by Rosie Walker
Every sound is magnified in the inky blackness. He can hear Maggie’s breathing near his shoulder, quicker than usual and slightly shaky, and the girl’s deep breaths next to him, loud and slow like she’s sleeping.
His feet make a gritty crunch on the concrete floor as he steps forward. Maggie’s footsteps, next to his. And the dragging of Zoe’s feet keeping her upright. Dripping pipes. Creaking from above their heads. The rustling of his jumper sleeves. At every small sound, each crack of branches or gust of wind from outside, he freezes.
They continue forwards, slow step after slow step.
Suddenly, everything tilts with his panic: he’s lost. Where are they? Where are the stairs? They have walked too far; they may have passed the entrance to the stairwell. He turns around, trying and failing to peer through the blackness. His chest tightens and it becomes hard to breathe again. Wheeze. Wheeze. He tries to slow down, sucking the air deep into his lungs.
‘Maggie,’ he whispers. ‘Where are the stairs?’
He hears her squeak.
‘Have we passed them?’
She makes a small mewling sound, like a kitten. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I want to go home. Please, Thomas. Please take us home.’
He presses his palm into the wall, as if the rough concrete could tell him which way they need to go. But nothing. Nothing. It is as if part of his brain – the part which remembers where they have been and how far they have walked – has shut down and disappeared, and the more he tries to remember, the further away the memory drifts.
They are lost in the endless tunnels.
He leans against the wall, imagining blood soaking into his clothes from the walls. But it’s not true, it’s just in his head. All the blood was in that room. And it was dry. Maggie starts to cry; little snuffling, hiccoughing sobs she tries to stifle with her hand.
Then he hears a noise from further down the corridor. The creaking of a door. Footsteps. Thomas bites his lip hard so as not to scream. The man is coming back to clean up his mess. The man thinks he’ll find Zoe, and instead there’s nothing but her bonds, sliced open. He’ll see what Thomas did. He’ll see that the girl is gone. And he’ll find them. The nasty taste on his tongue tells Thomas that he is on the verge of vomiting with fear. His mouth fills with spit.
He grabs Zoe’s arm and hoists her roughly, dragging her along the tunnel, away from the footsteps. Maggie lifts her from the other side, and her feet lift off the ground as they pull her.
His hand finds a doorway, he pushes at it, pushes and pushes but the door won’t budge. He shoves them all forward to the next door, clawing with his fingers for a door handle, ignoring the pain as he shreds his fingernails. This door stands half open. He leans against it, but as soon as it starts to move the rusty hinges creak and threaten to give away their position.
He wriggles through the gap, pulling Maggie and Zoe in behind him. He wants to drag the door closed but can’t risk the noise.
He has no idea where they are, but it doesn’t matter – as long as the man doesn’t find them.
The footsteps continue down the tunnel, getting quieter as they reach the far end, and the blood-soaked room where the woman’s body lies. Thomas slowly raises his hand and finds Maggie’s face, pressing a shaking finger lightly to her lips to tell her to be silent.
Her lips are dry and trembling. He pulls her towards him and holds her in his arms, clinging to her, his nose in her hair, eyes squeezed shut.
There’s a shout, a growl of frustration, and a clang of metal as the man discovers what they’ve done, that they’ve stolen Zoe from him.
Thomas and Maggie cower together, holding Zoe upright between them, listening through the door as the now-frantic footsteps run back along the tunnel and away.
All is silent as they wait for the right moment to escape.
Alexander
He is the apex predator now.
Lying on the tiled floor, his mother looks like she’s sleeping, her face relaxed and youthful like she hasn’t looked in years. The two lines between her eyebrows are gone, and her lips are fuller when they’re not pulled back in a cruel sneer. She’s beautiful, just as she always said. She was right.
Your father. McVitie.
