Dead Bad Things (3 page)

  Sarah entered behind him, making for the side wall, where a work bench was piled with dirty pans and crockery. Scanning the area, she noted that the kitchen was slightly grubby, as if the place had not been cleaned for several weeks. A layer of dust coated the benches and cupboard doors. Either shadows or dirt stained the benches. She could see it as she eased along the edge of the room, keeping away from the centre.

  Benson slowly opened the inner door to reveal a narrow hallway. Most of these kinds of Victorian houses had a similar layout: a main hallway right through from front to back, lounge and reception or dining rooms at the front and a large kitchen at the back. Upstairs: the bedrooms. Below: the cellars.

  Sarah took a deep breath and tried to compose herself. She was usually calm in these situations, but for some reason tonight her throat was dry and her chest was slowly tightening beneath her uniform tunic. She was wearing a lightweight stab vest – standard issue these days – and it felt two sizes too small.

  Benson motioned for her to follow him as he went through the door. He held his baton at the ready; Sarah could see his fingers tighten around the shaft. She had seen him use the weapon on a few occasions. He was an expert in hand-to-hand combat. Sarah had also used her own baton more than once, and it felt good in her fist. Reassuring.

  They moved slowly yet urgently through the hallway. The old boards creaked beneath their weight, announcing their presence inside the house to anyone who cared to listen for such subtle telltales and giveaways. If anyone were hiding in the shadows, waiting to pounce or bolt, they would be all too aware of the location of the two police officers within the building. These old houses spoke, slowly and quietly, and if you understood their language you could build up a wealth of information.

  Sarah often thought that she might possess some kind of special insight. There was nothing physical to prove this, of course, just a sort of tingling of the senses, like a breeze ghosting through her mind. Old houses, dark places, anywhere that normal people might consider staying away from, spoke to her softly yet explicitly; the intimate whisper of that phantom breeze in her ear. Police training was responsible for some of it, along with a natural aptitude for the work… female intuition? Yes, all of those things could be used to explain away how she sometimes felt. But still… still… she could not rationalise the way she felt at times like this. All she could say, if pushed, was that these places, these situations, made her feel like she was home.

  Up ahead, near the bottom of the stairs, something moved. Benson did not even notice – his gaze was fixed on the doorway to their left – but to Sarah it looked like a gentle fluttering. She thought of a small bird's wing in a dark room, or the movement of lips as they flapped lightly to expel a tired death rattle. The motion was there for less than a second, and then it was gone. Anyone else might have written it off as nothing – an illusion, or perhaps a manifestation of anxiety in a tense situation. But not Sarah. She knew what it was: a warning. She had seen something –
sensed
something – which would otherwise have gone unnoticed. It was all the confirmation she needed of her unswerving feeling that something was wrong here. Something was out of whack.

  Benson ducked his head into the doorway, and then pulled it back out again. He glanced at Sarah and shook his head: nothing of interest in there. Move on. There were two other doors leading off the hallway, and he checked each one in turn. Benson made the same deft in-and-out manoeuvre, and gave Sarah the same signal. The rooms were empty – of perpetrators, of victims, of life, of death.

  Sarah looked up at the stairs, peering through the gaps in the carved timber banisters. That subtle movement she had glimpsed moments before. Had it been going up or coming down? The walls looked damp, but it was only the darkness forming yet another illusion. The walls were not really rippling – it was the play of Sarah and Benson's shadows across their tall, flat surfaces. She knew that, yet the knowledge did not make the sight any less unnerving.

  She followed Benson up the stairs, staying a few paces behind in case anything happened without warning. In cadet training they had been taught never to bunch up, always to leave room to manoeuvre – fighting space – between the separate members of a team as they entered a potentially hostile location. It was a matter of common sense, of course, yet still it was surprising how many trainee constables would walk directly behind the person in front, narrowing any space in which to act if things got out of hand.

  Sarah's feet fell lightly upon the stair treads. She felt watched in the cramped space. Her grip on the baton tightened, and she was once again enveloped in a shroud of anxiety. Dust swam in the air before her eyes, creating random sketches in the stairwell.

  Benson paused as he reached the first landing, turning slowly to examine each side of the area at the top of the stairs, first left and then right. He moved forward to allow Sarah to access the landing, and then placed his back against the wall opposite the top of the stairs. Sarah stood at the top of the stairs, still convinced that something was about to happen, or that they were going to encounter one of the many faces of death which waited inside this house, this place of dust and shadows.

  "End of the landing." Benson's voice was low, his eyes were hard. He tipped his head towards the far end of the landing, where a single door stood open. The other doors were closed – five of them in all – and each one had a dark handprint near the handle. Sarah knew without having to check that the handprints were blood, and that they symbolised a locked door – if not a physical one, then certainly a notional one.

  But how did she know that? There was no time to examine the thought; Benson's urgency pushed her on.

  There was a patch of blood on the carpet across the threshold of the open door. It was a large stain, like a shadow far deeper than those she'd seen elsewhere within the house: a blood shadow.

  "There's something in there." She stared at the open door. "Some
thing
."

  "You don't say." Benson's voice was louder now; he had accepted that there was no longer a reason to remain quiet. Whatever was inside the house, and if it was still alive, it already knew of their presence.

  Then, slowly, as if it were drifting towards her on the air, Sarah caught the smell. It was the stench of the charnel house: the odour of bloody death. She knew it, even after such a short time on the force. They both knew it.

  "Back up required…" She heard the start of Benson's radio request, and the static from the two-way in his hand, but the rest of it was filtered out by whatever intuition she possessed and was even now jerking to life. Her senses were…
twitching.
That was the word she associated with the sensation. It was as good a word as any other, she supposed.

  Twitching.

