Except he wasn’t home…right?
For a moment her stomach churned with doubt. He was with Tyson. She’d heard the message on the machine, right? But what if Tyson was in the throes of some mental breakdown? Maybe Skip had just dropped the boy off moments before she’d come home. What if Kavi was sleeping in bed and that thing was in there with him?
Oh God!
How could she ever live with herself if she knew she’d left him to die? And if she was wrong and it was only the creature then she would gladly cave its head in with the iron poker. She didn’t have a second to lose.
To her right was the front door. It was damaged and around it lay bits of broken glass and wood, but nowhere was the monster that had leapt at her. To her left was Kavi’s bedroom and she headed in that direction.
She was walking on the balls of her feet and going as quickly as she could. If it was there she might be able to sneak up and put its light out forever with a single well-placed blow.
Ruma nudged open the door and gasped. For a moment, she blinked, unable to comprehend what she was seeing. Her initial scan of the room had produced at least one positive result. Kavi wasn’t here. The covers on his bed were still neatly folded the way she’d left them this morning. On the floor, the large plastic container where Kavi kept his Hot Wheels had been dumped on the ground. But instead of a huge pile, the tiny cars were lined up neatly in three tight rows. And hanging over these rows was the man-thing, a toy car clutched in each hand. It was playing with them. Lining them up exactly the way Kavi liked to do. Maybe even the way Tyson had done when he was young. For a moment, the man-thing no longer seemed like a man at all. Suddenly Ruma realized it was a young boy.
It was only when it looked up at her and snarled that she snapped back to reality. She was staring into the infinite depths of its inky, soulless eyes and in her mind’s eye she could see it hovering over her dead body the same way it was hovering over those toy cars.
Ruma raised both arms over her head, the poker scraping the ceiling as she did so. The creature lunged at exactly the same moment. This time Ruma hadn’t quite been expecting that. For a split second, she forgot what had happened in the hallway not five minutes before. She was clubbing a baby bird with a broken wing, that was all.
She was at the top arc of her swing when its jaws closed solidly around her left shoulder. Then a gush of foul smelling liquid jetted from its mouth and Ruma screamed and writhed in agony. Her entire shoulder seemed to melt and that’s when her left arm fell to the floor, twitching, the severed flesh still bubbling under the cotton blouse she was wearing.
But the man-thing was still on her. It would go for her neck in a moment and then it would all be over. In her right hand was the poker and through the blinding pain she stuck the point against its throat and rammed it home with everything she had. The creature let out a hoarse cry and fell to the floor. This time, Ruma didn’t hesitate. Up went the poker before she sent it arcing through the air and into that thing’s skull.
Spittle flew from her lips as she hit it again and again. Soon the seams in its skull had come apart completely and a blackened, sickening mess that might once have been a brain came spilling out. Even now its hands continued to claw at the ground, pulling itself toward her. Her last swing connected with the vertebrae at the back of its neck. There was a noise like dry twigs being snapped over someone’s knee and then finally it lay still.
She was exhausted and bleeding excessively from a gaping wound where her arm had once been. Ruma collapsed, her severed arm lay beside her and she looked at it queerly. Slowly the adrenaline was seeping out of her system and with it came the onset of excruciating pain and the stark realization that if she didn’t do something quick, that creature wouldn’t be the only one lying dead on the floor.
Every movement sent lightning bolts of pain coursing through her body. Slowly Ruma rolled onto her good side and was propping herself up with the poker when something drew her attention. In the dim light of the room she could almost barely make them out, but then again she didn’t really need to because she could hear them and there probably wasn’t a person on earth who didn’t know exactly how they sounded.
Flies.
She wasn’t sure how they’d gotten in nor how they had caught the dead creature’s scent so quickly, but here they were, dozens of them.
They were landing on the creature’s shattered head, seemed to be melting into it. And it couldn’t have been longer than a minute before that head stopped looking like a torn sack filled with bloody meat. No, it was starting to fill out, to look like a head again and the more flies that landed the more its skull seemed to stitch itself back together.
Ruma had begun trying to wave them away with her hand.
She stopped abruptly when she saw the thing’s fingers start to twitch.
“But I killed you,” she said out loud and imbedded in her tone was the sense that some golden rule had been broken. The creature was cheating.
Get up, Ruma! Get up and get out of here as fast as you can!
Ruma clamored to her feet. Her intention had been to buy herself some more time by whacking at it before she fled.
The creature vetoed that when its hand grabbed the poker before Ruma could firmly plant her feet. But strangely she wasn’t thinking about herself anymore. She was thinking about Kavi. Wondering if he was with Tyson. Hoping he was safe. If there was such a thing as safe from a thing like this.
The creature rose up on two spindly arms. Its head grotesquely misshapen. One eye was gone completely and most of its teeth were broken, but it was smiling. It could see the look of terrified disbelief plastered on Ruma’s face and that made it happy.
