The Hands

by Andrea Speed, A. B. Gayle, Jessie Blackwood, J. J Levesque, Katisha Moreish

  “You can’t be serious.” Aiden stared in horror at the jar and shook his head. It was bad enough he was wherever he was, but add this humiliation and it was too much for him.

  Vale couldn’t help but be slightly cheered at his distress. So pretty, and yet so fragile. “Come now, you slept with Archer, yes? So you’ve done worse things.” Thinking of which, he wondered if Dmitri had had any luck yet. With Flynn not answering his calls, and his cell phone GPS being non-existent, he’d had no way of getting him a message. So he’d sent Dmitri out to find the little fucker and drag him back here. It was possible Parker was superfluous to his needs if Dmitri could find the little Asian bastard, but he had to hold on to the teacher until Dmitri came through. If he came through. For a man with no sense of subtlety at all, Archer could disappear like a cockroach into the walls.

  “I’ve done worse things, but sleeping with Flynn was not one of them.” He tugged at the cuff around his wrist and frowned.

  “Really? Somehow I doubt it.” He turned to leave, but couldn’t help but put the boot in one more time, figuratively if not literally. “Did you know he was in a porn film? Very disgusting. If you’d like, I’ll bring it down next time. You can get everything on the internet.”

  Flynn? Aiden opened his mouth to say something, but couldn’t. It wasn’t the thought of him being in the film that made him upset. It was the thought of him being with someone else and having to watch it. Irrational, probably. But then again, Vale would say anything to get him upset, to he leaned back against the table he was chained to, almost relaxing, and shook his head. He couldn’t believe a word he said. “You lie.”

  “Oh, I wish I was lying. It’s called Ramming Speed if you ever want to find it yourself. Truly nauseating. He stars in it with some blond haired muscle boy who’s a worse actor than Keanu Reeves.” Vale grinned, and decided he ought to head on up before that insufferable Tate showed up. Or worse yet, some sobbing bag of shit customer. “If I have time, I’ll find the HD version. I bet you’ll be able to see every pimple on his ass.”

  “Is that really the best title you could come up with?” Aiden had to keep him down there. The longer he was away, the higher chance someone would come looking for him. He opened the bottle of Gatorade and took a greedy drink from it, relieving his parched throat.

  “Oh please. You think I have time to sit around and make up titles for gay porn films? I’m a busy man.” Was he stalling? Probably. The little teacher must have been lonely down here, with nothing but a jar full of eyes (locked away in the lower cupboard, but still here) to keep him company. “And the walls are soundproofed, so you’re only hurting yourself by screaming. But by all means, keep it up. I find it hilarious.”

  Aiden ignored most of that and pushed himself up onto the table so he was sitting. “What I find hilarious is that if this film exists, you actually took the time to find it and watch it enough to know what’s in it. And if it doesn’t exist, then you obviously fantasized about Flynn enough to come up with something.” His hand rested idly by the jar, one finger tapping the table.

  Vale glared at him. “Really? Do you think that playground shit will work with me? You’ve been around children too long, Mr. Parker.”

  “I teach high school. At the level they’re at, they’re far from children.”

  “No they’re not. Nor are you. You’re all children, as far as I can tell. You never can see the big picture. A pity, because if Mr. Archer could, you’d never be in this position. And if he’s run off like the coward I think he is, he’s left you to die all by yourself. What do you think of that, Mr. Parker?”

  Aiden wanted to ask what the big picture was, but instead he focused on the last question. “I think... no, I know Flynn isn’t a coward, and he wouldn’t leave. He had the chance to leave before and he didn’t. You don’t know shit about him.” His hand closed around the glass jar and before he could let himself think twice about what he was about to do - and with a quick prayer that his aim wasn’t absolute crap - he hurled it at Vale’s head.

  Vale saw it coming and put his arm up in front of his face, so the jar shattered on his forearm. It still hurt, and he felt an itch on his hairline that he knew was a cut from broken glass. The little bastard. Here he was, being kind, and this little pissant brat showed him no courtesy at all. What had happened to manners? “You are as stupid as you look, Parker,” he growled, pulling the scalpel out of his pocket and charging at the teacher.