He’s always wondered but never known for certain. That celebrated ‘genius’ she glorified for Alexander’s entire life, his predatory accomplishments held up as the ultimate goal. She worshipped at McVitie’s shrine as she disciplined Alexander again and again throughout his childhood, attempting to train him to be the next generation’s hunter. She was desperate to continue McVitie’s legacy and make it even greater, but Alexander always disappointed her when held up against McVitie’s greatness.
Yet there’s nothing great here; both of his parents were committed lunatics, rutting in their insane asylum, hiding from the nurses while they conducted their twisted affair. The scandal of two patients conceiving a baby got Mother discharged as soon as Alexander was born, and McVitie died soon after. It makes sense, he realises now: she never forgave Alexander for that, as if it was his fault that she was sent away from her mentor.
He feels a deep straining in his chest, between his heart and lungs. His collarbones ache. It’s a combination of grief, guilt and anger. He wants to pummel her face until it’s a bloody pulp for all the things she said to him, all the inadequacies she made him feel for his entire life. But he also wants to lie on the floor alongside her lifeless body and pull her into his arms, kiss her cheek and somehow bring her back to life to fight another day.
He’s not stupid: he knows that the deep love he holds for his mother is as twisted and weird as McVitie’s psychosis. And as one-sided: his mother doesn’t – didn’t – love him. But she loved to control him.
So much one-sided love. He remembers the glassy look in her eyes when she spoke of McVitie; how intelligent he was, how he shouldn’t have been in the asylum, caged like a lion at the zoo. Mother loved McVitie, but McVitie didn’t love her; he used her as his pawn. She was his way to keep killing after imprisonment, even after death. She was his ticket to immortality, and the plan worked. Until now.
Her skin is still warm under his fingertips. Even the shell of her being, this corpse lying on the tiled floor in the semi-darkness, has more energy to it than any other living human being he has ever met. Her power was immense. All he wanted was to make her proud.
He bends to kiss her forehead, lies a hand on her cheek to say goodbye, and then stands up, ready to act. He fills his lungs with musty air.
Now it is Alexander’s time. He is the lone wolf, the sole predator. Nothing stands between him and greatness.
His shoulders feel wide and strong, like he carried a heavy backpack for miles and someone else just took the burden. No one on this whole earth can tell him what to do now. No one can judge him, hold him back, give him instructions, or tell him ‘no’. He is the master of the universe; he can do whatever he wants. No one can stop him and there are no limits.
He has killed now.
He is the hunter, the apex predator. He has taken the mantle from his mother and now wields the power.
He must find the girl, and she can’t get far. She’s half dead and hasn’t eaten in more than twenty-four hours. She’s weak, thirsty, injured.
Alexander’s first instinct is to chase after her, hunt her down, bring her back here. But he’s worked in this labyrinthine asylum long enough to know that she’s still in the building, dragging her half-dead carcass through the endless corridors, desperate to find a way out.
The important thing is to keep his cool and think rationally. He needs to destroy evidence of their presence and launch the framing operation. Just as his mother taught him.
When he finds the girl, he’ll end it straight away. He’ll kill her. He’ll stab her in the stomach and rotate the blade, really stir things up in there. He feels a thrill of excitement; his second kill will be easier.
He looks at the body again, his mother’s bones sticking out bene
ath the thin white nightgown. She used to be taller than him. She looks so small, down there on the ground. He shakes his head. She used to be so powerful. She used to hurt him, until he learned never to disobey her. Just minutes after death, the power is beginning to leave her body. Her skin sags, her eyes bagged and surrounded by creases. Her hair is ratty. She was so magnificent, once. And terrifying. No longer.
She never thanked him. She never said ‘well done’. And she never allowed him to make the final cut.
Today’s the day. It’s Alexander’s turn now.
He turns away, runs out into the darkness of the basement tunnels.
He’ll slice the girl open. He needs to see the life drain from her open eyes.
Thomas
Thomas has no idea how long they have stood here, Maggie’s face buried in his shoulder and their ears straining against the silence.
