The Killing House

by Chris Mooney

  He didn’t feel like he was going to puke. More than anything, he felt tired. He shut his eyes, thinking about the cold trapped in this darkness. Yeah, it was weird, and yes, these tingling sensations crawling all over his body were disturbing, but his brain … it was like it had gone on holiday, leaving a fog in its place. A moment later he drifted off into a restless sleep plagued with fevered dreams.

  Like any normal person, he suffered from the occasional nightmare. The ones from his youth – involving a faceless alien creature that roamed the house at night and hooked its tentacles on to him and his family and drank their blood – had been replaced by more typical, standard fare: falling from the top of a building or being trapped inside a strange house full of endless halls and ever-changing rooms. His dreams turned really odd once he’d entered his present oh-so wonderful adolescent phase, with its constant bounty of boners that occurred during class for no reason at all, and acne that spread across his face, back and shoulders like the indestructible crabgrass in his parents’ lawn. Now his nightmares became more personal, more rooted in reality. The one he was having right now involved a recurring fear: public speaking. Principal Shelly told him it was time to address the students and pulled back the curtain. Jimmy walked on to the auditorium stage, his stomach doing flip-flops, and was immediately greeted with gasps and shrieks. Now came gales of laughter. It was at that moment he realized he wasn’t wearing any trousers. Or underwear.

  Jimmy resurfaced from the dream, sensing it had been prompted by a real-life event. His mind served up a real memory: showering after last week’s hockey game. The coach, a tiny moustached man named Peter Walsh, insisted that his players take a shower after each practice or game. Why, Jimmy didn’t know, but the guy stood guard like a cop in the locker room to make sure you did. Jimmy had been standing in the school’s big prison-type shower with half a dozen other guys, his buddy Michael Hauptman standing right next to him and soaping up when Haupy nodded with his chin to Jimmy’s crotch and said, ‘Dude, what’s up with your junk?’ Jimmy felt cold all over – the same way he felt right now.

  As Jimmy’s eyes fluttered open again to the darkness, he consulted his brain for an explanation. It failed to provide one, so he moved his right hand up and touched his chest. Bare skin. He felt his knees. Bare skin. He moved his hand round to his back and felt his bare ass. His junk was, in fact, exposed. He wasn’t wearing his boxers.

  Embarrassment more than terror parted the fog, and he managed to get himself on to all fours. Dizzy and still feeling drunk, he reached out and his fingers got caught in some sort of barrier made of chain link. He grabbed it with both hands and stood. Slowly he turned to his right, feeling the chain link, hearing it rattle. Then the barrier ended and turned to his right. More chain link. He followed it with his fingers and when it ended he felt something cold and hard and rough. Concrete. A concrete wall. He followed it and felt another chain-link barrier.

  I’m buck-naked and locked inside a … what? What is it?

  At that moment his brain returned from its holiday. The fog lifted and memories started to trickle in. Being pulled over by that undercover woman FBI agent, who’d claimed his father’s car had been involved in some robbery. Sitting handcuffed in the woman’s Chevy SUV, her stabbing him with a needle, and then … He couldn’t remember what happened next, but none of that mattered. A cop wouldn’t inject you with a drug. A cop or an FBI agent wouldn’t strip off your clothes and place you in this –

  A flashlight was turned on, the bright beam aimed at his face. Jimmy caught a flash of his surroundings before the light blinded him: he was trapped inside a cage made of the same type of chain link people used for fences. For dog kennels.

  The flashlight was turned off. He opened his eyes, bright stars burning across his vision. A shuffle of footsteps approached him and he backed up, blinded. He bumped into the concrete wall, his heart quickening as a door creaked open. He heard moaning – at least that’s what it sounded like, someone moaning in pain, or fear, or both.

  The door shut and the sound disappeared. The darkness surrounded him again, leaving him alone with his terror.

