Ficathon Fic: Boys' Club, 2/2, Red Cortina, by Sytaxia
The station was in uproar, and so was Gene. A young couple had walked in, the woman sobbing and wailing, the man looking horribly haunted, as if someone was dancing a jig on his grave. Their son, William Tapping, tops in cricket and footie amongst his class, and age eight, hadn’t come home from school that day. Pictures of the missing boy were taped to CID’s large chalkboard, along with hastily scribbled notes about his hobbies, his life, his home and his school.
“We’re going to find that boy, for the parents, and we’re going to nab this evil bastard before he does this again!” Gene shouted, and every member of CID flinched. Ray and Chris looked almost as haunted as the young father had, both of them stealing worried glances at the picture of the boy.
“Guv! I think I’ve got something!” Annie shouted it out as she poured over the papers that she’d collected, alongside Sam, with all of the notes they’d scribbled down from their meetings with the parents, the boy’s teachers, and even a few of his schoolmates, who’d stared, wide-eyed, at the station as their parents had led them in to be questioned.
“Cartwright?” Gene was on tenterhooks, looking as if he were wound tight enough to burst.
“One of the other boys said that they’d often gone to get comics at a local newsstand - I’m going to go and question the man that runs it,” Annie said, and Gene’s face fell. He’d obviously been expecting more.
“Get on it then, Flash Knickers,” he mumbled, and Annie nodded, grabbing her coat and handbag as she hastily made her way towards the door.
“Annie!” Sam called out, pulling on his leather jacket, “Let me come with you,” he said, and the two of them exited the doors to CID together.
“I can do this, Sam. I can do it on my own, just as good as any of you lot could,” she said, the confrontational tones seeping back into her voice. “You wouldn’t want to come along with any of the others, would you? Just because I’ve not got tackle, doesn’t mean I can’t tackle this,” she said, a hard set to her jaw.
“I, err, I mean,” Sam stammered, and Annie looked quickly around the hall before grasping him about the waist and drawing him towards her, pulling their bodies together and locking her mouth onto his. Sam drank in the taste of her, the smell of her, like flowers and sunshine and pure, sweet innocence, and he pulled back, smiling. “What about tonight,” he said softly, lifting a hand to touch the oddly starched, but somehow still soft curls of her hair.
“I’ll meet you back at your place. You go and have a drink with the lads, and try to calm him down, before he has a heart attack or something,” she said, gesturing towards Gene, and Sam nodded.
“My place. Tonight,” he said, the huge grin playing on his face. “You, me, a bottle of wine, and our adorable little friends for company,” he said.
“Your place. Stop and pick up some Chinese, so that you don’t have to spend time cooking, and I don’t have to spend time trying to remember what that ‘says one’ chicken thing you like is called.” She held a finger against his lips, and he closed his eyes, enjoying the soft, silky touch of her fingertip against his lips. He parted them slightly, the tip of his tongue dancing across the edge of her finger, and she pulled her hand back and leaned forward to kiss him again. “And maybe I’ll have some information for you on the case, Inspector,” she said, and he smiled.
Sam watched as Annie pulled on her coat and entered the lift, delighting in the sight of her luscious curves, the sway of her hips as she walked, the proud, high way that she held her head, and he found that the grin was still stuck to his face. Suddenly, the night couldn’t come fast enough.
***
They’d changed whatever it was that they kept needling into his arm, he thought, as the light above swirled and danced. It was so beautiful, the way that it curved and bounced, like the way that a girl he’d once fallen in love with had moved. Like some golden-era Hollywood starlet, it bounded about the room, shimmering on the white walls and floor, and he gave it a serene smile as it washed over him.
The door opened, and Jimmy Saunders walked in, his blood spattered shirt and the gashes in his flesh glaring redly against the white of the room. “Having a good day, mate?” he asked.
“Fantastic. And now you’re here! It’s great to have visitors,” he wondered when his voice had taken on such a sing-song quality, and then decided that he liked it, and that he was going to talk like that for the rest of the day. “I mean, real visitors. Not like the others. And not like the devils,” he smiled at Jimmy.
