“Matt…” He called with tears rising to his eyes.
“What?” Matt pressed his hand on Terry’s shoulder.
“Can’t you see them?” Terry whispered. As if it needed spelling out. He was looking at least sixty young children. He pivoted the light further left. He saw feet scramble into a hole under the stairs.
“See who?” Matt gently asked.
It hit Terry like a truck.
Sweet Jesus Christ…
“Hello?” It was a young voice. A little boy’s.
Terry turned around and a little boy was slowly coming towards them.
“Hello,” Matt greeted gently. He stooped to show the approaching child he meant no harm. “Are you okay?” he asked.
Terry was further awestruck that Matt was interacting with this child.
“I miss my mummy…” the little boy began to cry. Matt instinctively embraced him. The faces in the distance all watched transfixed. The little boy was around Christine’s age. He was a tiny little waif of a creature. Thin features with spiky black hair. His eyes were red from crying and there was mud and dirty across his face.
“Detective Logan?!” A police officer shouted from the top of the stairs.
“Down here, we have a survivor!” Matt yelled. Terry couldn’t stop the tears that silently bled out from his eyes. All around him he could see scared faces, little children who had no idea what was happening. Little children who were too traumatised and too broken to register help had arrived.
Perhaps that was because the help had arrived too late.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
Terry stood on the front doorstep and he was staring vacantly into nothing. He’d seen plenty of disturbing things in his life, but this week was the worst thing by a far margin.
That basement would probably be the worst thing he’d ever see in his life. It was so dark he felt like his soul had been stained by it. His mind had overloaded and he wasn’t capable of many thoughts. The one that recurred the most was how he wanted a cigarette. It felt appropriate, even if it was just a stupid flashback to his addiction. It wouldn’t make him feel any better but yet his mind wanted one. He was thankful not a single smoker had passed him. He might have asked for one.
The night had drawn in and it was slightly humid. A little too close for comfort.
“You okay?” Matt appeared beside him. He slid his arms around him but it didn’t help. Terry felt no comfort from it. He felt nothing.
“No… I’m not…”
“Talk to me,” Matt urged. He had never seen his husband so deeply wounded, not even his own stupid angry comment had touched him this deep. Something had shaken Terry to his core and it was unsettling.
“There must be at least sixty faces down there Matt… That’s sixty kids, how long was he doing this? We only know of ten… Why did we not know about the other fifty?”
“I don’t know babe, I don’t know…”
“Sir, you might wanna take a look at this…” A police officer disturbed them.
“What is it?”
“Just come and look sir,”
“Wait here…” Matt whispered to Terry.
Terry didn’t feel compelled to follow him. He’d seen enough horrors for one day.
He was alone for a few minutes before a new question slowly unfurled itself in his mind.
Where were the bodies?
Sixty children, where were the sixty bodies…?
Terry had a new puzzle piece in his hand and still only half a picture. He turned around.
Where did he put the bodies? When he killed them, where did he put them?
“Jesus Christ, have you seen the barn…” came an unknown voice nearby.
“No…Why?”
“Just don’t man, just fucking don’t… shit, I don’t think I’m gonna sleep right…”
The overheard conversation between two officers heading for the basement propelled him to the barn. He had reached his capacity of horror yet he felt compelled to see it. He wasn’t stopped by anyone and he entered it. He had entered the other half of the building he’d slightly investigated earlier. Like he’d walked into a bubble of noise he became assaulted by screaming animals. Pigs competed with cows and he couldn’t bear it. He stepped back out.
He took a breath but he couldn’t bring himself to walk back in. So much pain, so much fear. It was painful to bear.
“Terry? Don’t…” Matt appeared in the doorway.
“What? What’s in there?” Terry fired back with tears in his eyes. He could still feel the animal’s pleas for help in his mind. Echoing endlessly.
“…I don’t think you want to know…”
“Tell me Matt,”
“Three dead kids…” Matt deliberately omitted the fact the kids were naked and suspended upside down with their throats slit - like they were nothing but bled pigs in an abattoir. It was bad enough that image was burned to his memory banks forever, he could spare Terry the same.
“Why are you crying?” Terry wiped his eyes and saw a little boy was standing behind Matt.
“Because I’m upset…”
“My mummy told me boys don’t cry…”
“Boys cry when something really bad happens,”
“Has something really bad happened? Why is there policemen here?”
“…Because a very bad man did some very bad things…”
“Oh… So why are you here? You’re not like everybody else…”
“I’m helping the police,”
“Have you found the bad man?”
“Yes, he’s going to go to prison for a very long time…” When his injuries healed of course. Not that Terry felt he deserved healthcare after all that he’d done.
“Oh…Can I go home now?”
“Not yet kid, soon. But not yet. What’s your name?”
“Benjamin,”
“Benjamin Peters?”
The little boy nodded.
“Did you see what the bad man did here?”
The little boy nodded but his face darkened a little.
“Can you show me where he put the bodies?”
“I can show you where he put the bones…” the little boy offered.