  I’m locked inside a chain-link cage. I don’t have on any clothes and there’s a throbbing pain between my shoulder blades. He reached around his back with both hands, trying to feel the wound. He couldn’t reach it, but the smooth skin of his forearms rubbed against his head and felt stubble. He rubbed his hands across his head. No hair, just stubble. His head had been shaved.

  Jimmy was too terrified to cry. His mouth opened, making blubbering sounds as his mind decided that now was a good time to play clips from all the horror movies he’d seen over the course of his life. He tried to shut them off, but they kept playing.

  What am I going to do?

  He thought about the moaning he’d heard a moment ago and his insides turned to water. Then the tears came.

  What’s going to happen to me?

  I don’t know, a voice answered. But you’re trapped in here.

  Jimmy hadn’t been raised to practise any particular faith. He didn’t attend church, and wasn’t sure if he believed in God, but he closed his eyes and clasped his hands together and prayed as though his life depended on it – because it did.

  II

  The Living and the Dead

  27

  Malcolm Fletcher checked out of his hotel on the evening of his fourth day in Baltimore. He paid using Robert Pepin’s American Express gold business card and politely declined the valet’s offer to fetch his car from the hotel garage.

  Fletcher had parked on the top level, where there were fewer vehicles. He was alone, and he didn’t have to worry about security cameras. He opened the trunk and then rooted through his various cases, selecting the items he would need that night with great care.

  After he finished, he climbed behind the wheel and started the car.

  By the time Karim’s plane touched down at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, M had traced the emails and website orders of Barry Johnson, Jon Riley and Jessie Foster all the way back to a residential home in Dickeyville, a small historic village located on the western edge of Baltimore City.

  Fletcher had checked M’s work himself. There was no question in his mind about the validity of her information. It was rock-solid. Not wanting to waste any time, he left the plane, headed to his car and made the twelve-hour drive to Dickeyville. Karim had called once, to inform him of M’s additional research. The three Virginia men were fictitious; they were not residents of the state. The names of the deceased written on the order forms were also false. The death certificates had been forged.

  The house in Dickeyville was a single-family, weather-beaten white Colonial. It had been built on the top of a sloping hill on half an acre of land. Trees, shrubs and a waist-high wall made of stone separated the Colonial from the neighbouring homes.

  The lights were off, the attached garage empty. Fletcher searched the house using a monocular equipped with thermal imaging. The technology, developed by the British SAS, could pick up heat signatures through walls and floors.

  The home was empty. Fletcher decided to wait until he had more information about the house. There was no urgency, no need to rush. He found a hotel located less than seven miles away, checked in and slept. In the morning he collected the supplies he needed for surveillance work.

  Fletcher watched the Colonial for three long days. With the exception of the postman, no one approached the house. No one collected the mail. On the evening of his first night and under cover of darkness, he approached the mailbox and examined its contents. No bills or personal correspondence of any kind, just a meagre offering of promotional leaflets, catalogues and other assorted junk mail, all of it addressed to ‘current occupant’.

  The news hadn’t surprised him. Karim, using M’s computer skills, had completed a preliminary investigation on the property. The historic Colonial, built in 1870, had last been sold to ABC Property Management, a limited liability corporation owned by Mark Sulliva
n, of Madison, Wisconsin. The LLC was listed on the utility and property tax bills, all of which were paid through an online banking account set up by a man named Rodger Callahan.

  Subsequent data mining on Rodger Callahan and Mark Sullivan revealed an endless web of phone numbers and addresses all across the country that either did not exist, or that belonged to abandoned or foreclosed property. Karim pulled the LLC papers for ABC Property Management that had been filed with the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce. Its business address belonged to a gas station in Madison.

  Karim had also pulled, scanned and emailed the Colonial’s architectural plans to Fletcher, who memorized the layout during the boring slog of watching the house.