“Devils, mate?” Jimmy turned a quizzical eye to him, and a spatter of blood fell from his slashed shoulder and stained the white sheets. It spread out in the fibers of the fabric, the red running in odd, criss-cross patterns, making the grain of the sheets stand out.
“They have needles instead of pitchforks, and clipboards instead of tails, and pills in little paper cups, instead of horns. I don’t think they like me. They won’t let me out of the room. There was someone screaming last night, and they came and tied me to the bed,” he motioned with his chin towards the thick, padded leather straps that secured his wrists and ankles to the metal rails of the bed. “And now I can’t get up. See what happened?” He nodded with his chin again, and Jimmy took in the yellow, wet patch staining the sheets between his friend’s legs.
“That’s too bad, mate. Just plain bad luck, that is,” he said, and he leaned against the bed, giving a sympathetic shrug.
“I know! And no one’s even come in to clean it up. Nothing I can do about it, is there? You want to know something funny?”
“What’s that, mate?”
“I used to think that they were doctors, and nurses. And my mum! And they were trying to help me. But I know better now. And now you’re here, and you’re real! I think you should petition them to let you on staff. I can help you with the paperwork. I’m good with paperwork.” He gave a very serious nod to Jimmy as he said this, and Jimmy looked thoughtful for a moment.
“Don’t really fancy working for devils, mate,” he said, and he shook his head at the thought . “Besides, they don’t like ghosts on the staff. I think it’s discrimination, really. Sad, that.” Jimmy shook his head, and more blood fell on the sheets.
“That’s so right. It’s all over the place! And I think you’d do such a good job,” the world was spinning even faster now, the light wavering and sparkling around him. Jimmy’s blood looked like a great, glaring Rorschach against the sheet. He nodded his chin towards it, trying to make Jimmy understand.
“So, what do you see, mate? Not the time you spilled a very bad attempt at homemade palak paneer right where my head’s supposed to be, I hope?” Jimmy gave him a playful grin, and he rolled his eyes in response.
“Noooooo,” he drew it out, his voice still vaguely sing-song, and then he giggled. “You looked funny with it all over your face!” His face fell, suddenly grave, “I’m sorry.”
“Nah, mate, just you being clumsy. Come on, what do you see?” Jimmy waved the apology away with his hand, and then pointed at the bloodstains on the sheet.
“I see eyes. And they’re wide, and beautiful, and innocent, and I think I’m in love with them,” he said, his voice growing distant. “I was. I was in love. I really was. And everything, everything was starting to make sense, and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t real. Because it all made sense. And she was so beautiful, and so strong, and so, so…”
“Innocent?” Jimmy suggested.
“Yes. Yes. Yeeeeesssss,” he wailed the last word, a hideous, high pitched straining sound, and then started bawling explosively, struggling against the leather bands. Jimmy faded away, then, to give him some privacy, and he sobbed and screeched and pulled, hard, with his arms and legs, drawing his body up and smacking it down against the bed, the rails rattling as he did so.
By the time the demon brigade returned, everything in his room was quiet. And none of them listened to his complaints that the daft bastard down the hall was screaming again. The smell of rot pervaded, running like a punctured egg yolk through the room, an invisible scent staining the air. It was comforting.
***
“Annie! Annie?” Sam walked into the door to his dingy little flat, having found the door latched, but unlocked, and assuming that she’d used her key to enter the apartment. He saw Annie’s clothing, haphazardly thrown about in the corner, and he smiled. So, she was hiding, and she was hiding naked; brilliant. Why was it that it was always the women that came up with the most tantalizing surprises like that? The sound of water running signaled that she was in the bathroom, waiting for him. He envisioned her, waiting for him, naked in a steaming bath, and he hoped that his bathtub would be large enough for the two of them. He stepped forward, and then sidestepped quickly, careful not to step on the plate, another meal of milk nearly completely finished by his kittens. He didn’t want to admit it, but part of him wanted to keep all of them.
He looked over at his tiny table, and noticed that there were two place settings laid out, an uncorked bottle of wine, and two glasses. One of the glasses had been drunk halfway down, a very light, pinkish tinge on the rim, and Sam sniffed at it, smelling the taste of Annie’s cosmetics above the bouquet of the wine, and he set the glass back down. He started to empty the contents of the bag that he was holding onto the tiny kitchen counter, moving over towards the table and dishing out portions onto both of the plates, and then stuffing the half-emptied containers into the fridge. He heard a soft singing from the bathroom, and he called out, “Are you waiting for me?”