• • •
Hunter was sliding the car into drive when he heard the loud booming sound coming from Ruma’s townhouse. Then he noticed the odd shape of her door. From here it looked like it was bowing outward. And was that light from inside spilling out through a series of cracks? For a moment Hunter wasn’t sure what to do. He sat watching that door transfixed, somehow expecting it to keep pushing out like some great lung until it exploded. But it didn’t. The house was quiet and Hunter nearly talked himself into driving away. It didn’t take a genius to realize something was fundamentally wrong. Drawing on an increasingly distant and vague sense of humanity, he found himself stepping out onto the cold, hard pavement and moving toward Ruma’s house.
If he had been thinking clearly he might have had time to talk himself out of it. He might have listened to that little voice growing louder in his head now telling him not to interfere. Telling him to get back into his car and drive away.
Brenda?
The townhouse was just ahead of him now and he could see how badly the door had been splintered. Only something very strong or very angry could have caused the kind of damage Hunter was seeing.
He brought his eye to one of the cracks and peered in. A long hallway with what looked like rooms on either side, but no Ruma. He was about to call her name when he heard an unearthly shriek. In med school he had read about battlefield surgeries during the Civil War. Where surgeons had been forced to perform amputations without any anesthetic because the number of casualties were astronomical. Those haunting shrieks of pain had stayed with those doctors for the rest of their lives and Hunter thought he knew now what they had tried in vain to describe.
He kicked at the door. It was slowly coming apart. Too slowly. Finally with a well-placed blow, he was inside and running down the long corridor. On the wall were pictures of a woman and her young son. Ruma. A man in some of them. Was that Tyson? No time, he scanned each room as he passed. Kitchen. Family room. Bathroom. The whole time aware of the disquieting silence and what it might mean.
There was one last room at the end and he was certain that was where the horrible scream had come from.
Hunter stood in the doorway, his eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness. Then the muted shape of a body lying on the floor began to come into view. Light brown skin, black hair.
The body was horribly mutilated, but still he knew it was her. If only because she’d been wearing that same suit when they’d met earlier tonight. Hunter had seen his fair share of dead bodies before, that was nothing new, but this.
Less than an hour ago they had been speaking and now…now Ruma barely looked human.
Hunter’s pulse raced, but his fear was being dulled by guilt. If he’d only got here sooner.
You’d be dead too, Brenda’s voice said from somewhere inside him.
Whoever had done this was still here and the realization chilled him. He was turning to run away when a thin band of light from the hallway cut across the bed. Something was lying there, hiding in and amongst the child’s plush toys. But what really caught Hunter’s attention were the thing’s eyes: black and soulless, they were shark’s eyes. Hunter blinked and the next thing he knew that thing that had done those horrible things to Ruma sprang from the bed and knocked him off his feet. Hunter’s head hit the floor and he saw stars dancing before his eyes. But even through all that haze he could still make out his attacker; a hideous creature with a faintly human face and the deformed body of a monster. In another second he would look like Ruma, torn open and spilled out onto the floor. He had seen how it had shattered the door and knew he didn’t stand a chance of escaping.
The creature was studying him with those two bottomless eyes. Its head tilted the way a dog’s head might tilt when it isn’t sure what to do.
It’s jaw came slowly unhinged and Hunter saw rows of serrated triangular teeth, all bent back and Hunter’s first thought was that whatever this was the shape and angle of those teeth told him one thing. This was a carnivore. He expected those teeth to clamp down on his neck with excruciating pain and for the world to go black shortly after, but that never happened. The creature leaned forward, extended a thick putrid tongue and dragged it up his cheek. Then in a blur of speed its long arms snapped out, grabbed hold of the door frame and propelled it from the room. Hunter could hear it grunting as it clawed its way down the hall. He had just enough time for one quick glance before he saw it disappear into the night.
It was only then that he noticed instead of legs that it had a short little tail. And seeing that tail jogged something loose from his research into Brenda’s past. When the police had found young Tyson clinging to life with that plastic bag around his head, hadn’t they also found the remains of his older brother, Alexander, sitting placidly on a child’s bed surrounded by plush toys? And hadn’t that brother suffered from sirenomelia; a rare genetic mutation where a child’s legs fused in the womb to produce a tail-like appendage? But that child had died years ago, Hunter thought. That couldn’t possibly be him.
Chapter 29
The man at the desk didn’t look up from the magazine he was reading until Tyson stepped into his light.
“N’I help you?”
“I’m here to see my wife.”
A strand of the man’s thinning hair slid out of place as he fixed Tyson in the crosshairs of his beady little eyes. He licked the pads of his fingers and coaxed the rebellious hairs back into place. There was a ledger beside him with bold black letters which read “Kings County Medical Examiner.” He pulled back the cover and leafed through pages the way a hotel clerk might leaf through a register.
“Her name?”
“Ruma Barrett.”
The clerk ran his finger down the page and then stopped.
“No Ruma Barrett here. I have a Ruma Chaudhuri, and a Rumena Carter, but—”
“Chaudhuri,” Tyson replied, trying to shrug off the giant fist that was squeezing his insides to jelly. The man with the thinning hair rose, the expression on his narrow little face had inexplicably morphed from indifference to sympathy. Tyson wondered if he’d seen the look of pain on Tyson’s face and could find little solace in playing the asshole anymore.
The clerk’s hands trembled as he closed the register.
