The Blood Lives (In The Blood Book 1)

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  In The Blood

  By

  Lee Isserow

  Copyright © 2017 Lee Isserow

  All rights reserved.

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  Part One

  The Blood Lives

  1

  Ben Graham couldn't remember the night his mother died, but he could dream it. The dream itself was recurring, a relic from childhood, and obviously a fantastical extrusion of the truth. He believed it the product of a young boy's mind, the result of hearing the word 'monster' bandied about so often in reference to the killer. He told himself, over and over, that when young boys hear of monsters, monsters are undoubtedly conjured forth. But rationalising it away didn't stop him waking up in a cold sweat every time the nightmare was summoned by his subconscious.

  Before he lay his head down that night, Ben was already anticipating night terrors. He could feel them, lying in wait. A tingle of pressure building under his skull right behind his forehead. The same pressure that grew there every time the somnambulant horror show was preparing to take the stage. As he closed his eyes, he discussed it with himself, whether expecting it, fearing it, was more likely to bring it forth than simply trying to forget the horrific imagery that he had relived time and time again.

  Thoughts slowed, as sleep drew forth, and the bedroom lay quiet for the next half hour. The silence was broken by heavy breathing, tossing and turning, The nightmare was beginning to dig its claws in, starting as it always did, with an almighty crash of broken glass.

  Ben was in his childhood bedroom. He was five years old, sixth birthday just a few months away. The sound of a shattering window woke him, and young Ben bolted upright. The noise was loud, and he turned to each of the bedroom windows in turn, but they were all in tact. There were thudding footsteps coming from under him, creaking floorboards downstairs on the ground floor. Inspired by tales he had been read of the Hardy Boys and Famous Five, he kicked his feet over the side of the bed, setting out to investigate.

  As he crept down the staircase, it at no point occurred to him that his life may be in danger. After all, the kids in those books ran into smugglers and thieves, villains of all shapes and sizes, and never once came to an unfortunate end.

  Ben came round the corner at the foot of the stairs, and saw the glass on the floor. He remembered what he had learned from the investigations of his fictional heroes, and took a closer look at one of the shards, holding it in his hand, then putting it up against the hole in the window at the centre of the front door. It fit perfectly, like a puzzle piece that slotted in the bottom right corner by the frame. It had once been part of that window, smashed in by the intruder to enable him to reach the lock. The door had been left ajar. The sound of those heavy boots still thudding around deeper in the house, accompanied by strained breaths, grunts and scuffles. The robber was still there.

  Cautiously, the young boy entered the living room, where he found his mother. She was facing away from him, struggling with the man who broke into the house. But as their bodies turned with the movement of the fight, it became clear that this was no man that broke in to their house. It was a monster.

  The creature had no solid form, its body was gelatinous and constantly shifting in shape. The skin of the intruder, if you could call it that, was mostly bright red, with some patches that were a deeper maroon, others a slick, dark purple. There were tentacles coming out of its sides where arms might be on a man, which were wound round his mother's wrists. The structure of the hideous thing was different where it met her skin, a solid dark brown. The grasp it had on her was strong, and she was fighting a losing battle to break free from the clutches of the beast.

  Ben gasped as he saw the monster. Felt a chill, as if all the blood rushed from his body. He had never seen anything so terrifying in all his short life. The creature turned to him, saw him, and seemed to exude an angry gurgle at having been interrupted. The top of its viscous form reared up, tearing away from the main body. Sinewy drips at the rip between the upper and lower parts formed into teeth. As Ben watched in horror, the fiend's form condensed at this newly formed mouth. The teeth appeared to be not so much sharp as they were hard, becoming darker, a thick and solid brown, just like the tentacles that held his mother tight.

  He was frozen in place. Even if he could move, he would not have been able to stop what came next, as the creature lifted its top jaw up high, and brought it down on his mother's body with a sheer force that seemed to knock all the air from her lungs. The bottom teeth gored her next, ripping into her abdomen. Her blood spurted into the creature, absorbed into the thing's amorphous body, causing the monstrosity to grow in size. What the beast could not sup from her increasingly pale flesh dripped on to the floor, the cream carpet saturating with a bright red.

  Ben woke with a start. A layer of sweat lingering over his entire body, sending a chill over him in the cool night's air. He had known for sure that he was going to relive the nightmare. It was a certainty, because as soon as the sun came up, he was going to set about putting an end to the demon in his dreams. Once and for all.

  2

  Even though the nightmare was only an hour into the night, Ben was not able to return to sleep. He was overcome with dread that it would replay, that he would be watching it on repeat every time he closed his eyes and lay his head back down. So, rather than sleep, he went over his plan. Waiting patiently for the sun to rise, and the day to begin.

  Patience was a virtue Ben possessed in spades, it had already been close to thirty years of waiting, one more night was no big thing.

