Where The Bodies Rest: A Heart-Stopping Psychological Thriller

by Kate Sten

  The boy walked ahead of his mother, her shadow looming large ahead of him, as she tried to steady a candle dripping with melting wax while keeping up with the young boy.

  ‘Good! Good! Good!’ She shouted out aloud, as she looked at the pile of clothes hanging from a standing rail.

  Her hand paused when she got to one of the shirts. It felt slightly lumpy and uneven. Her eyes focused on Henry and her chest puffed up with burning rage at what she considered to be shoddy work.

  ‘What is this? What the hell is this? How many flipping times do I have to tell you to straighten the arms of these shirts?’ she thundered, slapping him at the back of the head.

  ‘Hands on the table now!’ She commanded forcefully, her eyes tracking his every move.

  Henry sniffled and gnashed his teeth in abject terror of her. He froze in his steps, his chest bursting with anxiety as panic overtook him but there was no choice open to him other than total submission to Camilla's whims.

  His hands were secured to the table with a rope, while she smacked the top of them with the sharp end of the ruler, leaving purple bruises behind. There were howls of anguish. But nobody came to save him from the beatings. Nobody ever did.

  When she was done inflicting pain on him for his perceived wrong doing, Camilla shoved the weeping boy in the dark basement, away from sunlight, food or anything that kept him from completely losing his sanity.

  The place was full of rats. He felt one with its beady eyes crawl over his feet, prompting him to jump in terror.

  Henry woke up in his bed, covered in cold sweat, almost screaming out in terror as the images of a bad memory faded from his eyes. His eyes were still tightly shut and his breathing irregular. Henry pinched his skin so hard that some blood snaked over the tips of his fingernails, making a thick red patch on his gray sweat shirt. His lips moved; they twitched repeatedly, almost as if he was about to become convulsive.

  ‘One, two, three, four…’ He counted, shivering intensely, sweat cascading down the sides of his unnerved face and his grip getting tighter on his stretched skin.

  She had been long locked away in the comfort of a home for the demented, but Camilla was still very much in the adult Henry's head. Her petite, imposing frame was very vivid in the corner of his eye. If he tried to open his eyes long enough, he would probably just about manage to see her poking a finger at his head or creeping up close to him and looking him in the face, unblinkingly.

  Camilla had suffered early onset dementia at the age of fifty four. She had been over to his place for Christmas, her hair all matted and knotted up, fingernails hideously long and untrimmed. She could barely remember who he was or why she was there.

  She was frail, ghost-faced, and draped in black like someone that had just been to a funeral, or a widow in mourning. The green eyes behind the black net flowing down her hat were sad but still cast a willful gaze. They were the only part of her that seemed recognizable to Henry. The sagged bags on either side of her face and the folds of skin on her neck was telling - she had not aged well.

  ‘Can I have a glass of water?’ Her lips moved very slowly and with a great deal of effort.

  Those were probably the kindest words that had ever been directed at Henry from his mothers rancorous lips. He remembered how his skin crawled when his eyes met hers that fateful afternoon. All sorts of vengeful thoughts swam around in his head. He was more inclined to strangle her with his bare hands than to quell her thirst.

  The impulse to wring her neck was almost intractable. It would take every iota of goodness that was left in him to resist those malign urges. Head bent low, and eyes glued to the ground beneath his feet, he poured her a glass of water and retreated almost immediately from her like a vampire escaping the burning beams of sunlight. He was all grown up but in the corner where he stood he could feel a wet patch form between his legs. He had wet himself.

  He was a grown man and his mother who he had not seen in fifteen years had made him piss his own pants. His hands clung to the door frame for dear life, and the eyes in his face remained near catatonic for a good couple of minutes.

  ‘Mom, why are you here?’ He managed to string the words together from a safe distance.

  ‘Mom? I am not your mom.’ Camilla sank deeper into the chair she was sat on, beaming a curious stare at her equally stunned son. ‘For goodness sake I only just met you.’

  ‘Do you know what your name is? What day it is?’ Henry asked inquisitively as he took slow steps towards her.

