by Ryan Casey
It was the abandoned care home.
The place where the streaker washes.
He took in as deep a breath as he could as he walked in its direction, on display behind the leafless trees. Perhaps it looked so much more exposed because the times he’d been here before, it was late spring, or summer even. Perhaps then, the green leaves hid away the derelict old building, untouched and unexposed, a perfect area of temporary shelter and privacy.
He walked further down the stone-strewn dirt track, every step feeling like a lifetime, the abandoned care home not getting any closer.
He remembered when he’d first been here. When he’d received that anonymous tip-off, the summer of last year, that somebody was causing a racket in Mason’s Wood. He remembered coming out here on that warm, sunny day and hearing the music, all dressed up in his PCSO gear, convinced that he was going to have to deal with a group of rowdy kids and troublemakers. He remembered standing beside the door, bracing himself, then storming inside and shouting at the top of his voice for these imagined kids to turn their music down.
He remembered the look on the poor bearded man’s face, rubbing a bar of soap around his body in the middle of an old abandoned reception area, a dusty old cassette player in the corner of the room blasting out music.
Brian stepped from the edge of the path and stopped when he reached the care home. Weird location for a care home, anyway. Once upon a time, there had been a road at the front, but it just got cut off in the end. Nobody needed to use the road, so the place was just lost to nature, like everything was eventually.
He remembered the conversation he had with the bearded man washing himself in that care home. He was nameless—they never did get an official ID for him. He was an interesting man, though. Always was, right from the start. Claimed he was homeless by choice. That he’d just had enough one day, and he’d decided to take off, out into the wild.
Brian approached the front of the care home. He tried to peer inside. It was quiet in there, and dark. Cobwebs covered the cracked window frames. He could smell the damp inside even out here, as weeds and vines clawed their way up the sides of the building.
He remembered the few visits he’d paid the bearded man, who seemed to be taking temporary residence at the place. Brian had kept it a secret. He wasn’t doing any harm, popping in for shelter and a wash. Besides, the building wasn’t being used anyway. He wasn’t causing any harm. Only to stuck-up wankers who didn’t like the sound of Eighties rock music on his radio.
The sight of that long-haired, greying, bearded man standing in the reception area, soap loosening in his grip, was one of those bizarrely hilarious moments that would always stay with Brian.
But even more hilarious was the stunned look on the face of Scott, his PCSO partner, when he first set eyes on the man.
It was their secret. Only they knew about the bearded man, right up until the day they paid a visit down here and he’d just gone. Taken off.
Brian pushed open the creaky old wooden door. It was already partly ajar, spiders scuttling into any corner they could find as Brian opened it further.
“The place where the streaker washes,” Scott used to say to Brian of their little secret. “Shall we pay our mate a visit?”
Brian stepped inside the building. Glass crumbled under his feet. He tried to breathe normally, but the place reeked of damp and sewage. He looked around the entrance area. It was fairly dark inside, the windows in the back boarded up.
He turned his attention to the door on the right. The door he’d barged in through that day, when he’d heard the music. The surprise he’d experienced at seeing that bearded man washing away, not a care in the world, cock flapping all over the place.
He stepped up to it. The closer he got, the better he could hear something. A quiet, tinny sound. Music.
He gulped. Stopped by the handle. He’d done the right thing coming alone, hadn’t he? He felt idiotic all of a sudden. Like a stupid, naive old bastard. He’d strayed off route in the past. It rarely brought him any good.
No. He’d done the right thing. The kidnapper had threatened the lives of Davey and Hannah if Brian did anything other than turn up alone. It wasn’t a bluff he wanted to call. Not now.
He placed his hand on the circular gold handle, most of which had caved in to rust. He gripped it tightly, the sound of the music growing more and more clear.
He held his breath.
Then, in a sudden swift movement, he turned the handle, and pushed the door open.
He was prepared to be surprised. Just like he had been that time when he’d walked in on that streaker.
