Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense

by Fynn Perry

  “What happened?” she repeated.

  “Don’t worry, Jen—it will heal,” he said with false bravado. Then he went through exactly what he had experienced: the attack on the highway, how he saw a part of him disappear with one of the surfer spirits; the Good Samaritan spirit who told him his wound would heal, and that too severe an injury could have disastrous consequences.

  “For God’s sake, John! Now I have to worry about your spirit and your body surviving? I thought being in a coma was some sort of protection, some form of healing.”

  “For the body maybe, but as you can see, not so much for the spirit,” he said with a half-smile. “At least now I know the dangers.”

  Jennifer sighed. “Tell me you asked her how people recover from a coma. Because we need to make sure that you do.”

  “I didn’t get a chance. She thought I was crazy when I told her that I’m not really dead,” he admitted. Seeing Jennifer’s frown, he added, “But before that she did say that spirits stay on earth until they’ve found the answers they’re seeking, until whatever is keeping them here is no longer of interest to them.”

  “And then what happens?”

  “Like the spirit of the old man said, we move on to the afterlife.”

  “How? What does that look like?” Jennifer pressed.

  “I don’t know, Jen. I’m guessing I’ll go through that whole thing with the voices calling out to me to join them, like I did just before I turned into this. Except, this time, of course, I wouldn’t fight it. I would just let them take me.”

  “But what if the same process applies to coma patients. I mean, what if, once they’ve found what they’ve been looking for, they don’t move on but wake up instead?

  “And those that don’t wake up are still searching?”

  “Yes! We have to assume that’s what it takes. It means that we have to find out why all this happened, John. I mean the stabbing, the attack. My father told me the police have a composite photo of the attacker.”

  “I know, and I’ve found out a lot more besides.” He recounted the events at the precinct. “It was obvious Donovan and the employee knew our attacker but were covering it up.”

  Jennifer sat in shock for a beat. “Why would they cover up someone trying to kill you?” she asked indignantly. “Do you think they were threatened to make them say what they did?”

  “I’m not so sure,” John said, and he went on to tell Jennifer about Jim’s drug addiction and the change in ownership of the pub. “My father knew Donovan was wasting the money he was sending him to run the pub. He’s a pretty good judge of character. But he kept on helping him because he told me once that Donovan saved his life. But I think Donovan has now gotten himself into something far beyond anything he can hope to control.”

  “But why would he want you dead? What would that achieve?”

  “That’s just it—nothing, as far as I can see.”

  “Just before you got here, my father told me he got a call from the detective leading the inquiry into your stabbing. He said an arrest will be made in the early morning. A gun store owner in Queens called in after getting a copy of the mug shot the police put together with the help of the second witness. He remembered the guy buying a knife, said there was something odd about him. The shop’s CCTV got a clear image of his face.”

  “Did the detective give a name?”

  “No, and they won’t until the suspect is arrested. My dad wants me to go in to identify whoever they arrest tomorrow. I’ve decided to do it. But you have to stay here and rest with that injury.”

  John could see in her eyes that she was in no mood to argue.

  Six

  Roaches scurried in darkness amid food debris and empty takeout containers, across the dirty kitchen floor of a sixth-floor walk-up in the South Bronx. Footfall vibrations passed like seismic waves through the floor, causing them to stop, motionless. Something heavy was coming their way.

  The door opened and a dusty lightbulb, suspended precariously from the center of the ceiling by an ancient flex, sparked to life. The large figure of Vernon Hardwell entered and stood amid the peeling, pale-green paint and tired kitchen cupboards. A lumberjack shirt draped the overhang of his belly above a pair of stained jeans. Looking far older and more unkempt than a man of forty-two years should, he stood looking at the roaches. Normally, he would make a clumsy attempt to kill one, but this time he just stood there, confused. He had no idea why, just minutes before, he had woken from what seemed like hours of sleep to find himself lying on the hallway floor on top of his black coat—his one good coat now dirtied, as were his hands, with dark, sticky blood. The metallic smell and taste had confirmed it was blood, and checking himself all over had satisfied him that the blood was not his. His relief would have been greater if it wasn’t for his delayed realization that he had someone else’s blood quite literally on his hands.

  The evil voice in his head telling him what to do, and pressuring him incessantly to do it, had gone. He couldn’t remember exactly what it had made him do, but the blood meant it was something bad, very bad. He washed it off his hands over the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. As he turned to look for a towel, his eye caught the distant, nighttime view of Manhattan from the solitary window. The top three sections of the Empire State Building were bathed in a green light, appearing like a bright-green wizard’s hat sitting on top of a sea of glittering lights. He stopped, enchanted like a child. His hands dropped to his sides and droplets of water fell and cratered the layer of dust and grime on the cracked linoleum floor.

  For a moment he managed to shut out the noise: the rumble of the traffic, the shouts and music of his neighbors. Then, suddenly, it all returned with the sound of banging, threatening and thunderous, on the door of his apartment and the shouted words, “NYPD! Open up!”

