Below please find the sample chapter, which is also available here.
Don was
already at the station, looking careworn and tired, when Eddie arrived.
“Have trouble sleeping?” Eddie asked.
Don nodded. “I couldn’t get some of that stuff out of my head. I
thought I’d managed all right. Felt fine when we went to see Malleson. I felt
okay on my way home.” He rubbed his forehead. “I think it was when I saw my
wife and kids. Somehow seeing them brought it back to me, those bodies, the
blood, the mess. It was as if I’d been coasting along, not really seeing any of
it properly, even though I thought I did.”
Eddie patted him on the shoulder. “Getting stuck into some work will
get rid of that,” he said, though he knew more than one copper in Edgebottom
had seen far too much of that kind of thing over the years and felt compelled
to resign when they could no longer take it. The devastation to the force after
the Maguire Family Murder in the late sixties was still talked about in subdued
tones. How many good coppers had retired or resigned or been fired for
misconduct or mental breakdowns after that?
“I was in the canteen having some coffee a short while ago and there
was talk that something big’s about to happen.”
“I thought what happened yesterday was big,” Eddie said. “What do
you mean?”
“It was a couple of the older coppers. They’ve been here for years.
Brought up locally.” Don scratched his head, uncertain. “I don’t know what to
make of it. When they saw me listening they seemed to shut up or go off the
subject. Before that, though, one of them said something about there being a
feeling in the air, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”
“Sounds to me like some of them are going soft in the head. Getting
spooked.”
“You couldn’t blame them, Sarge. Not after what’s happened.”
“What else did they have to say? Or is that it?”
“There was more. Like I said, they clammed up when they saw me. I
suppose I’m new to the area.”
“You’re probably right. It’ll take twenty years before you’re
accepted as a local – probationary, of course.” But Eddie could see Don was
genuinely concerned. “Anything else?” he asked.
“Some of them said they were going to take sick leave. Get out of
here till it’s over. What the hell it is they’re worried about I’ve no idea,
except the way they were talking it made me feel uneasy, as if they knew a lot
more than they put into words.”
“A load of old women,” Eddie said, though Don’s words made him begin
to worry. There was something in the air. He had begun to sense this
himself as he drove into Edgebottom. The streets looked quieter than normal.
What people there were about its rain swept streets looked furtive and nervous,
as if they really shouldn’t be there at all or would have preferred to have
been somewhere else. Even the traffic seemed sparse, subdued somehow. Of course
the weather could have something to do with that. The streets were inches deep
in water the sewers hadn’t been able to handle as efficiently as they should.
Much of this drained into town from the surrounding moors, and some of the
steeper streets were churning like rivers.
DI Parks strode over to the two officers.
“A bit of a breakthrough,” he said. He was smiling with self
satisfaction. “Several bullets were fired into the side of the Punto. Though
most of them were melted in the heat when it caught fire, one was retrieved
further up the road. Even though it was bent out of shape, it was identifiable
as a point two two.”
“So Morgan was there?” Eddie said.
“Could be. He had a score to settle with Broadman.”
“I thought it was Broadman who had a score to settle with him after
his right hand man was reputedly gunned down by him.”
“None of the men we found on the moors was shot,” Don said. “They
were hacked to death. It’s difficult to believe Morgan could have done that,
especially when all three were armed.”
“And with guns a damn sight better than a point two two,” Eddie
said.
“You may be right.” Parks was unperturbed. “But the bullet holes in
the side of the Punto show that Morgan was probably present when the car caught
fire. Whether he was there when Broadman was murdered is something else. We’ll
have to see what our search team finds, if anything.” He handed Eddie several
sheets of paper. “We’ve managed to get a search warrant on Shackleton’s house
on Queens Road.
I’d like you and Don to go through the place. Take a few uniforms with you.
Check everything. It would be interesting to see who Shackleton is involved
with. Somehow, in some way these crimes are linked, I’m sure.”
It took less than half an hour for the two officers to assemble a
team and set out. Queens Road
was in one of the better class areas of old Edgebottom, though it had declined
in recent years, most of its larger houses having been converted into flats or
bed-sits. They pulled up at the higher end of the road. Shackleton’s house was
a large end terrace, with two bay windows, a large, untended garden at the
front and side, and an attic between two gables on its roof.
“Good family house,” Don said, looking up at it through the
windscreen of their car as the police van with six constables inside it drew up
behind them.