  With his eyes focused on the scalpel, Vale’s upper cut caught him flush beneath the jaw, and he fell back hard against the table, where Vale rabbit punched him in the solar plexus and the kidneys before landing several blows in his side, where the short ribs were. He didn’t stop until he felt one break under his fist. Just for good measure, he slashed Parker’s face, opening up another crimson line of blood across his nose. “You can live minus several body parts, Mr. Parker. Try something this stupid again, and we’ll see how well you can throw missing your arm.”

  Vale had moved so fast, Aiden had no time to defend himself, and instead lay there, biting back a scream as each blow landed on him. He heard more than felt the rib break, and it spread a wave a nausea through him. By the time Vale was finished, he barely heard his threat. The nausea was fading, but the dark wave of unconsciousness started to mercifully pull him under.

  Haven Falls #192: Weighing the Evidence

  Lyle Ashley Tate

  (with mention of Henry Vale, Carter Gillespie and Miles Sutherland)

  __________________________________

  Miles had got Lyle thinking now. He knew he should leave it alone, not get involved, but there were things that were off-kilter, details. He hated when the small things were out of line. Like that damned diary they’d been looking at on Sunday, with its crude encryption and obtuse references to bones and ash, weights and dates. Lyle knew this was going to be trouble, but ignoring the situation wasn’t an option now that his puzzle-solving obsession had been triggered.

  He arrived early at work, earlier than his employer, it seemed, and swiftly dressed for his day working in the back rooms of the funeral home; he’d already learnt that Mondays could be busy. He crept down the stairs into the basement storage area. Quite why he was tiptoeing around he couldn’t have explained. Theoretically there were a dozen reasons he could give for why he was rooting around amongst the neatly stored tinned ashes if he was found, but he knew none of them would fly with his employer, Henry Vale, if he was discovered where he wasn’t meant to be. He was just the hired help, and he now had every reason to believe that his predecessor, Stan Riley, might have been another man whose curiosity had proven to be a fast-track to residence in an unmarked tin here in the basement of the funeral home.

  Really he should have told Agent Taylor about their suspicions and left her to deal with whatever Henry Vale was up to. She was the one trained for this kind of crap, the one with the authority and the resources for finding missing people. Miles thought Flynn might be trying to go it alone against Vale, that the kid had reasons for not wanting the authorities involved in his business, but that shouldn’t be influencing him. He should be looking out for his own skin, not putting himself on the line for someone he didn’t even like. So was this all about impressing Gil? God, he hoped not!

  Not surprisingly the basement of the funeral home was just as neat and orderly as the rest of the building, reflecting the tidy, dispassionate mind of its owner. Lyle began checking out the rows of shelves filled with square tins, all neatly labelled and arranged with military precision. Getting any of them out of their places and then putting them back precisely as they had been was going to be challenging. There was dust though, only a fine layer, but maybe enough to mark their rightful places side-by-side?

  Vale had not asked him to dust down here yet. Officially he wasn’t supposed even to be aware of the store space, Lyle suspected. He could imagine the lean, spider-like undertaker fussing around his captive dead, talking to them as he dusted their prisons. These were the
people no-one in Haven Falls could be bothered collecting, but whose relatives were not quite willing to set them aside yet either.

  Dust? Even a little? Odd; another anomaly that pinned itself to the inside of Lyle’s head for later consideration. This dust was the wrong colour, too. It was white-grey, not grey-brown. He wouldn’t risk touching the dust, but he suspected it was coarser than regular dust, too.

  Lyle examined the tins, looking for the ones with the least covering of the coarse grey dust, the ones he might pick down and weigh without leaving behind evidence of his examination of the caskets. He needed a place, too, to put down the scales he had brought down into the basement with him. He couldn’t risk the little gizmo leaving marks in the dust any more than he could risk disturbing the dust himself.