  ‘What sort of stupid questions are those? Of course I know my bloody name!’ She raised her voice, leaning forward slightly, causing Henry to pause in his steps, scared stiff, in awe of her. ‘I am Camilla Meredith Edwards. You would know that if you had come to the wedding. You stupid, stupid boy.’

  She was confused. But she hadn't been completely consumed by the illness of the brain that had ravaged her once virile body so badly.

  ‘Yes, indeed you are.’ Henry sucked in air, breathing a sigh of relief.

  He had the upper hand. She was not of sound mind. He could finally lock her away somewhere that she would not be able to get out of. He dialed an emergency number and demanded an ambulance and paramedics.

  They were over in a matter of minutes, bundling the aging woman into the back of the ambulance.

  ‘We are so sorry. It is early onset dementia. You should make plans for long term care. Here is a brochure that will help with catering for your mother's needs.’ A female paramedic crammed a brochure into Henry's breast pocket.

  ‘Thank you,’ Henry said, almost smiling at the paramedic.

  A single tear rolled down his face. But it wasn’t tears of anguish. He felt relieved and somewhat ecstatic that the old witch had gotten her just desserts. Poetic justice - he thought to himself.

  EIGHTEEN

  GRACE SALTER

  APRIL 1981, EASTWOOD POLICE STATION

  A stack of thick files sat in a tray, above the counter, next to the telephone, inside a busy police station. The officer behind the desk stood erect, phone in his hands and eyes focused on the dense computer screen ahead of him.

  He did not pay much attention to the people sat on the flimsy benches in the reception area where he worked, answering calls, and taking inquiries.

  ‘I am here for the boy.’ A soft spoken voice rang in his ear.

  ‘What boy? You'll have to be more specific than that!’ The police man snapped impatiently.

  He was surrounded by a lot of work and people to attend to. Vague requests did not sit well with his thinking process or method of operation. In fact, he found that sort of thing incredibly unhelpful.

  ‘Sorry. How thoughtless of me. I work with social services. I am a psychotherapist and I have been asked to assess the boy and possibly draft up a recommendation for where he should be housed. I also moonlight as a foster carer should the occasion arise.’ The slender female pushed a broad smile unto her face.

  ‘And you are?’ The policeman interjected before she could go any further.

  ‘Doctor Grace Salter! Most people just call me Doctor Salter!’ Doctor Salter raised her voice more assertively this time, her fists almost pounding on the counter.

  ‘Right! Doctor S-a-l-t-e-r with an R at the end of it?” The officer raised a brow, his eyes fixated on the screen and stubby fingers pressing on the chunky macintosh keyboard in front of him.

  Doctor Salter shook her head in the affirmative, and leaned closely against the counter, her elbow pointed towards the back of the counter.

  ‘Oh yes. You just popped up on the system. It says you were meant to be here by 11:00 am.’ The officer shook his head and withdrew his fingers from the keyboard. ‘You are late by a good thirty minutes.’

  ‘Sorry about that officer. I couldn’t put off a pre-booked appointment with another priority client.’ Doctor Salter adjusted her glasses, pushing them up the ridge of her nose.

  ‘No harm done, lady. These thing happen, I guess. You are lucky there aren't any other
visitors with approval from somebody that matters. I shall grab you a visitor badge so we don’t confuse you with the detainees.’ The officer joked, bending low to fish a plastic card from the drawers just beneath the bulky computer.

  The plastic card was handed to doctor Salter who promptly pegged it to her polka dot blouse. She was soon handed to a sour-faced female officer who escorted her through a tube-like corridor.

  They crisscrossed the corridors, always veering left each time, till they arrived at a dead end. The female officer stopped in front of a monotone green steel door, pressing her chubby hand on the handle as she fiddled with one of the keys in a bunch. Doctor Salter knew now that they had finally arrived where they needed to be. Her feet were starting to ache in the tight shoes that she had squeezed her size seven feet into.

  ‘You may go in now.’ The female officer pulled the door open, waving a guiding hand at a slightly hesitant Doctor Salter.

  The boy shuddered when she approached the cell. She was a small woman of similar build to his mother, his abuser. The lights blanketed her face, obscuring her eyes. He could barely make out her glasses. He hadn't seen sunlight in days, or any kind of light.

