Certain Danger

by F. R. Jameson

And that’s before she screamed.

  The noise was a roar of supernatural fury. It wasn’t only the sound she let go of: there was an enormous gust of sulphur-filled energy.

  It – The Marscht, or whatever it was really called – was attuned to her needs and desires. It crashed through the walls between her and Penhaligan, smashing the bricks and masonry to dust. She didn’t blast her way towards him, she pulverised everything in her path.

  Panic quivering in every inch of him, Doctor Penhaligan protectively threw his hands up in front of his face. Although he must have known, more than anyone else, that there was nothing he could do to prevent it. The pathetic squeal – piglet like, she thought – showed his desperation.

  She crashed into him. The Marscht enveloped and crushed him. The two of them together creating beautiful destruction.

  In those fragmentary seconds before he died, she knew him. She got to know every shred of pain he carried with him. There was a scar on his penis where twenty years earlier a truculent hooker had bitten down on his manhood and squeezed tight. On cold winter mornings it still ached. Then there were the eight stitches that had once upon a time been cracked into the back of his head. He’d told people he’d fallen over. Worked the story into an anecdote that even he now half believed. Although the reality was that some pimp had swung a cudgel at him after he’d paid his money. A double cross he’d been outraged by, but couldn’t mention to anyone. He’d never told a soul of his peccadillos – the disgusting things he made some of those women do. It was his secret shame and yet he took a dark kind of pride from every whore he’d ever had.

  The Marscht acting like her hands, she folded his long, thin body into a ball of broken flesh and bone. Buckling him in the middle so that his spine split with an echoing crack and a nerve-jangling scream. Then she doubled him over and bent him again and again. Every bone broke, the jagged ends of them ripped through his skin, his blood splattered over the walls. Nothing was now visible on those monitor screens beyond the contents of his burst organs. Relishing his deathly cries, she had The Marscht fold him into eighths and then to sixteenths. Each time he became less and less like a man. He’d been so smart and dapper when she’d met him, yet now he was barely recognisable from a pile of stinking abattoir meat. A mashed up, pulverised, gooey and dripping ball of flesh, with bone fragments jutting out and viscous red sprayed all around him.

  If she’d paid more attention, or rewound the moment in her mind, she probably could have pinpointed it. But, as it was, she wasn’t sure when he actually died. There was a fraction of a second when The Marscht seemed to almost glow for her with pleasure. That, she felt, was probably when Penhaligan took his last tortured breath. Although The Marscht didn’t celebrate each individual death. There was too much global pain and suffering to be had to luxuriate for long.

  For a start there were the others in the building.

  To a more or lesser degree they had been accomplices of Penhaligan. They weren’t just going to get to flee.

  Alice made sure the bitch of a receptionist went next.

  The woman was trying to run. Obviously the noise emanating from Doctor Penhaligan’s office had terrified her. Without even glancing, she knew that something had gone horrifically wrong. Actually, right from early that morning, she had thought this day was going to be a bad one. Her horoscope had even warned her. This was one of those times when a horoscope proved completely, frighteningly, accurate.

  Cynthia was her name, and she had none of the visible scars that the good doctor had possessed. Even emotionally, Cynthia felt herself blessed. Smugly pleased that nobody had ever done anything bad to her. She had done bad things to others though, even if she didn’t see it that way. Bullying and utter indifference to feelings were aspects of her character. She may have thought she was a lovely person, but more than one friend – and even family members – thought her utterly vile.

  The receptionist – she had never trained as a nurse, but still had been with Doctor Penhaligan long enough to know of the bad things happening – was halfway across the reception floor when Alice reached out and grabbed her. Her white high-heels had been clattering on the tile and she was perhaps four foot from the door, when her ankles were whipped out from beneath her. At the same time, Alice pushed heavily down onto Cynthia’s back so that she plummeted to the ground with no chance to break the fall.

  Her cheekbone shattered into ten thousand pieces when it crashed into the tile. The tile shattered as well, Cynthia’s face breaking through and crashing to the hard concrete beneath. That blow sent her mind spinning, but her senses swiftly came back – or at least that part of her primal mind able to scream out with fear – when Alice hoisted up her long limp body and hurled it against the wall. Cynthia’s arms and legs whirling helplessly in the air.

  Again Cynthia hit it face first, and this time every bone broke. As she rebounded backwards, it was as if her face was a perfect – if bloody – rectangle. Alice wasn’t done with her yet though. The woman might be dead, but The Marscht wasn’t finished playing. It slammed her head three dozen times more into that solid wall, obliterating every bone, squeezing out all brain matter and eventually leaving a stump where once there was a neck. Her nurse’s uniform (and indeed the room around her) was no longer white, it was a thousand shades of grey and red.

