Father of the Esurient Child, Page 2

dry paint. Words were scrawled in krylon and written backwards upon the plaster walls that cracked with age. “The preacher said she complained of ‘demonic harassment’ but that didn’t make her leave.”

  “Looks like someone a little more real was harassing the old lady. Probably some local punks; I guess they vandalized her house pretty good.” Frankie nodded his head to the windows. The heavy, leaded glass windows had wrought iron bars installed over them to prevent intruders. “Maybe she had a history of problems with vandals?”

  “Yeah, but that kind of harassment is… different. She complained of something supernatural but told the minister that she couldn’t return to deal with the teenagers. She differentiated between the two.”

  “I’ve never met a teenager that wasn’t a harassment.”

  Hugo peeked into the next room. “I think these teenagers she mentioned are all dead,” he said flatly and pointed. Three corpses lay on the floor. They were about as long gone as the feline sacrifice in the neighboring room.

  The detectives swallowed and entered the ghastly scene, cupping hands over their noses to try and dispel the putrid stench. Spiders had webbed the bodies to the floor with draped silken canopies. Hard lumps of black wax pooled where candles melted long ago. A dusty, opened copy of a book lay among them, next to an overturned ouija board and an antique bronze pot.

  Hugo leaned in and examined a corpse. The deceased was young, judging by his trendy clothing and low-ridden waistband. His body had dried and his lips shrunk back revealing braces still on his teeth. The detectives searched through the dead’s belongings which included a necklace with a pewter pentagram pendant.

  Frankie found a wallet containing a student ID card and recognized the name. “It’s those boys that disappeared early spring.” He examined one boy; the ouija board’s planchette, the part with the reader crystal, was buried deep in his skull. The cause of death was obvious, and yet curious.

  “But there were four of them.” Hugo said.

  “I bet we find the other one here, somewhere. One thing’s for sure, this case suddenly got much bigger than one missing girl.”

  “I’m going to call this in,” Hugo said. He took the cell-phone from his hip and explained the situation to the dispatcher as his partner continued examining the teens’ pockets.

  Proudly wagging his old, cellular flip-phone, Hugo grinned; the newer “smart” phones had lots of features, but none had the signal strength of his old dinosaur—it came in handy on days like this, even if his co-workers harassed him for it. “Forensics oughtta get here in a few hours,” he guessed. A loud bang interrupted him, suddenly, echoing through the mansion as the front door slammed closed as if by an angry force.

  Reacting instantly, the officers had each drawn their weapons and trained them on the doorway. They covered each other as they worked back to the main entrance.

  The heavy wooden door was shut. Hugo had left it open.

  The two traded glances and cracked up. “It’s like some kind of horror movie,” Hugo chuckled. “I bet it’s even locked.” He shook his head and chuckled through the adrenaline rush.

  “Wait,” said Frankie, very seriously. “Do you hear that?”

  Hugo paused in silence.

  “It… it sounds like a chainsaw!” Frankie laughed. “Come on. This is ridiculous.” He reached out and opened the door. “Must’ve been the wind.”

  “Wind?”

  “Yeah, you know, it’s air that moves.”

  “Touché. But it’s not windy.”

  As if on cue, a strong breeze suddenly blew through the house, kicking up dust eddies and scattering random detritus through the halls. Frankie smiled smugly. “See, a rational explanation for everything...” the detective trailed off.

  “What is it?” asked Hugo.

  “Something’s going on here,” Frankie intently stared at a decorative planter stand holding a dead fern. “I could swear this fern was over there when we came in.” He pointed to the other side of the room.

  Hugo raised an eyebrow, at his skeptical friend. “You think that’s more odd than a a sudden wind inside a house when it’s not windy outside… and the doors and windows are closed?”

  His partner shrugged. “Central air? Malfunctioning forced air system?”

  Hugo rolled his eyes and didn’t argue, even though he knew most homes of this age and size were more likely to have boilers.

  Frankie crouched like a catcher behind home plate and examined the pile of dried leaves opposite the planter’s current location. He nudged leaves aside with his stylus. In the dust he found three marks that matched the stand’s feet.

  “Interesting,” he said to his partner. But Hugo was already looking at something else.

  “Was this painting upside down when we came in?” Hugo asked.

