by Robert Wilde
“I think it might count.”
“Right, right, ring them up, tell them, see if this fits. Maybe we can pass this on!” He said it as a joke, even though he’d never take his eye off a case.
A few minutes later and Jeff’s mobile received a call.
“Yes?”
“Hello,” said the operator, “we’ve got a call for you, from Newcastle, a detective there has a potential lead on a new incident.”
“Excellent, put her through.”
The detective soon introduced herself, and she outlined what they’d found. “Do you think it matches?”
“Yes, we had an incident here, it’s in the same ballpark,” he was thinking of the taxi driver, “do you have a description of the woman you’re searching for?”
“Yes. Caucasian, five foot nine, long red hair, goes by the name of Dee Nettleship.”
Jeff only realised a little later he’d collapsed down onto his chair.
A sports car slid to a halt in the lot of motorway service station, and Dee climbed out. He’d stolen a car to help get her from, what did these humans say, A to B, but had dumped it at another service station when he’d stolen this far faster, far more impressive number, and it had been gunned down the motorway for a considerable distance, because no matter how often and how fast he drove, he never got over a love of speed and movement. It was one of life’s great pleasures, and he had been denied that for too long.
Leaving the car unlocked, because he didn’t have the keys, Dee’s body went inside and had a look around. An arcade, which would be fun, a parade of shops, many toilets, and a choice of places to get food. He wouldn’t use the term restaurants because of the fast food outlets, and he realised then he wanted a proper, large meal. Right, action, and he went in bought a map of the area, came back to the car and was soon driving to a real restaurant he’d picked out. Then it was a simple matter to go inside, smile sweetly at the staff, and get a table. This body had several useful skills, and charming men was one of them.
“What would you like to order?” the waiter asked.
“I’d like a bottle of red wine, your best, and the profiteroles, the tiramisu and the hazelnut ice cream with rum truffle.”
“Sorry,” said the waiter, “you want three deserts and no starters or main?”
“Three,” it smiled back, “one to start, one for main, one for dessert.”
“That’s, err…”
“Is that an issue?”
“No, no sir, of course not, let me just get that ordered.”
He smiled, leant back, and was soon sipping a very nice bottle of red. He had been in many bodies since learning the knack, and Dee’s was the most resistant to alcohol, which did mean he was hard to get properly drunk, but also meant you could have a lot of interesting tastes to get there.
Three desserts were served and consumed, and he rose, paid the bill using cash, and walked to the toilets, where it selected a cubicle, took out a bag of cocaine, and snorted a thumb full. This was good stuff. This time he had sourced some great stuff. Then he walked back into the main room and over to a table where a man had sat alone during his meal.
“Hello?” he said as Dee loomed above him.
Sticking her chest out, tilting her hips, the body that belonged to Dee said “nice shoes, wanna fuck?”
The man’s eyes widened, he looked her quickly up and down, and he swallowed hard. “I’ve… I’ve got a wife.”
“Boring,” he said, as he turned and walked off with a swing of the hips to make the man jealous. Where did a pretty girl have to go to get fucked round here?
Jeff slung his car off the main course of the road and mostly onto the footpath, switched it off with force and jumped out. A man who’d had to stop suddenly in front of him shouted “I’ll ring the police, you can’t drive like that, I’ll ring the police!” Jeff started to ignore him, realised this would create an unwelcome distraction, and flashed his badge.
“I am the police, and an emergency is happening.”
“Should I get indoors?”
This Jeff did ignore, as he rushed up to Dee’s front door and banged it very loud indeed. Seconds later Pohl opened it.
“Detective,” she said, with the motherly disapproval of a daughter’s failed boyfriend.
“I need to speak to you three, it’s very urgent, I texted Naz, he should be coming.”
“I came,” a shout err, came from the living room.
“Right, good. Can I come in then?”