  Amongst Karim’s information was the technical specification of an important item: the home’s alarm system. According to the installation notes, the control panel had been placed inside the basement. There were two security alarm keypads: one mounted near the front door, the other in the master bedroom. Each keypad had a panic button that, when pressed, immediately dispatched police and fire units. Both keypads also came equipped with a speakerphone that allowed the homeowner to communicate directly with emergency personnel.

  Tonight Fletcher would bypass the alarm system, enter the house and conduct a thorough search. Then he’d wait inside for someone to return – hopefully the shooter, the woman in the fur coat.

  28

  Dickeyville consisted of two main roads: Wetheredsville and Pickwick. The historic homes, such as the one at No. 5131 Wetheredsville, the house of Union soldier and Gettysburg flag-waver Billy Ware, had been preserved with remarkable care. Construction for new homes, as well as existing homes requiring modernization, had to meet strict guidelines set by the Dickeyville Community Association in order to maintain the village’s historic charm.

  Fletcher took Pickwick and snaked his way across the quiet and deserted street. He reached the Colonial, surprised to find the downstairs windows lit. Someone had returned. The driveway was empty, which suggested that the homeowner had parked in the garage.

  Fletcher drove past the house. When he reached the end of the street, he turned and made his way to Gwynns Falls. The area, with its numerous urban hiking and biking trails, offered a discreet and direct route to the back of the house.

  Fifteen minutes later he drove across a parking lot of compacted dirt. Given the time of night and the cold weather, there were no other cars – or neighbouring homes. He could dress privately. He popped the trunk and stepped out of the car.

  Fletcher wore a black, long-sleeved shirt over his bulletproof vest; all of his clothing was black. He took out his tactical belt, buckled it and strapped the nylon gun holster with its spare ammo clip to his thigh. He slipped on a pair of latex gloves, then exchanged his leather ones for a tactical brand made of Kevlar. The fingertips contained no extra material to get in the way of a trigger guard. He shut the trunk and locked the car.

  Fletcher buttoned his coat as he made his way across the frozen ground. He didn’t need to use his flashlight. The peppering of bright stars provided enough ambient light for him to make out his surroundings. It disappeared once he stepped on to the main trail, but he could see well enough, and he knew where he was going, having already walked this same route twice. Several minutes later, he moved off the main trail and headed up a slope matted with dead leaves and pine needles, the silence occasionally punctuated by the cracks of dried twigs and the crunch of downed branches beneath his boots.

  He studied the house using the monocular. Two glowing heat signatures, but only one was moving – the person walking through the ground-floor rooms. The second figure was upstairs and horizontal, lying in one of the first-floor bedrooms facing the garden.

  Fletcher watched the figures for the good part of an hour. The person downstairs wandered freely. The person on the first floor didn’t move at all.

  According to the schematics Karim had sent him, the alarm system was a standard wireless model that used passive infrared and six glass-break detectors. Fletcher suspected the detectors had been installed on the ground-floor windows. Most homeowners never bothered to install the detectors on the first-floor windows, as they were generally inaccessible.

  The back porch had a shingled roof, and there were no lights on the first floor.

  Fletcher tucked the monocular back inside his trousers pocket as he moved out from behind the tree, making his way to the garden’s picket fence.

  29

  Fletcher found the latch for the gate, opened it and walked into the garden. There was no need to run. The owner hadn’t installed sensor lights here. No one was watching him from the windows, and the neighbours couldn’t see him.

  The only light came from the porch’s sliding glass door. He could see part of the kitchen. Once he reached the bottom of the wooden steps, he could make out the deep mahogany units and the black-and-white-chequered tile floor. He moved to the left side of the porch, grabbed the railing and pulled himself up. Made of pressure-treated wood, the railing was sturdy, and he climbed on to it, got his feet settled, and then stood and grabbed the edge of the porch roof, his broken ribs groaning in protest. They exploded in pain when he jumped and hoisted himself up. It took a moment for the pain to subside. Nothing worse than broken ribs. No treatment, nothing to do but suffer through the pain until they healed.