  
My twitch
, she thought, imagining nervous tics and facial actions.
It's my fucking twitch.

  She was barely even aware of her legs moving as they carried her along the landing, past the blood-barred doors, and towards the open door at the end. It was automatic, as if some external engine were powering her. Even if she wanted to stop, she would have been unable to interrupt the motion of her legs, or stop the low whispering sound of her police-issue boots on the carpet.

  She had to go there. Whatever was inside wanted to be seen by Sarah, and by her alone. They had business, these two, in that dark house on a dark street after midnight. The nature of that business was a mystery, and might remain so, but the very fact of its existence could not be denied.

  Sarah moved slowly along the landing, her baton held loosely now in a hand that felt limp and boneless. It flopped at the wrist, that useless hand, and waggled like an animal against her thigh. The baton dropped to the floor but she didn't stop to pick it up – she knew that such a weapon was useless here, and against such things as whatever the hell was waiting for her inside the room.

  "Doherty! Come back. Get back here!" Benson's voice was harsh, yet fading. It sounded miles away, as if he were calling to her from a distant cliff top. She could hear the words, even make out what they said, but their meaning was pointless. Useless. They did not touch her.

  She stood above the blood-shadow, staring at it, seeing within its depth a face whose curves and edges were familiar. She knew that face, but couldn't quite grasp whose it was. It looked a bit like her, but then it didn't, not really. It belonged to someone else… and yet she and it were connected in some way.

  She stepped over the threshold and entered a vision from her dreams, a scene pulled dripping from her nightmares.

  The room was bare but for an unmade single bed pushed up against one wall, and an old-fashioned dentist's chair which took centre stage. Sitting in the chair, with its back to the door, was a figure. It was small: a small boy. His hair was messy; it looked wet. His arms hung loosely at his sides, the fingers not quite touching the floor. The posture of the body suggested that death had occurred some time ago: it was floppy and slouched, as if the muscle tone had gone and the effects of rigor mortis had faded.

  Sarah moved up behind the boy. Her arms were held out, she noticed, and she stared at her hands. Her fingers flexed, and then opened. She was reaching for him. Reaching out to the boy. The poor dead boy.

  The chair was mounted on a mechanism which allowed it to turn, to spin, so Sarah placed her hands upon the backrest and pulled the boy around to face her. In her mind's eye, like a trace of memory, she knew exactly what she would see before it spun around into view.

  His legs shifted as he turned. One arm swung heavily, the hand open.

  The boy, his skin as white as cotton and his eyes bulging wide, was strapped into the chair by thick leather braces. These, too, were old: the leather was frayed and the bonds were locked together like trouser belts, by a spike slotted into one of many holes and then the whole thing was pulled tight, tight, tight…

  He was tied at the waist and at the throat. The boy. The small, small boy.

  There were holes in his head. The front of his pate had been shaved – not quite down to the scalp, but very short; a fine blonde fuzz. Then someone had slowly and patiently drilled holes into his skull.

  The boy's small, small skull.

  Holes. In his skull.

  Sarah knew that the killer had used an old-fashioned hand drill with a wooden handle. She just knew; she fucking
knew
it. The fact that the chair was an antique, and the care taken to prepare the victim, meant that whatever scenario had been created here would only have been sullied by the use of modern power tools.

  And she just
knew
… Her twitch. It told her so.

  So the boy's head had been drilled full of holes – slowly, methodically. Then – and this was the worst part – something narrow and red hot had been pushed into the holes, cauterising the wounds but also searing the brain matter beneath. It was awful – medieval. Like something the Spanish Inquisition might have dreamt up.

  Sarah stared at the chair. At the dead boy. And at the small holes in his small head. There was very little blood, apart from a few drizzles that had run down onto the boy's face. The air smelled faintly of burning; the smoke from singed flesh and blood filled the corners of the room, painting them a muddy yellow colour.

  "Oh, God." Sarah felt sick. Her hands were on the boy, grasping his shoulders, and she stared at his loose body wondering why this all looked and felt (and smelled) so familiar. It was like a dream she'd once had, or a film she'd seen. Second-hand memories scampered through her mind, fleeing before she could grab them and pin a name to their bristling hides.

  "Oh, Jesus…"

  A hand fell upon her shoulder. "Come on. Let's get out of here. Back-up's on the way." It took her several seconds to recognise Benson's voice. Everything was different now, after the discovery of the boy's body. Things had changed – doors had crashed open to release a darkness that she knew she must outrun, if only she could. The world had transformed – or perhaps it had simply taken on its true shape. "Come on, now."

  It was all different now. This was something more, something else: she had been given access to a place she did not want to visit.

  Sarah allowed herself to be guided away from the chair, across the bare room, and out of the door. She stood shaking on the landing, yet she didn't know why. There was fear, yes, and revulsion – but what else was churning through her system, what other nameless emotion was even now charging her body with a terrible energy?

  Was it excitement? No, not that. Please, not that. Let it just be nausea.

  The bloody handprints on the closed doors now looked like they were waving, but was it a farewell or a greeting? Sarah closed her eyes but she could still see the boy. His image was locked forever inside her mind: an unwelcome tenant in her subconscious. When she opened her eyes the red handprints were no longer there.

  "You OK? What happened in there?" Benson leaned in close. His breath was stale; his cheap aftershave was a vulgar presence in her nostrils.

  "I… I dunno. It was weird, like I was walking in a dream – a dream I'd had before. I couldn't stop myself. I knew that boy was in the room, and that he wanted me to see him. He wanted to meet me." The realisation did not help. It simply made things worse.

  "I don't understand."

  Nor did Sarah. She didn't understand this at all, not any of it. A murdered boy wanted to meet her; it was hardly a sane thought.

  Hardly sane at all.