by Spencer Kope
Ross’s latest slice of four-meat is halfway to his mouth when his hand freezes and his eyes set as if working something out. “Did you find the chunk of lung that was cut out?”
Ben shakes his head.
“So … he took it with him?”
“I don’t know, I can only tell you we didn’t find it at the crime scene. The CSIs were still there the last time I talked to them. Maybe they’ll find it stuffed in a vent or hidden in someone’s desk drawer.”
I watch Ross’s eyes drift into thought. For a moment he looks like he’s going to be sick. “You don’t think we have a Jeffrey Dahmer on our hands, do you? You don’t think he’s eating them?”
“He’s not eating his victims,” Ben assures us. “If he were, there are far better cuts than the lung. You don’t see a lot of people eating cow lung, do you? Not unless they’re desperate and starving. Human lungs aren’t much different.”
“If you say tastes like chicken—”
Ben cuts me off with a laugh. “No, no. But the consumption of lungs—human or otherwise—was banned by the USDA decades ago.” He takes a quick sip of his beer. “The British government has been trying to get us to drop the ban for years because sheep’s lung is a key ingredient of traditional Scottish haggis.”
“Disgusting,” Ross mutters in disapproval.
“I agree,” Ben says, “but Scotland’s not alone. There are lung-related dishes from Italy, Hungary, Indonesia, the Philippines, Nepal”—he gives a bit of a smirk and tips his head toward Ross—“even China.”
“You seem to know your haggis,” Jimmy observes.
Ben laughs. “No, I googled it. I wanted to see if there was a reason someone would want to eat a human lung.”
* * *
Full on pizza and visions of dripping haggis, we drop Ross off next to his car at the Bakersfield Police Department parking lot and make our way back to the Sierra Inn & Suites. Marty and Les have separate rooms on the same floor, so we stop at each in turn and let them know it might be a couple of days before we can head home.
They take it in stride, asking few questions.
As I’m walking away from Marty’s room, he calls, “Hey, Steps. I found this snazzy little jazz bar not far from here. How about we dump the old married guys and go scope it out? See what Bakersfield has to offer.”
“Remember that part about me being engaged?” I call back over my shoulder.
“So? It’s not like you’re married yet. When I buy a car, I don’t hang my dice from the rearview mirror until I transfer the title.”
“And that,” I say without turning around, “is why your wives are ex-wives.” I give him a wave and keep walking.
“They couldn’t handle me,” Marty calls out with his unending confidence. “I was too much for them. They don’t make energy drinks potent enough to keep up with my kind of virility.” In a quieter voice, I hear him add, “Poor things were just exhausted.” Seemingly satisfied with this proclamation, he disappears back into his room and I hear the door close.
Jimmy’s still smiling and shaking his head when he says good night and peels off into his room. Mine is across the hall.
I contemplate a shower but call Heather instead. When there’s no answer on her cell, I call home, hoping she’s at Big Perch rather than her apartment in Seattle.
“Hello,” a British voice belts out on the other end, sounding remarkably like John Cleese.
“Evening, Ellis. How are things?”
“All right, Steps, all right. Are you okay? You sound a bit zonked.”
“I’m good. It’s just this case. You know how it is; sometimes they’re easy, sometimes, not so much.”
Ellis is silent a moment, then, dropping some of the accent, he says, “I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I’d love to come along with you on one of your little jaunts. I may not be FBI, but I was still law enforcement, after a fashion. I daresay I could give Diane a run for her money.”
I snort. “Diane would toast you over an open fire and eat you for breakfast.”
“Pah! She’s all bluster, that one. Besides, she likes me too much. I asked her to go sunbathing with me, you know? Last summer. She almost said yes.”
“Sunbathing? As in nude sunbathing?”
“Indeed.”
“I’m guessing that almost is a bit of a stretch,” I say pointedly.
“Oh, go ahead and mock the dreams of an old man,” Ellis says with good humor. “Was there a particular reason you called or was it just to take the mickey?”
“I was hoping to talk to Heather,” I say with a chuckle.
“Heather.” He hems and haws. “Well, yes, about that—she’s not here.”
I nod to myself. “I called her cell and didn’t get an answer, but I’ll give it another try. Can you let Jens know that we should be back in a couple—”
“Ah-hmm,” Ellis interrupts with some exaggeration as if clearing his throat. “She said she may not have cell reception because—how should I say this? Well, the truth of the matter is that she’s not at the apartment. There, I’ve said it.”
“Well … where is she?”
“I can’t say.”
“You can’t say, or you won’t say?”
“A bit of both, I should think.” Before I can press further, he says, “Now, don’t get spun up, Steps. It’s a surprise, you see. And frankly, I’ve given too much away as it is.”
“Given too much—” I stop myself. “The only thing you’ve given away is that she’s not at Big Perch, and she’s not at her apartment.”
“Well, that’s a relief then. Here I thought I’d gone and mucked it all up.”
I remain quiet, waiting for him to elaborate, to say something, to say anything. But Ellis is shrewdly silent.
“So you’re not going to tell me.”
