow motion, like in a dream or nightmare.
A woman lurked at the end of the hall. Old and crusty with wispy thin hair, so gauzy it seemed almost like silvered spider webs. Tan skin like ancient leather and rheumy brown eyes, which stared at us, seemingly blind. She wore a pale-blue nightgown, stained yellow in spots and dark brown in others. Snow swirled at her back, like a cape of white, blowing around her nightgown.
“Nonna Nicci,” Ferraro exhaled the name from behind me in a whisper. “No, you can’t … can’t be here. Impossible.” She shoved past me, jostling my shoulder as she took a position in front of Harvey and myself. Then she raised her weapon and assumed a shooter’s stance, feet placed about shoulder-width apart, one foot slightly forward, weapon held with both hands, arms extended, but slightly bent at the elbows. If I was right, the woman at the end of the hall was Ferraro’s worst fear, yet there she stood, head on, gun drawn, professional to her toes. Ballsy as all get out. Had to admire that.
Though Harvey still had a hand on my shoulder, he too had his weapon out and at the ready.
“Ferraro,” I whispered, trying to prevent the creature from noticing. “Shooting that thing isn’t gonna do dick, let’s just scoot along, find a thick door to hide behind—maybe a set of thick steel bars.” I didn’t know for sure, but it was a distinct possibility that the metus was a denizen of the Endless Wood, which meant one of the low fae. I wasn’t exactly sure about that, but it was kind of a reasonable guess, which meant thick iron bars would keep us safe … then again, if this thing wasn’t fae, we’d be stuck in a teeny-tiny room with no hope of escape. Sometimes the number of good choices to pick from can be a real burden.
Ferraro ignored me completely and continued to stare down the well-weathered invader at the end of the hall.
“You are not my Nonna, ciuccio. I don’t know how you’re doing this, but I’m going to make you pay.”
“Come now, my little mia nipote, is that any way to talk to your grandmother?”
“Don’t say another word,” Ferraro said, her voice sharp as a knife. “Raise your hands into the air, slowly, and get down flat on your face.” The crone just stood there, beaming with a haggard smile and staring with her watery eyes.
“Harvey,” I said, figuring a change in tactics might better serve me here. “Get these friggin’ handcuffs off—I bailed your ass out of a serious shit creek last time, maybe letting me help out would be a smart move, huh?”
He ignored me too, because I get less respect than the president of the high school comic book club does.
“I don’t know what game you’re playing at,” Ferraro said to the grandmotherly thing at the end of the hall, “but I’m gonna give you to the count of three to put your hands in the air and lay flat on the ground, facedown. I have one dead officer already, so failure to comply will result in your death. I can assure you, I’m not playing any game.”
The woman laughed, a raspy, dry sound like the passing of a cool fall breeze through leafless trees. Then she staggered forward a step, just a little shuffle really, but a movement filled with promise: I’m not gonna stop, it said, I’m gonna keep on coming until your blood is in my mouth, until I tear your flesh from your bones. I’m not going to stop until you are with me: cold and in the ground, food for worms.
“One!” Ferraro shouted. “I’m warning you … Two.” The woman took another shuffling step, this one a little surer—then she looked right at us and smiled, her thin mouth filled with rows of barbed needle teeth. Harvey fidgeted beside me, dipping a hand into his pockets and coming out with the handcuff keys.
“Three!”
The woman lurched forward, mouth wide, eyes bulging in her head, twig-thin arms extended toward us, yellow claws jutting from the ends of her gnarled fingers.
Ferraro pulled the trigger, and sound filled the hall along with the bright flare of muzzle flashes—bullets rocked Granny back on impact. For a moment, the hag just tottered drunkenly, absently examining her bloody wounds, before she toppled to her back and lay unmoving on the floor, brown eyes staring up at nothing. Harvey let out a sharp breath. “I’m gonna have nightmares for years—the psychiatric treatment is gonna break the bank. Just gonna retire. It’s the only sensible thing to do. Retire, and move someplace where’s it’s sunny all the time. Should’ve listened to my wife.”
“Harvey, I feel for you. But in order to retire, we need to survive, so less talky-talk and more unlocky-lock. Kay?”
Harvey seemed to have forgotten what he was about, though, which was too bad, because that old lady wasn’t gonna stay down.
Agent Ferraro took a tentative step forward, weapon still extended, her bearing screaming caution as she moved.
“Dammit, Ferraro. Ju
st stop—please listen to me,” I said, my plea carrying in the hall without any need to shout. “Please, don’t take another step.” Whatever she heard in my voice connected, because she ceased her advance.
