When I finished watching that video, I immediately tried to download it from the card to the computer’s hard drive. My old cop training had kicked in immediately, pushing through my confusion and horror, demanding that first and foremost, I preserve the evidence of what had occurred.
That’s when the computer froze up.
At first I thought it was just the aches and pains of the old desktop, and I had a moment of panic that the hard drive might have died, but when I rebooted it, the computer came back just fine. I went back to the memory card and it was empty. I fired up the proprietary video player and tried opening it from that, but no luck. After thirty minutes of trying different things and researching possible ways of at least seeing if the data from the bodycam was still on either the card or the computer itself, I gave up. Maybe some forensic computer expert could find the video, but as far as I could tell, it was just gone.
I spent the little time I had left on my shift sitting in a chair with my back against the wall. I had my cell phone in one hand and my extended baton in the other, and my eyes were constantly roving, looking for some lurking shadow coming down one of the halls or a swarm of small, furry bodies rolling toward me like some kind of biting, clawing wave. I wanted to call Oscar again, but decided to wait. I wanted to talk to him in person, and I’d see him in twelve hours. That would have to be soon enough.
A few minutes before shift change, I saw Spires pulling up outside the clubhouse on the external camera. I’d never been so happy to see him in my life. I wanted him to come on in, to either keep me company or relieve me early, but he sat alone in his car until one minute before his shift was supposed to start. When he did come in, I tried to hide my irritation and anxiety by asking him how he’d been doing since I’d seen him a week and a half earlier.
He raised an eyebrow and frowned slightly, almost as though he thought he was the target of some practical joke. “It’s been…fine. How’ve you been? I heard you were sick with a stomach bug.”
I smiled widely and then wondered if I looked like a crazy person. I was trying to restrain my manic glee at being around another person after such a strange and terrible night, but it was hard, and when I spoke, I could hear the frantic edge to the rush of words that spilled out.
“Oh yeah, doing much better. Thank you for asking. Just glad to be back at work, y’know? Got stir crazy in my apartment. Too sick to enjoy being off, y’know? But how’ve things been here? Anything interesting going on?”
Spire’s frown deepened. “No…nothing interesting. Same boring assignment.” He shrugged. “I caught a couple trying to get freaky in the Grey House on Monday. Called the cops, but they had run off before they got here. That’s been about it.”
I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or upset by Spire’s calm demeanor and lack of disquiet. Had he really not seen any weird shit lately? And if not, why not?
“Hmm. Good deal. So nothing odd or strange? Seeing or hearing weird stuff or what not?”
A thin line of anger flashed across Spire’s expression. “Look, man, is this some kind of joke? Why are you asking me all this stuff?”
I felt a surge of panic. Either he really didn’t know anything or he was trying to bait me into telling what had happened to me. Regardless, I didn’t trust him, and I worried that if I kept asking questions and acting freaked out, he might report me. Say I was acting crazy or like I was on something. So I gave up and started backing out of the guard station, still trying to smile.
“Nothing, nothing. Just trying to make conversation and doing a bad job at it. Probably need to go get some sleep.”
His anger seemed to fade to concern. “Yeah, you look like you’re still sick. You sure you’re okay to drive home by yourself?”
I waved the question away as I headed toward the exit. “I’m fine. Just got to get my energy built back up is all.” Pausing, I looked back for a moment to where Spires stood. He was so young-looking, all alone by himself in this place. “Hey, be careful though, y’know? And call for back up if anything does happen.”
He nodded. “Sure, I will. And take care of yourself, Jack. Hope you feel better.”
After a day of troubled sleep, I went back switched off with Spires. He seemed okay, thought he kept giving me odd looks as he packed up his bag. As for Oscar, he was late, and again I was considering calling him when he walked in with a wave and a wan smile. I was relieved he was okay and that I’d get to talk to him face-to-face.
It was important to me that we were together when we talked because I wanted to observe his body language and demeanor. My hope was that it would help me judge the credibility of whatever he was going to tell me. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him, but whatever was going on…well, I didn’t trust anything I couldn’t verify, and the only external proof I had of what I’d experienced had been conveniently wiped away. I don’t know that I’d believe anyone who came up and told me my story of the prior night—not without some proof to back it up, at least.
My hope was that Oscar would have that proof.
“The same thing happened to my video. I watched it at the main office, so it’s not just this computer here. And I even had one of the tech guys try to pull something up from the card, but he said it’s like it was refiled…?”
“Reformatted.”
