Something Wicked Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Unknown

  “I’ll be back before you know it,” he told her. Then, as a joke, “Don’t wait up.”

  He stroked her short blonde hair but Jane wasn’t laughing. The young couple, at odds. If only boredom alone made these nights long and taxing. She hugged the six-foot bulk of him, and before he could issue the usual warning, Jane did it for him:

  “Lock all the windows and chain all the doors. Keep my phone next to the bed. You really don’t have to keep telling me.”

  Tony rested his chin on top of her head.

  “I worry,” he said. And it was true. They had found another body in the canal.

  She looked up at him and for a moment, he thought she was going to tell him off, accuse him of trying to scare her. The evening news was surely still fresh in her mind.

  Instead, she just said, “I know you do,” and let him go off to work.

  It was a long walk. Downhill on the way, uphill back. Snow and ice still clung to the city, brown sludge and dirty glass. He walked past the Co-op’s golden glow, the pungent chip shop, over the bridge and through Frog Island, the river a weedy tract beneath him, the derelict factories dark on all sides. A bus passed, twenty minutes late and crammed as usual, the reason he would rather walk. Beneath peeling billboards and broken lights, Tony made his way into the city. He passed the old church with the jutting stones, seeing nothing, his thoughts focused only on the Cutter. His fears centred only on Jane.

  Monday had seen the Cutter’s third victim, a secretary from Oadby, a girl who had been working late in the city. Last seen on CCTV heading toward St Margaret’s bus station, another blonde in a pencil skirt, bundled up in puffy jacket against the winter cold. Claire Ellis, that was her name. Tony remembered it from the pages of The Mercury. She was next seen floating in the canal, face down, a short distance from Castle Park. Pencil skirt and jacket intact. No sign of sexual assault.

  This time the Cutter had taken the hands.

  Tony got into work ten minutes early. Swiping his microchipped card to open the gate, he strode across the car park and swiped it again to open the security door, the staff entrance into the basement. He walked down two flights of ill-lit stairs, descending from the living world above like a vampire returning to the tomb, entering a world of night, where cities slept and the day held no jurisdiction.

  Another graveyard shift awaited him. Here was the large underground room that comprised the monitoring station of Panther Ltd., which was, according to the company brochure: ‘the largest independent supplier of alarms, CCTV and security systems in the UK’.

  As Tony made his way down the grit-sprinkled steps, the automatic voice sounded in his ears: “Please close the security door. Please close the security door-” Tony obliged, shutting up the recorded woman, and crossed the threshold into the warmth.

  Cameras watched him with beady eyes as he navigated two more sets of time-lock doors, was buzzed in by the ladies on the day shift, and found himself in the small foyer that passed for a canteen. He stamped slush off his boots and hung up his coat, swapped a handful of coins for a packet of crisps from the outdated vending machine, and then went into the kitchen.

  During Tony’s training, his boss, Mr Griffiths, had informed his newest member of staff (now safely identity- and reference-checked) that by law, there must be two operators at the monitoring station at all times. Tony found his shift partner, Scott Grimshaw, sipping a cup of coffee (yet again, there hadn’t been one made for him, nor would one be offered) and reading the local newspaper. Grimshaw had worked for the company for fifteen years, and it showed. His thin white hair and walking stick, his air of lazy familiarity – a laziness that Tony had noted extended to his work – lent him the authority of shift supervisor rather than an operator. The younger man respected him as a colleague, but the respect was necessary, rather than natural. Grimshaw was an old man, doddering and often annoying. They had little in common - two weeks of night shifts had proven that.

  After exchanging greetings, Grimshaw brought up the subject on everyone’s lips.

  “Those poor girls.” The newspaper rustled as he read. “Three of them now. Wouldn’t have happened in my day.”

  No. In your day, you had the Moors Murderers, Tony thought but did not say.

  “You’d think with the police … findings,” Grimshaw went on, “they’d have caught the bastard by now. Forensics and all that…”

  Tony grunted. “I wish they would. I have a frightened wife at home.”

