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This message #101: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Black’s Crossing was posted by The Hooded Hood's Hallowe'en Trilogy starts here on Saturday, October 26, 2002 at 13:59.
#101: Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Black’s Crossing
Author’s Note: I was recently engaged in an internet discussion with other writers about whether it is possible to write a truly scary story, and especially whether it is possible to do so using ongoing characters whom the reader can be fairly assured will survive for another day. It occurred to me that I might test this by penning something using the Parodyverse regulars which set out to genuinely chill the reader. This three-part story is the result. I’ve given it my best shot. Judge for yourselves. Go somewhere alone. Draw the curtains. Turn down the light. Make yourself comfortable and read. But be sure you properly locked the door…
HH
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***
Off Interstate 666 out of Gothametropolis the snow was falling heavier, making driving difficult as visibility fell to forty yards and worse. Jay Boaz pushed his peaked chauffeur’s cap further back on his head and slowed to twenty-five miles per hour, the fastest he could safely move.
“Dammit,” he growled, “He’s going to get away.”
“He isn’t,” Whitney Darkness promised fervently from the passenger seat. “We’ll find him.”
“The snow will make it impossible for Finny to see him from the air and in this downfall his tracks will be covered in minutes,” Jay complained.
“But Yansen won’t be able to get far either,” Whitney assured her lover. “Believe me, this slime is not going to harm another person.”
In the back of the 4x4 Ziles sat cross-legged with an earpiece pressed to the side of her head. “It’s Andy,” she reported, listening through the static of the snowstorm. “He’s coming down to join us. Keep an eye out by the side of the highway.”
“Too cold to fly?” Whitney asked.
“Too snowy to navigate,” Ziles answered. “Fin Fang Foom is a Makluan dragon. He can survive in the absolute cold of space. But he’s coping with fierce crosswinds and swirling flurries. He’s better off with us chasing this kzthanasta on foot.”
“Your translator’s glitching again,” Jay warned the alien exile in the silver jumpsuit. “We didn’t get that last noun.”
Ziles frowned. “I don’t know the Earth word for a super-villain who uses his mutant strength and adhesive powers to rape old ladies,” she admitted.
“Dead meat,” Whitney informed her.
Jay Boaz, Hatman, gently guided the land cruiser in to the kerb to let Andrew Dean, Fin Fang Foom’s human form, climb aboard. “Where are we?” the dragon asked as he shook the snow from his collar.
“Good question,” Ziles told him. “The Global Positioning System’s down in the storm somehow, but our best guess is about sixty-fives miles out from Gothametropolis, near the state line. We branched off from the Interstate about ten miles back, and according to the maps we’re headed towards…” - here she consulted her chart – “Black’s Crossing.”
“If we can find somewhere sheltered where I can draw a proper conjuring circle I can try another location spell,” Whitney Darkness offered. The Sorceress still had the scrapings of blood from under the fingernails of Gluegun’s last victim, and the spirits of the dead were keen to lead their avengers to the murderer.
“We’re not going to get anywhere driving blind,” Finny judged. He glanced at the dashboard clock. “And it’s getting pretty late. Let’s find somewhere to stop.”
“There’s a motel marked on the map,” Ziles suggested. “It should only be a mile or two.”
The car travelled on in the eerie darkness, the only contrast to the white of the storm being the grey ribbon of road which was gradually vanishing under the whipping flakes. The journey was hypnotic, the snow spiralling past the vehicle and muffling even the sound of the engine.
“If Gluegun’s out in the open in this I pity him,” Jay commented.
“I don’t,” answered Whitney.
“There!” called Ziles. “The motel.”
***
It was just a collection of wooden chalets around a hardstand parking lot. A flickering neon sign announced MOTE. There were eight shabby chalets that looked like they were last painted in the ‘50s. Away from the road the forest was already painted white.
“Somehow I don’t think we’re going to have any problem getting rooms,” Jay surmised, looking at the empty lot. He pulled the 4x4 as near to the porch of the one lit chalet as possible and led the dash into the manager’s cabin.
A grizzled grey-haired man looked up from his black and white TV. “Yeah?”
“We’d like some rooms, please,” Jay told him with Canadian politeness.
“Have you booked ahead?”
“No. We just need three rooms. A double and two singles.”
“We’re fully booked. Sorry.”
Jay looked puzzled. “There’s nobody here. There are no cars.”
“Maybe he wants a bribe?” Whitney whispered, but Jay wasn’t going to go for that.