Zoe has slumped down to the floor, too exhausted to stand any longer, even with their support. She’s got a nasty cut on her neck, so Thomas has removed his t-shirt and tied it over the wound. His woolly jumper scratches against his bare skin, but at least she’s not bleeding any more.
The man is gone, his running footsteps faded to nothing. He hasn’t found them yet, but they haven’t got much time before he does. The man was so angry with that scary woman; Thomas has never seen a person so furious in his entire life. He probably could have torn the woman in half if he’d wanted to. Instead he just crushed her neck.
Thomas steps away from Maggie and opens his eyes. A murky light has begun to creep into the room through a tiny window up near the ceiling; too early for dawn, but not pitch black any more. Rusted filing cabinets line the walls of the room in which they stand, some drawers standing open and one cabinet lying on its side in the middle, surrounded by scattered papers and files. Massive pinboards line the walls, pasted with lists of names, dates and unpronounceable drugs. This room must have been some kind of office for the hospital workers.
The girl is curled up on her side, almost asleep, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Her swollen eyelids are closed, face twitching and eyebrows frowning as she dreams with short whimpers. Her dirty cheeks are etched with clear rivers where tears ran their path.
He nudges the door and peers out into the tunnel. Still he can see barely anything, but the tiny amount of light seeping through the few windows helps him regain his bearings and remember where the stairs are. His shoulders release a small amount of tension.
Silence. Maggie and Thomas wake the girl and struggle with her to get her to her feet once more. She keeps her eyes closed. Slowly and painstakingly they pull her into the tunnel, turning right and feeling along the wall for the entrance to the stairs.
Finally, they run out of wall. Thomas pats the air where the corridor turns, using his hand like blind people use canes. They shuffle forward, taking tiny steps until his toes bump against the first step.
He empties his lungs in a huge expulsion of tension and relief. It’s the stairs out of the basement. They’re on their way out.
At the top of the stairs, Thomas gropes along the door for a handle. Nothing. He pushes hard, but it won’t budge. The relief of moments ago dissolves into panic once more. His heart feels like it might leap out of his throat.
‘Come on, let’s get out,’ whispers Maggie. The girl moans, and Thomas winces at the sound, mentally willing her to be silent.
‘Come on,’ Maggie repeats.
Thomas feels an intense flash of irritation. ‘What do you think I’m doing, stupid?’ he hisses. He leans against the door with his shoulder, pushing as hard as he can. ‘I can’t get the door open. It’s locked or something.’
Maggie sinks into a sitting position on the stairs, her head in her hands. ‘We’re trapped.’ She begins to sob.
With only one person holding her up, Zoe starts to slump, unable to hold her own weight. Thomas’s back aches under the load of a girl at least a foot taller than him, and he nearly tumbles down the stairs, taking the girl with him. He lowers them both to the floor, so all three of them are sitting on the top step, Zoe leaning heavy against him.
Maggie opens her mouth, starting to say something, and Zoe groans again, loudly.
He reaches out and covers both of their mouths as fast as he can. Zoe flinches away as soon as she feels his touch. He presses harder, desperate to show her how important this is. ‘Shut up. Shut up. Please. Shut up or he’ll hear us and come back.’
Zoe shifts and her voice comes out in a whisper. ‘If we can’t get out, we need to hide.’
Helen
Helen wakes with a gasp, deeply confused. Blue half-light filters through the curtains, it’s not yet dawn but the sun is just below the horizon, ready to flood the world with light. Where has she slept?
She looks around, trying to focus her eyes on the busy walls, flowery scent and bright colours, even in this dusky morning: Zoe’s room. It all comes crashing back into her mind: Zoe’s gone. Her stomach heaves and she nearly vomits.
She stands up, and quickly slumps down to her knees on the floor – she must have slept at a funny angle, and her legs are full of pins and needles. She digs her fingers into the carpet, desperate for this to be the dream she can wake from.
Alfie jumps down from the bed, looking up at her with a guilty expression, waiting to be told off for sleeping on a human’s bed. She pats him on the head and his ears rise back up to normal position.
