Shred - Cuts of Flesh #1, Page 2

The journey to the Webb farm was for the most part a blur. Aleister had never been especially fond of mornings and their infinite promise that never seemed to materialise and this morning was no different, with frost covering his windscreen to such an extent that it took two kettles of hot water to clear it, which he unsteadily dealt with after drinking three cups of coffee to clear his head from the night's drinking. Consequently he found himself pulling up his battered red Citroen hatchback next to a farm gate just after leaving town, to relieve himself against a tree. When he was finished he decided to take the opportunity to light up a small self-rolled cigarette. He had given up about six months ago, for the most part, but usually still found himself nervous before a job and used it as a way of calming nerves that were running wild from the caffeine he ingested daily. All in all, he thought to himself as he lit up, he should simply drink water and eat bread and nothing else, which would be a better way of maintaining an equilibrium. It wouldn't be half as fun though.

  As he stood slowly working his way through the roll up, the chill in the air seemed to cut him to the core, despite the warm tan coloured coat he was wearing over his best grey suit. He was also wearing his most refined blue tie, as he hoped to make a better impression than he sometimes had in the past, with his jowls and hangdog expression giving him the air of a disgruntled plumber rather than a hardnosed investigator. He found himself staring out over the frozen clods of earth that formed the nearest field, rolling in jagged furrows down towards a haze of mist that drifted over a tree lined stream. The scene could probably have been called peaceful but the light was so stark that coupled with his mood and headache it simply seemed a bleak and frosted purgatory, without a single sign of life. His breath steamed in front of his face and mixed with the smoke before drifting away on the breeze. The stream at the far end of the field was dark and undulating in its bed and Aleister wondered morbidly how deep it was and whether it could drown someone. He'd seen that before, white flesh, cold and still as if under glass. That poor boy.

  With a shiver he stubbed out his cigarette when it was only half gone, grinding it into the icy grass with his boot. He looked forward to getting inside and getting warm again.

  It was only a further fifteen minutes before he arrived at the farm house, which was situated at the top of a hill that overlooked the town, shrouded in a tangle of low lying cloud. The morning mist obscured the garden that skirted the back of the large structure, only letting one or two gnarled trees poke their branches out of the vapour, fingers in the fog.

  As he stepped out of his car and onto the gravel path, his boots crunching among the stones, he spotted two cars – one dark blue and the other a metallic green – parked out in front of the house. He checked his watch, frowning with concern. It was eight o'clock; he was right on time.

  This is already going sour. Jacqueline had said in her confirmation email that her husband always left at seven thirty, presumably taking one of the two cars, so if Aleister arrived at eight then they would be able to discuss details about the case with no chance of interruption. What's changed? Aleister stood shuffling his feet for a couple of moments, rubbing his hands in the biting cold. He sighed. He wasn't going to stand here all day and he didn't want to simply drive back without some sort of starting point. Maybe the Webbs owned three cars. If not then he'd have to play the part of the 'old friend of the wife' and try to get a little information while the husband was still there. It won't be the first time.

  He walked briskly up to the large stained oak door, which was illuminated by a small antique light fitting above that was sparking fitfully. As he raised his hand to knock he noticed that the door was ever so slightly ajar, with a little light creeping out underneath, along with a small hand, clenched and pale...

  He pushed the door open slowly. It was well oiled, moving silently before nudging against the body of the young boy – named Lucas, if he remembered correctly – who was lying face down in a pool of blood, with what must have been a large wound on his back, as it had spilled bright red fluid across most of his school uniform. There was no hope of him still being alive, not with so much blood lost.

  Aleister sucked his breath in sharply. The world span away and he had to grip the door frame to pull it back into focus. The boy was supposed to be gone. What the Hell have I stumbled into? Instincts that had long ago atrophied due to lack of use started to reassert themselves as he stepped back into the freezing air to assess the situation with a detective’s eyes.

  There were no visible cars other than the two in front of the house, but as Jacqueline had never mentioned how many the family owned then one of them could belong to someone other than the family. It was only an incidental detail though, so he pushed it aside for the moment. What mattered was whether there was still a present danger, both to himself or anyone still left alive inside.

  He scanned the windows for any sign of life, but apart from the lights in one or two of the rooms there was nothing, no movement, and no shadows. The grey stone building seemed dead, a tomb bathed in morning light, its brickwork glistening as if it were some newly hatched alien form.