“Right this way, sir.”
Tyson followed the man through a set of wide double doors which read ‘authorized personnel only,’ when it dawned on him. That hadn’t been empathy Tyson had felt trickling out of the man’s pores like hot wax. The clerk was frightened. Maybe it had something to do with the state of Ruma’s body. He could see it now, laid out before him on a cold metal table. She had been zipped into a plastic bag like a sandwich. The bag was opaque and Tyson noticed the pink and brown mound of flesh within. Not enough yet for any kind of positive ID, which was the reason he’d been called in the first place, but more than enough to tell that something awful had happened to her. A sick feeling rose up from the depths of his bowels and he fought to suppress it. The clerk pulled at the zipper and mercifully stopped just shy of her neck. Tyson could see enough to know he didn’t—or couldn’t—take seeing anymore of the woman he had once loved with every inch of his soul. He could feel the clerk’s shifty eyes burning into him. The man was waiting for his confirmation.
“That’s her,” Tyson said, numbness running down his spine and into his legs.
“I’ll just need you to sign of few documents before you go. Just a legal formality really. So we can confirm this is your…ex-wife.”
The words stung and managed to add a level of morbid finality that somehow surpassed seeing Ruma’s mangled body, lying on a cold drafty slab.
Tyson nodded absently. His mind was snuggling itself into a warm memory which right now felt about as welcoming as a down-filled bed. He was thinking about the day he had proposed to Ruma. Nearly four months pregnant with Kavi, her belly was already starting to show. They were in Central Park enjoying a beautiful summer afternoon when the music started. You’re the One that I Love, from the musical Grease. Ruma’s favorite. That’s when groups of picnickers had begun to rise and dance, a handful at first, then dozens. By the end, there was well over two hundred of them. The entire thing was magical to watch; all of them moving in unison, each of them fixed on Ruma and the expression of surprise and elation plastered all over her face. The song was nearly over when a little girl emerged from the crowd and handed Ruma a tiny box. In it was a ring and that’s when Tyson asked her to marry him. She’d held her ringed hand in the air, fingers splayed while the sun’s rays had danced off its smooth surface. He had read an article about something called a flash mob back in 2003 and the idea had always stuck with him. Of course, this little ‘idea’ of his had cost him over five grand, but catching Ruma off guard and seeing those tears of joy streaming down her round cheeks had been worth every penny. That day in the park she was radiant and that was how he would always remember her.
“And there is the matter of her personal effects.”
Tyson felt himself jerked back into a stark, cold room and a thin little man with a pointed face.
“Beg you—”
“Her things. What would you like us to do with her things?”
“Where was she found?”
“You’ll have to talk to the cops about that. I’m sure they’ll be in touch.”
I’m sure they will, Tyson thought.
The clerk was holding a manila envelope now and he handed it to Tyson. In his other hand was a clipboard and a pen.
“I need you to sign here, here.” He flipped a page. “And here.”
The envelope was light, which was unusual since Ruma never went anywhere without a purse brimming with crap.
She must have been at home when it happened and that sick feeling seemed to come back all at once.
He up ended the envelope onto the metal table in front of him.
The first item to drop was a long silver chain. Hanging from the end of it was her wedding ring. Unconsciously his hand slipped into the pocket of his jeans, his fingers finding the smooth edges of his own wedding band. He felt himself almost collapse onto the metal table, sobbing uncontrollably.
Even after everything I put you through, he thought. You still never gave up on me.
Tyson cleared his eyes away, distinctly aware of the clerk fidgeting nearby. The envelope conta
ined two more items. The first was a compact. This wasn’t a big surprise. In spite of her natural beauty, she would never leave the house without putting on at least a modicum of makeup. He had made the foolish mistake once of suggesting she was stunning enough without it.
“Would you ever leave the house without your wallet?” she had asked him.
“No, I can’t say that I would.”
“Well, nor would I without putting my face on.”
He looked over at her face, the one peering up at him from between the set of plastic sheets, unable to reconcile the Ruma he’d known and loved and the Ruma lying torn and mangled before him.
The stark and soul shattering reality that she had died because of him could never be reconciled. He would live with the guilt for the rest of his life. His eyes started to fill again with warm salty tears. Through the blur was the manila envelope and the final item to come sliding out. A scrap of paper.
On it was a note, written in Ruma’s hand:
September sixth. Tyson’s nightmares and Brenda’s coma. What are the odds that both started on the same day? Coincidence?
Tyson slipped the items into his pocket. But what could that mean? And how did she know the date his mother had fallen into her coma? Tyson was on his way out of the morgue—mumbling to himself—when he bumped into a man who identified himself as Detective Anderson.
Chapter 30
“Just the person I wanted to see.” Anderson’s bulky frame filled the doorway like some unmovable colossus. His thick hairy fingers were doing a little dance along the door frame. “You saved me having to pay you a visit.”
“It’s been a real bad day so far, Detective.”
“I’d say you’ve had a bad week. I only have a few simple questions for you.”
The reception area of the Kings County Medical Examiners office had a series of plastic fold out chairs and Detective Anderson motioned to two in the corner.
Dark Passage Page 16
