The investigator's mind was blown. He'd encountered this thing during his first day in Moonville.
Dr. Klein, the very object of his search, had been the one to reach out to him in this accursed place on that first visit. The one who'd left that handprint behind on his flesh.
Ulrich had gone running, frightened out of his mind, without ever realizing that he'd just met the very man he was looking for.
The irony was not altogether lost on him, despite his incredible terror.
“I see you've come back,” came a voice from without the doctor. The words were uttered breathily, seeping into Ulrich's ear's and inciting a shudder that saw him scramble back a bit further.
“Doctor, what are you doing down here?” was all Ulrich could think to ask.
Dr. Klein did not respond, but instead fell into a bestial crouch. His arms hung limply between his legs, the backs of his long, bluish hands grazing the ground and his face downturned in a strange grimace like that of a medieval gargoyle. On further reflection, there was no color to the eyes. They were white as eggshells, utterly featureless.
“J-jerome sent me to look for you, doctor,” Ulrich managed, balling his fists.
Clawing his way forward like an animal, a terrible smirk haunted the doctor's lips. His blank eyes were leveled on the investigator. “You want to know what I did,” he mumbled, cocking his head to the side. “But you already know what I did,” he added, turning his head to the other side. “This house holds onto so much, and now it holds onto me, too.”
Paralyzed by fear, Ulrich gulped. “W-what did you do to Astrid? And w-why did you kill that patient of yours, Teddy? Is it because he knew? A-about you and Astrid?
At this, the smirk was dissolved from the doctor's face. In a low tone like a growl, he replied. “You cannot fathom the guilt I lived with for all those years. But I came back. I always intended to. Just like I came back all those years ago to silence that bitch. To clear up my mistake. She thought I was at the university, resuming my studies. Thought that she might be my wife. But she was wrong. I took care of her just like I did that homeless prick... Teddy, they called him. The way he talked to me, I wouldn't stand for it. I had a reputation... a good reputation to uphold. But he knew all about what I'd done with that whore. Surely I couldn't let him out of here alive. It made little difference, though. No one cared about him. No one so much as knew his name. A bit of extra morphine was all that I needed to administer.” The doctor's eyes narrowed. “This house ate me up, just like it did the rest of them. It was unavoidable. It was fate. It is merely the natural order of things. But that whore, Astrid, wouldn't be quiet. For years she hounded me. I can remember the way she'd stand outside my door every night, jamming her little notes into the seams for me to find. She left hundreds of them, trying to lure me back to this place. She wanted me back, she wanted me to face what I'd done. But the bitch didn't realize that I faced it every day. I knew what I'd done to them both. It was something I had to carry, a burden always weighing upon me. When that last note came, I'd had enough. I was going to end it. End it all. Free everyone that has ever been bound to this miserable stain...”
Then, standing bolt upright and clutching at his chest, the doctor began to scream. Loud shrieks erupted from the pitch black tunnel; that they were all emanating from Dr. Klein's lips Ulrich couldn't be sure.
Then, from the very edges of his vision, Ulrich became cognizant of other shapes. Searching hands emerged from the walls about him, their digits writhing like fat worms and reaching out towards the doctor. Though he struggled, Dr. Klein was grabbed from all angles, his pale, flabby form thrust this way and that by the sea of disembodied hands. In this way he was slowly dragged away from the light of the phone, dragged back into the dark depths from which he'd come. His screams continued to echo even as he completely disappeared from sight.
Horrified, Ulrich reached for his phone and scrambled to the entrance of the tunnel system. He needed to get out, to leave the Sick House before the grasping limbs took hold of him, too. He backed away, looking upward for the metal ladder, for the aperture, but saw nothing but waving, frantic hands. His head was filled with the cacophonous screams of the dead, and his strength was rapidly fading. Even if he found the ladder, his body was shaking too hard for him to climb it.
He would probably die here, would likely lose consciousness and get dragged into the shadows just as the doctor had been. This was it, the end. He'd never intended to die in the Sick House, but it was as natural and expected an outcome as any. Ulrich would simply end up as the latest in a long list of disappearances.
