The Bug - Episode 1

by Barry J. Hutchison

  THE BUG: EPISODE ONE

  By Barry J. Hutchison

  Copyright © 2014 by Barry J. Hutchison

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published worldwide by Dark & Sinister.

  www.barryhutchison.com

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  Also by Barry J. Hutchison

  The Bug - Episode 2

  The Bug - Episode 3

  The Bone House

  CONTENTS

  FRANKLIN, MASSACHUSETTS, USA

  GLASGOW, SCOTLAND

  BENIDORM, SPAIN

  MARTIN MARSHALL'S FLAT, GLASGOW, SCOTLAND

  DCI ROBERT HOON'S OFFICE, GLASGOW, SCOTLAND

  MARTIN MARSHALL'S FLAT, GLASGOW, SCOTLAND

  THE RODGER'S FLAT, GLASGOW, SCOTLAND

  MARTIN MARSHALL'S FLAT, GLASGOW, SCOTLAND

  GLASGOW NW POLICE HQ, GLASGOW, SCOTLAND

  FRANKLIN, MASSACHUSETTS, USA

  24th MAY, 8:47 AM

  It's Tuesday morning. Eight-forty-five-ish. Thereabouts. We're stuck in traffic on the way to school. Again. Every day I say we need to start leaving earlier. Every day we don't quite get around to it.

  The car's hot, even with the windows rolled all the way down. Horns blast all the way down Washington Street. It's the heat, the damn heat. We're not used to it up here. It makes people crazy. Even the air-conditioning has given up the ghost. The hot air it blasts at me when I switch it on feels like laughter in my face.

  At least the kids are quiet. Bradley's deep into some handheld video game. He's got that fire in his eyes that nowadays only seems to come when he's shooting pixel people in the head. Claire's reading, even though reading in the car usually makes her throw up.

  “You sure that's a good idea, honey?” I ask. “Don't want you blowing chunks before you get to school.”

  “It's OK, I only get sick if the car's actually moving,” she says without looking up, and I can't really argue with that. Don't even know how long we've been sitting here. Longer than usual, and there's no sign of the traffic even starting to move.

  I straighten my arms and push myself back in my seat, trying to fend off the back cramps before they can start. It turns into a stretch, which leads on to a yawn. That's what I get for staying up late and shooting pixel people in the head. Still, it was a gratifying experience. I can see why Bradley's so hooked.

  There's a movement in the car, just below my line of sight. I look down at my lap, and that's when I see it.

  That's when I see the bug.

  It's dark and shiny. And big. Real big. About the size of my iPhone, maybe a little bigger still. It's on my thigh, right by the steering wheel. Even through my trousers I can feel its spindly legs trip-trapping against my skin.

  I gotta admit, insects aren't really my strong point. I don't like them. In fact, I loathe the creepy-crawly little bastards. My natural instinct is to bludgeon them on sight with whatever happens to be closest to hand.

  But I'm not bothered by this one. I gaze down at it and get the distinct feeling that it's gazing back up. But I'm not afraid. Not a bit. There's no revulsion, no disgust, no urge to smash it with my shoe. The bug is just there, but in my head it's like it has always been there, right there on my lap. Gazing up. Nothing for me to worry about.

  I blink and it vanishes. There one second, gone the next.

  I don't know how, exactly, but I guess it must crawl inside me, because first I can feel it, then I start to hear it. Chittering. Whispering. Telling me to do things. Terrible things.

  To my kids.

  I watch them in the rear view mirror, clicking buttons, flipping pages. Click-click, flip-flip. They don't look up, don't acknowledge me. Drive them this damn road every day and they never acknowledge me. I watch them in the mirror, and the bug keeps whispering softly in my head.

  A car horn blasts. The woman in the 4x4 behind me points angrily ahead. The traffic is on the move. I grip the wheel and grit my teeth and lurch us as quickly as I can towards the school. I turn the radio up loud. The kids complain, but the bug stays quiet. I can still feel it though, wriggling around inside me.