  His hands hung over his eyes, shielding them from beams of light that entered the room.

  ‘Henry? Henry Winters?’ She called softly to him, reaching out to touch him on the shoulder.

  He recoiled from her touch, scurried to the farthest end of the cell and hid beside one of the beds, face pasted on his elevated thigh. He would not look at doctor Salter. The beatings he had endured for years impressed on him the instinct to avoid looking people, especially a woman, in the face.

  ‘Where is the switch? Can somebody kill the lights please?’ Doctor Salter raised a hand, beckoning the female officer who had escorted her to Henry's cell.

  ‘Why? The light isn't doing the boy any harm!’ The bulky female officer behind her shrugged.

  Doctor Salter turned sharply, squared up to her and beamed her an intense glare. ‘That boy is clearly averse to the light. He has been locked in a cellar, most likely without any natural light for God knows how long and you think that it is a good idea to flood the room with lights?’

  ‘Okay lady, I get it. Just back away already.’ the robust female officer conceded, shrinking away from conflict with the doctor.

  ‘These four walls. They are tight. They are constricting. These are not the best conditions for an eleven year old that has been exposed to harrowing and abusive conditions for the best parts of his life.’ Doctor Salter stepped sideways, shaking her handbag emphatically at the pudgy police woman.

  The police woman blushed with a reticent grin, dragging her feet reluctantly as she proceeded to locate the light switch. Her finger tapped forcefully on a single switch just outside Henry's cell.

  The lights came off. Henry instinctively avoided the beams of sunlight racing through the single window behind him as if he did not want to be found by the surging rays of light.

  ‘You can relax now. Nobody is going to hurt you. Look at my hands. I am raising them up,’ Doctor Salter dropped her handbag to the ground and slowly approached the withdrawn boy, her palms spread wide open so he could see she had nothing in her hands to strike him with.

  ‘No! No! No!’ Muted squeals bolted from the boy's quivering lips, his back exposed and the bumpy scars on it laid bare.

  Doctor Salter had been livid before she met Henry - She had seen the photos and read his file. Now she was overcome with empathy and resentment towards the woman that had done such a beastly thing to her own son.

  Had she no sense of human compassion? Where was the nurturing side that should have come so naturally to a mother?

  She had no case files for the mother of the boy. She had not been forthcoming when she was questioned by social workers and the police. The monster just grinned and downed her favorite rum without even uttering a single word in apology. The officers knew Camilla Jones well. Some of them had even been inappropriate with her on occasions not admitted to, of course. There was always the uncomfortable avoidance of her gaze by male officers, and sometimes female ones as well, whenever she got temporarily detained for soliciting. The male officers often let her off the hook for one favor or the other - those favors being of the amorous kind.

  ‘Henry, I am Doctor Salter. I am here to help,’ Doctor Salter spoke slowly and calmly.

  ‘Doctor?’ Henry raised his head, looking at the woman in front of him through curious but skeptical eyes.

  ‘Yes Henry, I am a doctor. A head doctor to be exact. I can help you with those shakes and the thing with lights. All you have to do is take my hands.’ Doctor Salter reached out to the fearful lad in the dirty ash PJ bottoms.

  He could make out the outlines of Doctor Salters's face. She had a round face and a less protruding jaw than the ogre of a woman who he was petrified of. The boy took reassurance in the knowledge of that, and proceeded to crawl on all fours, towards her.

  He had been so emaciated and weakened by starvation that his skin clung tightly to his bones. His eyes were buggy and deep blue. Not a shade of green like his mother's.

  He did not seem to have a shirt on his back.

  Doctor Salter could scarcely believe her eyes. He was in one of the worst states she had ever seen a child in. It was worse than she thought but she was confident that she could fix him - make him hurt a lot less that he already was.

  ‘That's it, little warrior. You are doing great.’ She choked back the tears that was building up behind the glass of her spectacles.

  His knees buckled under his own weight when he was just within reach of her, collapsing into her outstretched arms as he fell. She caught him and raised alarm. ‘Ambulance! Call an ambulance!’