  And no wonder. Tony considered those police findings, trying to suppress a shudder. A pair of scissors, rusty but well-oiled with blood, left beside the victims’ bodies. The items had lent the killer his name. Each pair of blades had cut something different, severed some grisly trophy from the girls. Tracy Marks, found in an empty shop on Swain Street, missing both her feet. June O’Brien, found a week later by Jewry Wall, her tongue lost to the Roman ruins. And, of course, poor Miss Ellis, who had waved her last farewell…

  The murders were gruesome. The police frantic. The scissors by the bodies a taunt.

  “They’ll catch him. And soon. You’ll see.”

  Tony grunted again, not so sure.

  In the meantime, they had work to do.

  His was a world of screens. The screens of their desktop computers were divided into horizontal columns representing different alarms – red for Fire, yellow for Intruder, purple for Panic, green for General Fault, et cetera. A panel of screens lined the wall above a long, curved front desk where the operators sat, their swivel chairs back-to-back. The screens flicked incessantly back and forth between locales, crossing hundreds of miles in the blink of an eye. There were screens that watched residential lawns and screens that watched business locales, the lamp-lit plots of truck stops and steelyards, showrooms and building sites, the untouched snow of industrial estates. There were screens that showed the traffic along Vaughn Way, shops in distant cities, factory car parks, empty loading bays, darkened offices. There were screens surveying sites across Leicester, including the gated car park outside Panther’s own premises. There was even a screen that showed the control centre, the CCTV directed inward, the cameras flipping between the kitchen, the canteen and the time-lock security doors.

  Big Brother is watching you. You are all stars on VDU.

  Tony laughed the notion away, focused on the job at hand. In amongst the bleeps and buzzes, the buzz of the phone and hum of electrics, he was there to provide the human element, a friendly and professional voice to those out there undergoing alarms. The oversensitive roller shutter, the low battery, the lost signal and occasional break in. Often the calls were purely clerical, customers chasing up engineers, rebooking appointments, changing passwords. According to Grimshaw, some guy in a restaurant would occasionally press an under-counter button, either in error or because they were faced by loudmouth yobs. Sometimes, he said, there would be office fires. In every instance, Tony would have to deal with the call, dispatch an engineer, reset the alarm remotely, or, once in a while, call the police. The control room never closed, Grimshaw informed him proudly. Panther ran an around-the-clock service, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year. Crime and electrical faults never slept.

  Tonight would be no different. The shift swap was over, Linda and Kim relinquishing their posts with a grateful sigh. Tony watched them on the screen as they collected their coats from the rack in the canteen and then buzzed them out, their orange-lit shadows snaking towards their cars. Exhaust fumes plumed in the chill, the metal gate slid open and shut, and once more, Tony was down among the dead. The graveyard shift had begun.

  It was seven p.m. and Tony no longer thought about the Cutter. No longer thought about missing hands.

  The phone kept ringing and he kept answering.

  “Panther Security. How can I help?”

  “It’s an unconfirmed alarm. I’ll just transfer your call.”

  “We’re the out-of-hours monitoring staff. You’d really need to talk to your branch about that…�
��

  Calls in and calls out.

  “Sorry to disturb you. The alarm is sounding at Fighting Bull News.”

  “Hello, this is Tony at Panther. I have an automatic fire alarm for you.”

  “No, sir. I’m afraid we no longer monitor those premises…”

  At eight-thirty, there was a lull. The hums and buzzes continued, a background of noise that Tony had quickly grown deaf to, a constant murmur that bled into a relative silence.

  An electronic shriek broke this silence, piercing in its intensity, resounding across the control room with the deathly clamour of a banshee.

  He had yet to grow deaf to the Dead Man’s Handle.