  My hands shake all the way to the front gate. I brake hard and the seatbelt goes tight across my chest.

  “Steady,” Claire says, sounding just like her mother.

  “Go or you'll be late,” I tell them. Have to get them out of the car. Have to get them away. They gather their bags and I wave them goodbye. No kisses. Not today. The bug won't let me.

  I watch them walk – not run, why don't they run? – through the gates and up towards the front door. Other kids swarm in the doors beside them. I keep watching until they're all inside. Keep watching until long after all the other parents have left.

  I move to drive away, but then I hear the bug begin to whisper again, its voice soft but urgent in my brain. It tells me my children are careless. Tells me they've forgotten something. Tells me I should bring it to them.

  The door beside me opens. Was that me? I try to fight, to resist, but then I'm standing on the sidewalk, and my feet are taking me to the back of the car. The trunk opens with a squeak. There's not much in there. A couple of scrunched up carrier bags, a pair of running shoes I bought in January and have only worn once.

  My eyes fall on the tire iron. I look at it for a long time, listening to the bug as it squirms and whispers, whispers and squirms.

  This is good, it says. These are the things a good daddy does.

  The iron is heavy in my hand, the pitted metal rough against my skin. There's a clunk as the trunk closes, although I don't remember doing it.

  Now bring it to them, the bug says, and its squirming makes my face go hot and my insides itch. Bring it to them, and show them what we do to careless little children.

  So I bring it. And I show them.

  God forgive me, I show them.

  GLASGOW, SCOTLAND

  24th MAY, 7:42 PM

  There is a woman on television and she is looking at me and she is a whore. She says words I do not like to hear. They give me the bad feeling and make me itch on the inside until I cannot listen to them anymore. I press the button and the television goes dark and the room goes dark, but I know she is still there, inside the television, looking at me and speaking words I do not like to hear.

  I get up from the chair and do not look at the television and walk four steps to the window. The window is dirty on the outside but clean on the inside. Outside is the street. It is dark, like the television is dark.

  There is a woman on the street and she is laughing at me and she is a whore, like the woman on the television is a whore. Like all of them are whores.

  I shout at the woman on the street but she does not look up. I shout until she has walked all the way along the street, past the blue door and the red door and the door I do not like to look at. I shout until my throat burns, but the woman who was just right there on the street is not there anymore.

  I walk four steps to the chair and press the button and the television is no longer dark. The woman is back looking at me and smiling now, smiling now, smiling now. Her name is written on the screen in yellow letters on a dark blue background. Her name is written exactly like this: Lacey Crane.

  Lacey Crane is a whore.

  And whores must be punished.

  * * *

  Martin Marshall hovered
just inside the yellow and black rectangle of DO NOT CROSS tape, doing his best to keep out of everyone's way. The cold was in about him, jabbing at his kidneys and grabbing at his balls. He was thinking about his old school careers advisor, wishing he would traipse round the corner now, so he could punch him right in the fucking face.

  Join the polis, Martin. You'll like the polis. Being in the polis is magic.

  Oh aye. Magic.

  “What a fucking night.”

  “Christ,” Marshall yelped, head whipping round. DCI Hoon stood on the other side of the tape, hands in his pockets, eyes on the guys in the white paper suits. The street light above him turned his pock-marked face into a landscape of shadowy craters. Big Boaby Hoon, wi' a face like the moon.

  “No' quite, son.” Hoon's eyes left the paper suits and went to the two sheets lying side by side, a few feet apart on the ground, two someone-sized lumps beneath them. “What we got?”

  “It's a belter, this one, sir. Way, way out of my league.” He blew out his cheeks. “Don't know where to start, really.”

  “Aye, well it’s been a night of belters for some of us, Detective Inspector. Half of Glasgow’s leathering seven shades of shite out of the other half. The whole city’s gone mental.”