“Once,” Eddie said. “Till everyone wanted to move to new houses in
the suburbs. Like me,” he added ruefully. “If it’s ever sold it’ll be divided
into flats like all the rest. Bloody shame, but that’s progress for you.”
They got out and climbed the half dozen steps that divided the front
garden in two and rapped on the door, though neither of them expected it to be
answered. A watch had been maintained on the house since Gary Morgan was
abducted and no one had been seen at the place since or had answered the
numerous attempts to get in. Eddie turned to the uniformed office behind him.
He held a large sledge hammer in both hands. The constable stepped forward,
positioned himself squarely to the door and swung the hammer just below its
handle. The door burst inwards with a crash against the wall inside.
“Let’s get started,” Eddie called as he led the way in.
The house looked neglected. Dust and cobwebs in every corner and an
overriding smell of what struck Eddie like meat that had gone off, though there
was enough furniture on the ground floor to show it had been lived in recently.
The front living room contained a sofa and a couple of chairs, all turned to
face a small TV and VCR. There was little else, other than a pile of magazines
and books. The wallpaper looked unchanged since the 1950s, as did the tiled
fireplace, which was brown and cream. Eddie glanced through the magazines but
there was nothing of interest for the investigation: a few copies of National
Geographic, a Radio Times, some Sunday supplements. The books were
novels: Evelyn Waugh, Angus Wilson, Aldous Huxley, Georges Simenon, all of them
well-read paperbacks. Not unusual titles, Eddie thought, to find in the house
of an ex-schoolteacher. There was a half empty bottle of Jameson whiskey and
several tumblers.
The dining room was even more sparsely furnished, a gate-leg table
and a set of chairs, with a couple of uninspired pictures on the walls.
“Not exciting,” Don muttered. To which Eddie had to agree. A more
boring house he had yet to see. Even the kitchen was nondescript, with a few of
the usual items, all of them old, well used but workable, stocked with an
equally unremarkable assortment of tinned or packaged foods.
Upstairs the front bedroom contained a double bed, covered in an
untidy pile of sheets that looked like they had not been washed in months, a
bulky Edwardian wardrobe and a computer, neatly laid out on a laminate and
chipboard desk with a cheap plastic swivel chair in front. The desk was in the
bay window, facing outwards. The computer was the first up-to-date item Eddie
had seen so far. It was a Dell, looked reasonably new, and had a scanner and a
bubble jet printer connected to it.
“We’ll get someone to take a look at this later. Take it back to the
station. Who knows what this little beauty might reveal,” Eddie said to one of
the uniforms, who began to unplug it ready for manhandling downstairs to the
van.
“Sarge!” It was Don. “Take a look at this.”
He was in the back bedroom. The light had been switched on. A quick
glance showed the window had been boarded up.
“What the hell have we here?” Eddie stared around the room,
reflecting that his face probably showed the same amazed look as Don, who stood
in the center of the room. Its walls had been painted white, but little of this
showed, they were so densely covered in hand drawn symbols, diagrams and words
and sometimes by crude, stylized drawings. “Get some photos of these,” Eddie
said. “God knows what they mean – but someone might know something about them.”
“Looks like some sort of occult crap to me,” Don said, his voice
betraying the disgust he felt.
Across the floorboards someone had painted an enormous five-pointed
star in red that reached to within a couple of feet of the walls, its points
touching the rim of a circle. More symbols had been painted inside it. To Eddie
they could have been Greek or Hebrew, though they might have been something
else altogether for all he could tell. All he was certain about was that he
felt disturbed when he looked at them, as if they awoke fears long forgotten in
the depths of his mind.
The burned out stubs of dark
candles, some of them black, stood at each point of the pentacle, their waxy
folds melted in pools around them. Worse, though, were the dried out, mummified
remains of what looked like small animals nailed to the floorboards. He knelt
to examine one of the larger. It was a cat, its paws secured so tight by the
nails punched through them they had almost split in two. From the state of its
face, he had a nasty suspicion the creature had been alive when this happened
and had been left here to die. Blood and foam had dried on the fur around its
mouth. Its lips were pulled back in a frozen grimace of pain. Other animals
were rats and a small dog, similarly killed.
“No wonder the place stinks,” Don said in disgust.
