The Hunter Inside

by David McGowan

  The Hunter Inside

  by

  David McGowan

  The Hunter Inside

  Copyright: David McGowan

  Published: 2012

  The right of David McGowan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.

  For Eileen

  The Hunted

  1

  The musty smell inside the cab attacked the senses of Bill Arnold, and he found himself pondering on what he should compare it to. A closet left full of clothes and untouched for half a century?

  He breathed deeply and gulped, forcing the musty, dusty air down his windpipe. No. More like a room full of decaying, yellowing paperbacks, centuries old.

  The cab needed a good clean, he realized. What he couldn’t work out was why now should be the time for him to consider this. Of all the times in the past five days that he could have thought about it, he had picked now.

  His eyes fleeted across the paneling in front of him, registering to his brain the thick coat of dust that covered it.

  Voices crackled on the CB radio. Distant voices. People he did not know. He had never once spoken over the hissing, gravelly void, and he had learned to tune out the stream of voices that continuously whispered, there but not there – out of reach.

  He normally preferred to keep himself distracted by taking in his surroundings. That was, after all, his reason for driving the big rig. His trucking career had begun with the desire for freedom, and he had longed to find release on the solitary journeys he undertook. The more time that passed, however, the more cut-off and confined the cab made him feel. The hulk of metal restricted him. And he always had to go back. Back to the most restrictive, constrictive thing of all. The thing he was never allowed to escape from.

  Real life.

  For once, the cocoon of the cab was welcome. He listened to the voices, and he looked at the dust. He couldn’t bring himself to look out of the window of the stationary cab; the sight of twisted, mangled metal made his heart rate soar. He looked at the backs of his hands, strong, gripping the wheel tightly. His knuckles practically glowed white; such was the force of his hold, and as the events of two hours before replayed over and over in his mind, it was this grip which kept him in the real world, as his head spun and his stomach continually lurched, flipping over and over like the car that lay crushed seventy yards away had done two hours earlier.

  A knock on the window made him jolt, and he banged the back of his head hard enough to make stars appear in front of his eyes as the highway patrol officer signaled for him to continue on his journey.

  The engine turned over on the first attempt, and Bill Arnold inched slowly along with the single line procession of traffic, past the crushed Toyota, which now sat on the back of a haulage truck. When it had hit the oil and spun out of control it had flipped spectacularly, and he had thought then that anybody inside didn’t stand a chance.

  He had been right.

  An officer using an oversized broom swept up debris – which included a plastic sign that proclaimed ‘Baby on Board’, and Bill wiped away a tear with the back of his hand as the traffic in front of him split into two lanes.

  That’s just it, he thought, life goes on.

  One tear was normally more than people had to give. Life had become like the endless stretches of blacktop that opened in front of him – a jostling merry-go-round where every man fought for himself and every inch was won with sometimes extraordinary risks being taken.

  All at breakneck speed.

  Life for Bill Arnold was a hill, and while he strove to get up the almost sheer precipice, pitfalls like the random acts of a god that allowed babies to die on cool June evenings made him wonder what he might look forward to if he ever managed to drag his burdens all the way to the summit. Whether what would lie ahead of him would be enough to distract him from the wasteland that lay just over his shoulder, opened out to inspection. Maybe there was only more barren wilderness on the other side. Maybe there was no higher force.

  He certainly felt alone as he drove away from the scene and towards his house. The temperature dropped steadily, and the only presence inside the cab with him was the crackling voices, speaking in another dimension – faceless, disembodied and without comfort.

  Combined with the image inside his head of the redundant ‘Baby on Board’ notice, the low crackle and murmur of the voices added to the sinking and depressed feeling that resided in his stomach. The cold began to penetrate the cab and chew away at the joints in his fingers, and he was relieved when he finally reached the small, unimpressive one bedroomed house and ended his four-day journey.

  He let himself into the house and picked up the small pile of mail that waited for him behind the door. As he walked into the kitchen, he arranged the three envelopes by their size. Two of the envelopes were circulars – yet more offers of all-purpose loans and personal injury compensation. The third envelope was the one he had been dreading seeing, even as the car ahead of him had flipped earlier.

  He opened the refrigerator, and was disappointed to see that there were just three bottles of Bud left on the bottom shelf. A moment’s deliberation led him to conclude that he would not go out again tonight. The chilled abyss of the Glen Rock night, with its icy quality, had made an impression upon his body that was not normally synonymous with the month of June, and that was something he had definitely been glad to leave behind.

  The morning would hopefully bring warm sunshine to Glen Rock, and he would make the half-kilometer journey then. After a good night’s rest he would be able to go and purchase beer and groceries. Not that the term ‘groceries’ encompassed anything more than TV dinners – his was a life of few pleasures and little effort.