  He had thought out every angle of his plan, from the act itself, to insuring that no DNA would be left on the scene. He had watched all the documentaries available, to make sure he wouldn't make a stupid or common mistake; listened to every episode of the My Favorite Murder podcast, specifically listening out for the crimes that remained unsolved; watched box sets of close to fifty different police procedurals from around the world to learn what the cops would be looking for at a crime scene, and how they processed evidence. He took grains of salt when it came to the fiction, focusing only the elements of police procedure that seemed to be constants across the board.

  He was ready. He was confident. And he was all too aware that he was ignoring the small voice that questioned; “Will going through with this make me a monster?”

  3

  The dawn chorus started long before the sun came up, an orchestral score to Ben rising from bed, showering, dressing, and trying to have breakfast. He couldn't eat. Stomach in knots that pulled themselves tighter at the mere thought of food, worse so when he actually laid anything edible out in front of himself.

  By the time the sun was up, he was in his car, key in the ignition waiting to be turned. He told himself again; this was what needed to be done. It wasn't just vengeance, it was justice.

  The engine grumbled to life reluctantly, as if it were an avatar of the voice he had been trying to suppress. He ignored the car's grunts, shifted into gear and pulled out from the driveway. His eye was on the speedometer more than normal, insuring that he was maintaining the speed limit as he headed south on the North Circular. Nothing was going to stop him. Nothing, apart from traffic.

  Ben cursed himself. Rush hour was the one thing he hadn't prepared for. The last time he had gone down to scout the location was by train, the time before it was by bus, the time before that was by cab, and all in the middle of the day. It was a preventative measure, to insure his car didn't show up on the Automatic Number Plate Recognition system before it was time to act.


  Until he started binge watching police dramas, Ben didn't even know that ANPR even existed. Cameras across the country spying on every car, monitoring every number plate as they travelled along almost every road. If he had driven there on his reconnaissance trips, all it would take was for some cop to look at the footage, see his car, run it through the system and they would see he had driven there multiple times – a suspicious thing indeed. Public transport was the smarter alternative, and he knew that. But now that he was stuck in traffic, it did not make him feel better. If he were late, that would be his one and only chance to make things right down the drain.

  As the dashboard clock ticked passed nine fifteen, the traffic started to ease up. He knew it wasn't a good idea to go over the speed limit, but couldn't help himself. As he came round Hanger Lane, on to Western Avenue, he ignored the signs that declared the speed limit had been reduced to thirty miles an hour, traversing it at the regular fifty, assuming the speed cameras hadn't been updated whilst the roads were being repaired. The car pulled up outside Wormwood at nine thirty on the dot. He looked out at the gates and saw no sign of activity. Driving along a little further, Ben turned the corner and parked up. Out of sight of the cameras, but still able to see the entrance.

  The red brick walls of the prison lay deep behind a tall wrought iron fence. The entrance itself had two towers on either side of a grand archway, with decorative plaster embellishments that contrasted with the crimson brickwork. A large circle of plaster lay at the centre of each tower. They each contained a silhouette, like giant cameo brooches. One of a man, the other of a woman. It looked to Ben more like the entrance to a renovated castle than a penitentiary. Of course, what lay beyond those walls was something altogether more violent and unruly than the occupants of castle. Violent offenders, prisoners on remand, and a litany of guards that were purported to be as violent and racist as the inmates themselves.

  Ben didn't care much for the conjecture, and if anything, he hoped the guards were violent. Then at least the last thirty years of incarceration wouldn't have been a cakewalk for the man he was waiting for. Tales were told on the blogs he had read, of offenders living off the taxpayer; three meals a day; access to a thousand channels of cable television; a full gym and library; educational programs that rivalled the flailing university system. One website went through the classes available to inmates, the basics of English and maths and science, all the way to the ridiculous options of art and drama. That infuriated Ben, the idea that the monsters within those walls were performing improv, making each other laugh, whilst he paid for their pleasure.

  He looked over to the passenger seat, funnelling that anger into the task at hand. Laid out next to him were the objects of his vengeance. First was the disguise; a hoodie to cover his face; a pair of gloves to mask his prints; boots that were two sizes too big, with weights in the toes to leave footprints and weight distribution that would not match his own. Then there was the instrument of his vengeance; a crowbar. The curved head was to make the first blow to take his victim down, perhaps joined by a second, third, or fourth, to incapacitate limbs. The base of it had been sharpened, two points that would be brought down into the gut and back. Sixteen times. It had to be sixteen. Eye for an eye.

  Television had taught him well. Each of the items had been purchased from different stores over the course of the last two years. He had paid in cash. Insured that his journey there and back were completely different routes. He had never touched the crowbar with his bare hands, hadn't even so much as breathed in its direction. Ben knew how easy it was to accidentally leave the slightest glimmer of DNA, and wasn't going to let himself get caught for something so stupid.

  The clock struck ten. Still no movement at the gate. He fidgeted in his seat, watching the minutes tick away on the dash. The pressure in his head was now a steady throb. Temporal lobe pulsing away in the lower-middle of his skull, accompanied by what felt like a balloon being blown up in his frontal lobe.