Pohl now stepped to one side and Jeff rushed through. Even though his body wasn’t exerting itself obviously, his heart was pounding so much he was out of breath. “I’ve got some really bad, and quite frankly unbelievable news.”
“You’ve come to the right place,” Nazir offered.
“It’s about Dee…”
“What?” Joe’s voice soared into life from the box.
“I don’t know how this happened, I can only assume we were watched and her followed, but Dee has been possessed by whatever demon we have been chasing.”
“Dee? Our Dee? Redhead Dee? Possessed by a sexual serial killer?” Pohl couldn’t have sounded more horrified if she’d just eaten her favourite kitten in a pie.
“That is exactly what I am saying.”
“Are you sure?”
“She hooked up with a guy in a Newcastle club, we have eyewitnesses, the women she was out with.”
“Finally,” Naz added.
“We have closed circuit television in the hotel, and we have a very dead body that, this time, was actually murdered the old way.”
“Which is?”
“Someone cut the guy’s throat.”
“Ouch.”
“And the guy turns out to be the cab driver we know was possessed. So yes, we’re sure it’s Dee. And the fact she’s now missing, and from what we know of this creature, we’re all fairly sure she’s got it…inside her.” The last words were forced out.
“What do we do?” Joe asked, clearly shaken.
“Do any of you have a plan, have an idea? Because the police are doing everything they normally would to find a murderer, we have a unit zeroing in on her mobile phone, but she might not have that long, we don’t know what it’s up to. Has it changed the pattern, did it pick Dee, what can we save, what is it fucking doing right now!”
“Okay, calm yourself Jeff,” Pohl instructed, “you’re no good to anyone with a heart attack.”
“I just don’t know,” Joe said. “This isn’t a science, there are no books we can look in, we make it up as we go along because we don’t know.”
Jeff nodded, looked at the ground, and closed his eyes.
Jeff had returned to the police station to follow the search for Dee, which currently spanned the country and was currently a murder inquiry, both to find her and to work out what sort of excuse they were going to come up with afterwards. The obvious solution was a call to Peters and a mandate from, what had he called it, a cross body soul group, but that would only be needed if they could find Dee before, well, before she died, because they were already too late to stop who knows what.
Nazir had returned to his place intending to search the web and read the police reports himself, which left Pohl and Joe alone in Dee’s house, and the latter was so fretting and ansty Pohl turned him off for a while and gone upstairs to lay down. She didn’t sleep, of course not, but she did slip into a worry coma where her mind went into dark corridors that continued on and on. It was a labyrinth of fear, and the minotaur had been replaced by something far older and with more scales.
Eventually she came back to the waking world, found herself thirsty, got up and went downstairs. In the kitchen she filled a glass with water, turned, and Dee came in through the front door thanks to the keys she was holding.
“Hello,” the redhead said cheerfully.
“Hi,” Pohl said, opened mouthed and not sure how to react.
“Having a good day?” Dee came in, looked in the lounge, eyes probing. Pohl consi
dered what she was seeing, and concluded Dee was looking for something. Something in her own house, a place which seemed alien. So this still wasn’t Dee. Those wild, roving eyes should have been a clue; this person was under the influence of some substance.
“Ah,” and Dee dived into the living room, and came back out holding the box, which she carried in and put on the kitchen table. Then she turned and looked at Pohl, making the still unmoving professor recoil at the searching, hungry look. “You, err, housemate, you’ve never wanted to experiment have you?”
“Experiment?”
Dee came over, stood inside Pohl’s personal space, and leant in. “Yes. An older woman, a younger woman, a love that dare not speak its name. You and I, you don’t want to experiment this afternoon?”
“No…” Pohl replied weakly.
“A shame,” Dee said, turned, and began filling a rucksack with bottles of drink and food from the fridge.
“Are you feeling okay Dee?” was all she could muster.
“Yes, yes, fine, just popping out for a long one. You know how it is. Although if you’re tempted…”
“No, no, I’m fine, fine, I just better go back to my nap.”