  Lyle found some empty caskets stacked beneath the stairs. Miles had said there should be two types, and he was correct. There was a large freezer to one side of the racks of shelving, so Lyle placed the scale on top of it, then weighed one of each type of container. He made a note of the weights of the empty tins and then continued hunting examples of filled tins for comparative weighing. He pushed away the idea of opening the freezer to check the contents; he really wasn’t up for that presently. One set of risks at a time. He hadn’t been a mortician long enough to be sure of not puking on the spot if he opened the freezer and found a murder victim stuffed inside. It was just a freezer. No matter that it was over-sized, clearly an industrial version rather than a domestic freezer. It probably just had Vale’s shopping in it. Or ice in case the body chillers upstairs failed. He tried really hard to be convinced by that explanation.

  The stairs. Something was odd about the stairs, Lyle thought to himself. He stood still and considered the scene, working to put his finger on what was wrong about the situation. The space was off. Humans like symmetry, especially people like Vale, he thought, and this space lacks symmetry, order. Architects seek to make the spaces they design flow, and this staircase wasn’t right. It ended oddly, like it had been cut off in its prime. Again he filed the information for later, he couldn’t risk getting distracted and being down here longer than was essential to weigh the tins like Miles had asked him to do.

  There were seven tins Lyle determined could be moved and weighed without too much risk. Fortunately, four of these were the heavier duty type, whilst the others were the standard type, so he should provide enough data to check Miles’s theory. Was Vale really disposing of additional bodies and mixing the resulting ashes in with those of his legitimate clients? Would it be possible to prove it, even if he was? What else might the guy be up to? Was he, Lyle, willing to get involved deeply enough to maybe eventually have to go even deeper into hiding, from a whole fresh set of enemies, if the Doctor’s suspicions were proved right?

  Just get the information. Weigh the tins and get back upstairs before Vale notices you are not where you should be. Get back to the cadaver you are meant to be processing and forget you were ever down here. Lie, tell Miles you didn’t find anything important. Stay out of it. Keep your new life safe and sound, you only just got it started after all. You’ve already done enough and lost enough in the name of public interest, your dues are paid up. Despite his misgivings, Lyle noted the weights and then carefully returned the tins to their rightful places before doing the same with himself.

  Haven Falls #194 Waking Up In The Shower

  Carter ‘Gil’ Gillespie and Miles Sutherland

  __________________________________________________

  The hot shower felt good against his skin as Gil sluiced his body under the jets. At least there’s a decent shower in this place, Gil found himself thinking, and the bathroom has room to move. Hell, there was even a huge corner tub, with bubble jets. Gil planned on using that one night. Now, if he could only get Miles to join him, that would be a night to remember. He chuckled. It probably wouldn’t take much...dinner, candle light, scented oil in the bath...romantic and irresistible. He dried off, wrapping a towel tightly round his hips. Neither he nor Miles were at the point where they could walk around in the buff and be comfortable with it. Gil sighed. Scratch that. He could walk around in the buff and be comfortable with it, but Miles...no way. The doctor hid behind an unkempt veneer of grunge. At home he wore scruffy clothes, used them as a shield to appear just unattractive enough to hide from any complicated encounters. The clothes he had worn at the Steele had made him look positively hot, which only went to prove he could do it if he tried. Which, on balance, made the situation worse, at least where Gil was concerned.

  He had almost had enough of seeing Miles doing that every day, hiding behind a layer of caustic wit and irritability. It frustrated him that the doc was potentially an attractive man but he was too damn sorry for himself to come out from behind the barricades for long. Gil finished shaving and peered at himself in the mirror. Maybe Miles simply wasn’t attracted to him. Can’t Miles see how I feel, Gil wondered?

  Tidying up his things, Gil wanted to beat a hasty retreat to his room. He knew Miles would be home soon and he wanted to be up and dressed when he arrived. He flung open the door. The surprised look on Mile’s face would have been funny, but for the fact that Gil managed to knock him clean on his ass. He stopped dead in the doorway. “Miles, you’re home early....”