“We, my boy, are at an impasse. I’ve been sworn to secrecy, and secrecy I’ll keep. Now, if you’re looking for a sympathetic ear, I’ve been told that I’m downright therapeutic in my abilities to listen and emote.”
“You’re no Heather,” I say with a chuckle.
With his bushy mustache, practiced estuary accent, and the pith helmet he favors, Ellis often reminds me of hundred-year-old pictures you see of adventurers off to hunt big game in Africa.
I’d known Ellis six months before I learned that he wasn’t British at all. He was born and raised in Philadelphia and worked for the US government as a border patrol agent for more than thirty years. He’s an odd duck with an affinity for hats and nude sunbathing, but we like him.
“Where’s Jens?”
“I believe he’s in the hot tub with the triplets.” Ellis is then shouted down by my brother, though I can’t quite make out what he’s saying. “Pay no attention,” the mustachioed faux Brit continues in his best estuary. “He’s just upset that I’ve taken thirteen dollars and some change off him in a straight-up game of poker.”
“Thirteen dollars isn’t bad.”
“We’re playing for pennies.”
“Oh.”
After talking to Jens for a few minutes and catching additional grief from Ellis for trying to elicit Heather’s location from him, I say my goodnights and end the call.
I miss them as soon as I hit the button.
26
Wednesday, March 11—7:17 A.M.
Jacob and Isaiah rarely skip school.
Well, they rarely skip school so close on the heels of their last skip day. Today, however, the twelve-year-old twins will make an exception to their normal operating procedures, a deviation born of necessity and curiosity. The mission is—well, they can’t talk about the mission. Just know that it’s top secret and of the utmost importance.
And if they don’t make it back?
That’s a risk the boys are willing to take. In such an unfortunate event, it would be left to their CIA handler to deliver the news to their mother, no doubt masked as a training accident or an allergic reaction to seafood.
Their last handler, may she re
st in peace, was run over by a car three months ago. They buried her in the backyard with the others; an unmarked grave for a hero of the republic.
It shouldn’t have gone down like that, but the stupid cat was always running into the street. It was bound to happen eventually. Now they’re stuck with Barney, an okay lookout but skittish as a field mouse. The three-year-old beagle is less than enthusiastic about his new position as CIA handler.
With the kind of devious diligence peculiar to boys, the twins put on all the airs of going to school: getting dressed, making their beds, fetching their lunches from the fridge, and waiting at the curb for the big yellow bus that’s bound to be by any minute now.
School mornings have a well-honed routine around their house, so much so that their mother, Penny, sets her internal clock by her boys. When they step out the front door and shuffle to the curb to wait for their ride, she knows that she has five minutes before she has to leave for work.
When she steps outside five minutes later and finds the boys still waiting, she pauses, as if unsure how to proceed, how to deviate from the routine.
“Is the bus coming?” she calls out after locking the door.
“It’s just running late, Mom,” Jacob says. “It’s fine.”
“You want me to wait?”
“Mom, we’re twelve!” Isaiah says disappointedly.
“I know, but—”
“We’ll call if it doesn’t show up,” Jacob interrupts, waving his cell phone in the air.
Penny thinks on this for a moment but then surrenders to the urgency of routine. It’s an eighteen-minute drive to work, with a four-minute margin for lights and traffic. “All right,” she calls out, “but if it’s not here in the next ten minutes, I want a call.”
It was that simple.
When she arrived at work she wouldn’t necessarily notice that she was ten minutes early. Even if she did, she wouldn’t suspect that the boys had left the house early. Why would they? Certainly not to wait for a bus that was still fifteen minutes away? Not a chance.
As soon as Penny’s Lexus turns out of the community, the boys race for the front door, unlock it, and duck inside. They wait another five minutes for the bus to arrive, honk twice, and then move on. Stashing their lunches back in the fridge, they gather their gear from under their beds and, donning the matching backpacks, exit out the back door.
* * *
They call it the Saw house.
Not because the old place was a former lumber mill, or because the sounds of various saws emanate from within, but because the semi-abandoned house reminds them of the movie Saw. Their overactive minds constantly imagine what horrors might lie within, and if the place had a basement—which it doesn’t—it would certainly be the center of all earthly evil.
Their cousin Tanner let them watch Saw when they were ten, telling them it was just like the reality show Survivors but with more blood.
It wasn’t. They had nightmares for months.
Now, at age twelve, it seems so long ago, like a decade has passed. When you’re young, every year seems so long, and there’s so much growing up that goes on between summers. The boys have seen other bad movies since that momentous viewing—maybe not that bad, but still terrifying. They like to think of themselves as older and more mature now, no longer the skittish ten-year-olds who were so easily frightened.
* * *
The Saw house is two lots north.
People have come and gone from the place for a few years now, never staying for long. The boys are convinced it’s because the place is haunted—bumps and groans in the night, that sort of thing. The simple truth is that the landlord makes more renting it as a short-term furnished home. And tenants aren’t overly picky about the home’s condition as long as it’s only for a few months.
Creeper has been there the longest.