“Bye housemate.”
Pohl walked up the stairs as nonchalantly as she could, closed her bedroom door, barricaded it with a chair, then grabbed her phone and texted Nazir and Jeff. Then she started shaking.
Nobody was more aware that the clock was ticking on Dee than Jeff, who returned to his office, sat in his chair and fought off the urge to get drunk and weep at the pressure of it all. They had a whole country, a whole world to search, and the countdown had begun. Dee drunk a lot, he knew that, so perhaps her constitution would cope with the excess for a while, but it would break eventually, as all the others had before, and that might be any day now. Any night now, he supposed.
That was the equation for her life. A question of the body lasting. The secondary question was her mind, her soul, which was still in that body and still seeing and feeling everything that was happening, just with no control. What must it be like, Jeff winced, to see yourself thrown to the edge with no regards to dignity or survival, what must it be doing to Dee stuck inside there. If they saved her, when they saved her, would she ever want to come out? Could she face them again? Was her future that of a hermit, walled away somewhere and never coming out?
Jeff put a hand to his head, felt a slightly receding hairline, and knew this was why he’d broken it off. He hadn’t wanted any more days spent worrying about someone else, a woman he loved who put herself in as much danger as he did, even more danger than he did, and if that was hypocritical or selfish so be it. He hadn’t wanted it, couldn’t cope with it, ended it.
Except it didn’t end did it. He still worried about her, he was just out of the loop, wondering whether she was safe instead of knowing what to wonder if she was safe from. An abstraction, but worry still the same, and now it had happened and he had ice in his stomach and a sprinter in his heart because he was terrified he’d lost her. What did they say, the more things change the more they stay the same?
His phone rang, showing Pohl’s number, so he snatched the device up and said “yes?” She told him, that Dee had been in the house. A cat like, slinking Dee with the eyes of a predator, and she hadn’t know what to do. Stop her going, risk damage to her? In the end, as they spoke, they heard the front door close, and Jeff let the phone fall to his side. He ran, ran out into the unit, and began barking orders. She was here, she was in the area, it was up to them now. They had to find her, and they had to do it because time was ticking and the clock was running out. No one knew why, and some had asked why he was working on something he was so close to, but as he bellowed at the whole station to get going they could see the desperation in the eyes of their most successful officer.
For reasons best known to the buyers, the car park which had been chosen belonged to the café where Dee and her friends hung out. This evening, however, it was empty of vehicles. Someone cruel or observant might have pointed out this was pretty much true of the day too. But the people were coming weren’t after coffee and snacks, and the first car arrived five minutes before the meeting time, and a very large man got out of the back and scouted the place out, before returning and sitting in.
The next arrival was in a car any police check would realise was stolen, and the vehicle certainly stood out when positioned next to the earlier arrivals perfectly chosen piece of camouflage. Occupants emerged from the vehicles at the same time, gathering in the space between them.
“Subtle,” said a woman who would normally have been large, had she not been standing next to her even bigger muscle.
“It’ll do for today,” Dee said smiling.
“You young fuckers never learn, don’t you know what the police and government are like these days?”
“Oh I do, and they can’t touch us.”
Why did the older woman feel there was something happening here she wasn’t aware of… she didn’t like that feeling one bit.
“Where’s this box?”
“Ah-ha!” And Dee reached into the car and pulled out the box. “One device for talking to the dead.”
“Right, well show us then.”
“What?”
“Show us. I’m not handing my money over unless I know it works. Talk to the dead.”
“There happen to be some here, so perfect,” and Dee switched the machine on.
Nothing happened.
“Are they meant to be talking?”
“Yes, yes come on, this machine lets you talk, come on.” The thing inside Dee looked into the afterlife, and saw Joe, held around the box, his face set and his eyes livid, doing the spiritual equivalent of holding an arm up to shut everyone else spiritual up. They, knowing Joe, knowing the machine, realising what had happened to Dee, played along, and they all stayed perfectly silent.
