by Will Molinar
Murder Haven: Rogues Gallery
Book Four
By
Will Molinar
Edited, Produced, and Published by Writer’s Edge Publishing 2015
All rights reserved.
© 2015 Will Molinar
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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Other Books by Will Molinar
* * * MURDER HAVEN SERIES* * *
Den of Thieves
Gallows Pole
Death’s Reckoning
Rogues Gallery
Lair of Killers
Prologue
Clang! Clang! Clang!
The noise echoed down the long, dusty hallway. The barest amount of light, its source a lone torch in a rusty sconce, gave the false impression of life and the barest glimmer of hope in the decrepit environ.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
A man groaned. “Of all the damn nights...”
Warden Harris swung his feet off the desk and sat up. He hacked out a wad of phlegm, just missing his scraggly beard, and pushed his red hair out of his face. He had almost been asleep, about to nod off into the bliss of oblivion.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
“Damn it all! Fernando! Come here, man! Fernando!”
The warden of Sea Haven’s asylum heaved a sigh and cursed. He shook his head to clear the numbness of potential sleep. Muttering another curse, he stretched.
“Fernando! Get moving, man! I need you.”
The red headed man yawned and rubbed his freckled face. He started moving towards his office door. If that fool wasn’t where he was supposed to be, there’d be another beating to hand out. Blasted freak. As he neared the door and reached for the handle, the door burst open, and the warden had to jump back lest he be hit.
“Damn it, man, watch it.”
Bent over with a prodigious humped back, Fernando stepped in and almost collided with Harris. His big toothed, gapped mouth, massive head nodded up and down like a water buoy. Harris backed up further and covered his mouth. Fernando’s smell was considerable.
“W-w-Warden Harris.”
“Shut up. Where were you? I called to you earlier.”
The hunchback looked around, his twisted intellect pondering. “I w-w-was….”
“Never mind. Inmate 47 is acting up again. This is three nights in row. I want this behavior curtailed. Quiet him, or I’ll have you disciplined again. Do you understand?”
The huge headed nodded with vigorous energy. “Y-y-yes! I go.”
“Get going you fool! I have a headache.”
Fernando dashed off down the hallway, dragging his left leg. It was a birth defect, much like all of his physical limitations, but it did not slow him. He snatched an unlighted torch off the wall and shoved the torch into the fire with a stuttered step. He marveled at the way the fire consumed the end, his bug eyes widening.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
“Fernando! Get moving this instant! I want that inmate quieted now!”
Fernando nodded again, even though the warden couldn’t see the motion, and ran towards the Troubled Ward, where Sea Haven Asylum kept the most dangerous inmates. It was a place he knew well, for the rest of the attendants sent him there often because of both his preternatural strength and their lack of compassion.
A few of the other attendants were awake and stared in the open room. Several doorways led into the wide cavern with dozens of cages hanging from the ceiling. The sleepy eyed attendants spoke to one another in hushed tones, glancing at Fernando as he limped past the swinging cages. The inmates inside were agitated by the loud banging and began to cry and scream. The attendants frowned and started forward with their long staves to quiet them as Fernando went to 47’s cage.
The hunchback carried a metal rod as long as his crooked leg and thick as his brawny forearm. Padding covered the top, meant to subdue and not injure. He eyed the cage and saw the inmate banging a food tray against his bars.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
The other high risk inmates joined in on the maddening cries of inmate 47, and soon a cacophony of the damned rang out in the room. Fernando grimaced and winced at the incredible wave of sound. The crooked toady weaved between the swinging cages and other attendants who tried and failed to quiet the inmates.
“Shut it, you!”
“Stop this nonsense, all of ya!”
“Quit it! Hey!”
One cage dweller, an old lady, swiped at one of them. Fernando’s colleague yelled out and thumped his stave on the inmate’s head to quiet them. The gray haired woman cowered and sat back.
Inmate 47 screamed and started in again. Clang! Clang! Cl—
Fernando whacked the metal food tray, and it tumbled out of the man’s grasp. The inmate exploded in anger and slammed his body forward. He smashed his face into the bars uncaring as his nose snapped. A loud crunch echoed even above the din. Fernando blanched as the man snarled and reached for him.
The hunchback cackled and jumped back. He swung his club and connected with the man’s hands. He didn’t seem to feel the blow. Fernando then tried to steady the tilting cage with his tool, but someone collided with him from behind; another security attendant dealing with the closest swinging cage.
The hunchback’s crippled leg couldn’t stop the sudden shove forward, and against his will, his upper body careened into the cage with the madman. 47 grabbed his collar and yanked hard, smashing poor Fernando’s head into the bars. He was close enough to smell the inmate’s hot, rancid breath against his face. The man gibbered something unintelligible.
Fernando sputtered and tried to work his truncheon into a proper position to fend off his assailant, but the position was too close. Dropping it, he grabbed the bars with both hands and shoved, but the inmate had his hands on the hunchback’s head and proceeded to twist it off his neck.