  He took the opportunity to ring the police station directly, the number of which he still stored in his phone in case of emergency, although he had never imagined that it would be for such a grim occurrence as a child’s death. After he was happy that the receptionist understood the seriousness of the situation he quickly hung up to reduce the risk of his being noticed by anyone inside. He was confident that they would be sending a reasonable force. Sean McKiernan, the Detective Chief Inspector, was a humourless and unimaginative man, yet he was nothing if not careful and thorough. He would throw everything at this to prevent a further loss of life if there was even the remotest possibility of further casualties. Aleister couldn’t wait for them to arrive though, not if Jacqueline was still alive in there, with what could either have been an interloper or potentially a psychotic husband.

  He made his way around the right hand side of the house as quietly as his out of condition body allowed, through a dew covered gate and into a garden. The bushes – though well-tended – still seemed marginally overgrown, just enough to stifle his progress slightly by catching on his coat and arms, reaching for him as if of their own accord to stop him investigating further, trying to tell him to turn back. He frowned at his own nerves. Maybe it was the coffee, filling his mind with that creeping paranoia that it sometimes elicited from him, or maybe he was still half asleep, although he definitely felt wide awake after seeing the body...

  He saw a second body.

  She was sprawled half out of the kitchen door on the way to the garden, her stick thin arms twisting around her body in her blood stained white and yellow floral dress, her head resting on the gravel outside at a sickening angle to the rest of her body. When she had died she had for some reason pulled her hands in, curling them to her torso with a strange protective action that reminded him of a dead spider. Her eyes were stretched wide, a sense of dread forever etched on her cold features as her mouth hung open in a silent scream, blood staining her teeth and showing through various cuts and lacerations that covered her face.

  He quietly approached and glanced inside the kitchen. The house was still, quiet as the grave. Is the killer gone? The most likely suspect was still the husband at this time, though he could have suffered the same fate if there was another party in the mix. As he stared down at the corpse of Jacqueline, Aleister half hoped that whoever had done this was still around so that he could beat the living shit out of them before the police arrived – in self-defence of course...

  She looked emaciated, not only from lack of food but her drawn features seemed dehydrated as well, almost mummified. Having never seen a photograph of her it was possible that she was this thin, he supposed... if she had an eating disorder of some sort. Perhaps the suspected infidelity had driven her onto a self-destructive course that she hadn't wanted to reveal in the emails.

  Aleister reached down and gently closed her eyes, though
the action did not make her look any more at rest as the last shriek of terror had forever transformed her face into a terrifying milk-white mask.

  Time to take the bull by the horns. Aleister stepped carefully over her body and into the kitchen. It was in disarray, with the remains of a fried breakfast scattered everywhere over the hardwood floor amongst broken crockery and cutlery. There were patches of smeared blood in amongst the food, leading from Jacqueline's body across the floor and further into the dark recesses of the house. The patterns of gore were strange, almost like footsteps in their regularity but small and circular for the most part. There were so many of them, covering the floor as if it were a pointillist artwork. There were also two carving knives on the floor and as Aleister bent down he could see a large streak of blood on one of them. He was about to touch the blade to get a better look when his instincts drew him back and he pulled out a pair of leather gloves from his coat and slipped them over his hands. He didn't want to get his own fingerprints mixed up amongst the forensic mess that this house contained.

  The blood could have been the killer's or Jacqueline's, as her dress was covered in it. That was one for the autopsy, all he needed to do right now was make sure that the house was clear. He reached up to a rack over the cooker and pulled down a large frying pan, testing the weight in his hand. It always helps to be prepared.

  He stepped slowly and carefully around the food on the floor in case he slipped over, and moved out into the carpeted corridor. The blood spatters led up to the front door ahead of him, which was still open a little, with the daylight spilling in across the body of the child. The corpse didn't appear to have been shifted, which would have been necessary for anyone to get the door open wide enough to make an escape, so if the killer had been here when he had arrived, then they were still somewhere inside...

  There was a room to his right, the lights of which were on, so Aleister slowly pushed the door open, hoping that he still retained the element of surprise. The room beyond was a relatively tidy dining room, with a large antique table in the centre that was set for breakfast, the meal that would never arrive. There were two or three slim book cases situated around the room and family photographs lining the walls. Aleister took a moment to scrutinise one, which showed a woman that must have been Jacqueline crouched proudly behind Lucas, who was shielding his eyes against the sunlight and grinning widely in his blue and green uniform. Looks like the first day of school. It must certainly have been taken at least a few months to a year ago, as Jacqueline looked to be almost a different person, with her cheeks blushing red and her figure full and healthy. Another photograph revealed the husband, who looked to be a reasonably happy and well-adjusted family man, his arm held protectively around Jacqueline's shoulder, although Aleister knew from experience that photographs could mean everything and nothing when trying to work out the facts about someone's personality, depending on the subject's skill at duplicity.