Curiously, Eddie barely noticed the extent of the smell till Don
mentioned it. Perhaps his mind had been engrossed with other things, he
thought. Now that he had become aware of it he felt sickened, especially when
he saw something move on the cat’s gas-filled stomach and a handful of maggots
wriggled through its matted fur.
He clenched his teeth tight in disgust, then stood up and strode
away.
A small bookcase stood by one wall. Only a dozen or so books filled
its shelves, one of which was laid open on top as if left there to be read.
Eddie strode over for a closer look. The books were old, heavily bound volumes
in what looked like stained leather that felt unusually soft to the touch, with
odd, distinctive pores. The open book was one of the largest. In size and shape
it reminded Eddie of a Family Bible. This, though, was as far as the similarity
went. The opened pages were filled with crabbed writing in what looked like
Latin, but it was the illustrations that surprised him. Skillfully drawn in pen
and ink, the things depicted were so outlandish they were more like something
from a frenzied nightmare. They were things of horror, huge, octopoid, outlandish
creatures, the like of which Eddie was certain belonged to no familiar
religion.
“What the fuck are those?” Don asked, joining him by the bookcase.
“They’re sick looking bastards.” He shook his head. “What kind of religion is
that?”
“Fucked if I know,” Eddie said with a smile, though it felt fragile
and false. “Perhaps they’re a drug addict’s equivalent of gin goblins.”
Don shook his head. “Looks old.”
Eddie reached down and picked through several parchment-like pages.
It felt old too, he thought, recoiling a little at the rancid smell that rose
from it. “Looks as if Shackleton was into some weird shit,” he said.
“Homicidally weird?”
Eddie looked at more of the grotesque drawings. “Who can say? What
we need is someone who can read this stuff.” He looked further along the
bookcase. There was a small transparent plastic bag, which had previously been
hidden beneath the open book. Inside were several ounces of white powder.
“We always suspected Shackleton was into drugs,” Don said.
Eddie reached for it. “Let’s see what it is before we jump to
conclusions. For all we know it could be flour.” Though he knew neither of them
thought there was a chance in a million of this. He opened it and took a
cautious sniff. And felt his brain explode in a kaleidoscopic frenzy of
blinding colors. It was as if he had leapt off the edge of an immense cliff and
was plunging headlong toward a sea of blazing, iridescent lights. He felt
scared and nauseated, his past life forgotten in the immensity of the moment.
He saw his arms outstretched in front of him, sinewy and long and covered in
wiry hairs like an animal’s. He saw his hands, like talons, his fingers flexing
with scaly knuckles, his fingernails long, horny and ridiculously sharp. He
opened his mouth and screamed and his jaws seemed to stretch larger and wider
till it seemed as if the whole of his head would turn inside out.
Then the blows, sharp and painful blows to his cheeks. Again. And
again. There were thunderclaps of agony that brought tears to his eyes.
“No more!” he heard himself shriek. “No more!”
His stomach heaved. He felt himself kneeling on the floor, felt the
splintery surface of the wood beneath his knees and the hard but gentle hands
on his shoulders, grasping him tight.
“Are you all right, Sarge?”
The voice sounded as if it simultaneously came from a million miles
away and only inches from his face. He looked up, saw Don’s face staring at
his, concerned and worried.
“Are you all right?”
Dry retching, Eddie managed to nod his head, though the accompanying
waves of nausea almost made him faint.
“Jesus Christ, I was worried for a moment,” Don said. “I thought
you’d been poisoned.”
Reality, like a shifting veil, returned to him as he straightened
his back, saw the bare back bedroom once more, with its painted pentacle and
tortured animals nailed to the floor. Reality! As if this was some kind of
reality, he thought, his throat raw as if it had been scraped with a file.
“What the hell happened?” Eddie asked, his voice rasping.
“It was as soon as you smelled that powder,” Don said, still
sounding concerned. “Your eyes rolled under their lids like you’d been
poleaxed. Your face went white. Then you collapsed onto your knees.”
Eddie could see some of the uniforms had gathered at the door.
Despite his embarrassment at what had happened, Eddie said:
“Anything else?”
“You started shouting something, Sarge. It was hard to make out. It
wasn’t English. In fact, to be honest, it was gibberish to me. ‘Aon scriosadh,
aon dioc’ – or something like that. Gibberish.”