  The police woman who stood guard outside rushed into the room and immediately whipped out a phone. She hurriedly requested that an ambulance attend the scene. There were paramedics all over the slumped boy in no time, his body wheeled out on a trolley, unto the back of a waiting ambulance.

  ‘I am his Doctor!’ Doctor Salter flashed her hospital ID card.

  ‘You are a psychotherapist? The boy seems to have urgent and critical physical health needs so if you wouldn't mind not getting in our way!’ The lead paramedic on scene snickered, raising his nose at her.

  ‘Budge over, will you? I am coming with you! I also work with social services so you would be obstructing if you got in my way!’ Doctor Salter let herself into the ambulance and strapped herself to a vacant seat beside Henry.

  The paramedic and his crew stood awestruck before finally deciding to leave her be and attend to the boy. The lead paramedic gripped the side of the stretcher Henry was laid flat on, swung his head sideways, just enough to catch a glimpse of the feisty redhead that had invaded his ambulance, ‘You don’t do anything. You don’t say anything. You merely sit there like a ghost in the back of this damn ambulance and observe. Are we clear?’

  ‘Crystal! You wont get a peep out me. These lips are zipped,’ Doctor Salter pulled an invisible line across her face, mimicking a moving zip.

  Legs crossed, eyes static, and hands locked together above her thighs, Doctor Salter muttered a silent mantra - the words audible to only herself - like somebody meditating or enthralled in deep soliloquy.

  ‘Someone shove the cannula in. We need to get his glucose up, keep him from crashing any further. His vitals are down,’ The lead paramedic barked orders at his crew.

  His limp, emaciated hand was raised, and hands crisscrossed over his tight skin, searching for a viable blood vessel to feed a drip into.

  ‘I cant find a vein. They seem to be too thin or fragile to hold a cannula in,’ A subordinate female paramedic raised her eyes, her voice shaky and rattled.

  The lead paramedic jumped to her side, cupped the boy's chin in his hand and looked his slumped body over. ‘Yes - atrophy, thin, weak, contracted superficial veins and a faint heart beat. Somebody fetch some HMB. We are going to need to administer that straight away, right a
fter I have secured a viable blood vessel.’

  ‘Someone put a damn oxygen mask on him already. Assuming you lot can manage that. You seem to be off your game today! Wake the fuck up, will you, the both of you!’ The lead paramedic raged at the other dopey-eyed sleep deprived paramedics. It wasn’t the angry kind of rage. It was the good kind - The righteous kind of rage that the people around him were not giving a damn as much as they should have been.

  ‘Right away, sir!’ The female paramedic behind him chirped, shaking her head twice in a desperate struggle to keep her tired eyelids from rolling down.

  She had produced a bottle with clear liquid in it, and a syringe laid out meticulously on a silver tray. The inscription on the label had almost been rubbed out, the words barely legible. You could just about make out the letters - HMB - if you squinted hard enough.

  ‘Got it, sir. Do you have the cannula in?’ The female paramedic swallowed down some thick spit.

  ‘Just about managed to find one. It is truly horrific and grotesque - what this poor lad has had to endure to get to this state. You see these sort of things on the TV, in those aid adverts for foreign countries but you never expect that something like this could happen on your doorstep. Horrifying! Just horrifying!’ The lead paramedic shook his head sympathetically, as he carefully picked up the syringe and injected a measured amount of fluids from the HMB bottle into the cannula.

  Some saline was later attached to Henry's left hand. The one with a vein that had not been affected by his eroded muscle tissue.

  ‘Do you think he will make it?’ Doctor Salter asked, her face sullen and her eyes sincere.

  ‘Hopefully, if all goes as expected and if there are no further complications, or underlying side effects of his severe undernourishment then we could expect nothing short of a full recovery.’ The lead paramedic managed a courteous smile.

  A soft sigh percolated from Doctor Salter's lips, her body slouched to one side, hands scraping back loose hair that ran down her face. She pulled the hair away from her line of sight and a vaguely content smile shun through. ‘That is jolly good news. You lot are absolute miracle workers. I genuinely feared that the prognosis would have been dire indeed.’