  Panther had installed this shrill device, a high-pitched pre-programmed wail, to ensure the safety of its employees. With who knew how many passwords, entrance codes and personal details stored on Panther’s numerous databanks – the virtual keys to a host of companies, ranging from newsagents to jewellers – it was no wonder security was high. There were several protective measures in place, from panic alarms to automatic lockdowns, to keep those databanks – and the properties they guarded – safe from criminal intrusion. The Dead Man’s Handle was the most immediate of these. The shriek emitted from a little black box set on the desk, midway between the operators. Only a small red button adorned its slightly angled facade. A press of the button silenced the alarm, cut the banshee off mid-scream. The alarm sounded at random intervals, responding to an automated program. Should the button go unpressed, a signal would pass straight to the police, a warning that the staff in the control room had somehow been incapacitated and were unable to silence the alarm. The Dead Man’s Handle was basic but effective, a modern take on the simplest of bell-and-rope techniques. It was also incredibly loud.

  Startled – as he always was by its sudden, strident voice – Tony swivelled in his chair and depressed the small red button. The shrieking stopped at once. Relative silence rushed back in, the hums and buzzes an absurd comfort.

  Behind him, Grimshaw chuckled. He must have heard Tony start from his seat.

  Red-faced, Tony shrugged. “I’ll never get used to that sound.”

  By one a.m, the calls had tapered off. In the relative silence, Tony sat and read a book, yet another fast-paced action thriller, the kind Jane hated – girls, gangsters and guns, but hell, still literature. By three a.m., Grimshaw was asleep. Two weeks in the job and Tony already knew this was the normal state of affairs. It had taken just days for him to realise that he was handling most of the calls, that his colleague’s slight, sly dithering whenever the phone rang usually meant Tony would answer it. Grimshaw was old, sure, but also lazy. The walking stick he brought into work, the way he complained of his hip, were all contrived so that he would never have to make the coffee or jump to catch an incoming call. His excuses failed to convince Tony. And when Grimshaw started snoring behind him, head propped on the back of his chair, it was clear that he was taking liberties, leaving Tony to do all the work.

  What little work there was, anyway.

  I’m not Care in the Community, he wanted to say. I’m not bloody Help the Aged.

  But, being the new boy, he exercised caution, and in the meantime, buttoned his lip.

  He was in this state of bored frustration when the screen next to his desk blinked on. Idly, he turned toward it, taking in the grainy picture, some shadowed yard in black and white, not the watery sodium light of the more advanced cameras. It was January, and more often than not, falling snow or wildlife triggered the surveillance cameras. Sometimes the wind or fluttering moths. Since starting on the job, Tony had seen a whole host of early morning interlopers – rats, birds, rabbits, foxes. The yard was empty, swathed in snow, walled in on three sides. The shadows lay thick, cast by an orange sodium glow, the radiance of nearby streetlights. On one wall was a bricked-up arch, a dark mouth stuffed with night. The grainy image seemed to swirl, pixels and tired eyes lending the impression of movement, making the darkness somehow wormy. Those tracks across the yard – were they footprints? The image was not clear enough to tell. And what were those shapes in the middle of the yard, those two black smudges strewn before the arch? Dead birds? Litter?

  Tony peered closer, frowning.

  No. They were gloves. Gloves some workman had probably dropped when the yard was open. A glance at the right hand corner of the screen, where the postcode blinked off and on, told him that the site was local, some warehouse over on Vestry Street.

  He grunted to himself in weary satisfaction. False alarm. There was no one in the yard.

  Was there? Had he seen a shadow, slipping across the far wall, its source standing just beyond the scope of the camera?

  He rubbed his eyes, looked again.

  No. Of course not. He was tired, seeing things. Surely, there was no one –

  The Dead Man’s Handle shrieked again, startling Tony out of his trance. Cursing the device, he pressed the button to silence it. At his back, Grimshaw snorted, his doze barely disturbed.

  When Tony looked back at the screen, the alarm had timed out. The image switched. Gone.