A moment later the old woman sat up, mouth still wide and grinning, silvered hair blowing in the breeze. She spat blood from her needle-filled jaws.
“Nicole, dear, that wasn’t very nice at all. I think you’ve been terribly naughty, a very bad little girl, a very, very bad—”
“Stata zee,” Ferraro said, brandishing her weapon as though to ward off the unspeakable words.
“A very bad girl,” the old woman continued. “And we both know what happens to bad little girls, don’t we, Nicky … they get snatched up by L’uomo Nero.”
“L’uomo Nero isn’t real. A fairytale boogeyman you tried to scare me with,” Ferraro spat. “You’re not real. This … this isn’t happening. Can’t be.” She said the words, but didn’t lower her gun. Smart move.
Oh, it was happening all right, and boy was Ferraro gonna have a rude awakening when she found out most of the “fairytale” monsters were real, nastier than the books would have you believe, and hanging out all over the world. Probably including her L’uomo Nero—though that wasn’t a name I’d ever come across before.
“Ferraro,” I said again. “Ixnay on the banter business, let’s just get our asses in gear and boogie.”
She never took her eyes from the creature, disguised as her presumably dead Nonna, but she nodded and started slowly walking back toward Harvey and me.
“The interrogation room,” she said, “get there quick—Harvey, stay with the prisoner at all costs.”
“Smartest thing I’ve heard so far, ma’am,” Harvey said, and started pulling me along, still neglecting to unlock the handcuffs.
“‘Bout friggin’ time someone listened to me,” I muttered, gladly letting Harvey maneuver me away from the freaky-ass hag just cooling her heels at the end of the hallway.
Grandma zombie chuckled again. “Mia Nipote, L’uomo Nero is not a myth. I thought you learned better than this … a very bad girl.” Her head snapped to the left, crack. Right, crack. Up, crack. Down, crack. The movement jerky, sporadic, and each made with bone-shattering speed … over and over, the sound reverberating down the hallway, sounding for all the world like machine gun fire—she fell to her back, body contorting, hands outthrust, yellowed nails beating out an unsteady rhythm on the linoleum hallway floor. Like a scene out of The Exorcist. I wanted to just turn and sprint outright, but the horror show was oddly captivating.
Ferraro’s Nonna had undergone one nasty makeover; the thing at the end of the hall still had Nonna’s face, but everything else had changed. The old woman was something new: her flesh now the pasty white of a maggot’s body, her legs transformed into a fat worm’s tail—long, slick, and segmented, though still partially covered by her nightgown, now solid black. Strangely, she also sported a dusty black stovepipe hat, which didn’t make a damn lick of sense to me. She pulled her body along with oddly shaped arms: too-thick forearms, strangely thin biceps, and clawed hands that belonged on a grizzly bear. Drag-thump, Nonna went as she wormed her way forward, rheumy eyes never losing us for a second.
Ferraro fired the remainder of her shots, but the bullets merely plowed in with meaty thuds and disappeared into wormy flesh.
“Run,” Ferraro said, the word tight and controlled. She turned and pushed Harvey and I to get us moving. Trust me, I needed no motivation whatsoever. Generally, heroes don’t run away from the bad guys, shrieking like little girls—and no it was not Ferraro screaming—but as I’ve mentioned a time or two, I’m not a hero. Sometimes running away is the absolute smartest game play there is: like when you’re facing down a crazy worm monster called L’uomo Nero while powerless and handcuffed. Yeah, if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, you just run, I won’t think less of you. Honest.
We bolted toward the adjoining hallway, me unashamedly in the lead, followed by Harvey, with Ferraro bringing up the rear. I slid around the corner—drag-thump, drag-thump, drag-thump, the sound pursued us down the hall. Faster and faster the noise came; Grandma Slug was gaining momentum like a freight train of grossness.
Drag-thump. Closer. Drag-thump! Closer still.
I zipped by the observation room on my right, paying it no mind, and headed straight for the interrogation room. I slammed into the door, chest first, thinking it would swing open, but, of course, it was locked up tighter than a bank vault. Despite the fact that I knew I hadn’t shut the door all the way when I’d exited, there it was: locked. Mocking me with its safety, while I leaned against it handcuffed, waiting for some terrible end. Lady Luck, my ass, this had to be one of the crappiest, most unlucky nights of my life.
“Move dammit,” Harvey grunted, elbowing me aside, fumbling for the cardkey attached to his belt.
DRAG-THUMP—I could practically feel the slug queen’s hot, fetid breath on my neck.
I heard the sound of a magazine reload. “Any day,” Ferraro practically swore, followed shortly by the bark of more fired shots.