Eddie let Don help him to his feet. “Teach me to be daft enough to
test something like that by sniffing it,” he said in an attempt to make a joke
of what had happened. He heard some of the uniforms laugh, relieved, perhaps,
no harm had come to him. He grinned back at them, though it took an effort of
will. Dazzling images still flashed before his eyes like aftershocks and he
knew it was far from over yet. He could smell something goatish and fishy deep
inside his nostrils, elusively.
“Perhaps we should get you checked out at hospital,” Don said. “You
never know what effects it might have.”
Had he seen something in his face, Eddie wondered, a glimpse of the
hallucinations that were still flickering even now, like something buried at
the back of his mind?
Eddie shook his head. “I’m fine. Let’s get on with the search. The
sooner we finish the sooner we can get out of this bloody place.” He scowled at
the carcasses nailed about the floor. “What the fucking hell was Shackleton
into?” he said.
“Do you want me to package these books and take them back to the
station?” Don asked.
“They might give some clues as to what’s been going on. You never
know. We should get someone who can read that stuff to take a look, perhaps
from one of the local schools, maybe, or Manchester University.”
He looked again at the opened book. There was a black and white
etching of a grotesque satyr – or satyr-like creature. It seemed to be a
mixture of male and female, with a face straight out of a nightmare. It struck
him as incredible how the artist had been able to blend a mixture of evil and
lust on its goatish features. He looked at its arms, and realized with a jolt
that these were what his own looked like in the hallucinations. He looked away
from the drawing, realizing how stupid he had been to taste anything here. He
should have known better. For all he knew Shackleton might have left that bag
of white powder as a trap, hoping to tempt someone to do exactly what he had
done with it.
He headed for the landing. There was another flight of stairs to the
attic. Slowly, one hand on the banister rail for support, he started up to the
next floor. There was little light up there, and he knew even before he looked
into the room that the attic window had been boarded up as well. He reached for
the light switch but nothing happened.
Looking back down the stairs he called for someone to fetch a torch.
One of the uniforms said he would get one from the van and Eddie
waited, reluctant to go any further in the dark. Even blinking his eyes brought
flashes of the hallucination back before them, vividly bright, as if someone
was shining a film projector straight into them. Damn it, he hoped the effects
would wear off soon – otherwise he would have to follow Don’s advice, which
would almost certainly result in him being signed off sick.
A couple of minutes later the uniformed PC came clattering up the
steps, a heavy duty flashlight in his hands. Taking it, Eddie switched it on,
then followed by the PC took the few remaining steps to the top of the stairs.
He pushed the door into the attic open and shone the torch ahead of him. Its
beam filled the room.
If he had thought the boarded up bedroom below was nightmarish,
there was worse ahead. This time it wasn’t tortured animals that were nailed to
the floor but a human body – though whether the victim was male or female Eddie
was unable to tell. What flesh there was had withered to such an advanced
degree it was impossible to make out more than that whoever it was seemed to
have died in extreme pain. Even though the victim had not been able to move
because of the heavy nails hammered through their hands and feet, the body was
grotesquely contorted. The head had been thrown back and, though it was now
little more than a skull, its parchment-like skin stuck to it in dark brown,
papery folds, its eyes nothing more than shriveled plums, sunk back into their
sockets, the mouth stilled straining against the lengths of tape that were
bandaged across it to the back of the head, again and again, so there had never
been the slightest chance of the victim being able to scream, there was no
mistaking the horror the victim had felt in their final moments.
How long had this creature lain here in this state? A year? Two
years? More?
Eddie called for more help in the attic.
“We have a murder,” he told Don. “We need a full forensic team right
now.” He staggered back to the landing. He had seen enough. He had seen more
than enough.
“Let’s get a breath of fresh air,” he told Don, after he had
returned from the attic himself, white-faced and trembling, a moment later.
“What’s happening?” Don said. “Is the whole fucking town falling
apart? I don’t understand.”
“Perhaps some of the older coppers do,” Eddie suggested. “You heard
them this morning.”
“That’s bullshit, Sarge. Isn’t it?”
Eddie shrugged, wishing suddenly, as they stepped out of the house
and headed down the street, that he smoked. He needed something, he knew, though
if he went to a pub right now he would be drunk inside an hour.
If you are interested in reading more it's available both as a paperback and an ebook on Amazon:
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
If you are interested in reading more it's available both as a paperback and an ebook on Amazon:
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
No comments:
Post a Comment