  Frankie stood to join him. A giddy knot twisted in his gut. A true mystery was unfolding in front of him and it thrilled him. Frankie lived to solve puzzles and discovering each clue excited him as he tried to make sense of them, finding the common thread that linked each together.

  “Let’s get to the bottom of this… gather some more details before anyone else gets here.” An excited tone bled into his voice and Hugo knew it was futile to disagree when his partner got like this.

  They meandered through the old home. Graffiti covered most walls and empty aerosol cans littered the floor near a spread of ancient, thick baseboard. Few areas of the house had not been damaged by vandals; they’d obviously indulged every whim with epicurean fury.

  Entering the kitchen at the rear of the house, they found the fridge door ajar; fuzzy, gray mold spilled outwards and down to the floor, seemingly cementing the refrigerator to that spot. Against one corner, cookware and other appliances had been thrown against the wall covering the area from floor to ceiling.

  “That’s a little weird.” Hugo dug through the pile inquisitively. “There’s a door under here.” With two hands, he dug the pile down, scattering pots and pans across the tiled floor. They clattered with an empty, resonating sound.

  Hugo stopped and cocked his head, listening.

  “What is it, Hugo?”

  “Nothing, I guess. I thought I heard a girl’s voice.” He shook after a long pause and then dismissed his uneasiness. “I must be hearing things.”

  3

  Frankie helped him clear a path. The door was locked firmly. Slightly smaller than a standard door, it looked like a cellar access, or perhaps a servant stairwell. Whichever, it firmly barred their way.

  Frankie opened a cabinet door and examined the contents. Except for a key, it was empty—all of them were. Apparently, everything in the kitchen had been strewn about the room.

  He unlocked the narrow door that had been blocked until now and it yawned wide open to reveal an old root cellar hollowed out from the bedrock. A pair of dress shoes lay at the bottom of the sagging stairs. The leather had a lustrous sheen suggesting a relative newness compared to the rest of the aged items inside the house.

  Hugo peered down and noticed the same thing. “Go check it out?”

  “You have a flashlight?”

  “Heck no,” he laughed. “Nobody carries those anymore. You’ve all got those new-fangled mobiles with built in apps for that kind of stuff.”

  Frankie glared at his partner who shrugged in response.

  “Yeah… maybe that’s why I refuse to get one of them. So I don’t have to go into the scary, dangerous basement,” Hugo laughed guiltily.

  With a scowl, Frankie turned and grabbed the door. He noted that the antique mortis knob had been broken off the inside of the door so that it could not be opened again from the inside. “It ain’t gonna be funny if you close that door on me,” he warned.

  “Something else about this place seems to have sucked all the humor out of the air,” Hugo assured him. Neither had much intention of joking around.

  Frankie went down the stairs, stepping gingerly on the wood planks that were spongy with aged elasticity. In the light of the
doorway he retrieved an old shoe and held it up to examine it.

  “A Dr. Scholl’s loafer.”

  “That’s an old man’s shoe,” Hugo said from the top of the stairs. “Maybe Woodson’s brother fell down the stairs?”

  Frankie pulled out his phone. The remote location made the device constantly cycle in a search for useable signal and the battery life had already drained significantly. He thumbed on the flashlight feature even as he thought he heard a low growl in the darkness.

  Blazing illumination ripped through the blackness. He didn’t see any threatening animals, just an all-but devoured cadaver and a furnace system the size of an old Volkswagon bus. The crumbled fieldstone foundation walls looked as jagged as the remaining bits of leathery flesh remaining on the corpse.

  “Pretty sure it’s Woodson’s brother,” Frankie called up the stairs as he bent low and concentrated the light upon the body; he nudged a tuft of white near the skull which might have been a tanned piece of scalp with an attached wisp of patriarchal hair. “Body’s the right size for a mature male. Bones exposed: barely anything left. Some kind of wild animals have been into him—there’s hardly anything left.”

  An animalistic snarl roared in the darkness as Frankie stared at the carcass. Frankie tried to bring his light to bear even as he reached for his sidearm. Whatever this beast was that defended its territory, it knocked the cell phone aside and connected a second blow against the detective’s cheek.

  Frankie screamed as jagged claws grazed his face and he snapped off two