DRAG-THUMP! Finally, Harvey worked the card free from his belt clip and flashed it over the lock read—the door unlatched, and Harvey bowled me through the door in a bid to get to safety. I stumbled forward, tripped, and couldn’t do a thing except crash like a felled tree right onto my face because that jerk Harvey had failed to uncuff me.
DRAG-THU—the door crashed shut behind Ferraro, all amidst the sound of muffled curses and labored, heavy breathing. But other than that, it was sweet, glorious silence. Slightly creepy silence. Grandma wasn’t banging on the door, the observation window didn’t shake and shudder in its frame. Just a stillness, occasionally broken by the soft moan of the wind. I rolled onto my side, the motion awkward.
“For Pete’s sake, can someone please take these cuffs off?” I asked. “If some slug-body nightmare is gonna make me into lunch, I’d at least like to be able to punch her in the belly a few times.”
“Unlock him,” Ferraro said, stalking back and forth across the length of the room, gun still in hand. She plucked the radio from her hip, “Teams one and two, this is Ferraro, we have contact with the suspect on three. Hold your positions, over. I repeat, hold your positions, and wait for further instructions. Out.” She latched the radio back to her belt.
“Should’ve retired,” Harvey said again, while helping me to sit up. Finally, at long last, he unlatched the cuffs and I was free.
“Why isn’t it trying to get in here?” Ferraro turned, her eyes settling on me like a weight. “You’d better start talking. What the hell was that? I want to know how it was able to look like that—to say those things.”
I propped my back against the wall, and dabbed at my nose, checking for blood, though my hand came up dry. “Finally ready to listen to me?”
Her eyes narrowed, and I thought for a moment that she might start shooting me to get the answers she wanted, but then she sighed and nodded.
“I need you to tell me about the thing in the hall,” I said. “The woman, who was she to you? And the whole bit about L’uomo Nero?”
She hesitated for a moment, her gaze seeming to turn inward to some buried, long-dead thing inside herself. “My Grandmother Nicci,” she finally said, “from my mother’s side. We all called her Nonna Nicci. She always scared me as a little girl … so old and fragile. Like a skeleton. Her breath smelled like beans and rotten vegetables. She was strict—old school, ultra-conservative Catholic. And superstitious. Always told me stories about L’uomo Nero—he’s Italy’s version of the boogeyman. She would pinch my cheeks whenever she would come to visit—pinch my cheeks and sit at my bedside with her rancid breath. Telling me how L’uomo Nero would come for bad little girls …”
“Jeez,” I said.
“When I was fourteen,” she said after a pause, “Nonna came to visit. I wanted her to die, I wished for it. A terrible thing to wish for, but I was just a child. The next m
orning my mother sent me into her room to wake her for breakfast. She was dead. I found her in bed, her middle bloated, her legs swollen, her face pale and thin. For years I blamed myself, I thought that maybe something had heard my wish, my prayer. That maybe L’uomo Nero had come for her. I’ve never forgotten the way she looked that morning.”
“That’s enough,” I said softly. “I just needed to confirm a suspicion. I’m pretty sure we have a metus on our hands. If you’re ready to listen, I think we can kill this son of a bitch, and send it back to wherever the hell it came from. I’m gonna need your help, though—I’m gonna need everyone’s help.” I looked at Harvey. “So are you ready to play ball or what?”
“Seeing is believing, in my book,” Harvey said, shaking his head slightly as though he couldn’t really believe what he was saying.
Ferraro looked at me, her eyebrows dropping low, a frown creasing her mouth. She twirled a long finger in a curt, okay, move it along gesture.
“Right now, the metus is probably gathering strength to make its final play.”
“You keep using that word, metus. What does that mean?” Ferraro asked, annoyed and angry.
“Metus—the freak show from the hall—it’s a type of fae creature, I think. Basically, an evil fairy, sent here by the guy who actually killed Kozlov.”
“An evil fairy.” She crossed her arms beneath her breasts.
I grimaced, fully aware of how ridiculous this would sound to an outsider. “Yes, an evil fairy. Well, maybe. But it definitely feeds off fear and death—the more fear, the more killing, the stronger it’ll grow. It expected me to be an easy meal … but things didn’t turn out so well, so it’s probably biding its time, gaining strength until it’s sure it can take me out. It’s playing a conservative game, it’ll want to wait until it has a sure thing, but I think we can use that against it.”
“I literally can’t believe what I’m hearing. Can’t believe I’m falling for this.” She shook her head in disgust then ran a hand through her hair. “Okay. Fine. So how do we beat the evil fairy?”