Oscar nodded. “Yeah, that’s it. Fucking computers. Anyway, I thought it was suspicious at the time—it just so happens to get fucked up right after I watch it? What are the odds? And after hearing the same thing happened with yours…” He sat back in his chair, and maybe it was the gloomy fluorescent lights in there, but he looked older then than I had ever seen him. Not just old, but fragile in a way that broke my heart a little. I had just got through telling him what had happened the night before, and while he looked somewhat surprised and worried about it, his overall lack of reaction was disconcerting. There was no confusion or disbelief—I was apparently just catching up to where he was already. And while I saw fear in his eyes, I couldn’t say for sure how much was due to what I had encountered versus what it made him recall from his own past few days at Whispering Oaks.
Seeming to make a decision, Oscar scrubbed a hand through his grey beard and leaned forward to catch my gaze. “Okay. Enough stalling. Time to tell you what I’ve seen.”
When you got sick, the first day of work you missed was a Friday night. I was scheduled to work too, and I just covered that shift and Saturday night by myself. My alternative was soldier boy, and I wasn’t in the mood for his bullshit. For the first part of Friday’s shift everything was quiet. Then, about three in the morning, I was doing my second patrol of Zone Five when I saw something. It looked like a light coming from inside of the Red House. Not like a flashlight or something, though. More orangey and wavering. Like a flame.
My first thought was some stupid kid had knocked over a lit candle in there while trying to tweak out or get lucky and we were about to have a major fire on our hands. I tried calling it in, but my radio was on the fritz…just like you described when you went in that house last night. I had left my phone back here on accident—stupid thing is dead half the time anyway—and so I had to choose whether to go on and check it out or ride back to the clubhouse and call for help. I could see my pension going up in smoke with that house, so I decided to head on in and see what was going on.
You know how the Red House is laid out. Huge front hallway with two big rooms off on both sides followed by the hallways that lead off to the two side hallways for the two wings…fucking rich people and their wings…and then in the back, the double spiral stairs going up to the second floor with the door to the kitchen underneath them. Well, when I go in the front door—I had to unlock it, but then there are like eight doors into that house—I see what’s making the light right away.
It’s a big candle sitting on the bottom right stair step. If it hadn’t been for how dark everything else was and the way the light reflected, I doubt I’d have even noticed the light from outside, and as you know, I can be a bit…inconsistent when it comes to doing the interior checks once a night. But now that I was in there, it was clear I wasn’t the only one who had been in there.
For one thing, the place was clean. Really clean. I know they get the crew in once a year to shop vac away the dust and dirt that’s accumulated in the finished houses, but the last pass was eight months ago and this place hadn’t looked that clean just a few days earlier. Everything was polished and shiny like someone was about to move in.
Second, there was this smell…It reminded me a bit of some kind of spice…I don’t know. It prickled my nose. Made my eyes water a bit.
Third, of course, was the candle itself. As I got closer, I saw it wasn’t a real candle at all. It was one of those LCD jobs with the fake flicker…ok, LED. Whatever. Like it makes a fucking difference. Anyway, it ran off batteries. So far, all a bit weird, but I’ve definitely seen weirder. I pulled out my stun gun and started clearing the house, starting with the central portion of the main floor.
I cleared every room in that area—the front rooms, the bathrooms, the kitchen, the laundry. Then I went up to the second floor of the central portion where the big banquet hall or whatever is. That room was easy enough to check, but the three rooms on both sides all interconnected with each other and the big room and the hallway. I gave them all a look, saw nothing out of the ordinary, and moved on.
You know the problem with clearing a big house by yourself. It’s too easy for people to avoid you if they’re quiet and know the layout. You go this way, they go that way. And I really didn’t want to get stuck deep in there with some junkie toting a boxcutter and no way to call for help. So I was going to head back down, grab the candle, and take my happy ass back to the clubhouse where I could call for some help to do a more thorough check. The main office would bitch about it, but they’d send someone.
When I got back to the stairs to go down, I froze. Where there had been one candle on the bottom step of one set of stairs, now there was a candle on both sets. And between them, a trail of candles going back through the kitchen door that lay between the two staircases.
At this point, I should have run. I wish I had run. But I…look, I know I’m not much any more when it comes to doing this job. I’m old and fat and lazy. No, no, it’s true and I’m man enough to admit it. But I do still care about this job, and there was a time when I was really good at it. I stopped a woman from being raped at a shopping mall back in the late nineties, and a few years before you started I kept a family from being carjacked in the parking deck of that insurance company we service downtown. I’m not a coward, and I don’t like people fucking around with our clients’ property.