The bones…?
“Show me, please,” the little boy stepped around Matt. He had no idea he was a ghost and that he could just phase straight through him. Matt was lost in his thoughts but he noticed Terry sharply turn and begin walking away.
“Terry? Where you going?”
The response he got was a swift hand gesture and Terry kept on walking. He was watching a pocket of air just ahead of him. Had he connected to another survivor? He decided he would give him space.
The little boy led Terry between the two big metal buildings and out towards a field. He then pointed to a patch of earth. A patch of earth no different from any other. “That’s where he buried ‘em,”
“Thank you Benjamin,”
The little boy shrugged like it wasn’t a problem.
“I can stop hiding now can’t I… The bad man is gone…”
“Yeah, yes you can…” Terry agreed. He headed for the patch of earth, collecting a shovel as he walked past it. He had no idea how deep the bones would be buried.
“Mr Logan, what are you doing?” It was a police officer and he was fast approaching. Terry didn’t acknowledge him. The little boy disappeared as Terry reached the specified patch of dirt. For the second time in a week, he drove a shovel into the ground and began digging.
“Mr Logan STOP!”
Terry continued to disobey the order. He swung big clumps of earth to the side.
“MR LOGAN I INSIST YOU-” The police officer appeared at his side and tried to take the shovel from him. He stopped because he spotted a skull staring up at him. A skull and two little off-white bones. They shone faintly in the moonlight.
Terry dropped the shovel and stepped away.
That’s where the bodies were.
He was too overloaded, too emotional saturated to process
any of it.
The picture felt incomplete. Despite the overwhelming plethora of evidence before him, something was niggling at him.
“Terry? Terry!” Matt was approaching. He was wielding a torch.
What was Terry not seeing? There was something to this equation that just didn’t make sense. He ignored Matt, he shut out everyone around him. He needed to concentrate, he was almost there. The answers were looking him in the face.
Why was Anatoly kidnapping the kids? To what end?
The silhouette of the van in the distance snagged his attention.
What did the butcher shop have to do with it all? They was collecting pies, but then what pies? The pies that had been made in the industrial kitchen, but then from what? They surely wouldn’t just be vegetable pies. They would be meat, but then what meat? The slaughterhouse was shut, there was only one sad neglected pig on the estate. What was they putting in the pies? Where was they getting the meat?
Then it clicked.
“Oh fuck me…” he moaned. The contents of his stomach suddenly burnt up his throat and he doubled over. He vomited hard, hard enough to make him slump to his knees and his eyes to sting.
“Terry…?” Matt was close but his voice sounded miles away.
“The kids…” Terry whispered. The vomit had exited his nose and he sounded wet. He spat, unable to shift the sour taste of acid in his mouth. His mind was spinning and he felt nauseous still. “…the kids, they’re in the pies… He was using the kids to make the pies…”
----------------------------------------
The sound of rain hammered against the car door. He was sat in his car staring out into the dark countryside on all sides. He felt like his mind had been on a week long alcohol bender. He was numb to his very core.
The sound of the rain and the stillness of the road were soothing for his traumatised mind. To his left there was the occasional light of a flashlight, of a police officer going about his business. Somewhere in the darkness, somewhere in the bustle was Matt.
It was the only person Terry wanted to see.
But he was lost to him right now, lost to his work.
Understandable. The case had just been cracked open.
It was the shocking shit-storm of the century! A single horrifying event that would no doubt scar itself permanently on the public conscience for many years.
The Russian who mulched up children and put them in pies…
Terry shuddered to think what dreadful name the media would invent for him…
“That’s a lot of cops…”
The Russian accent made Terry’s heart sink.
“There’s a lot of work to discover the extent of your…”
“Business…” The Russian smirked a little.
Slowly Terry turned his head. Anatoly was sat beside him, in the drivers seat. Despite the inside of the car being only illuminated by moonlight, he was visible. The only way to tell he was a spirit was the faint glimmer and fuzziness. His stern face dropped the smirk and he cricked his neck. The movement looked strange, it had a blackish shimmer like scratches and burns on old film. He’d never seen a ghost move that way before, but this bastard was something else. He wasn’t a normal human being, what human being ground up innocent little kids and stuffed them in pies?
“Why?”
It was the only question that mattered.
“Why not?”
“Because they were children you sick fuck!” Terry’s face crumpled and he placed a fist to his mouth.
The ghost said nothing.
“So many of them… So many…”
“I thought it was ironic, all those hipsters with their free range bullshit. Their little cameras taking pictures for the internet. So niche, so cool. So desperate for something new…”
“So you thought you’d feed them children?” Terry’s tone was ugly.
“I thought I would illustrate how fucked up the world is… I thought what better way to do it than to feed them their own kin…”
“It’s grotesque…”
“It was business… Always business…”
Terry slowly turned a very dark glare onto the spectre accompanying him in the car.