The old man leaned on the formica counter. “Look, it’s out of season. Four of the cabins are shut down right now by those damned health inspectors. One’s full of all kinds of crap that the boss stores here in winter. One’s out of order. One’s mine. So we only got one right now. And that ‘un’s reserved for a telephone booking. Okay?”
“It’s fine by me,” Ziles admitted. She wasn’t looking forward to staying there anyway. There was something in the musty air or the faded cheap decor that gave her the shudders.
“Your reservations aren’t likely to show up now, are they?” Andy Dean suggested. “Let us have their chalet, and if they turn up we’ll clear out. And what’s wrong with the out-of-order hut? If it’s just a blocked shower or something we can probably rough it.”
The manager seemed to consider this. “Well, it’s just that we haven’t cleaned up since the last occupant is all. If you don’t mind the mess I guess you can have cabin 5. But a reservation’s a reservation. I’m holding cabin 2 for Mr Dean and his party.”
Jay looked up sharply. “What? Who?”
The old man consulted his notepad. “A Mr Andrew Dean with a party of four,” he read. “When you folks arrived I thought you must be them.”
“We are them,” Andy admitted, puzzled. He produced his drivers’ license. “But I have no idea who called you, since we didn’t know we were coming here till we got here.”
“Took the call two hours ago,” the Manager told them. “A woman’s voice, kind of faint. Maybe an old woman.”
Ziles really didn’t want to stop there.
***
Cabin 5 was a wooden rectangle, lit by a single unshaded bulb in the centre of the ceiling and a pink bedside lamp. The air conditioning rattled into life and reluctantly began to pump lukewarm air into the frosty interior. Finny and Ziles hurried inside from the cold and started to go through the usual nervous negotiations about who got the couch until they noticed the state of the room.
“What the hell?” Andy growled. “That guy said it wasn’t cleaned up, but…”
The room was perfectly neat and tidy, with cheap worn furniture and a faded carpet. But the walls were covered with graffiti, scrawled over in marker pen. The same words were written from skirting to as high as a man could reach: “GREYGREYGREYGREYGREYGREYGREYGREYGREY”
“Somebody didn’t get back their deposit,” noted Ziles.
“What could possess anyone to do something like this?” wondered Andy. He peered into the bathroom. “It’s scrawled across the tiles in here too. And on the doors.”
“And the windows,” puzzled Ziles. “Oh!”
Andrew Dean turned round suddenly as he heard his companion’s gasp.
Ziles backed away from the window. “Sorry. I thought I saw something out there for a moment. Just an illusion of the snow. Sorry.”
Finny peered into the darkness and the snow. “Not Gluegun?” he checked. “Maybe I should just slip into something more comfortable and take a look.”
“No,” the Xnylonian told him quickly. “Stay here. It was nothing. Nothing. This place is just making me jumpy, that’s all.” She pulled down the blind to shut out the night, feeling exposed in a lit cabin. “My empathic sensitivity is picking up lots of old feelings here. Regret, and betrayal, and cheap passion, and despair. I guess this isn’t a place people come to live life to the full.”
Andy nodded. “We’ll be out of here first thing in the morning, as soon as Whitney’s completed her location ritual. In the meantime try and get some rest. Take the bed. I’ll be fine on the couch.”
Ziles curled miserably under the slightly damp duvet and stared at the pink-lit walls scribbled with GREY and tried to go to sleep.
***
In deference to the worn carpet the Sorceress didn’t use chalk and oil to create her circle of power. She invested a little more energy and traced the lines in glowing light an inch above the floor, chanting words drilled into her by her grandmother over long years of tuition as a witch. She shivered a little as she slipped out of her clothing, but some of the divination rituals worked best skyclad, with nothing physically or psychically between querent and otherworld.
“Don’t worry Jay,” she grinned impishly at her lover’s worried expression. Hatman didn’t really like her using magics of this kind that left her vulnerable to the spirits. “I’ve done this before. And afterwards you can warm me up, hmm?”
She pressed herself languorously up against Jay’s body and offered him a long deep kiss as down payment of things to come later. As he always did Jay tensed up for a moment then relaxed and went with the flow, melting into the embrace. His hands came down to clasp Whitney’s waist, then lower.
And suddenly the Sorceress knew, somehow knew, that whoever she was kissing was not Jay Boaz.
“What?” she gasped, trying to pull away. His tongue tasted strange and bitter in her mouth.
“Everyone gets a little bored sometimes,” Jay said to her, but his voice was the voice of a stranger, dry and old.