But what he saw now didn’t surprise him.
It just baffled him. Gripped him with an uncanny sense of overwhelming fear. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t right at all.
The music came from a little silver radio in the corner of the room, and was reasonably loud now. The song that was playing was the very same that the streaker had been playing that summer day. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division. One of Brian’s favourites.
All of the windows were boarded up, but Brian didn’t need sunlight to realise what was in here.
Or rather, who was in here.
There were two bathtubs at the bottom end of the reception area. They looked like they’d been dragged in here, cracks and scratches in the tiles where the feet had slid across. Steam rose from the baths, which were full to the brim.
Above each bath, hanging by their arms, there was a person.
One was a woman. The other was about half her size. A kid. Both of them were blindfolded, dangling by rope around their wrists. A couple of weights were wrapped around the kid’s stomach. Both of them were still. Very still.
There was another person in the room, too. In fact, the moment Brian opened the door, he turned around and nodded, as if he’d been expecting him. Then, he went over to the radio, and turned the volume down, brushing his hands against his black hoodie. He was wearing all black except for the blue cap on his head.
“Wondered when you were going to show up,” he said. A natural grin spread across his face as Brian stared at him.
Brian’s knees went weak. All of a sudden, he felt alone. Very alone.
The man pulled off his cap and tossed it to the side of the room. “Well, come on in so I can explain,” he said. “Don’t be shy. Never usually are, ‘ey?”
Brian wanted to turn around and run. He needed to get out of here. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. This was somebody else’s life, not his.
“Let’s just have a chat,” the man said, sticking a thumb in the direction of the two dangling, blindfolded bodies. “Your fiancé and son would appreciate it. Very much.”
He wanted to charge in his direction. Beat the life out of him. He wanted to shout every curse word in the book in his fucking face as he gouged his eyes out.
Instead, all he could manage was a weak, half-hearted, “Scott? Why? Why?”
Chapter Thirty One
“‘Why?’” Scott said, taking a moment to consider Brian’s question. “‘Why?’”. He stared up at the cracked ceiling above, eyes narrowed, finger on his chin. “Well, that’s a good question. A question I was hoping you’d ask, but also a question I thought you’d partly have figured out by now.”
Scott smiled at Brian. He had taken his cap off, so he just looked like he did on the job, walking the streets in the name of the PCSO unit. The same, except for that black hoodie, and that black tracksuit. He looked out of place. So, so out of place.
Beside him, Hannah and Davey were hanging from their wrists over two steaming baths. Their wrists were chapped. They were completely still, tightly blindfolded.
Any part of Brian’s mind that might’ve suspected a prank had long receded now.
Scott hit the pause button on the portable silver cassette player, cutting out the music completely.
“You let them go,” Brian said. His body pented up with rage. His mind was fuzzy. He paced in Scott’s dir
ection. “You stop this fucking around and you—”
“I wouldn’t come a step closer if I was you,” Scott said. He grabbed a rope that was tied to the ground. As he did, Hannah and Davey both wobbled. Davey’s feet edged closer to the bath of steaming murky liquid.
Scott gasped and shook his head. Sweat dripped down his cheeks. The scratches from the runaway cat he’d got a couple of weeks back, before this whole fucked-up thing started, was pink and sealed under his eye, partly scarred over. “Your fiancé and your kid are elevated above two plastic bathtubs filled with hydrofluoric acid. The only thing keeping them up there—alive—is this rope, which is in turn attached to the rope around their wrists. If I yank this rope at any time, the pair of them will fall to a very painful death. So think carefully about your next step, Brian. Think very carefully indeed.”
Brian wanted to take another few steps forward, but he was frozen on the spot. The sight of Hannah and Davey, elevated above what he now knew were hydrofluoric acid baths, was finally starting to hit home. This was serious.
Scott raised his bushy eyebrows. “So you’re going to keep your distance, okay?”
