“If it is, they’re death metal, or whatever they call it these days. No, boss, I think this is some kind of black magic ritual bullshit.”
John stood looking at the poster for several seconds. It looked like something a teenage boy might do, and certainly didn’t look capable of being the cause of the mayhem in the adjoining room.
“So, what?” he said. “Kids like to play mumbo-jumbo games when they’re stoned, you know that. Sometimes it’s a Ouija board, sometimes a tarot pack, and sometimes it’s bullshit magic circles and pentacles. It’s not like we haven’t seen this kind of crap before.”
“But it usually ends with them scaring themselves silly, or else a fist fight and some cuts and bruises, not the bloody Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
John studied the makeshift artwork again. He had rarely seen anything less likely to be magical.
“You really think this is related to what went down next door?”
Janis couldn’t seem to drag herself away from the poster.
“I think it must be, Boss. At least that’s what my gut is telling me. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, though. But there’s also no doubt that something kicked it all off. This is as good a place to start as any, isn’t it? We’ve got to start somewhere.”
John had one last look at the artwork then turned away.
“Okay, it’s your call. Ask the blonde about it when she’s sobered up.”
As they walked back through to the main room John saw that the view from the main room window was now obscured by fog, not in itself unusual in St. John’s at this time of the year. What was unusual was that this fog was so thick it looked like a gray wall just beyond the window. It had come out of nowhere, for the harbor had been in bright sunshine just a few minutes earlier, and you usually saw the gray stuff coming from a long way off through the Narrows or over Signal Hill.
The room fell dark around them, as gloomy as late evening in a matter of seconds. Janis flicked a light switch, but nothing happened. John tried the television, amazingly the sleek flat-screen had survived the mayhem without even being toppled, but it wasn’t getting any juice. It stayed dark and black.
“Great,” John said. “No light and no power. Well, there’s no use stumbling around in the gloom. Best just leave everything to the Forensics lads. We’ll both talk to the blonde at the station, see what she’s got to say for herself.”
He didn’t get any argument from Janis, and Constable Wiggins was already on his way out, heading for the stairs. John followed the other two down an increasingly dark stairwell. It seemed the power was out in the whole building, and that the fog outside was getting thicker by the minute.
By the time he reached the bottom hall the constable had already stepped outside. Janis stood in the doorway, holding the door open.
“It’s as thick as soup out there, Boss. I think we’ll be faster walking than taking the truck.”
John nodded.
“I’ll be right with you.”
He turned for one last look up the stairwell. There was thin light, high up there, from a skylight that was gray and opaque, but no sign of any movement, not any sound in the whole building. He hadn’t asked Janis about the other occupants and it should have been one of his first questions, another sign he wasn’t quite up to speed yet.
He turned back to the door to finally ask her, but she had already left, there was just a wall of fog in the doorway. He couldn’t hear any traffic noise or any voices. Everything beyond the immediate hallway was silenced by the gray blanket that had fallen on the town. John stepped forward into the doorway then one step further, into the fog. He expected to meet cold air, but the fog felt strangely warm against his face, and as he tried to take another step it pushed back against him, preventing him from going outside.
“What the fuck is this now?” he said loudly. “Janis? Is this some sort of coming back to work joke? Because if it is, I am not fucking amused.”
He got no answer, and the fog, or whatever it was for he was no longer sure that fog was the word for this, pushed harder against him. He wasn’t making any headway. He could reach six inches or so past the plane of the door opening itself, but could go no further. It was as if a physical barrier had been slid into place to prevent him leaving. He stepped back into the hallway, slightly out of breath with exertion, planning to take stock. As he did so the heavy wooden door slammed shut with a bang that shook the whole house, leaving him alone in a hall that was lit only by a small window above the door itself, a window filled with swirling, thick fog.
He tried the door handle. It turned, but when he tugged it didn’t give, the door didn’t move in the slightest in its frame, and there was no other mechanism to open it from the inside. There was a keyhole, but no key. The door was locked, securely, and from the outside.
“Janis?” he shouted, and beat on the door with his fist. “I’m beyond not being amused now, now I’m fucking royally annoyed. Open this door right now.”
There was no answer, no sound of any kind from beyond the door. The fog continued to swirl in the window above the frame.
What the fuck is going on here?
He tried the door again with the same lack of result. Giving it a hard kick didn’t help, but it at least let off some of the steam he could feel building up in him, it was all he could do not to take out his pistol and start blasting at the handle.
“Sergeant Lodge?” he shouted again, trying to keep his voice calm. “Okay, you’ve got me. Big joke. We can all go back to the station and everyone will get their jollies at my expense for a while. But we’ve got a multiple homicide to deal with here. It’s time to be getting on with it.”
His appeal to her sense of duty should have worked. He knew her well enough to know that she held her job as being of prime importance. The door should have opened straight away.
It stayed resolutely shut, and there was still no noise from outside.
John turned three-sixty degrees in the empty hallway.
He was alone in the dark.