Whitney pushed herself backwards, sprawling over the delicate tracery of light-lines, tangling the sorceries so that they winked out to nothingness. She didn’t care. She scrabbled away from the stranger before her.
“Uh…” Jay said, shaking his head as if to get rid of an irritating buzz. He noticed that Whitney was on the floor. “Whit? Are you okay?”
The Sorceress scrabbled into her robe and clutched it tight about her throat. “Not really,” she admitted, “No.”
***
The whispering woke Andrew Dean. Somebody was speaking in his ear, in old guttural tones, telling him things he needed to know, things he had to understand before it was too late to save everyone; but he couldn’t quite hear them.
“Speak up,” he answered, and realised that he was speaking in the dead tongue of the Makluans. So were the voices.
“You are dead,” he told the company of ghosts. “Long dead. Even the mind that once occupied this last dragon form is dead, and the flesh has been bequeathed to me.”
The long gone Makluans watched Fin Fang Foom with glowing eyes and told him it was time to join them.
Andy woke in a cold sweat and sat up suddenly
The room was bitterly chilly. Andy shifted to half-dragon form to better endure the cold and his improved night-senses caught a momentary movement over by Ziles’ bed; but it was nothing.
Then Andy realised why the cabin was so cold. The window was open.
***
In the morning they checked out of the motel and drove down into Black’s Crossing. The snow had stopped although there was the promise of more to come. For now the fall had turned to slush and in the town it had already acquired that grimy dirty look that makes everything seem squalid.
Black’s Crossing was not a cheery place. The town was dominated by the brutal outline of the plastics factory, a massive building that cast a shadow both figuratively and literally over the settlement. Eighty percent of the jobs in Black’s Crossing were at the plant. Management had built most of the row upon row of cheap identical houses that the staff lived in. For sixty years the people of this place had worked and died in service to the factory.
Jay bought everyone breakfast in a diner on the main street. The fare was cheap and tasteless but even the bright desperate cheerfulness of the café was a relief after the seedy gloom of the motel. Police Chief Gadler joined them for coffee and reported on the search for Gluegun.
“Phoned around and had a couple of cars drive up and down the toll road as far as the ploughs got,” the fat officer told Andy Dean. “Only thing worth following up was a report of a disturbance with the dogs out at the Brunner farm. Ezra says they were kicking up a stink about 2.30 this morning, but he couldn’t see anything for that blasted snow. You want me to have a couple of my boys run out there and take a look?”
“No. we’ll handle that,” Andy told him. “Can you mark the map for us so we can get there? If your people do see the man we’re hunting tell them to keep clear and report. He’s metahuman and dangerous.” He pointed to the warning words beneath the mug shot photograph of Paulo “Gluegun” Yansen which reinforced the message.
“Gotcha. We’re happy to leave it to you. We don’t have a lot of violent crimes here. Just a few drunks on payday and some domestic violence that we never get told about anyway. And the odd suicide.”
“Suicide?” asked Ziles, looking up sharply. “You… didn’t happen to have one up at the motel, did you?”
Chief Gadler stared at her oddly. “Well, yeah. About two weeks back Frank Curry drove out there for some reason, hired a room, and hung himself in the shower. Never did quite figure out what set him off, though he’d been pretty quiet since his wife died about three years back.”
“He didn’t write all over the walls before he killed himself by any chance?” Andy checked.
“Yep. But it didn’t make any sense. Look, I gotta go and see that the boys know what they’re doing out there. You keep me informed about this bad guy, you hear?”
“That explains the bad vibes you were getting, I suppose, Ziles” Finny commented as the policeman retreated. “And maybe that’s why Whitney couldn’t get her locator spell to work.”
“Yes, maybe,” Whitney agreed shortly. “Look, you said you needed to check in with the Lair mansion, right? How about Ziles and I take the car up to this Brunner place and look around, and after you’ve said hi to the gang you and Hat can do an aerial search while the weather holds?”
“Makes sense to me,” Andy agreed. “Anything to get out of this gloomy, depressing town.”
“Grey,” Jay told him. “It’s grey.”
***
It took Whitney and Ziles over half an hour to coax the land cruiser along the snow-choked path to the Brunner farm. Whitney was at the wheel and was surprised to find that her companion was dozing when the pulled up to the homestead.
“Sorry,” Ziles said, waking abruptly. “Didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Me neither,” admitted the Sorceress. For the first time since she knew him she had felt uncomfortable lying beside Jay Boaz.
In nervous silence they trudged from the car and introduced themselves to the Brunners.
“What now?” Ezra Brunner asked as he came to the porch screen. “Did you ladies forget something?”