  Aleister slipped back out into the hallway and glanced up the staircase that stood to the left of the front door, leading into darkness. There were blood stains here too, leading upwards, some on the stairs and some wiped across the walls in gory trails. There was a small lounge to the left of the staircase but a glance inside told him it was clear. The only way was up.

  He stepped carefully around the pool of blood that surrounded the boy, which was still spreading – its surface rippling queasily in the breeze from the doorway – and started to make his way up the blood stained stairs. The third step creaked with a sound that seemed to be a piercing wail in the silent house and Aleister sucked in his breath in annoyance. There was no point going back now though, so he continued up, knowing that if anyone was lurking upstairs then they would now be fully aware of his arrival.

  At the top of the stairs the trail of blood veered to the left towards the end of the landing, leading into a door that stood ajar. There were other doors leading off the landing but now that Aleister was certain that he would have been noticed by whoever was in the house he decided that speed was of the essence. He charged at the door and shouldered his way in, knocking it back into a bookcase and spilling two or three shelves' contents onto the floor with the recoil. The books landed in a heap and scattered everywhere, some coming to rest in the blood stains that surrounded the corpse of Jacqueline's husband.

  What was his name? Aleister found that question buzzing around his mind as he stared wide eyed at the naked, shrunken body before him, huge folds of thinly stretched skin lying in piles around what was still essentially a skeleton in body mass. The corpse was covered in blood that dripped and ran from every orifice, including his eyes, which had been punctured or devoured and were now deep red sockets that dripped fluid down his cheeks. Thomas, that was it. She had said his name was Thomas Webb.

  Thomas was slumped with his back against a desk, naked and long dead, hands held out at his sides as if in supplication, with his head thrown back in the same silent howl as Jacqueline, covered in the same cuts, although his had somehow scabbed over. It was another death but it was still not obvious how or why they had been killed. Aleister moved closer, picking his way around the blotches of blood on the floor until he was able to crouch down next to the corpse. The close up view was not any more palatable. From the flow of blood it seemed to have been pushed out of Thomas’ body, even forcing itself out of his pores in tiny globules, some of which had already started to clot into tiny dull rubies on his forehead. The folds of skin that sagged from the body were streaked black and red with sickening stretch marks that ran across the body as if it were the corpse of some twisted ruby tiger.

  Aleister had never seen anything as uncanny as this, except for once... and that time it had forced him to change his career. The thought of it started to crawl back into his mind, flesh and tear, shred and rip...

  Aleister stood up and noticed the desktop computer monitor that was stood on the desk, next to the small black mini tower PC. It was still on, with various windows open across the desktop, although some of the screen was obscured by a spattering of blood. Sense told him to leave the computer as it was; he was already overstepping the bounds of what was reasonable as a civilian by investigating the house after the police were already on their way... but something caught his eye. My name.

  He peered closer at the screen and could clearly make out a file titled “Aleister Ward details and docs”. He wouldn’t be able to find out what it contained without moving the mouse or using the keyboard, which was also splashed with Thomas’ blood. He sighed, knowing in his gut that there was no way he could leave this. Questions were already going to be levelled at him if the police found this, so he may as well add a few more whilst getting a few answers of his own.

  He searched around the desk, still being as unobtrusive as possible, until he found what he was looking for in one of the desk’s drawers – a small USB stick, perfect for his needs. He connected it up to the computer and used the mouse to drag the files onto the portable device and off the hard drive, smearing blood over the desk, before he noticed a small application that was still running in the task bar. When he opened it a part of his own face was displayed in a window, with the rest being obscured by dark red. In the corner of his senses he heard a creak from the stairs but was too engrossed in the computer to register it. He looked up and spotted the web cam, with a splash of blood over the lens. The program was still running, still recording...

  He quickly stopped the file and saved it onto the USB stick before disconnecting the device and popping it into his pocket. That was when he noticed the flash of movement on the web cam’s display, just visible in the corner of the picture where previously his face had been, something dark and quick within the doorway...

  Aleister span around to be confronted by the slowly closing door, which was as blood stained with the same strange marks as the rest of the room. He approached it carefully as it slowed down and stopped moving before it closed completely. He took a deep breath, hand on the door handle, and wrenched it ope
n to reveal the same landing, the same dark stairs, but almost certainly more blood...