2
Janis stood out on the sidewalk for several seconds after stepping outside. The fog cleared quickly as a sudden breeze, helped by the return of strong sunshine, blew it away as if it had never been. She turned, expecting to see the boss in the doorway. The door in front of her was shut and there was no sign of the inspector.
She turned the handle, opened the door and looked inside. The dark hallway beyond was empty and quiet.
“Boss? You still in here?”
Her call echoed up the stairwell and she waited, listening. She got no reply and the house stayed quiet. She’d been told earlier that the rest of the rooms were not in use, she’d had a constable check, and he’d reported nothing but empty rooms that looked like they’d been that way for quite some time.
“Boss?”
There was still no answer. She closed the door and went back out onto the street, looking up and down the hill, but she couldn’t see John Green anywhere. There was an old man walking a dog further up the hill, but nobody down this end but her and Todd Wiggins.
The constable was standing at her shoulder. She turned to him.
“Did you see the boss? Did he go down or up the hill?”
She saw immediately that the younger officer knew about as much as she did.
“He didn’t pass me, so he must have gone up, but I thought he was with you,” he said.
“He was, until a couple of seconds ago.”
“We probably just lost him in the fog,” Wiggins said. “He’ll be on his way back to the station on foot. We can drive round and pick him up as we pass him.”
Although Janis couldn’t see how the inspector could have evaded them, or why he didn’t just turn and come back when the fog lifted so quickly, she could see the sense of the constable’s plan. She got in the truck as he started it up, checking up and down the hill one last time first. Wiggins took their usual route back, the one the boss would normally use if walking, but although the journey was long enough
that they should have caught him easily, there had still been no sight of John Green by the time they reached the station. Janis also had a look at the logbook in reception. He had not checked in at the desk ahead of them.
She wanted to go straight back out to the house again, but Wiggins put a hand on her shoulder.
“Leave him be for a bit, sarge,” he said softly. “We both saw the look on his face when he saw the bodies. He came back too early. I’m not sure he can handle it. Maybe he’s gone home, and is too embarrassed to have us see him like that?”
Again, that sounded reasonable, knowing what she did of the inspector’s frame of mind in recent weeks. She’d checked in with him regularly during his recuperation after he got out of hospital, joining him for coffee and Scotch, not much for her, too much for him, and had even put him to bed twice when the booze caught up to him too fast. She had thought then that the road back might be longer than he hoped. Now she was sure of it.
“Okay,” Janis said, realizing Wiggins was still waiting for a reply. “But I’m not leaving him to brood. As soon as we’ve talked to the survivor, we’ll go around to his place and make sure he’s okay. Deal?”
Wiggins nodded and together they headed for the interview room, where their only witness was waiting for them.
The young constable charged with watching over their witness looked more than a bit relieved to be allowed out of the room when Janis and Wiggins entered.
“I don’t know what she’s been on, sergeant,” she said. “But I don’t want anything to do with it. It’s scary sounding shit, pardon my French.”
The blonde sat slumped on the other side of the table, as loose as a rag doll that had been discarded and left in the chair. She looked up when the two cops entered, as if expecting to see someone else, her face falling when she realized it was only the two officers. She had been crying, long and hard, black streaks of mascara running down her cheeks, almost symmetrical in the patterning on either side and giving her the look of a particularly crazed clown. She wiped some dribble away from her nose with the back of her hand and sniffed wetly until Janis handed her a box of tissues they kept on a shelf. People cried a lot in this room, and the cops had learned to be prepared.
“Can I go home now? I really want to go home now,” the blonde said. She looked about ready to burst into tears again at any moment.
There wasn’t any way this woman was going anywhere other than a cell for the foreseeable future, not while there were still six dead bodies to account for, but Janis knew that telling her that right now might mean she wouldn’t get a statement.
And I need that story.
She sat down in the chair opposite the woman and Wiggins sat down on her right-hand side. He slid a file across to her as he pulled up the chair.
“Just tell us what happened in the apartment last night,” Janis said. “Then we’ll see what we can do for you.”
Janis read the woman’s rap sheet as she waited for her to decide to talk. It was a longish list, but all petty misdemeanors, DUI, shoplifting and small quantity possession, but nothing since she turned twenty-one some five years ago. There was certainly nothing in the file to indicate a violent streak, and nothing to say she was capable of the bloody mayhem that had been visited on the other partygoers.
But drugs make people do crazy shit. It wouldn’t be the first time.
She looked up when the woman finally decided to talk.
“Can’t I just go home? It’s my mam, see,” the girl, Samantha, Janis noted, said. “She’ll be waiting for me.”
Samantha wasn’t quite bright enough to realize that her sheet also told Janis that her parents were both deceased, but Janis kept quiet for the time being. The blonde had started talking, and interrupting her now would only set things back a step.
“And I don’t know anything, I swear. The big guy, the good looking bearded one, picked me up in that Irish bar in George Street last night. I’d had a drink or two…you know…and a smoke, and it was getting late, so I was going to give him the brush off. But he said he had a party going, it was just ’round the corner a way and there would be free booze and pizza. So, Sheila and me went with him and his pals.”