“Mr Brunner?” Sorceress checked. “I believe Chief Gadler told you to expect us?”
“Yep,” the farmer agreed. “But I already told you everything I know.”
“We’d like to hear it first hand though,” Ziles explained. “And maybe take a look out where the dogs were.”
“Again?” Brunner scowled. “I got work to do, you know.”
Whitney scowled too. “What do you mean, again?” she asked.
“I mean you already trudged me all over the damned farmstead,” Ezra Brunner complained.
“Who did?” Ziles demanded, starting to feel nervous again.
“Why you two,” the farmer replied. “And those two men with you, the thin one and the tall one with the baseball cap. When you came here a couple hours ago.”
***
From above, the plastics factory looked like a toad sitting gloating over some squashed animal corpse. Thick noxious fumes spewed from the chimneys and made the higher air foul to breathe.
Hatman was wearing his Jets hat to grant him the power of flight. Foom had taken on his draconic shape and dragged himself through the air on mighty wings. Both of them instinctively turned away from the grim shadow of the factory and the dull sprawl of Black’s Crossing, flying south and east over the distance to the Brunner place.
It was Finny who spotted the black shape on the melting snow.
Hatman and Foom landed beside it, Finny reverting to his draconic humanoid shape and size for ease of movement. There, sprawled on his belly across the middle of a field, was the body of Paulo Yansen. He was undoubtedly dead.
“Frozen solid,” Foom noted, leaning over the corpse. “He must have got lost in the storm.”
“Could be,” agreed Jay, squatting to examine the body more carefully. “But that doesn’t really explain why his heart’s been ripped out from his chest, does it? Or where his face has gone.”
***
Nats pointed his telekinesis-enhancing walking stick and burst the door into a thousand fragments. A split second later Goldeneyed teleported into the other side of the apartment with precision timing. Then CrazySugarFreakBoy! smashed through the window, bouncing off the far wall before rolling to a standing stop looking round for trouble.
Nobody else was in Fin Fang Foom’s apartment.
“Check the bathroom,” G-Eyed told Nats, striding towards the bedroom himself. The intruder alarm had been triggered from the lounge movement sensor, but none of the perimeter systems had given warning. Still, it was important to check out any such alert.
CSFB! eyed the wreckage of Finny’s door. “Do you think he’ll be pissed that we busted his flat up?” he asked ruefully.
“It’s standard procedure to come in as if we had a hostile intruder,” G-Eyed answered. “Fin’ll understand. We can fix the door. Anything, Nats?”
Bill Reed walked out of the bathroom carrying some sheer silk underwear. “Do you think these are his?” he worried.
“Nah. They’ll be Ziles’,” CSFB! opined. “You know she moved in here, right?”
“She did?” Nats was always the last to hear this kind of stuff. “With Finny?”
“Uh, I don’t think Finny knows yet,” Goldeneyed explained. “He doesn’t get out here much. He pretty much lives in the mansion. We try not to spoil his day.”
“But it does mean the intruder system here is pretty advanced,” Dreamcatcher Foxglove noted. “Ziles takes her security precautions seriously.”
“There’s no sign of an intruder,” Nats noted. Perhaps it has been a sensor malfunction.
“Except for this,” G-Eyed answered, pointing to Finny’s bed. A sheer white camisole had been carefully laid across the mattress, then slashed to ribbons by five sharp strokes.
***
When Andrew Dean got back from arranging other accommodation for a second night at Black’s Crossing he found Jay Boaz just pulling off his green plastic surgeons cap and finishing up the autopsy in the police morgue. “Well?” Andy asked.
“He froze to death,” Ziles answered. “We don’t know why he decided to sit down in the very middle of an open field but that’s what happened. It’s unlikely that the body was moved after termination of life.”
“The heart and face were removed after death, when the skin and soft tissue had already frozen,” Jay added gruesomely. “It wasn’t surgical. Somebody with phenomenal strength simply reached in, through ice-hard flesh, shattering the rib cage as they went, and snatched it out. The front of the skull was shattered when the face was ripped away. I’ve got some strange cellular samples that I need to analyse in the lab here that might give us DNA on the perpetrator.”
“It couldn’t have happened to a better person, though,” Ziles frowned. “It’s not as if he wasn’t dead already when his heart was… taken. If this man had been shot by Messenger or something would we even be bothering to investigate?”