The only difference was that no one would come looking for him. No clueless PI would get hired to seek him out. He'd get dragged away and the outside world would forget he ever existed.
Ulrich backed into something soft, very nearly falling over it. Lowering his light, he found it was a long, human-shaped bundle on the ground, draped loosely in a white sheet. Dropping to his knees, cowering from the frantic reach of the phantom hands that erupted from all around him, he took hold of the sheet and pulled it away.
What he revealed made the entire tunnel fall suddenly quiet.
It was a human body, but it wasn't the skeletal, decades-old remains of Teddy that he'd expected.
Dr. Klein's corpse was beneath the sheet, and from his head to his toe, a single word had been etched into his skin. In what manner this had been done-- whether it'd been cut into it with a knife, or burned into the flesh-- he couldn't be sure. The word “GUILTY” had been written again and again across his skin, and every letter oozed with fresh blood like a fountain. The corpse didn't move, but was quickly obscured by a torrent of its own blood, which flowed without surcease from every pore.
And then, its eyelids shot open, revealing two blank, white orbs.
Ulrich staggered away, spotting the entrance to the tunnel just above. Jumping with everything he had, he grasped one of the upper rungs and fought up the groaning metal ladder. His cell phone weighed heavily in his breast pocket and he was plunged into an otherworldly darkness. From below, where he'd left the bleeding corpse of the doctor, he heard a doubtful shifting and rustling which terrified him to no end.
Climb, climb, damn you! It's only ten rungs, he thought to himself, dashing up the ladder as quickly as his body would allow. He made it up the first five, six, and continued till he felt the tenth and final rung in hand. Reaching just above it, he sought the lip of the aperture that would take him into the cellar, but instead, he found merely another rung.
It was impossible, defied explanation. There should not have been another rung. Or, for that matter, there should have not been another, then another, above it. Scrambling further upward, the notion that he'd somehow miscounted was rapidly dismissed.
Ulrich continued to climb from he knew not where, weeping. He hoped that each rung would be the last, that he'd reach the top of the tunnel with the next grab.
But he didn't.
He climbed for what felt like hours, days, never reaching the top of the ladder.
When his body finally gave way, he slipped down into unfathomable depths. He let him self go, let himself plummet into the shadow.
Only vaguely conscious of his descent, he was still free-falling through the darkness when his mind sputtered into oblivion.
Chapter 26
Awareness stole over him like a rough right hook to the jaw.
Ulrich lurched over, his face meeting something hard and smooth. He felt on the verge of vomiting as his mind drew up visions of damp, subterranean tunnels, of abandoned buildings, of animated corpses and disembodied phantom limbs.
But none of that seemed to reflect his surroundings in that moment.
For one, the air seemed comfortably warm, and the smell of moisture was nowhere to be found. Opening his eyes, he was some moments into recognizing the surface beneath his nose; a lacquered wood floor. Slowly, he reached out and touched it with both hands.
Then, from behind, he felt a firm grip hoisting him up off of
the floor.
“Awake?” came the voice. Ulrich didn't recognize it at first, his hearing spotty as though he'd taken in a lot of sea water. His eardrums trembled a little at the word. Then, when the speaker asked a second time, it finally got through to him.
It was Officer Mark Dennison's voice.
Blinded by the glow of a lamp, Ulrich slumped back against the officer's grip and was eased onto the edge of a bed. He was dizzy, and the room was spinning all around him, but already he could make out a few details in his surroundings. It was a furnished room, a bedroom. He was on a bed with a scratchy woolen comforter, and there was a small bookshelf near the door. In the doorway was an older woman, standing by not a little concernedly, wearing a grey sweater that matched her greying curls.
“He's awake, ma,” said Mark to the woman, waving her through the doorway. “Bring him some water or something, will ya?”
Licking his lips, he found his tongue a dried-out husk. Ulrich tried to speak a few times, but it was a while before he managed to get the words out as anything more than a baffled whisper. “What happened?”
