by Ian Rogers
“Suicide?” Toby said. For the first time since they arrived, the smug look had been wiped from his face. “The guy was ripped to pieces. He couldn’t have done that to himself.”
“I didn’t say it was suicide,” Charles said. “I said he killed himself.” He turned to face the warehouse in all its derelict glory. “The guards stationed here had strict orders prohibiting any entry both to this property and to the building which stands upon it. This prohibition included themselves. Earlier this morning, one of those guards disregarded that order and paid for it with his life.”
Charles spread his arms.
“This place is no more an ordinary warehouse than the Mereville Group is an ordinary insurance company. This is one of the Eight. Buildings so paranormally polluted they have been deemed unfit for human habitation.”
Sally felt her entire body break out in a cold sweat. Even though she’d known the truth about the warehouse before they arrived, hearing the words from Charles’s mouth gave the place a reality she couldn’t deny, as much as she might want to. To deny it would be like denying the existence of ghosts, when she knew for a fact that they were real. She had acquired this knowledge through the most effective possible means—personal experience.
This was not her first time in the presence of the Eight. Two years ago, she and Charles had been assigned to investigate a double murder in a house on Ashley Avenue, in Rosedale. A house that should never have been placed on the market, much less sold and occupied. The couple who purchased the home were found dead less than twenty-four hours after they moved in, and before their investigation was complete, it almost claimed the lives of Charles and Sally, as well.
The fact that these properties existed was enough to keep Sally up nights, but it made her angry, too. The Mereville Group were the owners and caretakers of the Eight, and sometimes she wondered why they didn’t take a wrecking ball to each and every one of them. But she knew the answer to that, too. It was another truth she couldn’t deny.
The structures comprising the Eight weren’t only dwellings for dangerous paranormal forces. They were also containers. Prisons. As much as she feared these places, Sally was even more afraid of what would happen if they no longer existed to hold and contain these deadly entities.
“The problem,” Sally said to Charles, “if we’re going to talk about issues with the security of buildings such as these, is that we know the inherent danger of the Eight. The security guards do not. So it’s not fair to expect the same level of vigilance from those who don’t have all the information.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Forewarned is forearmed, Charles. You taught me that.”
Charles looked taken aback for a moment—the closest he ever got to looking wounded, Sally thought—then he pursed his lips and gave a solemn nod.
“You’re not wrong, but I think you know me well enough by now to know I’m not an insensitive person. I’m sympathetic to the dead man’s plight, and I can assure you his family will be suitably compensated for their loss.”
Sally crossed her arms. “What you’re saying is the Mereville Group will pay them off.”
“Yes,” Charles said. “That’s something the Group will do—the only thing they can do in this situation to give Mr. Budden’s family the sense of closure they both need and deserve. Telling them the truth of what happened here would mean telling them the truth of this place, and they wouldn’t benefit from such knowledge. There are some problems the Group can fix by simply throwing money at them.”
He turned to regard the warehouse.
“For the rest, there’s us.”
III
Charles retrieved his briefcase from the car and took out a case file. Sally and Toby gathered around him as he spread the contents out on the hood. “Okay, kids. Time for a history lesson.”
Toby groaned and Sally elbowed him in the ribs.
“Shut up and you might learn something.”
Toby shook his head. “Go ahead, Chuck. It’s your show.”
Charles stared at the young man for a moment, then licked his lips and began.
“In 1952, the land we’re presently standing on was sold to North Water Fisheries. The processing plant was built the following year. It was a regular one-stop shop. The boats caught their fish in the lake, then came right into the building via the channels described by our friend, Mr. Voorman. They off-loaded their catch directly to the workers on the factory floor, where the fish were cleaned and processed, then packed in ice and loaded into refrigerated trucks that pulled up to the loading zone right over there.”
Charles pointed to a line of bay doors on the east side of the building.
“Then, on April 12, 1957, tragedy struck.”
Charles slapped down a series of 8x10 black-and-white photos, fanning them out across the hood of the car. Sally and Toby leaned in close.
At first glance, it was hard to figure out what they were looking at. There were arms and legs, hands and feet, and heads—lots of heads—but they all seemed strangely out of context. Familiar and yet oddly unnatural. It didn’t take the two investigators long to figure out why, and when they did they were glad the photos weren’t in colour.
The body parts looked strange because they were no longer attached to their respective bodies.
The lack of colour may have dampened the grisly nature of the photos, but it ended up giving them an unsettling, abstract quality. Dismembered limbs, severed heads, mangled organs, torn pieces of flesh—all of them splashed and splayed about in pools of blood that were as dark as chocolate syrup in the pictures.
Sally picked up one of the photos. “How many…”
“Twenty-five workers,” Charles said. “The entire night shift.”
“Jesus.”
Charles nodded. “Any questions so far?”
Toby raised his hand. “Why does a fish processing plant have a night shift?”
“Any real questions?”
Toby frowned. He picked up a paper clip from the file and started fiddling with it.