“Yes,” answered Andrew Dean forcefully. “He was a criminal. We would have found him, brought him to trial, presented evidence and had him convicted for his crimes. He would probably have got the death penalty. But that’s the right way to do it. This isn’t justice. This is just plain weird. We have to get to the bottom of this.”
“And of the lookalikes that Farmer Brunner saw of us,” Jay added. “Between that and the pre-booking at the motel last night I’m feeling a little spooked.”
Ziles was more than a little spooked. Her every sense was screaming to her to get away, to leave Black’s Crossing and never come back. She suddenly wondered what the Crossing was, and where it crossed over to. “Haven’t you people got the feel of this town yet?” she demanded. “Look at the folks in the streets, shuffling around like walking dead men. They get up and work long hours at that factory place and come home to cheerless lives with cloying families, and tomorrow is the same as today and as always. It’s a hopeless place.”
“It’s a small town in a hard recession,” Jay admitted. “There’s lots of places like this.”
Ziles shuddered. “I hope not. Surely you’ve noticed it, Andy?”
Foom stopped trying to hear the faint whispers in the back of his mind and gave his attention to the conversation. “Oh, yes. Well, I don’t think it’s a friendly place. I booked us rooms at Mrs McGrath’s lodging house on Close Street. It was the best I could find.
“Anywhere’s better than the suicide motel,” Whitney Darkness told him, striding in from her fact-finding tour at the local records office. “Really. Did you know that there have been sixty-three suicides there over the last forty-eight years? And that over half of them were in chalet 5?”
“Eew,” shuddered Ziles, remembering the despair and horror she’d felt last night. Her mind felt tired and dirty.
“Um, I had to book four single rooms at Mrs McGrath’s,” Andy went on. “She’s particular about couples being, well, married,” he told Whitney and Jay.
Jay cast a troubled glance over at his lover, but she seemed more than happy with the arrangement. “That’s okay,” she conceded. “We can manage without each other for a night. Really.”
“Why are we staying at all?” Ziles asked. “What will we accomplish? The snow covered any tracks around Gluegun’s body, we have a better forensics lab back at the Mansion, and as near as we can tell everybody in town was too depressed to have seen anything.”
“Because a heart-ripping creature is out there somewhere and I want to know what it is and why it did what it did,” Andy answered. “I’ll call Bry and let him know we’ll be delayed.”
***
“Lair Mansion. It’s Goldeneyed. Where have you been, Finny? We’ve been trying to contact you for hours. I was just about ready to scramble a rescue mission.”
“Bry, we’re in a place called Black’s Crossing up near the Gothametropolis state line. Gluegun’s dead, but somebody tore his heart out afterwards and ripped up his face. I want to find out why. We’ll be staying on a couple of days.”
“Finny, I wanted to warn you that there was an intruder alert at your place. There was, um, well we think it was one of Ziles’s undergarments on your bed, ripped to shreds by a knife or claws or something. Did a real number on your mattress I’m afraid.”
“Fine. I’m sure you can handle it. I’ll check in again tomorrow but I’m getting a lot of static on the line. For some reason this place is a communications dead spot.”
“Well if you’re sure that’s what you want to do. I’ll wait to hear from you, Fin.”
“Foom out.”
“Bye.”
Jay looked over as Andy finished the com-call. “Everything okay back at the store?” he checked.
“Sounds fine,” the dragon admitted. “G-Eyed said it was all quiet. Nothing to worry about at all.”
And back at the Lair Mansion Bry Kotyk gave Dancer a puzzled frown. “That’s weird. I expected old Foom to fly right back here and check on his place, or at least to comment about Ziles’ flimsies on his bed. But he just said he and the team were taking a couple of days R and R and to take them off the duty roster for a while.”
“It’s nice that he’s got confidence in us,” Dancer suggested brightly.
On the fogged-up French window behind her there was nothing to be seen as the imprints of five fingers smeared a line down the pane of glass all the way to the floor.
***
Old hands unscrewed the glass jar and lifted the shrivelled heart out to admire it. “Perfect,” the dry voice that had spoken through Jay before said. “Black to the core, this one. A perfect addition to my collection.”
An old, dry tongue licked the pulpy organ just once, savouring its flavour. Then the hands carefully replaced the heart in its container and placed it back on the shelf.
There were lots of other bottles beside it, some of them dating back to when glass-blowing was a new art. Each one had something withered and fist-sized within.
Four of them were empty, waiting for new occupants.
***
Next Issue: Night falls at the Lair Mansion, Finny and Co have dinner at the Black Estate, and the evil at Black’s Crossing becomes manifest. More shivers and shocks in Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Black Hearts in two days time.
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