And yeah, I was spooked by that point. I knew someone had to be fucking with me, and I had no idea how they had set all that up in the two or three minutes I was upstairs, much less without me hearing or seeing anything. But the fear…well, it just made me angry. Made me want to catch the smart little shit and show him he wasn’t so smart.
I don’t know. I don’t think I really know why I didn’t leave. I just know that I didn’t, and that not leaving was a mistake.
I went down the stairs slowly, looking out for an ambush, but there was nothing. I followed the trail—because it was clearly meant to lead me somewhere—back to the far corner of the kitchen where the door to the root cellar was. Again, my brain began sending up warning flags, but I ignored them and followed the trail of candles down the stairs.
Between the light they gave off and my flashlight, I could see pretty well. The cellar looked empty except for the candles, and I had a moment of relief before I saw something didn’t look quite right at the far end of the room. The candles stopped a few feet from the wall, and it was hard to see into the shadows past their bright light, but the dirt floor of the cellar looked different there.
Moving closer with my flashlight, I saw that was because the earth was mounded up around a large hole in the ground. Hell, not a hole. A tunnel. It sloped sharply at first, but even at the edge of where my light could reach, it had begun to flatten out, and it was big enough for a man to walk through if they stooped a little. There was no way I was going in there, of course. Whatever this all was—drug runners, an escaped lunatic, whatever…I was done with it. I had done my duty and I was going to get the fuck out of there.
Until my flashlight went out, along with all the candles.
Well, not all of the candles. Because in the new darkness I could see the same flickering light barely visible in the tunnel below. And as I started backing up, sending plastic candles rolling this way and that, I felt a hand grab the back of my neck. That same spicy smell was overpowering now, and when I tried to pull away, I realized I couldn’t. I felt a hot breath hit the side of my head as the thing holding me whispered into my ear.
“Do you come to give Alms?”
Oscar was gripping his hands tightly as he told me this last, but despite his best efforts, they still trembled a little. Worse was his face, which had grown paler and more weary as he recounted that night to me. Now he sat silent for a moment. I realized it was because he was struggling to not cry.
“After…Um, after that, I didn’t remember anything else. It was like you, kinda, except I wound up back outside the Red House in the grass. At first I was confused. Worried I’d had a stroke or something. But then I started to remember. It seemed so crazy…like a dream almost. I came back here to the clubhouse and just sat for a bit. Tried to get my head straight. I wasn’t ready to call anybody because I wasn’t sure what I believed.”
“Then I remembered the damn body camera.”
“I pulled up the video, and while it was hard to make out a ton, I found the place where I was going down into the cellar. I could even seen the entrance to the tunnel and heard the voice when the lights had gone out. I had started screaming then, and…it looks like something grabbed my legs. Pulled me down into the tunnel. It…” He was crying a little now, his mouth quivering slightly. “It ends soon after that. I was getting pulled into some bigger place I think. And…I think they did something to me there. I don’t know what exactly. And I…”
Oscar stopped midsentence. “Don’t move.” He said in a lowered tone. “There’s something down the hall. Something small. I just saw it move.” His face was perfectly calm now, and for a moment I could see the younger man he once had been. Keeping his eyes just over my right shoulder, he slowly eased his baton from his belt. “When I go to move, you dodge hard to the left. Understand? Left.”
I wanted to ask a question, but then he was raising his arm with a speed I didn’t know he had. I went off my chair to the left and looked up as he was hurling the collapsed baton down the hallway. I heard it strike with a loud thud, followed by Oscar cursing.
“I missed the fucker. Goddamnit.” He was already heading over to where he had thrown the baton, and I stood up and followed.
“What was it? Did you see it?”
He shrugged angrily. “It was dark, but it looked like one of those rats you were talking about. I knew pegging it was a longshot, but better than chasing it.”
I was only half-listening to him by that point, because I had found something on the floor near where the baton had put a dent in the wall. Picking it up gingerly, I stepped back closer to the light to see it more clearly. Oscar came behind, asking what I’d found.
It was tiny, yet ornately made, with brown fur finely stitched with some kind of translucent thread. Something similar to dark suade or velvet lined the insides of the ears and covered the nose. There were long whiskers of grey wire and teeth that looked like yellowed ivory. And the eyes were made of two black oval stones that seemed to flicker with an inner fire. Along the sides, tucked discretely behind the furry cheeks, were small straps and impossibly delicate metal buckles to secure it all in place. Turning it over in my palm, I felt a chill at how much it looked like the animal it was mimicking in its own strange way.
“It’s a mask, Oscar. It’s a tiny rat mask.”
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Credits
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