The door to the bathroom opened a crack, and Annie stepped out, a very sly grin on her face. He stared at her, naked and beautiful, her curves white and creamy in the dim light. She gestured towards the table, “I want you to drink that, and then I want to show you something. It’s a surprise,” there was something very odd about her voice, but Sam dismissed it, wondering if she was trying too hard to put up an act.
“Annie, you know you don’t have to play act for me; I like you just as you are. I, I think I love you just as you are,” he swallowed hard after he said it, not sure of what to do now - they’d made love once, well, several times, but only in one session, and he was babbling on as if he was an infatuated teenager.
“I’m not acting, Sam. Not now. Now drink that up,” she gestured towards the wine, and Sam took it and sipped it. “Come on, I’ve already had a glass, you’ve got to catch up.”
Sam gave her a wide grin, taking off his jacket and throwing it to the floor, and then started to unbutton his shirt, the top of his vest showing through. He picked up the glass and drank deeply, feeling the alcohol warm his throat, and rush along into his blood stream. He blushed, not from the alcohol, and then drank again, willing the glass to empty itself so that he could go to her, join her for whatever mad ‘70’s free love’ game she was obviously about to spring on him.
Sam downed the last of the glass, feeling slightly silly, chugging away at it like a partying student, and then noticed something odd. The sleeve of Annie’s blouse, where it lay on the floor, was torn. “What happened to your shirt?” Sam asked, gesturing toward it, and Annie gave him a very odd grin, her mouth crooking up at one corner.
“You tore it, Sam,” she said, and Sam gave her a puzzled look.
“You mean, in the station today? Were we really being that rough?” He stepped again, bumping into the chair, and realized that the floor was wet, and slippery. He reached down and touched it, and found that it was dry; he drew his fingers along it, and noticed that he could see mild patterns of light fading behind his fingers, as if he’d just touched a Polaroid photograph, or a flat-panel monitor.
“No, Sam, that’s not what I mean,” Annie said, and Sam suddenly disliked her new smile. It didn’t suit her at all, and the way that her eyes danced when she did it… A shiver ran down his spine. There was definitely something off…
“Annie…” Sam took a step towards her, and then stared at the floor again - was it moving? There had to be something wet on the floor, he was sure of it. He leaned down to examine it, and then Annie moved towards the bed, and the phone that sat on the top of its odd cubby hole. She picked up the handset, and then dialed, very quickly, so that Sam couldn’t see the number that she was dialing. “Who are you ringing? Annie?” Sam was incredibly confused, and as he looked up, he saw her, standing there, on the opposite side of the bed from Annie.
The test card girl hugged her clown to herself, and then smiled at Sam, “I think the rabbit hole’s too deep for you. You should have listened to me, Sam. I was only trying to help,” she said, and Sam shook his head and rubbed at his eyes, willing her to disappear. He was not going to spoil the moment by having some bizarre, crazed vision right in front of Annie, not when they’d finally connected. He realized that he’d missed out on Annie’s entire conversation as he’d stared at the girl, and he looked at her, suddenly confused. Was she out of breath?
“Annie?” Sam asked, and Annie grinned at him, that same, lopsided leer that she’d given him before, the corners of her eyes crinkling, her chin lowered and her eyes glinting in the pale light.
“He went back to the station. He was there. And now he’s coming here,” Annie said, still leering at Sam.
“You - you what?” Sam was speechless. Had Annie actually invited Gene to his flat, for, for what? What had she said? He tried to remember anything that he could have heard, but all he’d seen, all he’d heard, was the girl, with her crazy manic smile, and that clown… He looked back up at Annie, and realized that her smile was the same manic, contorted leer that twisted the girl’s face. Annie and the girl advanced towards him, and Sam suddenly realized something else that was wrong.