Getting slowly to her feet, Helen tries to sort out her head, remember the facts and there’s something … something niggling at the back of her mind. Before she fell asleep, there was something important she’d hit upon, a tiny kernel of an idea.
She picks up her phone to see an email notification and a missed call from Tony. Her foot nudges against something on the floor; the stained shoe discarded where Alfie dropped it last night.
She calls Tony’s mobile again, but he doesn’t answer; he’s probably getting a little sleep. She tries to marshal her thoughts. Still nothing from Zoe, and her phone is still going straight to voicemail. All the possibilities of where her daughter might be – with a friend, out clubbing, even injured in a hospital – peel away to leave no options behind except a screaming void so terrible that Helen can’t think it. It’s like a mental flinch if she strays too close to the edge; a stepping-back protection mechanism. But still, that deep void is there, sucking her closer to destruction every hour that they have no news of Zoe.
She needs to act, to do something that might help. Even if it’s futile. Her fingers itch to load up a search engine and find more news articles about missing girls, local serial killers, anything that might help, like Janet suggested.
She opens her laptop, and this time Googles ‘Lancaster UK serial killer’. The results aren’t helpful: the articles are mostly about Buck Ruxton, the doctor who killed his wife and housemaid in the 1930s. She skims over some digitised library copies of newspapers from the late 1980s. Nothing new about the teenage girls case, just Janet’s newspaper article, its purple URL indicating a path she’s already trodden.
Janet couldn’t tell her anything new, really; just what she’d already read online. Some teenage girls are missing but there are no obvious suspicious circumstances, so no one is investigating. One thing Janet had said which gave Helen hope, though, was that it’s possible that Zoe’s case would ‘crack it all open’. Helen hates that her own daughter might become the sledgehammer the police force needs to make progress.
She clicks to her emails, and finds the new one, from Zoe’s friend Max. There’s no text, just a link in the body of the email.
She clicks the link. It’s a grimy, cheap blog-style website with a black background and green font, like old DOS computers in the 80s and 90s. Nothing about this place looks like reputable journalism. The logo at the top shows a cartoon face with a pair of sunglasses and an upturned collar: ‘Urban Dark Reporter’. The side menu identifies subcategories like ‘urban exploration’, ‘unsolved crime’, ‘cold cases’ and ‘dark w
eb’. She’s about to close the tab, when her eye falls on the intro paragraph of a recent article: ‘the biggest thorn in the side of Lancaster’s police force’.
Investigating Mr X and Family: Lancaster’s Heredity of Slaughter
By Urban Dark Reporter
New investigation uncovers multiple generations of murderers never caught: the biggest thorn in the side of Lancaster’s police force
The city of Lancaster has been hounded by a series of unsolved murders for almost 100 years, and no one has linked them together, until now!
In the 40s and 50s, a chameleon stalked the UK’s city streets, committing crimes under stolen identities and slinking off into the shadows as soon as he might get caught. Leonard McVitie was a prolific serial killer in locations around the country, and even after his capture, his legacy resonates down the generations.
We thought we knew everything about McVitie, and criminal historians marked it ‘case closed’, but pocket communities on the dark web say that his crimes continued by proxy even after he was imprisoned in Lancaster Lune Asylum in 1959.
How did he do it? With the help of a partner: an equally dangerous and prolific serial killer who has still never been caught. We suspected he had a protégé, but until now we didn’t know who that was.
See also: Leonard McVitie’s Legacy
My source says: ‘After his capture, McVitie was always writing and talking: in the asylum he gave speeches to the inmates and they all hung off his every word. He wanted to teach people what he knew, and the nurses let him get away with it. They didn’t have time to monitor every patient, so they just let him do it. I saw it with my own eyes one afternoon: he was teaching the lace-makers how to tie a handcuff knot.’
It’s not known how many inmates learned from McVitie, or what he taught them, although his archives are starting to reveal some of his secrets. But it is suspected that one of his pupils was released in the mid-1980s, and continued the monster’s legacy.