Something Terrible

by Wrath James White

  “Mrs. Ditmar? Is it okay if we ask you a few questions?”

  “Please, come sit down, boys.”

  Her voice was deep and scratchy as if she’d been smoking two packs a day since age twelve. It was almost an Eartha Kitt, Cat Woman purr but raspier and with more bass. I wondered if perhaps Mrs. Ditmar was really a man. I’m not a detective or a psychologist, but the immodest way she was dressed said anything but gang-rape victim.

  Chavez sat down and we sat beside him.

  “My name is Detective Chavez. Can you tell me what happened to you this evening?”

  “Ellen Ditmar. You can call me Ellen.”

  “Okay, Ellen. What happened to you tonight?”

  Mrs. Ditmar reached out and took one of Chavez’s hands pulling it to her chest, right into her cleavage as she closed her eyes in some exaggerated expression of anguish. She dropped his hand to her lap and held it there on her thigh. Chavez looked like he was about to crawl out of his skin. Obviously, Mrs. Ditmar was not his type.

  “Well. I was asleep in my bed. I had just taken a Xanax so I was sleeping pretty deeply which probably explains why I didn’t hear them break in. They were all over me when I woke up. Their naked bodies were pressed against me, crushing me into the mattress.”

  “Did you see what they looked like? How many there were?”

  “They were black and there were six of them. Big, strong, muscular, black men with big long cocks thick as my wrist. They ravaged me right there in my bed. They took me one at a time and then all at once. They sodomized me. They made me swallow their cocks and then they ejaculated all over me.”

  She began rubbing the Detective’s hand over her nipples and then down between her thighs, grinding her clit against it. Chavez snatched his hand away and leapt from the couch as if he’d been electrocuted. Even Daryl had to turn away to keep from laughing.

  “I think we’ve heard all we need to.”

  “But I didn’t tell you about them blindfolding me and driving me to their dungeon.”

  “I’m sure it would make a lovely story, but I think these two can handle it.” He shook his head and rolled his eyes as he turned to the two officers. “Good luck, boys.”

  “Wait! You can’t go! They put something inside of me! I can feel it growing in me. It’s inside of me!”

  Chavez turned and stormed out of the house red-faced. Daryl and I followed behind. I giggled nervously at the absurdity of it all. Daryl smiled back mirthlessly. Under different circumstances seeing that old chick try to fuck Chavez’s hand would have been hilarious. But after Daryl had just watched his daughter tear its way out his wife’s womb and then stood by helplessly as the woman he loved bled to death, then seeing his child transform into some type of demon and get her head blown off, I wasn’t surprised that he couldn’t find any humor in the situation. Remembering what had happened at the park I found all the humor draining out of me as well.

  When we returned to the vehicle reality hit us. We had been to two 911 calls now and we were no closer to figuring this thing out.

  The next call was in Green Valley about twenty miles away on the other side of town.

  “Are you sure this is the best way? There’s got to be more we can do than just follow these random calls hoping to get lucky and find a lead.”

  “I think this is the only way. What else can we do?” Daryl answered.

  “It may take us dozens of calls before we find a real lead. That’s police work, my friends. Clues don’t just fall out of the sky into your laps. It’s tedious, boring, exasperating work sometimes, but if we want to find out what’s going on and keep you two out of prison than we need to stick with it,” Chavez said.

  Mark and Valerie Trevor lived in a big two story house that overlooked a golf course. There was a guard gate and Detective Chavez paused at the gate to ask if the guard had seen anything unusual tonight.

  “Did you notice any strangers coming through here, any vans or large SUVs with tinted windows?”

  “A lot of SUVs came through tonight. Almost everyone who lives here drives an SUV.”

  The guard was a muscular Latino guy in a black beret. His uniform had stripes on the shoulder and he wore a gold badge. Chavez quickly dismissed the guy and continued through the gates to the Trevor’s home.

  Mr. Trevor was waiting at the front door in his pajamas and robe when we pulled up in front of the house. The guard had called ahead to let him know we were on our way. Mr. Trevor’s eyes were bloodshot and his hair was disheveled. He was smoking a cigarette and there seemed to be a slight tremble in his hands as he raised it to his lips.

  “Mr. Trevor?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Detective Chavez, Las Vegas Metro Missing Persons Department. Do you have a moment? We wanted to discuss the emergency call you placed earlier.”

  “Thank you for coming. Please come in, detectives.”

  I had been expecting him to tell us that his wife had been in the home all along and that it had all been a mistake, but he seemed eager to talk to us about something.

  “I understand that your wife is home now?”

  “Yes, she is. But something isn’t right.”

  Chavez turned and looked back at Daryl and I. We were all thinking the same thing. Maybe this was what we had been looking for.

  Mr. Trevor walked us through an expansive entryway with a slate floor and into his great room which had a twenty-two foot ceiling and a fireplace as tall as me. We sat on a big plush couch made of some sort of soft tan suede. The couch had gold tassels hanging from it and looked like it should have been in a showroom and not in someone’s living room where strangers like me might sit on it and scuff or soil it. I was actually nervous about sitting down and brushed off the back of my pants before I did so.