There were others before him, of course, and before them all, it had been the lair of a dark witch, an old hag right out of the movies. She’d yell at the twins as they rode their bikes up and down the sidewalks, racing each other from one end of the street to the other. Then one day she was just gone, and the house sat empty for a long time.
That was years ago.
They never heard what happened to the witch, and Isaiah, the oldest of the boys by twenty-three minutes, said that a witch hunter had killed her and burned her body in the backyard. He said he saw the fire from his bedroom window one night.
The witch was the worst thing that ever happened to the neighborhood … at least until Creeper moved in.
They call him Creeper because, well, that’s what he is. They only see him outside the residence on rare occasions, and when they do, he’s always casting about, checking to see if anyone’s watching. He wears a hoodie that covers his head and throws his face into shadow so that even if they wanted to, the boys would be hard-pressed to describe him.
One time, they saw Mrs. Mulligan talking to the big man, though the exchange didn’t seem overly friendly. More like two spiders squaring off for a leg thrashing. Mrs. Mulligan is a creeper too. It’s because of her that the boys stay close to the backyard fences as they approach the Saw house.
* * *
It’s not the first time the boys have snuck into the dilapidated house. If they were honest, they’d admit that it’s not even the tenth time. They’d learned years earlier that the latch on the bathroom window doesn’t lock. Nobody had ever gotten around to fixing it because, well, the window is so small it’s not like anyone can crawl through.
Except for a twelve-year-old boy.
Jacob always gets the dirty job of shimmying through the opening, dropping his feet to the toilet seat, then hurrying around to unlock the rear sliding door. Isaiah says that since he’s the oldest, he has to stand guard outside.
Jacob says that’s a bunch of bull crap.
* * *
When his feet hit the bathroom floor, Jacob crouches for a moment and listens. When no sound comes to him, he rises and peers out into the hall and then down into the living room. Nothing. It’s not like they were expecting anyone. They’d watched Creeper leave that morning and had never seen anyone else coming and going from the residence.
Still, as Jacob makes his way down the hall, he pauses and listens a second time, holding his breath for a moment. He thought he heard … no, it wasn’t anything. Just his imagination. Yet, as his feet carry him the rest of the way to the sliding glass door, his steps are a little more hurried than usual. He glances back over his shoulder at the long hall with its closed doors leading to closed rooms.
The boys haven’t been in the house since Creeper moved in. They hadn’t dared. But when they saw the giant man applying wet newspaper to the rear bedroom windows two weeks ago, it got them curious. Creeper doesn’t look like the type with hobbies, and even at their age they know that you only paper over a window if you’re hiding something.
That’s what today is about.
They want to know Creeper’s secret.
When Isaiah is satisfied that the perimeter is clear, which mostly means that Mrs. Mulligan didn’t see them sneaking in, the boys make their way down the hall, big brother now in the lead. They move past the first closed door without interest and stop at the next door on the left. They whisper-argue back and forth over who should open the door, and Isaiah finally relents and turns the knob grudgingly.
The room is dark and there’s a soft, rustling sound.
“Rats,” Isaiah whispers to Jacob.
The newsprint on the windows blocks most of the light, and Isaiah has to fumble a moment before finding the wall switch. When the naked bulb in the open ceiling fixture illuminates the room, the boys blink a moment against the harsh blaze.
Then their eyes settle … and their hearts stop.
Isaiah is the first to scream.
27
Wednesday, March 11—7:34 A.M.
Noah Long is groggy when he wakes.
He’d been groggy as long as he can remember, which doesn’t mean any
thing because time seems to have shifted out of phase from his reality. Hell, reality has shifted out of phase from his reality. The only constant for him is pain; pain and the dark room.
And the demon.
The creature comes and goes, never helping Noah, just laughing at him and saying odd things like “I’m gonna top you off.”
Noah struggles with the words every time, unsure what top you off means.
It troubles him that he can’t puzzle through it, but his mind won’t work the way it’s supposed to; the way it usually works. He’s only ever before felt like this a few times in his life, and that was back in college. Bad decisions that he never repeated.
There’s something else about the demon.
He remembers that it once had a name, almost like a man has a name, or a dog or a horse. As he focuses on this single thought, it plays at the edge of his muddled mind. It seems to him that the demon once looked normal like a man, only larger and not a man. He whistled while he secured Noah to the bed. He remembered that part: the whistling. The securing. The yank on the restraints, like a sailor making sure a knot is especially tight.
But that was ages ago. Eons.
Now, glancing around at the shadowed room, Noah struggles for something else, some other thought or realization. He struggles for it until it finally takes shape in his mind: Something had woken him. It had stirred him from his stupor, knocked on the door to his subconscious, pried open his eyelids, and demanded he wake.
Wake!
He understands that now—or thinks he does. Was it a noise? A vibration? As his mind tries to clear, he wonders if the demon has returned to “top him off.”
He listens as intently as his addled mind will allow, but the house is quiet.
In a fit, he pulls against the restraint on his left arm, knowing the futility of it. He tries to call out to Marco, but the words won’t come. His jaw moves and his tongue dances around his teeth, but no sound comes. There’s a reason for that, but he can’t remember what it is.