There were so many things Brian wanted to say, but he couldn’t process them. Scott—his work partner. His friend. He’d only considered inviting him to his engagement party earlier that day. This was wrong. So wrong.
“So, you asked me ‘why?’” Scott said, pacing from side to side, but staying close to the rope. “And to be perfectly honest with you, I’m a little disappointed with you. I told you why. I laid out all the clues for you to solve. And yet, here we are, you staring at me with those fucking vacant eyes.” He shook his head. “Shame.”
“What the fuck is all this about, Scott? You…you can let Hannah and Davey go. You can still walk out of here. We…we can.”
Scott burst into a chorus of laughter. A chorus of laughter that Brian had so often shared. “You think I can walk out of here after what I’ve done? After all the things I’ve done? No. I’ve left the clues I needed to leave now. I’ve served my purpose. Brian, I don’t want to leave this room. In fact, the only thing that matters in my life anymore is right here, in this room. This moment, right now. This is what I’ve been building towards. What I’ve wanted all along. Right from the moment I brought that medieval sword through the neck of the first archeologist’s neck.”
Brian felt like a sword had swung through his own body when Scott said those final words. “It…It was you?” he said, stuttering. “All along, it was…”
“Oh, come on, Brian,” Scott said. His tone was snappy now, and he wasn’t smiling anymore. “Keep up. Yes, I killed Davidson Archeological Contractors. Yes, I killed the Brabiner’s group at Longridge Fell.” He paused. Peered at Brian. “Yes, I killed that sister-in-law of yours. Had the most fun with her. The closer they get to the family, the more fun to be had.”
Brian could tell that his mouth was dangling wide open, but he felt detached from his physical body, as if he were in the room, listening in to a conversation that he really did not want to be the centrepiece of.
“I had to kill that journalist, too. Shame though. He was alright, I guess, in the end. But it was what he knew. He was on the verge of ruining my big surprise. He came this close to ruining the final event,” Scott said, a tiny gap between his thumb and index finger. “But hey. What’s got to be done has got to be—”
“Why, Scott?” Brian said. His voice was shaky and his throat was dry. His mind spun with the sudden reality—the danger—of the situation he was in. “Why would you…you wouldn’t kill all those people. There’s no reason. There’s…”
Scott shook his head again, but a smile tugged at his clean-shaven cheeks. “That’s where you’re wrong. And you know you’re wrong. You’ve just spent a fortnight chasing this ‘Harold Harvey II’ figure. You’ve seen the sums of money—the 1612 link, the eleven killings, the runaway rat scum…Yeah, you were right about it all. You just didn’t make the final link, that’s all. The final, crucial link.”
Brian’s eyes were watering so much that his vision was blurred. A strong sweaty smell radiated from his body. “The runaway. You…You’re the runaway? A descendant of the runaway? But—but then why are you doing this? Why go under the Harold Harvey name? Why—”
“I’m the runaway?” Scott said. His nostrils twitched. “How fucking dare you insult me like that.”
“Then who are you?” Brian shouted.
Scott looked up at Hannah and Davey’s bodies, elevated above the bathtubs, as if he were doing something as casual as pondering a mathematics question. Then, he turned back to Brian, the anger washed from his face. “In 1612, Harold Harvey took twelve witches out into a field and put an end to their miserable lives. That’s the official story, anyway. In truth, eleven of them died. One of them got away.” He stepped around the front of the baths and leaned against one of them, like a teacher at a desk telling a story. “One of them managed to escape, somehow. Crawled away, like a little rat, it did.”
But one little rat ran away to hide…
“Now, nobody heard from this little rat for six years. People got on with their lives. Harold and his family got on with their lives in peace. Had a beautiful wife—pregnant—and a beautiful child. Joseph, I believe. Beautiful name.
“But one day, when Harold’s sitting around in his writing chair, aged sixty, his wife in the kitchen, his children playing with one another, somebody breaks into his house. Now, Harold has family over, too. A sister-in-law of his. And the first thing he sees when he leaves his writing office to check on the disturbance is that little rat from six years ago holding the head of his sister-in-law.”