“Annie,” he said, swallowing hard and backing away from her as she and the girl advanced towards him, “Where are they?” There were no meowing sounds in the flat, no small, playful balls of fur crawling towards him. He backed further away, and found his back pushing open the bathroom door. He turned, slowly, and as he did so, Annie and the girl started to laugh, in unison, a tinkling, slick sound that was nothing like the laugh he’d heard Annie use in the past.
Behind Sam, the bath was full, and there were seven small, strange shapes at the bottom of the tub, tiny strands of fur floating on the surface of the water. Sam gasped, and then felt his heart begin to race. Slowly, purposefully, he reached into the water and pulled out the bodies of the drowned kittens, their tiny bones showing through the matted mass of wet fur that covered them. Sam felt tears roll down his cheeks, and his hands were trembling as he picked them up and set them on the bathroom floor. “Why? Why would you…” He turned and saw Annie and the girl standing there, both still giving him that horrible, haunting smile.
“Initiation, Sam. I’m in the boy’s club now, aren’t I? And this is what boys do; they’re cruel, and hard, and they’ll do anything to get their way. They block out all the little girls, won’t let them play with them, won’t let them join in on any sport. Just like all those little bastards,” Annie spat the word out, her eyes wide and sparkling with mad glee, “The ones that always treated the girls so badly. They got what the deserved, didn’t they? And imagine how far into the boys club I’m going to get, once I find out who the killer is, hmm? After everything you’ve showed me, teaching me to use my education, to track down all the facts, I’m going to go farther than any woman ever has. And it didn’t cost anything, did it? Just a few stupid, little pigs that were out to make life miserable for all the poor little girls, and some crazed, screaming lunatic that set off my mothering instinct and my libido a bit when I met him. Not a bad price to pay, Sam.”
“You… You…” Sam scrambled past her, running out into the main room of the bedsit, ramming into the table and knocking it over, the sound of splattering food and wine coupling with the shattering of plates and glasses resounding deafeningly in his ears. As he stared, the corpses of the kittens, still waterlogged and with their fur matted and stringy against them, started to crawl towards him. They were laughing… And the floor was melting, as were the walls, plaster and wood and wallpaper slowly shifting, swirling and dripping into one another.
“The wine,” Sam gasped, as he fell over onto his knees, the room suddenly spinning about him, and the girl, still standing next to Annie, multiplying. They were everywhere, now, dozens of them, each in their perfect little red dress, hugging their clown. The clowns’ mouths were all gaping open now, each a dark hole full of jagged teeth, and they were laughing, too.
“You’ve had psychotic episodes before, Sam. I tried to explain it to the Guv, about the incident on the roof, about what Tony Crane said, but he just wouldn’t listen to me. No one ever listens to the girl, do they?” Annie’s face twisted into a sharp, perverted look of malice, and then she smiled at him again, “They will now, Sam.”
“You killed them. All those boys. You killed…” Sam could barely hear himself over the din of laughter that was filling the flat, and he could see it, feel it pulsating in the air.
“LSD has been known to trigger psychosis in patients that have previously exhibited it, you know,” Annie said, twirling about the room in a bizarre, delighted dance, her naked body suddenly seeming to melt, moving corpse kittens and great, gaping clown mouths appearing on her flesh, which was mutating horribly in front of Sam. “I was afraid that it would happen after that honey-trap girl gave it to you, but apparently, she didn’t give you enough. You’ve had more than enough now, Sam, even more than you must’ve ingested in that Tizer bottle before you had your other episode, during the Lamb case. It should do the trick, now. Still think you’re from the future, Sam? You know, I used to feel so sorry for you, but after what you did during the Twilling case, after you almost destroyed my career, after what you did to Tony Crane - I think you really do deserve this, don’t you?”
The creature that Annie had become smiled at Sam, and he launched at her, forcing her to the ground, “Give me back Annie. I love her. Give her back to me, now! Fucking thing!” He screamed it at the top of his lungs, and then he brought a fist down into her mutating face, the soaked fur and ribs of a kitten rising up out of her cheek where he punched her. It was then that the door burst open, wood splintering on the jamb.
“Bloody hell…” Gene stared at them, horrified and aghast, not sure what he was seeing… Sam had his shirt half way unbuttoned, and Annie was stripped down to the skin, her torn and ripped clothing scattered about the flat, and Sam was punching her… Gene rushed forward and grabbed Sam off of Annie, shaking him violently as he did so. “What the fucking hell are you doing, Tyler? Cartwright, what…” Sam started to struggle in his arms, screaming.