Fernando mewled like a tortured dog as he realized the depth of the madman’s strength. It was inhuman. He swung his arms in an ineffectual attempt to stop the slow grind of his neck popping. Sinews strained, but 47 cared little. Twisting, pulling, and squeezing his skull with hands made of iron, the madman was inescapable. The inmate wanted to kill.
Fernando’s mouth came open and a pitiful moan escaped his lips. He let go of the bars and grabbed the man’s wrists, but he might as well have been trying to pull off an anchor from its chain. Impossible. No man was this strong. Fernando enjoyed a reputation as one of the strongest handlers in the asylum, but this was something else, a level of physicality beyond his understanding.
The hunchback squirmed and screamed though his breath was waning in the face of the enormous pressure on his head. He couldn’t quite get his mouth open far enough to get a deep breath in. His face was pressed too close against the bars, and he felt the skin of his right cheek bruise and even split apart. The bone would crack soon.
Fernando let go of the madman’s wrists and beat his hands
against the bars. He kicked the cage, and it rocked to and fro. The cage rolled and spun on its attachment.
Then someone cut the rope, and the cage fell. It was lucky for Fernando that it fell to the side and did not crush him. Instead, the landing only jarred his already abused body. His neck jerked hard at the bottom, and he felt as if his head would pop off like a grape from a stem, but inmate 47 loosened his grip. Fernando jammed his hands in between the man’s hands pried them off.
He was free and rolled on his back like an upended turtle. He spent a moment or two listing from side to side until he could get to his knees and stand. 47 was also free and out of the cage, which had broken in the fall. He was causing all kinds of havoc amongst the attendants.
Four of them rushed him, two high on his torso, two at his legs. A common practice when the high risk inmates acted up; but they struggled to get him under control. The madman bellowed in freakish misery and anger, a terrifying sound that made Fernando’s ears hurt. It wasn’t human; it was torn from the abyss. This was a creature from hell. Chaos reigned.
Fernando got to his feet and looked around. The other high risk inmates were inspired by 47’s actions. They gripped their bars, and every cage in the room swung back and forth. It was almost comical, watching them twist and turn in the air, suspended above the ground. They were too far apart to crash into each other, but Fernando felt less secure than he ever had in his life. They would die, all the attendants ripped apart by the mad. He never thought that might’ve happened, but it would unless they got 47 under control fast.
“What the devil!”
Fernando turned his aching head towards the entrance, and saw Warden Harris barging into the room. His red hair flew about his head in a jumble. His face was flushed, and it scrunched up in confusion as if the scene were not happening. Fernando understood how he felt.
But then Harris took charge, grabbing a couple of security men near him and shoved them forward toward inmate 47.
“Get that inmate under control now! Contain that man!”
His order was understood but difficult to implement as inmate 47 continued to demonstrate his freakish strength. He straddled one man and, with his hair in his hand, bashed the poor attendant’s head into the ground. It made a sickening, wet thumping sound, and then a resounding crack echoed through the room. The man slumped, his brain spilling out behind his skull. Another two attendants were on top of 47’s back, but they might well have been children going for a ride on their parent’s shoulders.
Others were busy smacking him with their staves, but it did nothing to stop his wild thrashing. A moment later he swung his torso and launched an attendant across the room. The man sailed through the air and slammed into a cage before tumbling to the ground in a heap.
Fernando shivered and backed away from the main fracas. He made eye contact with the Warden. Harris’s eyes were wide, disbelieving.
The other violent inmates continued to shout and scream for blood, egging the madman on to greater heights of destruction and death. They understood little about the world around them, but they knew what they liked. The smell of blood and the ruckus was enough to get them into a flurry of rage and violence.
Fernando looked at the lone female housed among the violents, the old woman who’d snarled at him earlier. She had never uttered a word in the decade since her day of admittance. She was catatonic and prone to violent outbursts; two men had been injured a few years ago before they put her in a cage.
At that moment she had both arms around her knees and was rocking back and forth in her swinging cage. She was gibbering, spittle flying from her lips. Fernando saw the gleam of malevolent intelligence in her eyes. It was something he had never witnessed before from that particular inmate. It was as if something had been awakened in her. The depth of pure evil in her eyes was disheartening.
Harris moved closer to the struggle and shoved more men forward into the fray. “Take him down! Take him down!”
They tried. Men came at him from all sides, dodging the swinging cages, which were becoming as much of a physical threat as 47. They struck him with their rods and tried to tackle him, but he shrugged them off and continued to bellow in anger. Harris’ face was full of blood, and his eyes were wild. The environment affected him as well as the other inmates.
Fernando felt it too. A surge of something in the air filtered around them. He didn’t understand it, but it frightened him. The feeling entered his head and dropped down to his belly. A feral shiver spread to his arms and legs. Fernando groaned and rubbed his face. His head hurt.