  He only made the connection later, after his long walk home. Splashed by early morning headlights, Tony made his way up the hill, trudging through the melting snow. His breath steamed a trail past the allotments, the bus stops filled with the huddled shapes of immigrant workers. He trudged past the all-night garage, a truck there filling up on coffee and fuel. At the top of the hill, dawn broke the sky, pink streaked with factory smoke. Like a ghost, like a vampire, he hurried home to bed.

  He snuggled in beside Jane, her skin soft and warm. She murmured at his chilly presence.

  “What time is it? I’ll be late for work…”

  He snuggled in closer, calmed her slumbering words.

  “Same time it always is,” he told her. “Go back to sleep.”

  He drifted off, letting Jane warm him. His mind wandered back to the yard, those grainy shapes under sodium light. Those black smudges strewn before the arch. He no longer thought they were dead birds or litter. Neither did he think they were gloves. The sudden inkling prickled his flesh, stroked him with feathers of ice.

  Not gloves. Hands.

  But that was stupid, wasn’t it? Just sleep deprivation. Paranoia.

  He dismissed the idea and slipped into dreams.

  Two weeks later, the Cutter took his fourth.

  The Leicester Mercury screamed her name, determined, it seemed, to vie with the nationals. It was a Saturday, and Tony and Jane were both off work, one of the rare times that they both occupied their HP sofa, eating chocolate and watching TV. The football was on, West Ham vs. Birmingham, the score nil-nil. When the newspaper dropped on the mat, Tony retrieved it with some reluctance, then stood in the hall, frozen by the headline. Frozen by the photograph, the blonde-haired girl.

  CUTTER STRIKES AGAIN. CITY IN TERROR.

  Her name was Susan Pepper. Pretty name, pretty face. The girl in the picture beamed out at him from some social event, a recent party where serial killers would have been the furthest thing from her mind. A dog walker had found her in an alley off London Road, propped against a spray-painted wall, head hanging loose on her chest. At this stage, the details were scant, but the journalist had shared what few facts there were with obvious relish. Pepper had been a young, unmarried mum. A local girl who worked in a bar. Friendly and well loved. Family devastated. Missed by all. Information could mean a reward. The police had made an official plea.

  Tony read on, paying no mind to the blare of the TV in the next room, the rise in volume proclaiming a goal. He read on even when Jane called him, told him that he was missing the game. He read the article to its conclusion and then hid the newspaper under the stairs, stuffing it under a heap of old coats. He had a shift tomorrow night. Jane would be on her own.

  He returned to the lounge with a counterfeit grin.

  “Someone at the door? West Ham just scored.”

  “Nah. Salesman. Double glazing.”

>   Jane tutted, then spared him a look. “You okay? You look a bit pale.”

  Tony exhaled, sat down beside her. He rubbed the gentle bulge of her stomach.

  “I’m fine, love. Give us a kiss.”

  Jane obliged. He buried his fears in her arms. He would not let his dread infect her. She would hear about the murder soon enough, but not tonight, not tonight.

  So he didn’t tell her how the Cutter had dragged Susan Pepper from her flat on Cank Street, where he’d broken a window at two in the morning. He didn’t tell her that the police were baffled, having found no fingerprints, no telltale signs. He didn’t tell her about the scissors, left bloody and blunt beside the body.

  He didn’t tell her that the Cutter had taken her eyes.

  He watched the football and tried to forget.

  Sunday night and Tony went to work. Entered again that world of screens.

  A notice board filled with the faces of Panther employees hung in the canteen, a cheap thing with stuck-on photographs, passport-sized and mostly faded. Tony found Grimshaw at the display, pasting up the photograph Tony had taken in a small booth in the Highcross shopping centre a couple of days before. His face now obscured the dark-haired, stubble-faced man who had previously occupied his position.

  Out with the old, in with the new. The treadmill never stops turning.

  As if reading his thoughts, Grimshaw turned and offered an apologetic smile, tapping the board with a fag-stained finger.

  “It’s set in stone. You’re part of the company. Too late to escape now.”

  Grimshaw laughed, a sound that held no trace of irony. His breath smelt bad in the cramped surroundings.

  There were few perks here, down among the dead.