“I wanted to provide for my family. It was never my original plan… Magda… She wanted a child. But we had no success with the official avenues, so we had to resort to the unsavoury kind. It came with a cost…” A bullet of mental images pierced Terry’s mind. He saw a posse of blurry faced gangsters, smelt dirt and pig shit and heard muffled conversations.
“They needed some bodies… disposed of.”
“So I did…”
Terry witnessed fifteen young children being offloaded from the back of a lorry. Several older women coming with them, confused and disorientated. He couldn’t make out their words, but somehow he knew they were speaking different languages. They were led, as a procession into the barn.
“We kept one… We called her Alyona… but we didn’t know how sick she was…”
Terry wasn’t prepared for the assault of mental images that front ended him. The little girl, maybe ten or eleven, approached him. She placed a hand on Anatoly’s thigh.
“Drugs… Sex… She was…”
In the mental scenario Anatoly batted the girl away but she insisted, pursuing him. Terry could feel the Russian’s horror, his disgust at what this adopted little girl was doing.
“She was sick… So sick…”
Terry felt his stomach churn.
“She ran away, ran away because we didn‘t … she died, in the cold… that little girl… so tainted… ruined…”
“But the pies, the meat…” the meat from the illegal immigrants, “it wasn’t wasted. It sold well, sold too well… Ironic, everybody hates on them but enjoyed eating them… Perfect way to dispose of the evidence” The spectre was half rambling now. His words felt cold, felt lacking.
There was no atonement.
A memory slipped into Terry’s mind and suddenly he understood everything. The meat, the illegal immigrants that Anatoly agreed to, or perhaps blackmailed into, slaughtering dried up. They stopped coming and the business ran out of meat.
Desperate, he turned to English kids. He meticulously planned it, using his old army taught skills, and started abducting them.
Terry realised it became a perverted thrill, the more he abducted and the more he got away with it. It was an addiction, a psychopathic thrill seeking. Stealing Christine was arrogance, it was deliberately provoking the police force he had beaten. It was unsettling to see the Russian’s stalking and surveillance of the Logan household.
What had once been an ugly means to an end, had become something of a thrill. A slippery descent into a perverse display of superiority.
And if he hadn’t have taken Christine, he would’ve got away with it! Pride had came before his fall…
“So what now?”
“We’re gonna find Magda and we’ll continue to-” Terry stopped. The strangest smell of smoke and fire teased his nostrils. His gaze shifted back from the moonlit abattoir to the spectre. But he was gone. There just an empty space and the smell of fire.
He tentatively touched the driver’s seat and half anticipated it to feel hot. It felt warm, warmer than it should’ve in the cool of the night.
“That’s what…” he mumbled to himself.
The sudden silence in the car was deafening. It felt like the aftermath of the atom bomb. Nothing but quiet and destruction.
Slowly he turned his attention back to the car window.
At least he had the answers, not that he had any spare mental capacity to process it.
Nor any sense of what to do next.
If Terry’s soul and mind was a room, he gently pulled the door shut and disappeared inside…
-------------------------------
Terry was sat on his sofa and didn’t know how he’d got there. The last few hours had been a blur and he had no idea of time anymore. He remembered the odd scrap of information, the odd piec
e that penetrated the thick fog in his mind. He had fell into a swamp of thoughts, uncertain and fragmented ideas and revelations congealed like a cesspit.
In his hand he had a shot of rum, Matt had put it there.
He had been taken to the precipice of a complete mental breakdown and he wasn’t sure if he’d fallen too. He felt violated, yet numb. He felt emotionally raw, yet desensitised. He felt overwrought and saturated yet completely empty.
He was a psychological mess.
He probably deserved to be. It had been quite the week.
Whenever he closed his eyes he saw fifty young faces looking at him.
Fifty innocent faces that had been brought to the slaughterhouse to be killed. Fifty innocent faces that ended up being mulched and…
He could never finish the thought. It was sickening to the very pit of himself.
So he kept his eyes open, daren’t close them.
But he was tired, so tired.
It was daylight and he knew he hadn’t slept. The night had just rolled into day. He had no concept of how long he’d sat catatonic in the car.
Matt appeared, a blur in the corner of his eye.
He probably spoke but nothing computed. He was led by the elbow, the glass of untouched rum taken from him. It was placed somewhere, anywhere, it didn’t matter to Terry. He followed the guiding hand, one foot in front of the other. The rhythm of his feet felt soothing, felt familiar, felt comforting and he held onto that.
He traversed the stairs not breaking from his daze. Was led to the bedroom, before being undressed to his T-shirt and underwear. For Matt it was an intensely private and strange moment. His lover, his soul mate, was nothing more than a walking zombie. He was led easily, so pliable and barely lucid. As he undressed him he felt sad, but like every other emotion he buckled it down under the trapdoor. Duty had kicked in. Responsibility.
He couldn’t cry until he had Terry sorted. He couldn’t process the horrors that would no doubt come to define his career until his husband was asleep. The man with such a strong soul had finally broken and Matt was at a loss. He was stunned by it. This had broken his husband and he was powerless to fix it.
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