  He took one of the dew-covered bottles and swung the refrigerator door shut, before walking through the open-plan building, arriving at the sofa in the lounge with half a dozen paces. Unlike the rest of the house, the sofa was large and luxuriant, and he flopped down into its comforting embrace – setting down the unopened beer and the envelope, and allowing himself one more momentary distraction before he faced the contents of the plain manila parcel.

  The sofa welcomed him and encouraged him to close his eyes, which he did without realizing. Colored shapes appeared out of the broken images as they disintegrated from his field of vision and swirled away, to be replaced with fresh streams and orbs of color that lulled him towards sleep, caressing him in a gentle hold. He listened, unconsciously, to the sound of his own breathing, which became heavier and imbued with a murmuring growl, as his eyelids fluttered and the room around him faded before disappearing into blackness.

  The blackness opened out in front of him, and the comforting lull of sleep’s warm embrace suddenly eluded him. It was blackness unlike any he had ever seen before. No sliver of light filtered into this place: it was as dark as the bottom of the deepest ocean. The veil that shrouded his surroundings was so close as to be pressing against his eyes. Not even a faint whisper of a breeze blew, and Bill suddenly noticed something else: He was not breathing.

  Dream, dream, he thought, fighting the urge to panic that manifested itself in waves that beat against the inside of his stomach, swelling and crashing as though looking for a way out.

  But he
definitely wasn’t breathing. When he tried to suck air into his lungs, no breath passed his lips. This place had no air, and he noticed something else. His feet were beginning to sink into the floor. It had become like quicksand, and had already claimed a little over the tops of his feet, bringing with it a sensation of numbness similar to that he had felt in his fingers earlier.

  He blinked, trying to clear his vision. With each double-blink he heard a tick-tock sound, as if a huge clock hung on a wall he could not see. He stopped blinking and held his eyes open, but the sound continued, gouging his mind with its brittle strikes.

  Now, his ankles were sinking through the floor, and as he tried to pull his feet free, he felt the weight of an ocean pressing on his shoulders. His movement was restricted, almost slow motion. A presence loomed over him. It was behind him, and he was blind, but he sensed that it was there, and his heart would have skipped a beat – but for the fact that it had already stopped beating.

  Dream, dream.

  Tick-Tock. Tick-Tock. The sound swelled in his ears, matching the feeling of dread in his stomach as he struggled, managing to free his feet from the grip of the black, airless vacuum and beginning to run. Trying to escape the thing that was behind him. The thing that now pursued him.

  The noise remained, masking the sound of his feet as he tried to run. Whatever was in this place with him, its aura hung all around him. It was part of his surroundings, and this realization made his flight from it more difficult. Impossible. His arms and legs pumped in slow motion and the ground seemed to slope upwards, fighting against him.

  Something appeared ahead of him. A white orb of light presented itself from the darkness. He couldn’t make out what it was as he continued to struggle towards its position, and it began to move away from him. He reached out with his mind, trying to identify it, and the previously upward slope that he traversed began to even out. He could see his arms in front of him as his pace quickened, and hope flickered like a spark in the gloom.

  He breathed in and his heart beat. Something was happening. The floor began to slope away from him. He began to lose control, flailing wildly towards the dim light once again. The breath he had so desired moments ago became rapid and uncontrolled, but despite his headlong rush, the light ahead of him seemed further away than before.

  In fact, it was fading, and he could no longer control the pace of his forward motion. He began to stumble, his temples pulsing with the pressure of the blood that rushed to his head, and then his legs buckled and he fell, spinning head over heels. As he rolled he tried to maintain his view of the white light, but it vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and he was left spinning uncontrollably towards what could be a bottomless pit.

  The air around him was pitch black, and the presence that had seemed to track him earlier returned. It was now stronger than ever, and as he continued to roll he closed his eyes. The ticking was louder again. The ground evened out, and he slowed to a stop. He opened his eyes and got to his feet. The white light ahead of him was there, almost within clear view. It looked like a baby. He staggered towards its singular radiant light and looked into its face.

  Then he woke up, lying next to the sofa in the lounge of his home, screaming.

  *

  For five seconds and more, he continued to scream, his anguished cries muffled due to his stubbled face being pressed into the carpet, before the haze of disorientation cleared and he lifted his head. When he did so, he was left looking at the envelope.

  It was the same as almost thirty others he’d received in the past couple of months, all without postage marks, and the terror of the sight of the baby’s bloody, shattered head was quickly matched by the memory of the unopened mail.

  He picked himself and the envelope up. There was no use in wondering and fearing its contents, he knew he had to open it. Words can’t hurt me, he thought. Sticks and stones may break my bones…

  He tore open the top of the envelope and pulled out the single piece of paper. On it were ten words. Ten words that sent shivers down his spine:

  Your time will soon be here. I will see you

  He looked back at the envelope and noticed what looked like a photograph inside. His perspiring, shaking hands made it difficult to extract from the torn envelope, and when he did it was facedown. As he held it in his hands he felt his heart rate increase until it felt like a jackhammer inside his chest.