  Daryl looked just as uncomfortable as I was and had squeezed himself into one small corner of the couch as if trying to minimize his impact on the furniture. Chavez plopped down onto the couch with utter disregard and for one horrible second I was afraid he was going to rest his feet on their stained-glass and brushed nickel coffee table. Then he appeared to think better of it and crossed one leg over the other. Mr. Trevor sat down on a loveseat across from us. He crushed out his cigarette into a nearby ashtray and immediately lit another one.

  “I’m not supposed to smoke in the house. I had stopped smoking for a couple of months. I was using one of those electronic cigarettes that give off water vapor. But then this happened and I grabbed the nearest pack I could find.”

  “What happened?” It was Daryl who asked first.

  “I woke up in the middle of the night and Valerie was gone. I heard the front door slam and a couple vehicles pull out of the driveway?”

  “A couple?” Chavez asked.

  “Definitely more than one. Maybe even three or four.”

  “Did you see what they looked like?”

  “I couldn’t. I couldn’t get out of bed. I felt paralyzed. I just laid there listening to my wife being driven off by God knows who. I laid there like that for an hour or two and then I . . . I’m ashamed to say it but I . . . I fell asleep. When I woke up four hours had gone by and I could move again. I jumped up and grabbed the phone and called 911. I told the dispatcher everything that happened and she said she’d send a patrol car. When I hung up the phone I heard the shower running. I ran into the bathroom and Valerie was there taking a shower. She was crying and there was blood and welts all over her. It looked like she had been whipped. I asked her if she was hurt and she just started sobbing louder. She screamed at me, said she’d been raped. Then she told me about being pulled out of her bed by men in black leather, black men. You know? African Americans.”

  “Black guys?”

  “Yeah, she said that they were black guys and that they had taken her to some type of church and poured goats blood on her and dripped candle wax all over her, that they said it was made from the fat of an unbaptized baby. Then they injected her with drugs and they raped her with . . . ” He swal
lowed hard and his bottom lip trembled. “With this . . . big statue thing shaped like a penis while they played drums and prayed and chanted. They forced her to have intercourse with a bull.”

  “A bull? You mean like a male cow?” I asked. Just the thought of a woman being fucked by a bull bordered on absurdity. I was rather certain that the bull was probably one of her black male captors. I was almost just as certain that this was another bullshit call. Whatever this chick had been involved in, it had probably been voluntary. Her story sounded more like some sort of sexual fantasy than a real crime.

  “Yes, a bull, a goat, and then a snake.”

  “A snake? How do you fuck a snake?” Daryl asked and Chavez gave him a mean look and shook his head. It was an insensitive question given the circumstances, but I wanted to know too. Then Mr. Trevor explained and his explanation brought to mind even more absurd images.

  “They strapped her down and slid the entire thing up inside of her. She said she could feel it writhing around inside of her . . . you know. Then they made her drink blood. They said it was demon blood.”

  “Sir, I hate to say this but—”

  “I know. It sounds crazy. That’s why I called you guys back and told you not to come. I figured she was either lying or high or sleepwalking or had just gone crazy. But there was all of that blood on her and when you guys showed up I figured I might as well talk to you.”

  “Where is Mrs. Trevor now?”

  “She took a painkiller and an anti-depressant and went to sleep. There was one other thing she said though, before she went to sleep.”

  “What was that?”

  “When they used that big stone statue on her, the phallus, she said it ejaculated inside of her.”

  “It what?” Chavez asked. His patience seemed to be giving out and this was looking like another dead end. We were wasting time.

  “She said the statue ejaculated. It came inside of her.”

  Detective Chavez shut his notepad and stood up. He turned his back on Mr. Trevor and began walking toward the door.

  “Well, that’s it for me. If you want to file an official report just come down to the station, but we have another call to get to.”

  “That’s it? You don’t want to interview his wife?” Daryl said, looking almost as confused as Mr. Trevor.

  “Well, she is sleeping. I wouldn’t want to wake her if you don’t think it’s necessary,” Mr. Trevor said.

  “See? She’s sleeping and we’re done. Let’s go.”

  With that we all filed out of the room. Mr. Trevor’s face was turning red as he held the door for our departure but I couldn’t tell if it was from anger or embarrassment.

  Back in the car we were all silent. Chavez was gripping the steering wheel again in that white-knuckled choke hold and his jaw muscles had tightened. He was getting increasingly annoyed, and I was worried that he was going to give up and just take Daryl and I into the station and turn us in. As much as I didn’t want to go to jail I was even more worried about what was happening to these women.

  My imagination began running wild and I wondered if women were being kidnapped all over the state or maybe even across the entire country. What if it was happening around the world? What if hell had risen? Come to earth through the birth canals of these poor women? I imagined a world overrun by those little demon babies. Then I had an even more troubling thought. What do they become when they grow up? Images of old Ray Harryhausen movies came to mind with marauding monsters the size of skyscrapers.

  Daryl was chewing on his fingernails, tearing them off in long strips and spitting them to the floor, then doing the same to his cuticles. He was going to draw blood at that rate. I looked over my shoulder at him and his eyes were wide and fidgety. He looked like he had something he needed to say.