  “Whole world. Hear about that business with the school in the States? Dad and his two kids.”

  Hoon nodded grimly. “Drugs. Bet it's drugs. But this is getting us nowhere. Who's our victim?”

  “Right, well, we're actually doing all right there, as it happens.” Marshall fumbled open his notebook, his hands shaking - only partly from the cold. “Young lassie. Just turned twenty-four this month, according to her driving license.”

  “Name?”

  Marshall angled the book towards the light and tried to decipher his own scratchy scrawl. “Lacey,” he announced. “Crane. Lacey Crane.”

  For the first time since arriving on scene, the Chief Inspector looked his way. “What... the Yank bird? Off the telly?”

  A pause. A pointless glance at the notebook. “Um... I don't... I don't know.”

  “Aye you do,” Hoon said, badger eyebrows meeting in the middle. “Blonde haired piece. Does the weather. Pretty wee thing.” He rocked back and forth on his heels. “Probably no' any more, mind you.”

  “Aye, well, you can say that again.” Marshall scribbled in his pad. “Weather,” he said, his pen scratching the word onto the paper. “I'll get someone looking into it.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “Other one?”

  “The other victim.”

  “What other victim?”

  A slab of a hand emerged from a pocket. A sausage finger jabbed past the guys in the white paper suits. “That other victim.”

  Marshall blinked.

  “For fuck's sake. The sheet. The other sheet.”

  “Oh, right, the other... aye, sorry, sir, it's been a long... The other sheet.” Marshall shook his head. “No,” he said. “That's her, too.”

  “What? What are you—?”

  “That's the thing, sir. She's been, uh... She's been cut in half.”

  The badger eyebrows crawled halfway up Hoon's forehead. Air whistled through his yellowed teeth. “Aye? Jesus. That's a new one.” He nodded in the direction of the sheet-covered mounds. “What's top and what's bottom?”

  “No, that's not what I... It's not...” Marshall stammered, then gave up trying to find the words. He raised a hand and pointed instead, first to one sheet, then the other. “Left half. Right half.”

  Hoon didn't say anything at first, just stopped rocking on his heels, slipped his other hand out of his pocket, clenched his jaw then let it relax. Even when he did speak, almost half a minute later, it wasn't anything worth writing home about.

  “Bollocks.”

  “Funny,” said Marshall, not smiling. “That's what I said.”

  “That's no’ possible. No way. No way that's possible.”

  “Apparently it is, sir,” Marshall told him, with the look of someone who'd seen first-hand precisely how possible it was. “And, well, you see, the thing is...”

  Hoon turned to him. “What?”

  Marshall looked across to the sheets, both of them washing-powder-ad white. “The cut in half thing?” he said. “That's not even the weirdest bit.”

  BENIDORM, SPAIN

  24th MAY, 11:22 PM

  “He was, I swear. He was just like him. Shut your eyes and he… Alan!”

  “Hmm?”

  “I'm saying if you shut your eyes he could've been Elvis.”

  “Aye,” admitted Alan, who already had one eye closed as he attempted to negotiate a key into the hotel room door lock, “but open them and he could've been a baby hippo. Did you see the size of him?”

  “Well he was big towards the end, Elvis, wasn't he?”

  “Not that big, Barbara. Graceland isn't that big.”

  With a triumphant yelp Alan finally slid the key into the lock and wrestled his way into the room. The rattle and clunk of barely-functional air-conditioning filled the corridor, before Barbara stumbled in and closed the door behind them.

  As holiday rentals went, it wasn't the best, but it was cheap and near the beach, and there was a different sound-a-like show on every night of the week. It had been Tom Jones yesterday. Alan was partial to a bit of Tom Jones, but had been disappointed that Elvis tonight had turned out to be the same fella in a different wig.

  He hoped the guy didn't score the hat trick tomorrow. It was Shirley Bassey night. He shuddered at the mental image.