  ‘Calm down or you’ll give yourself a heart-attack,’ he murmured to himself. But it was no good; his heart was beating out of his chest, and would continue to do so in the face of the threat.

  He turned the photograph over. What he saw made the blood run out of his face, his stomach turn, and the world spin. He expected at any moment to feel a sharp pain in his chest, or a tingling sensation running through his left arm as the stress caused his heart to malfunction.

  What Bill Arnold looked at was a photograph of a man. But this man was dead. He had obviously been quite savagely murdered.

  He was, by Bill’s estimate, about twenty-five years old. He couldn’t be sure about this because of the massive injuries the man had suffered. His wrists were tied to bedposts and he was naked.

  There must be gallons of blood, he thought. He could make out eight thick wounds, which he figured were probably stab wounds, spread over the man’s chest and stomach. On top of this, there were dozens of slash marks across his arms and legs and his throat had been cut from ear to ear.

  Bill looked away to try and settle his wildly churning stomach. It was no use. The feeling of nausea was mixed with a sense of fear that outweighed even the sense of pity and sadness he had felt earlier in the evening.

  He felt worse at witnessing this photographed carnage than when he’d been informed of his father’s death. That had been ten years ago, when he was forty years old, and now he felt a heightened sense of mystery, like he had two years after the death of his father, when his mother had walked out.

  She had been a broken woman when his father died. She changed from outgoing and confident, to a woman that Bill barely recognized as his mother, always suspicious and very quiet. He never really knew why she’d walked out and had never seen her again to ask her, but the feeling he had now was the same as the feeling he’d had then. He felt he was caught up in something bigger than was apparent to him. Like a deer caught in the headlights of a car. About to be hit, but minus the knowledge of by whom or why.

  But at the age of fifty, Bill Arnold felt too old to be playing games. Up until the arrival of the photograph, he’d thought that if somebody had a gripe with him then he would sooner they confronted him with it than try to scare him. Then they could seek, and find, closure. But looking at the photograph and the terrible injuries that the murdered man had suffered, he was no longer desirous of meeting the person behind the correspondence – he had a fair idea what the closure would involve.

  He turned the photograph over again and looked closely at the man’s injuries. Arm’s length was as close as his stomach would permit. There was so much damage. It seemed incomprehensible that a human being was physically capable of doing such a thing, but this was now very real for Bill Arnold, the trucker who had seen enough horror in one day to last him a lifetime. He’d changed his mind. He would drive the half-kilometer to the liquor store. He’d also changed his mind about the Budweiser.

  He was going to need a large bottle of bourbon.

  *

  He made his way around the house, holding aside the tangled branches that grew at various points around the perimeter of the garden. Somehow he had never gotten around to sorting out the thick, thorny bush that made gaining access to the rear of the property difficult to achieve. Now, as he entered the cramped and musty car hold situated at the rear of the house and slipped behind the wheel of his old Ford he wondered why. He also wondered why the state of the garden was entering his thoughts at a time when it should have been furthest from his mind.

  He sat for a moment, reflecting on the note and the photograph, and wonderi
ng what to do. If he went to the police they might think he had committed the murder. He had no alibi and he also had the photo, which linked him to the crime scene. He knew he would be hauled in for questioning, and he didn’t trust the police.

  But who is this mysterious stalker? And why am I on his hit list? he wondered. He was unable to speculate on who it might be. He therefore abandoned at an early stage trying to work out why he was a target. He decided to get the beer and the whiskey, knowing it was the only chance he had of forgetting this sick and twisted killer.

  The car’s engine sputtered into life after a couple of attempts. He pulled out of the car hold and drove down the drive slowly, waiting until he reached the blacktop outside before picking up speed and beginning his mission.

  It was now 9:30 PM and the temperature was not much above freezing. He drove carefully, fearing invisible patches of black ice. When he reached the store he hurried inside and grabbed a crate of Bud that was nearly as chilled as he was, before going to the counter.

  ‘Give me the largest bottle of the cheapest whiskey you’ve got,’ he said to the young girl behind the counter, checking her out as she turned away with a look on her face that suggested she thought he might be an alcoholic.

  He wondered how much else was going to go wrong for him today.

  He left the store, pausing only to glance at the front pages of the evening newspaper to see if there was anything regarding the murder scene that he had viewed so recently. There was no reference to it on the front page. He knew that this was the only page fit to report such an abhorrent scene, and while he was relieved at the realization that this could mean it had not happened locally, he also considered the possibility that the body had not yet been discovered. He climbed back into the car, depositing his purchases on the rear seat before starting the engine and pulling out of the parking lot.

  Upon his arrival home, he went inside – making sure he had double-locked the door – and turned on the TV. He drank the first bottle of Bud very quickly.