  “Something bothering you, Daryl?”

  “You mean aside from my wife being dead and you shooting my daughter’s head off after she tried to kill you?”

  He stared at me with cold humorless eyes and for some absurd reason I kept waiting for him to smile or something to let me know that he was just kidding and didn’t blame me for his child’s death. His expression never changed.

  “Yeah. I mean aside from that.”

  “Mr. Trevor’s story . . . I mean Mrs. Trevor’s story it . . . it sounded pretty close to what happened to my wife . . . I mean, what I know happened to her. And that other lady, the horny old broad . . . her story was pretty similar. They both said they got kidnapped by big black guys.”

  “Everyone says that,” Chavez interrupted. “Black guys are the generic default bad guys. Saying that you were attacked by a bunch of black guys is the same as saying I don’t know who attacked me.”

  “But the stories were so close.”

  “You know, I hadn’t thought about it, but Daryl’s right.”

  “No. He’s not. Look, that old chick said the guys were wearing leather, Daryl and Mr. Trevor said their wives were kidnapped by guys wearing robes, which I admit is pretty similar but not unusual. People watch those horror movies about devil cults and that shapes what they think they see. That old chick said she was raped in her bed. Neither of you said that happened to your wives. Mr. Trevor said the guys never touched his wife. She said they made her fuck a bull and a snake . . . ”

  “And a goat,” I added for no particular reason.

  “Yeah, and a goat. No gang rape. You said you were awake when your wife was taken and there was no gang rape involved.”

  “Well, maybe they’re just getting the details mixed up. I mean, you see how that old broad was. She’d fuck any swinging dick that came through the door. She was probably upset that they didn’t gang rape her and so she made that part up or maybe they did and she just embellished on it. Maybe it was Trevor’s wife who made up all that shit about fucking snakes and bulls and ejaculating statues to mask the fact that she’d been gang raped by a bunch of big black guys in black robes. Maybe she liked it a little and was embarrassed about it. Getting gang raped by big black guys is a pretty common fantasy among white chicks.”

  I didn’t even want to know how Daryl thought he knew that.

  “So, are you saying we should go back there?” Chavez asked.

  “Maybe we should.”

  “What do you think the odds are of the very first calls we go on being connected to what happened to Daryl’s wife?”

  “It depends on how frequently this is happening,” I said, giving voice to my fears. “If this is happening to hundreds or even thousands of women then our odds are pretty good.”

  I kept my worries about what these things would grow into to myself.

  “Let’s just see what else happens tonight. Maybe we’ll find something that will tie everything together,” Chavez said, shutting down the conversation and sending us all back to our own introspections.

  The next call we overheard was a multiple homicide. A man had killed his twin sons claiming that they had attacked him in his sleep. His wife had to be rushed to the hospital due to severe bleeding, complications from childbirth. The twins had been only two weeks old.

  “I think this is what we’ve been looking for.”

  It was beginning to look more and more like an epidemic. I couldn’t help wondering how many of these babies were out there right now running loose.

  Chapter 5

  The house was an abattoir. There was a trail of blood from the master bedroom to the master bathroom all the way to the front door. The blood looked chunky as if it contained bits of meat. My stomach rolled and I got a little dizzy. I had to turn away and lean against a coffee table to keep from falling over.

  “That’s from the mother. I guess she’d been bleeding ever since she left the hospital,” Detective Martin Link said. He was an old homicide guy that Chavez knew from back when he first made detective. He was a hulking 6’5” and well over two hundred and fifty pounds. He had a large belly, but he also had biceps the size of my head stretching the fabric of his brown sports coat. As odd as it fe
lt to say this about another dude, there was something majestic about him, like a military general or a ruler. There was a hardness about him that made you wonder if he ever smiled, ever thought of anything but enforcing the law and catching criminals. Chavez had the same hardness but in Link it was tenfold. He was clearly not a man to be fucked with. I wondered what would have happened if he had found out that Daryl and I were wanted for the kidnapping and death of a child. I definitely didn’t want to find out the answer.

  Apparently Chavez had once considered going to homicide but had changed his mind at the last moment and chose missing persons. He wanted to help people who were still able to be helped rather than merely avenging those who were past saving and bringing justice to their murderers.

  He had introduced Daryl and I as material witnesses on a case he was working with a similar M.O. to the killings. That satisfied Detective Link, but he still didn’t look too happy about civilians poking around his crime scene. Chavez explained to him that it might help jar our memories if we could see the crime scene while it was still fresh and that we might even be able to spot something that could help him with his case. Detective Link looked doubtful, but he allowed us to stay.

  We borrowed shoe covers and latex gloves from the CSU boys so we wouldn’t leave footprints or fingerprints and we were ordered to leave the shoe covers with CSU when we left in case we wound up with some valuable piece of evidence sticking to the bottom of them.

  As I looked around I spotted blood spatter on the walls that I at first assumed had come from the baby, but a closer inspection revealed them as tiny bloody footprints and hand prints. Something had crawled across the wall. I remembered Detective Chavez’s description of the baby running down the wall toward him and a shiver ran through me.