The Thing in the Alley (Anomaly Hunters, Book 3)
Page 30
30
The leucrota’s shroud wound up being a piece of merchandise called a Magician’s Curtain, an eight-foot-tall, twelve-foot-wide piece of black linen adorned with glow-in-the-dark stars and moons and ringed planets. Judging by the photos on its box, it was meant to be a prop for amateur magicians to drape over their disappearing cabinets or ladies about to be sawn in half. Calvin guessed it sold equally well as a decoration for college Goths’ dorm rooms.
Calvin draped the curtain over the dolly. Then, after snapping on latex gloves from his and Cynthia’s investigator’s kits, he, Cyn, Brandon, and Donovan hefted the leucrota’s limp, heavy corpse onto the dolly and folded the ends of the curtain over it.
They spent a while wiping down any surfaces they may have gotten fingerprints on and picking up their litter—dropped flashlights, broken weapons, the swatch of Brandon’s coat, the contents of Donovan’s pockets—then made their way back to the rear entrance, Calvin pushing the dolly, which thumped and rumbled across the concrete floor. He walked stiffly, his thighs still sore, and he kept repositioning his splinter-jabbed palms on the dolly’s metal handle to try to relieve their soreness. Cynthia was hobbling along on her damaged shoe. Donovan was limping from his thrice-injured knee. Violet alternated between massaging her bruised tit and rubbing the knot on her head she’d gotten when she tripped over Donovan. Brandon kept ruefully inspecting his damaged jacket.
“I certainly hope all our cases aren’t going to take quite this big a toll,” Lauren said, glancing about at the battered crew.
“Our cases?” Calvin said. “I take it you’re fully on board, then?”
“Yeah. I’m in. Although at this rate we’ll all be cripples before long.”
“Hopefully this was the exception rather than the rule. But even if it’s not, I don’t plan to quit.”
“Same here,” Cynthia said.
Everyone else echoed the sentiment.
“Yeah,” Lauren said with a sigh. “I guess I’d better start pricing wheelchairs.”
It took a little effort to get the dolly through the rear exit, which was barely wide enough to admit it, but after a minute of grunting and straining and repositioning, they got the dolly outside and rolled it over to the van. Brandon unlocked the van’s back doors, and the same four who had loaded the leucrota onto the dolly now hefted it into the back of the van.
While the others climbed into the van, Calvin rolled the dolly back inside the building and parked it next to the big bloodstain where the graffitists had been attacked.
He paused there a moment and shone his flashlight into the depths of the warehouse. The beam penetrated the blackness for only about forty feet, then faded out. He thought of the graffito they had found next to the leucrota’s nest.
A speck of light in the middle of endless darkness, Calvin thought, then shivered. Being alone in here—alone with two rotting corpses, and a madman’s scribbles, and the stink of blood and wild animals—was making him more and more uncomfortable with every passing second. The very atmosphere of the place felt tainted, irrevocably corrupted by what had happened here.
He started to turn to go but stopped at the sight of those looping bloodstains on the wall. He raised the light and “Wildbo” appeared, the unfinished Y dropping away in a long, descending line like a Black Tuesday earnings chart. Next to it was that creepy bit of doggerel carefully scribed with a black magic marker:
This is the house that Jack built
This is the dog that lives in the house that Jack built
“Not anymore,” Calvin muttered, then left the building, firmly shutting the door behind him.