She stopped, as if she’d suddenly remembered that her friend should be around somewhere.
“You’ve seen Sheila, right? She’s okay, isn’t she?”
Janis guessed that Sheila would turn out to be one of the deceased, probably the one that died trying to get to the door, but again she kept quiet. Samantha didn’t need to know that, not yet, maybe not for a long time yet.
“We nearly changed our mind when we saw where he was taking us. Their apartment was in that big spooky house on the corner halfway up Church Street, but I guess you guys know that already. Once we got there everything was cool for a while…we had a smoke…strong stuff, Sheila barfed…and a drink and none of the guys even tried to grope us or anything. Like I said, it was cool. Then, just as I was getting a good buzz on and getting ready to really party, the big beardy guy starts in with the weird shit, you know, that intellectual late-night meaning of life stuff that the students like when they’re stoned? Well he went on and on and his pals seemed to be lapping it up. Sheila had the best of it. She passed out on the sofa and after a while I was getting desperate for a whiz, so I went to the little girl’s room.
“The screaming started just as I was doing my business. I thought at first they’d put on a movie, but it sounded too real, you know, too much like crying? And then the whole place filled with that warm bloody fog. I couldn’t see a fucking thing, buggering about in the dark looking for a light and knocking myself off the fucking walls. I staggered out into the flat and I could hear them all shouting and screaming and some old bugger singing about a Sleeping God or some old shit. I did find what I hoped was the front door and ran out into the hall, where I only went and banged my fucking head against the guardrail and knocked myself out. I went down like a sack of bricks. And that was that, until this morning and your man found me, bleeding like a stuck pig with my panties down around my ankles. Not cool. Not cool at all.”
It had all come out of her in one fast rush of words, but now she seemed spent and empty. Her gaze took on the same far way stare they’d seen before, focused on something over Janis’ shoulder as new heavy tears ran silently down her cheeks, smearing the mascara further, more black tracks running down the side of her nose and around her lips.
Janis handed her another tissue but she barely noticed and just sat, staring into space.
My turn.
“Let’s back up a bit. You went to the lavatory and the screaming started? There was nothing else? No indication of anything wrong?”
“I think the big beardy guy said something about opening a door? Does that help?”
Not really.
“Anything else?”
“Just that…maybe the singing…you know, the old dude and the Sleeping God…maybe that started first before the screaming but I was pretty messed up and once that bloody fog came in I was concentrating on getting the fuck out of there.” She stopped, and smiled, but it only made the runs of mascara look even more grotesque. “That’s all she wrote. Can I go now?”
I wish we both could. But we’re just getting started here.
They kept at her until nearly noon. But no matter how much she tried, Janis could get no more information from the woman than she had already: a party, some weird shit and thick fog. The talk of fog worried Janis more than it should have, it was obviously a product of the booze and drugs, but it also reminded her that John Green still hadn’t shown up, and that the last time she’d seen him, it had been foggy.
During the questioning, some forensic info turned up that showed that the other woman at the party, Sheila Durning had indeed been among the victims, but informing Samantha of this only brought her to unrelenting weeping, bringing the interview to a rapid end.
They left her with her grief and went out into the corridor, where the other constable, Malone, the man who
’d found the blonde at the scene, having gone into the building when he found the front door lying open early in the morning, told them what he had. It wasn’t much more than they already knew. They got a name, Peter Hines, for the owner of the flat, a big bearded guy according to Malone, but that didn’t help them much this early in the case. All they had was the witness statement, and whatever else Forensics could turn up. Janis wasn’t holding out much hope in that area.
“We’re getting nowhere fast,” she said.
“We need to go back to the scene, find out what we might have missed,” Wiggins replied.
“Agreed. But let’s swing past the boss’ place first like we said. I want to be sure he’s okay.”
“Have you tried phoning him?”
“The boss? You’re kidding, right? When have you known him to remember his phone? But yes, I’ve tried. It’s going straight to Voicemail. I’ve left two messages but no joy yet.”
They went back out into a crisp, clear, St John’s day.
3
John stood in the dark hallway for several minutes, unsure as to his next move. There was still no sound from out on the street, still no sign of the door being opened and the fog still swirled in the small window above the door.
He bent down and lifted up the brass letterbox. There was only fog on the other side.
“Hello?” he shouted. “I’ve had enough of this shit now.”
His voice echoed around him and he waited in vain for a reply. He stood away from the door again, wondering what to do. He recognized the layout of the old building, there were many like it in town, three floors, two apartments to a level, having been converted from a townhouse at some point in the past. In this case, the past was a relatively long one, the property was one of the stops on the Historical tourist tours, not for any architectural significance, but for the people who had lived there and their stories. The house had been, over the years, a bar, a brothel and the site of a huge political scandal in the early Twentieth Century, a home for retired fishermen, and now it was these six apartments, all of which seemed to be currently unoccupied if the silence was any indication.
Songs of Dreaming Gods Page 2