  Now he crept across the roof, his attention locked on the window he couldn’t access from the roof, the one for the occupied bedroom. Monocular in hand, he looked through the window and saw the glowing heat signature still lying flat and level. A press of a button and the bright and swirling colours gave way to the green glow of night vision. The filmless micro-channel plate and auto-gated power supply with its reduced halo effect provided remarkably vivid details.

  A man lay on top of a twin bed. He was bald and barefoot. He wore trousers and a collared shirt. Fletcher couldn’t see the man’s face; it was turned away from the window.

  The man didn’t pose a threat. His hands hung above his head, his wrists were bound to the headboard’s spindles with what appeared to be zip ties. Fletcher zoomed in and discovered that that was, in fact, what they were. The man’s left shirtsleeve had been loosened and pulled up across the elbow to accommodate an IV needle, which was connected to a hospital-grade piggyback IV stand holding two bags of fluid.

  Fletcher switched back to thermal imaging and turned his attention to the window for the accessible bedroom. No heat signature; the room was unoccupied. He crawled his way to it and then used night vision to examine the window. It contained no glass-break detector or magnetic sensors. The window had a tight seal, and it was locked. He couldn’t use his tactical knife to prise the clasp loose. He tucked the monocular away and stripped off his Kevlar gloves, revealing the latex ones he wore underneath. The latex would allow him to handle the tools he needed.

  Fletcher placed a suction cup on the thick pane around the window clasp and, glasscutter in hand, went to work. It took him less than a minute to cut through the glass. The suction cup kept the square-shaped section from falling. He pulled it loose, turned and flung it far into the garden. He didn’t hear the glass break. He unlocked the clasp and used his tactical knife to open the bottom part of the window. It slid open easily. He went in feet first, stood and eased the window shut.

  The bedroom door was open; muted voices came from the hallway. Television voices. A man and woman arguing about how the president was bankrupting the nation with his universal health-care programme. The arguing stopped, and was replaced by a commercial for a new medication to treat erectile dysfunction.

  Fletcher entered the hall and turned right, the carpet masking his footsteps. The door to the occupied bedroom was also open. He slid inside the room. The man was still lying on the bed, still unconscious. He appeared to be of Hispanic descent, early twenties, and relatively short in size and stature. Not bald but a shaved head thick with stubble. His jaw hung open, and he was breathing rapidly. The damp skin smelled of soap.


  The piggyback IV stand was by the side of the bed facing the window. Fletcher moved to it and read the labels in the dull light: a ten-litre 0.9 per cent normal saline in one bag, the other holding a wide-spectrum antibiotic used to treat severe bacterial infections.

  Fletcher pressed two fingers against the man’s damp, hot neck. The man did not stir or register the touch. Fletcher tracked time in his head. After a minute passed, he moved his hand away.

  The young man had an elevated heart rate, and he seemed to be suffering from a fever.

  Fletcher used one of the surgical-spirit prep pads on the nightstand to wipe the screen of his smartphone. He used it again to clean the man’s fingers.

  Fletcher pressed the fingertips of the man’s right hand against the screen, holding them in place as a narrow beam of light scanned them. He wiped the screen and scanned the man’s thumb. Then he did the left hand. He sent off the prints to Karim’s private email, traded his phone for his sidearm and moved back into the hallway.

  30

  Fletcher found the stairs easily in the dark.

  His movements were slow and smooth as he crept down the carpet runner, listening for movement and watching for shadows. He reached the foot of the stairs, stepped into the roomy kitchen and waited. No sounds, no movement. He walked across the tiles and followed the television voices, his footsteps whisper-quiet against the floor.

  Sidled against a wall, he peered around a corner and found a large living room decorated to resemble a politician’s lair – burgundy-painted walls and dark leather sofas and club chairs arranged on a sweeping oriental rug; side tables holding crystal ashtrays and coasters. He could see part of a bar, the polished mahogany shelves stocked with top-shelf spirits.