Charles continued, “DNA profiling didn’t exist at the time, and all that could be determined was that not all of the victims’ body parts were present at the scene. This in turn led investigators to believe that one or more of the workers could have been responsible for the deaths. They theorized that this individual, or individuals, had gone berserk—possibly from exposure to mercury in the fish—and slaughtered his or her co-workers with the knives used for cutting up the fish. It’s actually not a bad theory—as long as you can get behind the idea of one or two people killing twenty or so others all by themselves with no one escaping. Either way, it didn’t matter. No perpetrators were ever caught, much less convicted of the crime. It was the worst mass murder in Canadian history.” He hesitated. “At least until a few months later, when the same thing happened again.”
Charles spread out another series of photos. Sally and Toby made no effort to look at them.
“Forty-two people were murdered in the second incident. There were survivors this time—three of them—but they ended up being of no use to the police.”
“Shock?” Sally said.
“Catatonic,” Charles said. “Blessedly so, probably. Considering what they had seen.”
He picked up an old police report, the pages yellow and faded.
“The police were at a loss to explain what happened. North Water closed the plant for a time, then tried to reopen it again the following year without success.” He smiled grimly. “They couldn’t find anyone willing to work there.”
“I wonder why,” Toby muttered.
“And life went on, as it always does,” Charles said. “The story of the fish plant murders of ’57 was relegated to the newspaper archives, the history books, and documentaries about unsolved crimes. North Water went bankrupt in 1961, the fish plant was put up for sale, and the Mereville Group scooped it up for a song.”
“Of course they did,” Sally said.
Charles smiled at her, then glanced over at Toby. H
e had stopped fiddling with the paper clip, but it continued to move around in his hand, twisting across his palm like a worm made of steel wire. Toby noticed him looking and winked.
“Did the Group know what this place was when they bought it?” Sally asked.
Charles reached into his briefcase and extracted another file—a red one.
“They knew something.”
IV
On June 7, 1970, four Mereville Group operatives died while investigating the former North Water fish processing plant. This was in a time before computers, and since there were no other records in the Group’s archives about the plant, it was generally believed the property had remained empty and unexplored in the nine years since the Group had acquired it.
According to Charles, the report wasn’t very detailed—mostly because there were no survivors. The investigators arrived in the early hours of June 7 to begin their preliminary assessment of the property. The team was composed of four members—two field operatives and two psychics.
“What kind of psychics?” Sally asked.
Charles scanned the file with his finger. “They were twin brothers, David and Radovan Petrović. Born in 1947 to Serbian parents who had immigrated to Canada the year before. Popped up on the Group’s radar in ’64 when they were eighteen. Immediately entered into the Group’s psi-training academy and working in the field by March of ’65.”
“Get them while they’re young, huh?” Toby said.
Sally and Charles glared at him.
“What kind of psi-abilities did they have?” Sally asked.
Charles kept reading. “David was a mental dominant. Radovan was a telepath and a sensitive.” He raised his eyes from the report and looked at Sally. “Just like you.”
“What happened to them?”
“I’m guessing they got turned into Hamburger Helper,” Toby said.
“No one knows exactly what happened to them,” Charles said. “But yes, they were slaughtered, like the fish plant workers in ’57.” He closed the file. “Only this one didn’t make it into the history books. The Group covered it up—even in 1970 they were good at that. The building was sealed, the first in a series of fences was erected, and security guards were posted to keep people out. Things have been quiet ever since.”
“Until this morning,” Sally said.
“Until this morning,” Charles agreed. “Which brings us to the case of poor, unfortunate Mr. Budden.”
He reached back into his briefcase and brought out another file, this one a buff-coloured folder that wasn’t nearly as flashy as the top-secret Mereville Group file.
“Forensic science has come a long way in the past sixty years. And so has technology. This is the preliminary report on the autopsy of Mr. Budden performed by the Mereville Group’s resident pathologist just a few hours ago. Toxicology and DNA testing aren’t available yet, but the report states Mr. Budden died as a result of massive tissue loss. Wounds on the body are described as bite marks with wide teeth on the upper jaw and smaller, pointier teeth on the lower jaw. The predator with the closest match to these characteristics is a shark—specifically, a bull shark.”
“A bull shark,” Toby said.
“Yes,” Charles said. “A big one, apparently.”
“I think that autopsy report is a bunch of bull shark.” Toby turned to Sally. “Are you buying this crap?”
Sally frowned. “Wasn’t the body found inside the warehouse? On land?”
“Yes,” Charles said, “but…”
“I hate to state the obvious,” Toby said, cutting him off, “but even if this guy was attacked by something in the water and somehow managed to crawl back onto land, Lake Ontario is a freshwater lake. There have never been any sharks in there.”
“No,” Charles agreed. “Not recently.”
Sally and Toby took a moment to let that sink in. Then Toby said, “What are you saying, he was killed by the ghost of a shark?”
“A ghost shark?” Sally said. “Like that terrible movie?”
Toby glanced over at her. “I kinda liked it.”