  He had lived with the pressure for as long as he could remember, and was able to ignore it for the most part. The pressure, the psychosomatic swelling in his brain, his 'condition' as he called it, was a harbinger. His thought processes made physical. His unconscious mind at work, preparing, knowing that an act of violence was about to occur.

  4

  Ben's 'condition' was his father's fault. Or at least, he blamed his father for it. His earliest memories of feeling that pressure building under his skull seemed to originate from his father putting him to bed.

  It was his mother that read the Hardy Boys and Enid Blyton stories to him. His father was not a proponent of filling his head with fantasy. He had read all the studies, and they informed him that the moments before sleep were when a young mind was most susceptible to learning. And so, when it was his turn to put Ben to bed, rather than read from the pages of whatever book his wife was in the midst of reciting, he preferred to use that time to educate his son's young mind.

  It started with basic science. By the time Ben was three he could recall the periodic table from his father's out of tune rendition of Tom Lehrer's The Elements. He knew about meiosis and mitosis, gravity, the water cycle, and so on. But his father's favourite subject was his own speciality; the brain.

  Every night the first thing his father would espouse was what the two hemispheres, and then each section of the brain, was responsible for. At four, Ben could say it back verbatim.

  “The weft hemis-eer of da' bwain contwols the wight side of da' body. Da' wight hemis-eer of the bwain contwols the weft side.

  He knew the brain almost better than knew how to speak.

  “Da wight bwain is for cweativity. The weft bwain is for maff and wogic.”

  By the time he was five, he had gained more control over speech sounds, and had a better understanding of the workings of the brain than any other child his age.

  “Frontal lobe does emotions, planning, speech, movement and awareness. Parental –“

  “-- Parietal.”

  “Parietal lobe does language, senses. Ossipital –“

  “--Occipital”

  “Occipital does vision. Temporal does language and memory.”

  When he was close to turning six, when his mother died, the lessons ended abruptly. Ben moved in with his grandparents, and his father was no longer there at bed time. At first, he felt lucky if he saw him once a week. Then it was once every two weeks, then once a month.

  By the time his eighth birthday came around, he hadn't seen his father for the best part of a year. He waited in anticipation, staring at the door all day long, begging and praying for his surviving parent to walk through to celebrate with him. But he never did.

  That was the first time he remembered being acutely aware of the pressure building, the anger physically crawling under his skull, behind his forehead. The frontal lobe pulsating at the emotional reaction to being let down yet again. The rush and ripples that came with the myriad options he could take to act out. He got to his feet, not of his own volition, remembering it as if his boiling blood were leading the way. It took him on a tirade of destruction through his grandparent's house. Throwing books from shelves, smashing vases on to the floor, throwing pots and pans around with an almighty cacophony of clangs.

  The loving old couple came down the stairs, stepping through the trail of devastation he had left in his wake. They found him crying on the floor in the dining room, where he had run out of things to smash, and was now emotionally and physically exhausted from the whole experience. The pressure in his head hadn't let up. It was still pulsing along with his emotions, still pushing him to act out.

  As the years passed, he learned it wasn't just anger that triggered the pressure, it was everything; from the standard emotional arc of a day to the most benign of thoughts. Each process, whether it be physical or intellectual, resulted in a different part of his brain tingling, throbbing, or clawing under his skull.

  He found it distressing at first, and went through therapy to try and d
eal with it, becoming convinced that it was a reaction to the loss of one parent and being abandoned by another. His councillor gave him basic tools to suppress it, ignore it, and Ben would do so for the following twenty-plus years.

  But soon, he was going to let all that buried anger out. Almost three decades of pressure that had been building in his head was going to burst forth, and take a life in the process.

  5

  There was a noise beyond the prison walls that sounded to Ben like a klaxon. He jerked upright, became instantly alert, on edge, the ripples under his skull reacting to the rush of emotion that was running through his head.

  He heard the faint sound of a door opening. Saw a figure walking out. At first, he wasn't sure if it was him, the man's head was drooped down, hair scraggy and long, covering his face. It reminded Ben of the colour of bundles of wet straw, from a summer his family spent in a cottage in the countryside. The man's thick frame was slouched, shoulders hanging ahead of him, arms hanging down by his sides, fingers curled in, as if his knuckles were a weight dragging along the ground below him. A gut hung out ahead of him. Ben's memories of the man were of a thin and wiry frame, sharp cheekbones and a beak-like nose. From his view, far away and to the side, it looked as though prison had made the man slow and fat Each footstep was heavy and laboured, the tips of his toes barely leaving the ground, grinding against the tarmac beneath him. Although this man was physically different to the one who walked in through those gates all those years previous, Ben was certain it was the same person. More certain than he had ever been of anything in his life, even if he couldn't see his face properly.

  Ben brought the engine to life, and turned the car around. Pulling out of the side street, he followed the man, slow, at a distance. It wasn't time to act, not whilst still so close to the prison.