  “Fuck it, Gillespie, you noticed... Did you have to come barging out of the dunny so fast? What the hell’s wrong, you got a hot date?” The doctor was definitely uncomfortable, his gaze anywhere but on Gil who reached down and took the doctor’s hand, intent on helping him up.

  “Sorry Miles, I really didn’t know you were back, much less just on the other side of the door.”

  “Apology accepted. Now get me up.” Miles hand tightened in Gil’s, testing his strength. Apparently satisfied he braced to allow the man to help him up. Under Gil’s fingers, Miles’ pulse was racing. His own fingers still faintly damp from his ablutions, Gil felt his grip slipping as Miles was half way to his feet. He flung out his other hand to take hold and steady the doc but as he did so he felt the knot of the towel slide inexorably undone. He made a grab for it but missed and it slipped gracefully to the floor, revealing Gil in all his glory.

  “Oh bugger...” That sounded like the words had tumbled from Miles’ mouth before he could stop them. Gil was amused that Miles couldn’t help staring, even though he must have seen his share of male genitalia before. Suddenly all Gil’s frustrations rushed to the fore. With a growl, he grabbed Mile’s shirt front in his fists and hauled him properly to his feet, propelling him backward. Miles gasped and grunted as his back connected with the wall. Gil’s hand came up beneath Miles’ chin to hold his head steady as he claimed Miles’ mouth in a heated kiss, a messy connection of lips, tongues and teeth a both men sought dominance. Taken by surprise, Miles seemed to react instinctively, his tongue fighting for supremacy as he felt Gil’s hands groping and grasping, popping buttons and ripping at his pants’ zip with no finesse or patience. Under this onslaught, Gil felt Miles’ cock swell in his pants, straining beneath his questing fingers. Oh God that felt so damn good. Gil cupped him through the fabric, fingers teasing, his eyes twin pools of passionate need.

  Miles didn’t seem to know what to do. He glared back, a lion cornered in its den, predatory, an Alpha male challenged in his own territory. Gil made the decision for him, grabbed Miles’ hand and closed it over his own swollen prick, groaning with desire as Miles’ fingers curled possessively around his solid length. “Fuck...Miles...”

  “This isn’t a good idea...” the words cut into Gil’s ardour like a scalpel through flesh.

  “Fuck good ideas, I need you.” Gil’s voice was rasping, husky and sexy with his craving.

  “We shouldn’t...”

  “Your body says otherwise. Bugger the consequences, we both need this...”

  “Gil...” Their faces were very close, lips tantalisingly near....

  “GIL? Gil, mate...It’s me!” Miles’ voice reached him through the closed door and a haze of s
leep. Gil came suddenly awake, sat up and cracked his head on the stupid overhanging shelf above the bed that he had marked for removal as soon as he could. Not soon enough obviously. He groaned, long and loud. “Oh, Fuck It!” aware that the dream had left him hard and aching.

  “Gil? You okay? Time’s getting on...if you need the shower, I’m finished.”

  Shower? Gil thought with a grimace, that’s irony for you, I need a shower alright, a cold one...

  Haven Falls #195 - Death Becomes Her

  Henry Vale and Lyle Ashley Tate

  (with mention of Flynn Archer and Aiden Parker)

  ______________________________________________________________

  Lyle stood in the tiny kitchen of the funeral home waiting for the kettle to boil. Since Vale hadn’t arrived yet he couldn’t get started on his day’s tasks. The schedule would be in Vale’s office, and he wasn’t going to extend his snooping to going in there uninvited. He was bursting to look at the notes he had made whilst in the basement, but that would be too risky. Vale could arrive at any moment.

  “What the hell were you doing in the basement?” Vale asked, standing in the doorway. Lyle startled, spilling boiling water onto the counter as he did so, only narrowly avoiding a scalding. “Good morning, sorry, I didn’t realise you were here, would you like a drink?” Lyle tried a ‘filler’ whilst trying to recover himself.

  “No, I want an answer.”

  “I..I was just weighing some urns. Someone was asking about it, they were wondering what it might cost to send ashes home by post.”