  Disoriented, he tried to grasp what was happening. He had seen enough cop shows to know that the police wouldn’t ask twice. The door burst open, and two NYPD ESU officers carrying AR15 assault rifles stormed in, followed by two more. The barrels of their weapons quickly panned across the room. The muzzle of one rifle homed in immediately on Hardwell’s chest. He already had his hands up.

  “Reach for the sky!” he mumbled to himself, thinking of the classic westerns he liked to watch.

  “Drop to your knees! Hands behind your head!” an uncompromising voice screamed at him.

  The voice was female, and her stance was solid and muscular. Her dark eyes seemed to pierce through the tactical goggles that protected her against acid attacks along with the balaclava beneath her Kevlar helmet.

  Hardwell immediately complied, cowering before her. He was still mumbling to himself. On his knees, with his head dropped forward and his hands positioned obediently, as ordered, he was easy to cuff. In the meantime, the other officers searched the apartment. The other officer shouted the ‘All Clear’ seconds after the female officer had finished cuffing the suspect.

  “Need any help with that one?” One of the officers joked as he saw Hardwell’s deflated posture.

  On hearing the all-clear, Detective Williams entered the apartment from the safety of the corridor. He immediately noticed the coat on the floor and what he supposed were ESU-regulation boot marks on it. Unfortunate, but understandable. These guys risked getting their heads blown off every time they burst open a door so he didn’t have to. The last thing on their minds was not disturbing evidence, which in this case had caused a smearing of blood on the floor around the coat. “Get CSU here now to bag this,” he said to one of the officers and motioned for the suspect to be helped to his feet.

  “You’re under arrest for the attempted murder of John Logan,” he told the faintly babbling suspect, who was then read his Miranda rights. “Do you understand your rights as I’ve read them to you?”

  Hardwell kept his head dropped and mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

  Williams pulled the man’s head back to make solid eye contact. “Do you understand them?”

  “I’m sorr
y,” Hardwell continued to say, as if in a trance and with tears running down both cheeks.

  Both confused and frustrated, Williams let the suspect’s head drop back down. The detective ruminated on the fact that this guy just didn’t seem like the type to slash someone’s stomach open. He motioned to the female officer to take Hardwell away and the man was led out of the apartment still mumbling and with tears welling in his eyes.

  Williams looked around the tiny apartment. It was a sour-smelling, dismal place, void of anything personal. The single bedroom, like the kitchen and adjacent living area, was dirty, dimly lit and contained only the bare essentials of furniture which looked like the secondhand or cast-off variety.

  Near one wall a large number of high-quality color photos had been strewn across the floor. They showed a young woman, late teens, and had clearly been taken from a distance with a good zoom lens without her knowing. He recognized her as Jennifer Miller, the victim’s girlfriend, who was in the hospital recovering from a concussion. The photos formed a haphazard chronicle of various everyday activities in her life. There were full-body photos, multiple headshots, and enlargements of her eyes and mouth. He left them in place and snapped individual photos of each on his phone.

  One ESU officer remained––a man called Tim Marks. They had been on several raids together. Like many in the ESU team, Marks was an ex-Marine, but Williams considered him less of a Jarhead and more what he termed ‘the reasonable man in the room’––someone who he could get an objective opinion from. “What’s your take on all this, Marks?” he asked.

  “Take a look at these,” Marks said, pointing to a pile of photos in a trash bin in the corner of the room. Williams used his pen to move the photos around in the bin. They all pictured Jennifer with a young man whose face had been cut from each photo.

  “It looks like he definitely had it in for this young man.”

  Williams considered that if the missing boy’s face was that of John Logan, then this seemed to be very compelling evidence that Hardwell was the attacker, yet something still didn’t feel right. Williams had seen the wound on the victim’s body. It wasn’t an amateurish attempt— it was clean, quick and deep. Almost professional. Everything about this suspect was a mess. Nothing seemed to add up.

  Looking over the room again, Williams noticed some marks to the headboard of the bed in the corner. Because it was yet another piece of battered, junkyard furniture in the apartment, the marks in its worn varnish didn’t initially register as unusual. But as he looked closer, he could see slivers of wood had been gouged out to form crudely fashioned letters, repeatedly spelling out the name J-E-S-S-I-C-A, horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. The color of the exposed raw wood in one set of letters appeared much fresher than the rest. As he thought, they had been carved recently. Perhaps with the same knife used to stab John Logan, he pondered. But if it had been Hardwell making the marks, why spell out ‘Jessica’? The name of the girl in the photos and the victim of the attack was most definitely ‘Jennifer.’

  Williams looked at his watch. It was just after five in the morning. He confirmed that Marks could leave as soon as CSU arrived to process the apartment.

  Seven

  Next morning, Jennifer was still adamant about John needing to rest, and with his wound still reddened and sore, he couldn’t argue. She left him in her room and took an Uber to meet her father at the 109th precinct in Queens. During the ride, her attention was held by the orange hue of a vast number of spirits co-habiting the city, and in particular by the acrobatics of a number of surfing and car-hopping spirits, just like the ones John had described. She walked straight past a crowd of spirits outside the precinct, careful to avoid any acknowledgement of their presence. The only followers she had were on social media, and she intended to keep it that way.