“This is bullshit isn’t it,” the woman sighed.
“They’re here, they’re just playing along with the ghost. I think he wanted to fuck me, now he’s, look, you let them talk or I’ll smash this box to bits.” Joe stayed schtum, knowing one word would allow a sale. “So you’d rather be destroyed than sold?”
He’d rather die than please this monster who’d hurt Dee. Which, an observer might, suppose, it was lucky he didn’t need to do, having already died.
Dee sighed. “I can’t prove it here. Maybe if we go somewhere else.”
“Maybe we kill you and you can talk through it?”
“Yeah, cos I’ll do that.”
“The only thing stopping me from ordering your death is I don’t believe this machine works, so there’s no point in taking it. My advice to you is to fuck right off and never, ever, let me see you again. Good fucking night cunt flap.”
Saner heads had prevailed, and Jeff had been cautioned to hold himself back from an investigation which involved his ex-girlfriend as a murder suspect. They told him to go home, get some rest, have a sleep and then come back in the next day for other work. Jeff had interpreted this as ‘get in your car and drive round the streets desperately looking for Dee’. He hadn’t quite caused the cliché of jumping out to grab a red haired woman and finding it was someone else, but he knew he was getting close.
It was stupid, of course, you wouldn’t happen to drive past one woman in a large city, but still he motored on through the evening, stopping only to refuel the car with petrol and himself with petrol station burgers and coke. Then he got a call.
“Jeff, it’s, look, it’s Smithers.”
“Hi, what’s happening?” Please have something useful, please.
“We have a sighting, I believe she’s entered a nightclub on the east side. Do you want the team to plan to apprehend her?”
Thank you Jesus I’ll suck your cock. “Why are you telling me?”
“I thought… you’d want to know?” Her voice was laden with meaning, and he knew it mean ‘sort this out yourself first.’
“Thank you Smithers,
thank you, we’ll sort this out later.” Jeff flicked his phone off and thought. Here it was, his chance. He just had no idea what to do. The next number he dialled was Pohl’s. “Hello, Professor, how goes the research?”
“Have they found her?”
“We have a sighting, a nightclub on the west side,” he lied, “do you know how to shift this demon?”
Pohl sighed so hard it sounded like tears. “No. We’ve ruled out exorcisms of all varieties, we just don’t see how it works. But with no Joe, just Nazir and I, our experience is very limited.”
“I understand, I do. I’m going to go to the club before the police arrive.”
“Excellent, we’ll meet you there.”
“Okay,” he agreed, knowing they’d ask and having the false trail in place. He gave a name, and told them to be there ASAP, they’d meet in the car park down the road. Then Jeff switched off his phone, put a hand to his eyes and rubbed.
No one had any idea how to really free Dee from this monster, so they were in the realm of guestimates. Jeff had one, a single solid idea, and it was a really, really stupid one that was really, really risky, but what other choice did he have? They could arrest Dee and hope no one got hurt in the fight, but he was in no doubt this demon would want a fight and stretch it out. It loved excess, and about the only thing it hadn’t done was have a fight. So Dee was going to get hurt tonight, and he knew he could only cope if he was the one who did it, to limit the damage. Even if they fought her down, what would happen? It could move into any one of them. If officers would find themselves destroyed. He had an obligation to his team too. All the while panic clouded his thoughts.
Jeff opened his glove box, and looked at the pistol.
Dee was sat in the nightclub, a cocktail in hand, pleased that he had found a body so suitable for a massive evening out, but so desirable he could have any man, and plenty of women, in this room. So, the question is, who to go for? That chap with the rock hard torso who was barely wearing a shirt? Tempting, but if he put that much on display he was probably pretty shitty in bed. That woman might have been giving her the eye, and the eye suggested a strong dominatrix streak, but he didn’t really like being the submissive.