The source stood before them all, in the center of the maelstrom of violence and pain. 47 continued to fight like a wounded wolf, scratching and biting. He ripped one man’s throat out with his teeth and punched another so hard his jaw popped and dislocated. The poor attendant turned, and his face shook with spasms. He spun away and fell. The madman grabbed another man about the shoulders and bent him over backwards. He snapped as 47 folded him in two.
Fernando blanched at the shocking brutality but felt compelled to join in because Warden Harris’ continued commands. He always did what the warden said. But the hunchback couldn’t move. His colleagues were braver and beat at 47 over and over, and at last hit a more vulnerable spot: his knee.
The joint buckled, and he drifted to the side. Several of the attendants swarmed his faltering body. Amidst a jumble of swatting fists and kicking legs, grunting and flexing with effort and yells of exertion, they piled on top of him with a sense of urgency.
Warden Harris yelled. “Rocko, get in there! Sit on him. Keep his legs still. Tie him up, damn you all!”
Rocko was the largest man in the asylum and had to stoop whenever he went through a doorway. His bulk filled most passageways. Thick and strong, the dim witted man got the toughest assignments. Whenever they needed extra help with troublesome inmates, they called on him. He rushed in, pushing aside another man on the way and used his beefy body to squat down on 47’s legs, facing his feet. He grabbed his ankles with his meat hooks. His fingers were like stuffed sausages. Three others grabbed the madman’s arms while another shoved his head down. They should have killed him.
47 was bruised, battered, and had suffered wounds that would put any other man unconscious. But he continued to squirm and bellow in frustration as they shackled his ankles together and struggled with his arms. They couldn’t get them behind his back.
“Rocko,” Warden Harris said, “make him comply.”
The massive man sat up and sat back down hard, thumping his butt into the inmate’s lower back. Fernando winced. That would cripple anyone. Rocko was closer to four hundred pounds than three hundred, and he knew how to use his bulk to great effect. 47 felt it. For once something had hurt him, but he still managed to kick his legs and managed to get them free.
The tension in the room rose. It wasn’t over yet.
“Keep him down!” Warden Harris said and shoved more men forward. “Get on top of him! Now!”
They responded. Rocko reached forward to grab the escaped limbs and almost lost his seat as 47 kept pushing up from the front. But the weight of extra attendants kept him down. It took two strong men to get one arm behind his back to get the shackle on that side. It took two more and Rocko to get the other. Three others threw themselves on his legs while the big man switched places with them.
Fernando drew closer to Warden Harris, rubbing his sore head. Blood streamed from his nose, and his entire upper body ached. Battle weariness settled in, and all of a sudden the room quieted, with only the breath of the attendants and slight grunts of further exertion. The other violent inmates were silent and still. Their cages settled into a motionless stupor; both person and cage back into their normal positions.
Inmate 47 spoke.
Rocko was out of breath, as were all of them, and he scrunched up his thick features and stared at the madman.
Fernando couldn’t hear what was said. “W-w-what did he say?”
Warden Harris stood besid
e him and heaved a sigh, shaking his head. “What indeed.” His face had paled, and he was sweating. He drew a shaking hand across his brow. “Bring some more chains in. I want him in seclusion as soon as possible.”
They had the now docile man on his feet. His face covered with blood and strains of long, scraggly hair. They dragged him towards the door, and Fernando limped out the way, still afraid. How normal the inmate’s eyes looked at that moment, whereas before they held an undeniable glint of insanity.
47 kept muttering the same thing under his breath over and over in a relentless chant. As he went by, Fernando thought he understood.
“… Muldor, Muldor, Muldor….”
Fernando had no idea who this Muldor fellow might’ve been, but he did not envy him.
Chapter One
Marko knew trouble when he saw it.
The drunken fool on the other side of the tavern’s taproom was all kinds of trouble. The lout was loud, oafish, and stupid; qualities that often went together, and in most cases meant bad things would happen. He dressed in thick brown leggings and a dirty frock.
The nominal leader of what the locals called the “toughs,” a gang of rough but less violent than many other more insidious groups of ne’er-do-wells, Marko Bulini stood with several of his men and watched the drunk make a fool of himself with a young woman.
She was dainty and small, very young, trying her best to be nice. She was a prostitute, one of Madam Dreary’s girls no doubt, perhaps on his first night out to drum up business for the city’s lone whorehouse. Marko felt bad for her. Dealing with the losers and scum of Sea Haven must’ve been exhausting.
Marko doubted the man had much money, if any, and most had been spent on booze. The girl was being too nice. She should shove him away and move on to a paying customer. The man’s speech was slurred, and his breath must have been rank. He groped at the poor girl with dirty hands, feeling up her breasts, and while she did her best to smile, the discomfort was prevalent in her eyes.
