Near Alfred's Pond (The Sentinel - gen, 1230 words)
For the Spook Me Multi-Fandom Halloween Ficathon 2014, a very small piece of urban folklore... the prompt being (surprise!) 'boogeyman'
Near Alfred's Pond
We have a boogieman somewhere near Alfred's Pond.
The stories, Cascade's own newest urban legends, were about a dead serial killer who snatched people and tried to become them, and an undead ghost - Mister NoName, Mister WhoAmI - who couldn't stop doing it. Jim heard it soon enough, and he was fairly sure Blair knew about it earlier, probably from talk swirling around the University, kids passing the scary stories around like some kind of teenage coinage.
If Blair knew, he didn't speak of them because that would have given them - and the memory of what had happened in the old warehouse near Alfred's Pond - power over him. And Jim knew his friend and partner, the serial killer's last and only living victim, too well to pretend that that power wasn't there, lurking in the shadows.
In the broken stairs and shattered, crumbling walls.
In the remnants of candle wax imperfectly scraped from the shelves, and the threads of yellow silk only a Sentinel could have seen between the floorboards. In the dust and the droplets, soaked long ago into old wood, of drugs used, and urine released in terror.
In the flash of recall that happened somewhere between sleeping and waking, of chains and a dentist's chair and the sound of a light, detached, gentle voice talking about friends.
Jim heard the stories and went cold inside, and waited for Blair to speak first.
We have a boogieman lurking near Alfred's Pond.
The stories were just that, stories. A friend of a friend knew a friend who had been crossing the deserted dockyards and took a shortcut, that sort of thing. Someone on a bus was heard talking about someone they knew, there one day, gone the next, heard to maybe mention Alfred's Pond... or not. Schoolchildren daring each other to up the creep factor in late night talking. They didn't matter much.
It was different when Homicide took a hand: two of their detectives, with two, maybe three real people missing and presumed dead on their books, came to talk to him first. There was a tip that the kids had been looking for a cheap thrill, had been planning to spend the night in the warehouse and find proof that Mister WhoAmI was real, dead or alive.
"No one even knows if they went to the right warehouse," Detective Dolan growled. "The talk going round, it sounds more like garbage pulled from slasher movies, the talkers don't know or care about what really happened. They just like scaring and being scared."
"So what the hell do you want to talk to Sandburg for? The whole sick story's in the paperwork." He and Simon had made sure of that, making sure that every t was crossed and every i was dotted and Blair was shielded every step of the way.
"You know why, Ellison."
Yeah, he did. The stories were nasty and increasingly graphic, and described Mister WhoAmI with ever-increasing detail and an almost gleeful enthusiasm that made him sick. Small slender body, blue jeans, brown corduroy jacket, long dark curls. The shine of glasses instead of eyes. Yellow scarf - or gag - around his mouth. Serial killer in the guise of his victim.
Or - to pragmatic cops like Dolan - copycat killer playing dressup as serial killer in the guise of his victim.
Or - and Jim was far too cynical to think that someone wouldn't think of it, murmur it, start a new story of it - victim acting out as serial killer, in the guise of himself. Someone was going to look at Blair himself and make up a sick story of him as Mister WhoAmI.
Jim didn't intend to let it happen.
Blair took it well. The interview was - at Jim's insistence, backed up by his Captain and all of Major Crimes - was done in their office and the questions were careful, achingly careful, with not a breath of accusation, just the details and nothing but the details. Blair answered them slowly, carefully, and only his white-knuckled grip on the chair indicated that he was fighting the memories of the worst waking nightmare of his life. He insisted on staying afterwards, finding some sort of blind solace in mindless paperwork, but there was a darkness in his eyes that Jim remembered too well.
They didn't speak of it, not then, not driving home, not during a half-eaten dinner and a few hours watching some crappy crime show on TV. Before they turned in, however, Blair turned those darkened eyes to him, just once, and said all he was going to on the subject.
"It's not your fault, man. And you can kill the bad guys - like him - all your life, but you can't kill talk."
"Not like this," Jim grated through an aching throat.
"Always like this, Jim." His smile was a little too fixed, but not as fake as Jim knew his would be if he tried to smile. "Some other poor schmuck will be next, and it'll be forgotten again. The real madman, whoever he wanted to be, he'll be an old forgotten news clip again." The smile twisted. "Who am I, for real this time, because no one remembers."
"The fucking stories though -"
"Maybe I'll do the thesis on them, man." Blair said with a tiny, genuine choke of laughter. "Hey, someone is gonna, sooner or later. If there's going to be power in the words, maybe it should be my words that have it... but not yet." He was silent for a minute. "I'm not brave enough yet."
They found the kids three days later, it turned into a case of simple runaways, on a bus half-way to Reno, and Blair never told him if the rumors that had brought Homicide into their bullpen made it to the University, worked their way around his classes and office and campus. If they did, the bus story probably settled them, for now.
Blair didn't say any more about the stories.
Jim wasn't fool enough to think they were gone forever.
Jim went out to the warehouse three days later, alone, in the icy morning sunshine. He skirted the broken step, climbed down into the serial killer's hiding place and looked around, seeing with Sentinel vision the scraps of candle grease and fabric, the scraped floor where the dentist chair and chains had been, staring down with grim protector's satisfaction the gaping hole in the floor where the man had fallen, five bullets in the chest ensuring he never got up.
He could hear the cold wind whistle, almost inaudibly even to him, through the shattered, filthy windows; it which sounded like the panting breath of a panicking predator turned prey. He could see his own faint reflection in the pooling water, and something that might have been mistaken for flickering candles but was more likely just a trick of the light. But the face staring from a broken shard of glass, that Jim knew no one else would ever see - the frozen frightened now powerless face surrounded by a black curly wig - well, maybe that was just memory.
We have a boogieman trapped near Alfred's Pond.
Jim stared down into the glass, and the boogieman's face... and he said nothing.
-the end-