“I’m not talking about a stupid movie,” Charles said. “And I’m not talking about the ghost of a prehistoric shark. I’m talking about a creature that existed long before there even were sharks. Millions of years ago this whole area was underwater, and it was home to all manner of creatures, some of them so strange and horrifying they would’ve made H. P. Lovecraft shit his pants.”
“I know about that stuff,” Toby said. “Continental divide, glacial drift, all that jazz. I read the dinosaur books. I watched those BBC documentaries.”
Charles said, “We can at least agree that whatever killed Mr. Budden, and the many victims before him, it was very big and very vicious.”
“Okay,” Toby said. “So the ghost of some prehistoric predator is munching on anyone who goes into this crappy warehouse. I get it. But why now? This place has been locked up tight for almost fifty years. If this thing has been here the whole time, then how come no one has seen it? And why hasn’t it killed anyone since 1970? I mean, before it gobbled up the security guard this morning.”
“I believe the entity has been manifesting over the years,” Charles said. “Maybe not often, but it’s been here. I also believe the entity’s ability to manifest is directly connected to the ‘meals’ it ingests—not so much the people themselves but their lifeforce energy, which is almost certainly the thing from which it takes actual nourishment.
“I don’t think it was Mr. Budden’s fault he went into the warehouse. Not entirely. I believe he was merely one factor in a confluence of events that led to his untimely death. Maybe the lock on that particular door finally failed after doing its job for so many years. Or maybe the wood in the doorframe had rotted to the point that the lock became superfluous, and a random gust of wind blew the door open. The point is, we will probably never know the circumstances that led Frank Budden to enter the warehouse. Maybe he’d been inside before. Maybe he went in there some nights to get out of the cold, or to take a break from his loquacious partner, Mr. Voorman. It doesn’t really matter. What it boils down to is Mr. Budden was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He entered the warehouse in the early hours of this morning when the entity happened to manifest on this plane of existence … and things happened accordingly.”
“Okay,” Toby said. “But what are we supposed to do about it? The man is dead and we can’t change that. Why don’t we lock the place up again and leave it alone? The legend of the Eight lives on and so do we. What do you say?” He looked back and forth between Charles and Sally.
“We can’t just leave,” Sally said. “Whatever started here this morning, it’s not over yet. The energy the entity absorbed from the guard wasn’t enough to sate its appetite. It’ll come back, hungrier and more powerful than before.”
“How do you know that?” Toby demanded. He turned to Charles. “How does she know that?”
“I just do,” Sally said. “And so do you.” She paused. “Because we’re psychic.”
Toby frowned at her, then looked over at Charles, who was smiling at him.
“I am not psychic,” Charles said, “but I knew she was going to say that.”
“It’s the pattern of the deaths,” Sally said. “The two incidents in 1957 were separated by a few months. Like a small meal followed by a big meal.”
Toby said, “You call twenty-five people a small meal?”
“A smaller meal, then,” Sally said. “An appetizer followed by a main course. Then the entity was dormant for a while. For years. As though it was recharging between meals.”
“Or digesting,” Toby said.
“Exactly.”
“But there was no pattern in the 1970 deaths. It was only those four Mereville Group guys. How come there weren’t more deaths after that?”
“Think about it, Toby. Two of those investigators were psychics. An entity like this will feed on the lifeforce of any living being, but a psychic is probably like foie gras to this th
ing.”
“So you’re saying those two brothers ended up super-sizing the monster’s meal?”
“Uh, sure.”
“Okay, fine.” Toby turned to Charles. “So how do we exorcise the ghost of a fish?”
“The psychokinetic energy the entity absorbed from the security guard won’t be enough to satisfy its appetite. Like Sally said, it will be back. We could lock up the warehouse again and hope for the best, or we could do something about it ourselves, right now.”
“Do what?” Toby said, although he already had a pretty good idea.
“The energy allowing the entity to manifest in our realm must be dissipated. In order to do that we have to draw it out. And in order to do that we need to lure the entity with bait—psychic bait.”
Toby looked over at the warehouse. “So one of us has to go in there.”
Sally turned to Charles. “Couldn’t I stay out here and project my mind inside?”
“That won’t work,” Charles said. “You were right about psychic energy being the kind of food this entity likes best. But it also wants meat. This thing may be a ghost, but it still remembers what it was like to be alive. It remembers hunger.”
Sally shook her head. “I can’t do it, Charles. I can’t go in there alone.”
“You won’t be alone,” Charles said. “We’re all going in.”
V
While Charles scooped up his files and returned them to his briefcase, Sally and Toby went over to stare at the building they would be entering in the all-too-near future.
“We’ll be fine,” Toby assured her. “The Group wouldn’t have assigned us this job if they didn’t think we could do it.” He held out his hand. “Here.”
For a moment, Sally thought he was offering his hand to hold, but then she saw something small lying on his palm. It was the paper clip he’d taken from one of Charles’s files, the one he’d been manipulating with his telekinesis. Toby had transformed it into a curved triangular shape.