  All thoughts of tomorrow were pushed aside when Barbara stepped in close. The lights were out, but the moonlight through the window sparkled in the eyes that had hypnotised him almost two decades ago. The face around them may have aged, but the eyes hadn't changed at all.

  Barbara's arms slipped around his waist and he pulled her in against him. “You're drunk, Mrs Roger,” he told her.

  “You bake that tack,” Barbara replied, throwing in a comedy hiccup for good measure. “Well tiny bit, maybe. You want to go to bed?”

  Alan gave an exaggerated yawn. “Good call. I'm pooped.”

  Barbara slapped him playfully on the shoulder. “Funny guy. I'm not letting you off that easy. Go get into bed. I need to pee.”

  With a peck on Alan's lips, Barbara dashed for the bathroom and hurriedly closed the door behind her.

  Alan slumped down on the bed and began trying to solve the enigma that was his shoelaces. He had to pull a bit, he knew, but right now he was somewhat vague on exactly which bit that was.

  “There's a cockroach in here,” called Barbara, her voice muffled by the door. “Big bugger, too.”

  “Tell it to look the other way.”

  “I'm going to hit it with my shoe.”

  “Or that,” said Alan, flopping backwards on the bed. “Either works.”

  The effort of trying to figure out his shoelaces – not to mention the eight pints of cheap Spanish lager - had taken its toll. The ceiling, with its wonky fan and grinding air-con began to spin around him.

  Alan draped his arm across his face, covering his eyes. The world bobbed and lurched and spun out of control, and his mouth filled with the sour tang of pre-vomit saliva.

  “Hurry up, Barbara,” he urged, swallowing back his nausea. “I might need in there.”

  But before his wife could even answer, Alan began to snore.

  * * *

  Alan awoke with a start, a headache, and absolutely no idea where he was. It took a full thirty seconds for the racket of the air-con to bring everything flooding back. He patted the bed on either side of him. Cool and empty.

  “Barbara?”

  He tried to sit up, but made it as far as his elbows before the world started to spin again. The bedside clock was displaying… numbers. Yeah, he was almost positive they were number. It took him a few attempts to figure out the finer details.

  3:17am.

  Elvis had left the building – with some difficulty, as the
door was quite narrow – at 11pm. They'd come straight back to the apartment after that, so that was… what? He tried to calculate the time, but settled in the end for ‘ages’.

  “Barbara?”

  Silence.

  With a groan of effort, Alan sat all the way upright. He perched on the end of the bed, gripping the mattress, waiting for the sensation of sea-sickness to wash all the way over him.

  “Oh Jesus,” he muttered, kneading the bridge of his nose. The Spanish booze may have been cheap, but the price he was paying now seemed disproportionately high.

  It took a couple of attempts to get to his feet, but he was mobile immediately, stumbling through the gloom with one arm held out before him and no real means of applying the brakes.

  The bathroom door rose up to stop him. He bumped against it, spent a few panicked seconds wondering what the Hell it was, then knocked gently.

  “Barb?” he said. “You still in there?”

  He pressed an ear to the wood. There was no sound from within the bathroom. He turned and glanced around, in case he'd unwittingly shuffled past his wife on his way across the room, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  “You there, Barbara?” he said again, louder this time. He tried the handle. It turned, but the bathroom door remained closed. “Locked,” Alan muttered. He knocked again. “I say it's locked, Barb. You've locked the door.”

  He listened again, more intently this time, concern cutting through the hangover haze. For a moment he thought he heard… something. A gasp, maybe. The squeak of skin on cracked tiles. Had she fallen? What if she’d fallen and couldn’t get up?

  “Shit.”

  Alan sized up the door. Like everything else in the room it looked flimsy and tired. He lined himself up. One good kick and it would…

  But what if Barbara was on the other side? What if she had fallen, was lying there now, right behind the door?