  Inside, in the lobby, Jennifer saw a couple more spirits hanging by the reception desk. She gave them a cursory look as she approached the desk sergeant. They were young women with skirts that were unashamedly too short, tops that were too tight and cut too low.

  As the desk sergeant took her details, she overheard one of the female spirits size her up and comment that with a bit of work, she could make some decent coin turning tricks. It took nearly all her restraint not to say anything.

  She was asked to take a seat, and ten minutes later she was approached by a man who introduced himself as Detective Williams and explained that he was in charge of the case. He escorted her to an observation room, which looked onto an interview room. Her father was already waiting. So was another man, and she guessed from the badge hanging from his neck that he was another detective.

  The room had subdued lighting, which further emphasized the view through the one-way window onto the brightly lit interview room. David gently grasped his daughter by her arms and calmly told her not to worry.

  Detective Williams introduced his colleague as Sergeant Adam Clarke. “The man we are about to bring in is Vernon Hardwell and he will be represented by his lawyer, Robert Devereux.”

  “Devereux?” David Miller asked.

  “Yes, you know him?”

  “He left the legal clinic where I work about three weeks ago to start up on his own.”

  At that moment, the door to the interview room opened. In walked a uniformed police officer, followed by a man, medium-height, with his head lowered and hands cuffed in front of him, his elbows bent to accommodate a sizeable paunch. The height and build seemed right to Jennifer. Not many people were taller than John.

  Jennifer watched as the detainee was pushed by the officer to sit in a chair on the side of the table facing the mirror. He kept his head lowered as one of his hands was uncuffed and the spare bracelet clamped around a thick, U-shaped steel bar, both ends of which were buried into the steel table. She felt relief that he wasn't going anywhere but agonized over still not being able to see his face. She didn’t want to see it––but she needed to for this all to be over.

  Detective Williams entered the interview room and sat down opposite Hardwell. His head obscured Jennifer’s view of the suspect. Sergeant Clarke, who had remained in the viewing room, saw her moving sideways to get a better look and so he pointed to a monitor screen above the viewing window which was showing a live feed with sound relayed from a ceiling-level camera within the interview room.

  “For the record, I’m Detective Michael Williams. Before we continue, we have to wait for your attorney.” Hardwell did not respond. He kept his head lowered. They sat in silence for a few minutes. Then in walked another uniformed officer, followed by a man in his fifties dressed in chinos and a dark-brown corduroy jacket, shirt, and tie. He stopped and confidently addressed the occupants of the room with an air of authority. “Robert Devereux, Mr. Hardwell’s attorney. Anything my client has said to you so far, without me present, is inadmissible.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Devereux. Your client simply said ‘sorry’ repeatedly when he was arrested,” Williams smirked as he got up to shake hands with the lawyer.

  The lawyer sat close, but not too close, to his client, to whisper something into his ear.

  Jennifer was fixated on Hardwell’s lowered head. It was as if he knew that her not seeing his face was tormenting her.

  “We have you on CCTV purchasing this knife.” Williams slid a photo of a knife with an ebony handle and a distinctive skull-shaped decoration across the table, letting it rest below Hardwell’s bent head. The prisoner raised his head, ignoring the photo, to look directly at the viewing window, and a smile seemed to play at the edges of his mouth.

  Jennifer stood motionless, staring at the face on the other side of the one-way glass. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Not only was it the missing piece from the macabre jigsaw of her nightmares, but the eyes were unlike anything she had seen before–––they were the eyes of a spirit, not just glowing orange, but giving off a raging fire of orange light. This seemed to be a spirit and a human form merged into one.

  “Jennifer? Jennifer?” Her
father’s voice called, pulling her out of her trance. “It’s him,” she muttered and then looked directly at Clarke and repeated firmly, “It’s him!”

  Her eyes snapped back toward the window. She was unprepared for what happened next.

  Jennifer could see the light from Hardwell’s eyes growing increasingly intense. His face and the exposed areas of skin on his neck and hands looked as if a fire was illuminating them from within. For one hideous moment, an eerie shadow of his skull was cast onto the inside of his face as the light moved outward. His skin appeared translucent and mapped with blood vessels as the glow shone through it and through the fibers of his clothes. It—whatever it was—was about to exit.

  It appeared as a crown of light bursting through his balding pate, which then radiated from his chest and arms, every corner of the room becoming immersed in a soft, orange glow. A head––glowing orange and translucent––was rising from the living, breathing body of Vernon Hardwell.

  Jennifer, gasping, looked up at the screen showing the camera feed. It now showed Hardwell’s body slouched forward, unconscious. She looked through the one-way glass for a clearer view. The spirit—for she was sure that’s what it was—had fully emerged from Hardwell and was now standing in the center of the table, appearing to wear it, as if it were a designer’s ridiculous catwalk folly. Hardwell’s chest fell forward with his head following, and his forehead collided with the unforgiving metal of the table with a heavy thud. The spirit stood for a moment staring at the mirrored glass, then started toward it. Every fiber in Jennifer’s body was screaming at her to run, yet somehow, she couldn’t take her gaze away from the face of the spirit. Her legs remained anchored to the floor, while all around her there was commotion over the arrestee’s sudden collapse and unresponsive state.