Mark helped him onto his back, fluffing the pillow behind his head. He grinned, slapping Ulrich in the arm. “I'll tell you what happened. Your hunch was right; the doctor was down there, in the tunnels under the cellar. You found him. Dunno what happened, though. You lost consciousness down there, and it was only when I stopped by to check on you that we found you. You were probably down there a couple hours.” He paused, crossing his arms. “You weren't answering my calls. Figured you'd gone to the infirmary despite my warning and didn't have reception. If I hadn't gone looking for you, you'd probably be in bad shape right about now.”
Ulrich nodded weakly. When Mark's mother brought in a glass of ice water, he sucked half of it down in a single gulp, sputtering and coughing. The drink was refreshing, and with it came a little more awareness. He palmed at his forehead, looking around the room in wonder. “So, you found the body, huh?” He remembered Dr. Klein's body, the bleeding, wounded mass that'd been draped in a sheet in the tunnel. He shuddered for the remembrance.
“Sure did,” replied Mark. “It was a little roughed up, and we're not sure who did it, but our guys think he's been down there almost a month.”
A little roughed up? The body had been utterly savaged, by Ulrich's standards. “What do you mean, a little roughed up?”
“Well, there were a lot of scrapes and such. Looks like some rats might've nibbled him, maybe. But nothing too bad.”
Ulrich held his breath. No mention of the etchings into the doctor's skin? Of the profuse bleeding? As best he could remember it, the doctor's skin had been marked all over with the word “guilty”. Then again, perhaps he'd been mistaken. Or he'd hallucinated.
“Yeah, we found a gas tank down there, too. They think he might've brought it down there with him to burn the place down. The fumes built up down there; I was feeling lightheaded when I went down after you, and I bet you inhaled a lot more of that than was healthy. When you're feeling up to it, we'll get you off to the hospital for a proper once-over.”
Gas fumes? Ulrich couldn't help but chuckle to himself. That was one explanation for the terrifying, hallucinatory things he'd seen in the tunnel. Somehow, though, he wasn't buying it. “You, uh... you didn't see anything else down there, did you?” he chanced to ask, sitting up on his elbows.
Mark shook his head. “Few rats and such. Otherwise, no. And we sent a few guys in to have a more thorough look. Found you and the doctor's body.”
“No other bodies?”
The officer narrowed his gaze. “Uh, no... why? You know something I don't?”
Ulrich tensed. “No. Just curious.” Apparently, Teddy's body remained elusive. Perhaps Dr. Klein had succeeded in stashing away the patient's body before dying in the tunnel. Or maybe someone else, Sister Ruth or Astrid, had moved it.
“We still need to find out who did it,” continued Mark. “We don't have any leads, but this was a murder. Pretty confident of that.”
Ulrich felt his pulse quicken. It'd been a murder, all right. But the culprit hadn't been human. The murderer wasn't someone that could get cuffed and marched off to jail. He'd seen the culprit with his own eyes, had glimpsed, in the hellish bowels beneath the Sick House, the legion of grasping, ghostly hands that'd reached out and dragged the physician to oblivion. Teddy, and perhaps the other spirits of the Sick House had done him in. After waiting for him to return for so many decades, the place had swallowed him up, gotten its revenge. At least two of the deaths on that ancient property could be attributed to him. Astrid had called him back to the infirmary over the years, and when he finally set foot there, he'd gotten his comeuppance.
There was no good way for Ulrich to explain that Dr. Klein had been murdered by spirits. There was nothing he could say to make the truth sound even remotely believable. He'd seen it with is own eyes, had witnessed the retribution of the Sick House against the monstrous doctor first-hand. But no one would ever believe him. He could hardly believe it himself. Even Mark, who believed the place to be haunted, would likely balk at such a report.
And so would Jerome, for that matter.