“Kill her, Guv, just stop her! She’s everywhere, and she took Annie! She took Annie away, you have to stop her, we have to kill her, now!” Sam was shrieking hysterically, wild-eyed and crazed, and Annie had started sobbing on the ground.
“Oh, thank God you came, Guv! He was going to rape me, and then who knows what! I warned you, I told you he was sick, Guv, please, help me!” Annie’s voice and face had changed drastically since Gene entered the room, and now she was shaking and sobbing on the floor, curling in on herself to hide her body from his eyes. Sam was still flailing manically in Gene’s arms as she did so, and Gene turned a bewildered and furious face to Sam’s, and saw what he’d always refused to see before… Sam Tyler was crazy. Not just a bit soft, not just odd, not just eccentric, but horribly, dangerously, crazed. He slammed his fist into Sam’s face, and then rammed his entire forearm, hard, into Sam’s upper back, trying to hit all of the soft spots that he could think of without inflicting anything more than a bruise. After a few more unintelligible shrieks from Sam, he finally found a mark, and Sam lapsed into unconsciousness.
Gene stared around him, not knowing what to do. All of his worst nightmares were coming true… He knelt next to Annie and pulled off his coat, draping it around her, and she pulled it closely about herself and held a shaking hand out, pointing towards the bed.
The body of William Tapping was stored there, beneath the place where Sam slept.
***
The door to the white room opened again, but it wasn’t Jimmy, or Joni, or any of his other friends that came through it this time. It was one of the white women, her tail and pitchfork and horns hidden in one of her deep white pockets, and behind her walked a strange apparition. It was tall, and strong, and camel-colored, and it floated behind the demon lady towards him. He felt his breath catch in his throat.
“You’ve got a visitor, Mr. Tyler,” the demon said, her voice dripping from her tongue, and he tried to edge away from the thing that followed her, and found that he couldn’t, because he was still strapped down too tightly.
“Not real.” Sam whispered it like a prayer, slowly and deliberately under his breath, as the thing walked closer to him, the strange, hulking apparition. He looked up and saw Jimmy and Joni and several others standing at the end of the bed, all smiling at him, and he nodded towards them. “I’ve already got visitors. They’re my friends, the ghosts. They’re all real. That’s not,” terror and panic filled his voice, and he writhed and twisted atop the bed as the apparition moved closer.
“Annie says she forgives you. And me. I should have listened to her, all along,” the apparition spoke, and its voice was as haunted as its green eyes, lost somewhere far away. He wondered if it came from the place that the pervasive, underlying rot came from. He wondered if its voice and eyes were trapped there. “I should have done something. But you’re getting help now. It’s for the best.” The apparition ran a hand along its strange, sunbeam head, like golden clouds, the thin, rainless kind you see on sunny days, he thought. “It’s for the best. Ray’s me new DI, and Annie, would you believe I’ve got me the first ever WDS in the Lancashire Constabulary? Smart as a whip, and I’d never noticed. Oh, I did, but I didn’t pay it any mind. I should have done. And you. I should have done something.” The apparition was breathing heavily, its voice breaking. “And I’m going to keep visiting. I know you didn’t mean it. I still trust you. And I know this is for the best. You didn’t mean it.” The apparition loomed close to him, and he started to cry, in slow, helpless, moaning wails.
“Not real. Not real. Take it away! Not real! None of them, none of it, not the future, not the past, and there is no present! They told me,” he pointed with his chin at the ghosts, who were waving at the apparition and the demon, “They’re real. They help me. They told me. None of it. It’s not real. We’re going to Monterrey today, and I’m going to get a new phone. Not real. Not real…”
The apparition’s breath hitched slightly, and then it moved quickly from the room, something silver glinting as it was withdrawn from the strange, camel-colored mass that disappeared out of the door.
He continued to mutter it, over and over again, the one prayer that he had, muttered to his ghosts. “Not real, not real, not real, not real…”
He was still repeating it as the white demons started to shave the sides of his head.