But one little rat ran away to hide, and returned to cause some pain.
“Now at this point, Harold is terrified for his family. He runs into the living area to see to them, but anyway, one thing comes to another, and eventually Harold is restrained by this…this rat.” He spat when he said the word rat, dribbling down his chin. “Harold is restrained and his wife…his pregnant wife, Isabella, she’s stripped naked by this rat and raped. Fucked and fucked and fucked. And then…” Scott choked up and wiped his eyes. “And then the same thing happens to his son. The same fucking thing. This rat. This fucking awful rat. The horrible things he does. The horrible things he puts them through.”
Brian was stunned to silence by the outpouring of grief from Scott. The outpouring of grief about something, as horrible as it was, that happened four hundred years ago.
“And…and then this rat does a horrible thing. A horrible, horrible thing. He makes Harold Harvey choose, he does. He makes him choose between his wife and his child. His wife, carrying an unborn child, and his child. Can you imagine being given that choice? Can you imagine the grief this poor man felt?”
“Scott, I—”
“Shut up. Shut up. I am not finished.” He took a deep breath and steadied himself. “After minutes, hours, maybe even days, Harold finally chooses. He chooses his child. He chooses his little Joseph. And that’s when he loses his wife. And the rat crawls off to the sewers, just like that. Gone. So he…he tells little Joseph exactly what has happened. Little Joseph who has been forced to witness his mother’s death. Little Joseph who had unspeakable things happen to him at the filthy claws of the rat. He writes little Joseph a letter of it all. Makes Little Joseph swear to keep hold of it. To pass it down through the generations until the family of this little rat are identified.
“But little Joseph grew up to be a good man, in spite of what happened. A noble man. And he saw the spawn of the rat, upon occasion. Yes, the rat spawned. But that was a good thing. It meant that he’d spread his filthy sperm and propagated the family. That was good, because it meant that one day, revenge could come, but only when somebody strong enough to seek it came along.”
Scott was about to continue, but then he held out his open palms and nodded in Bri
an’s direction. “Any questions now? Any more half-hearted, self-pitiful ‘whys’? Or is it starting to make sense now?”
Brian’s throat felt like a vice grip was wrapped around it. His arms buzzed with adrenaline and fear. Scott was insane. Completely insane. “I don’t know what you think I have to do with this, but—”
“Brian, you are everything to do with this,” Scott said, smiling. “You are this. The rat spread its filthy spawn and the generations went on and on and on, and so too did Harold Harvey’s secret letter. It’s only today, four hundred years later, that the two families should come together again, after deviations all over the world.” Scott held up a crinkled, ancient-looking yellow piece of paper. The writing on it was fading away, and it was barely readable at first glance.
But there was one word he could definitely read clearly, right from all these feet away, through his watery eyes and in the dim light of the room.
“Little Joseph named the little rat. Added it to his father’s letter. And it didn’t take me long to find you when I knew what I was looking for.”
But no matter how much the little rat run,
One day, today, justice is finally done.
Scott folded the paper up and stuffed it back in his hoodie pocket, but the name was clearly engrained in Brian’s vision, still there when he blinked, and when he looked around.
McDone is the rat.
Brian noticed a movement in the corner of his eye on the left of the room.
“Ah,” Scott said, smiling as he looked up at Hannah and Davey. “Just in time.”
Hannah’s foot, dangling down towards the bath, started to twitch.
“It’s time for you to choose, Brian,” Scott said, holding on to the rope. “Choose like Harold Harvey was forced to choose. I want you to feel the pain your rat ancestors caused my ancestor. I want you to feel it—live with it—for years.”
Brian shook his head. He was a descendant of the “rat” that Scott described; all this time, it was all so personal. All just one big moral lesson for him. One twisted 17th Century grudge.