Ulrich sighed. This was something he'd have to keep to himself. Something he'd have to live with. When it came to reporting off to Jerome about his findings, he'd have to play along with the official line, that the murderer was still on the run. He'd succeeded in doing what he'd set out to do-- he'd found the doctor. Identifying his murderer had never been a part of the deal, though. And he was thankful for it. Ulrich would spare Jerome the sordid details of his uncle's past, too. There was no sense in telling his client that Dr. Klein had been a savage and murderous man. The Sick House had taken its pound of flesh; now, he hoped, the place would settle down. This would just remain one of the countless terrible secrets left buried there. It'd all come full-circle. The bad guy had gotten what was coming to him.
Case closed, he thought, laying back against the pillow. Looking up feebly, he smiled at Mark's mother, who remained in the doorway. “I'm sorry for the inconvenience, dear. I don't suppose you could fix me a strong, black coffee, could you?”
Chapter 27
Ulrich stayed only a short while longer in McArthur. The moment he was well he set out for his home of Toledo, stopping only briefly at Milo's for a final cheeseburger. Despite Mark's repeated urgings to visit a hospital, the investigator proved stubborn, and left town at the first opportunity. The two of them maintained a friendly correspondence in the months to come, and when the forensic reports were returned in early winter, the young officer called Ulrich to let him know that the bones they'd uncovered in the grounds of the infirmary had been positively identified as those of a nun named Astrid Baker.
This, of course, had been expected.
Ulrich's dealings with Jerome were as quick and vague as possible. Desperate to wash his hands of the case, and also to keep the true, paranormal nature of the events he'd witnessed from the client, Ulrich described the subterranean channels running beneath the infirmary and merely guessed that the authorities had overlooked them during their initial search for the missing doctor. He said nothing of the trail of clues that'd led him there, nor of the terrifying visions he'd suffered. Ulrich did not mention the fact that he'd seen the old doctor's spirit on more than one occasion, or that Siegfried Klein had been responsible for two cold-blooded murders decades ago.
To Ulrich's delight, Jerome was not particularly distressed at the condition of the SUV. Though in a terrible state, still caked in mud when he received the keys, Jerome didn't pay much attention to the vehicle during their final meeting outside Ulrich's office. Instead, he proved extremely grateful for Ulrich's work, and seemed preoccupied with the large inheritance that was now coming his way-- a great deal larger than Ulrich had initially been led to believe, if local rumor was true. Despite his endeavoring to act concerned, Jerome had only hired Ulrich in the interest of solidifying his own financial gain. There was a body, and so his inheri
tance would not be held up in the courts. When Ulrich, and subsequently the State Highway Patrol, announced to him that the doctor's body had been found and positively identified, Jerome asked precious few questions about the how and why. He feigned a little outrage at his relative's murder, but seemed altogether unconcerned with apprehending the killer.
Jerome had his money now, and that was all he'd ever really cared about, despite his claims to the contrary.
For his part, Ulrich had more answers than he cared for. He'd visited the Sick House during his first day on the case, and Dr. Klein had reached out to him, leaving a handprint behind. Maybe the specter had wanted to talk to him then, to come clean. Perhaps Ulrich could have spared himself a whole lot of grief by simply standing his ground and further inspecting the old building, rather than sprinting out of it like he had. In the end, things had worked out, however. He felt proud of the work he'd done, even if the events surrounding the investigation had left him feeling permanently uneasy. Dark streets and unlit corners would never be the same to him, and more often than not, he found himself unwilling to look up into the empty, cloudy windows of the abandoned factories outside of Waterman street during his commute.
Ulrich spent his first day back in Toledo paying debts with the crisp bills Jerome had given him, and he treated himself to a great dinner. When that was through, he took in some live music at a cafe and drowned himself in coffee that would surely keep him awake till morning. That night, rolling around in his bed, he finished the Raymond Chandler novel he'd started so many days before, and then slept soundly until mid-afternoon.
He thought little of any future cases. After all he'd been through, he felt the need to rest and recover.
And more than that, he felt like he'd done more than enough work to last him a while.
Marching around his apartment in his pajamas the next day, he put his Best of Sinatra CD into his boombox and crooned along with “Mr. Success” while preparing a light lunch.
The Sick House: An Occult Thriller (The Ulrich Files Book 1) Page 18