  Alice’s eyes were still shut, but her grin was impossible to hide.

  There were two more people in the house. Hilariously, they thought she hadn’t seen them.

  Both were upstairs.

  The first was the nurse who Penhaligan had telephoned when he said he wanted Alice’s files. An actual nurse, this time, one who had been with Penhaligan almost since the beginning. Of course, she’d made no effort to get the documents – instead she listened to the microphones in Doctor Penhaligan’s office with rapt curiosity. Taking notes the whole time in squiggly shorthand.

  She was still in her tiny office on the first floor. Unable to understand what she was hearing, not crediting this new reality, she was cloistered away and unmoving.

  Heidi was her name. And maybe she thought she was safe. Well, she was about to find out how unsafe she truly was.

  A sturdy middle-aged lady born in Austria, but raised in Hampshire, she had once – when Alice was a child – taken a metal ruler to Alice’s backside to punish her for some minor infraction. She was even crueller to Paul, although typically he’d been much naughtier. His bottom bared, she’d hit him repeatedly, until she actually drew blood. Paul cried out in terrible pain and this bitch had barely managed to hold back her laughter.

  Alice and The Marscht were as one.

  The suddenness of it, knocked Heidi’s breath from her. Once Alice had upended this old bitch from her chair, she forced her face down so that it ground against the rough, unvarnished floorboards. Shaving away the skin from her cheek. It was as if Heidi was trying everything not to cry out. A stoic bitch. That was about to change. The Marscht and Alice became a red hot spike and then they bored a hole into this woman’s anus. They sank and sliced right into her guts, then made the sensation as hot as possible. So that even though Alice was physically downstairs, she could smell the burning meat.

  Finally the woman screamed. There was no way she could hold it back. She had believed in hell all her life, and now she got to experience of it before she died.

  There was one left. A man, a contemporary of Doctor Penhaligan – Doctor Rufus was his name. He was running, but he wasn’t going to get far.

  He had been above Doctor Penhaligan’s cubbyhole, watching the video-feed as well. When the walls collapsed, the floor gave way beneath him, but he’d managed to grab onto a beam. He clung on tight, and with his burly middle aged arms, hoisted himself up and pulled himself into the corridor.

  Now he tried to find a way out to safety. With each passing second though, his hopes were dying.

  Unlike Doctor Penhaligan, he hadn’t been filled with confidence. He knew what they were dealing with was volatile and, although he wa
s happy to go along with Doctor Penhaligan’s experiments, he feared the results would be dicey. All his worst fears had come starkly to fruition and he dashed down the corridor to the fire escape as fast as his round belly and shaky legs would let him.

  Every one of his dreads chased him – the bullying of his childhood, the harshness of his father, the way his wife had openly cuckholded him with their golf playing parvenu of a neighbour.

  But there was something else.

  It had been a kindness, he had told himself. She had been a lonely girl and he was simply giving her the affection she needed. That’s how he justified the many times he had taken himself into Marianne’s bed late at night. The numerous occasions he had forced himself on her, Alice’s mother.

  He was Alice’s father, he believed. Rufus had genuinely wept when Paul had died. A number of them had been struck with tears – it had been a bigger, better funded, team back then – but he was the one who truly meant it. Paul, as far as he was concerned, was his son.

  As Alice tore apart The Butterfly Clinic, this was the only time she had even a flicker a doubt. It lasted an infinitesimal fraction of time – allowing him barely a step and a half of extra life – but it was there.

  This man, this Rufus actually considered that her mother squirming beneath him meant that she liked him. That her whimpers were cries of pleasure.

  He had promised himself that he would look after her children – their children – although he’d actually done nothing of the sort. When they were delivered back to The Butterfly Clinic, he just let Penhaligan get on with his experiments. Deferred in the gutless way he always did.

  What kind of father was he?

  Alice saw that he was no type of father at all.

  Despite what he’d convinced himself, he wasn’t her father.

  Marianne had actually been raped by two of the doctors – and it was old Doctor Yap who’d landed the blame for her pregnancy and had to leave in disgrace. But she had also made love – proper and meaningful and consensual love – with one of the students. Jerome was his name, and whereas he wasn’t as powerful as her, he still had his own minor ability with The Marscht.

  It was the two of them coming together which gave their remaining child, Alice, so much control. Which allowed her to wield the power so expertly now.

  Doctor Rufus’s run ended suddenly. Two sharp spikes jammed themselves from thin air into his eyes. They didn’t go deep enough to sink into his brain. That would have destroyed his ability to feel, and Alice really wanted him to feel.

  Suspending him a foot or so off the ground, the spikes turning around in his eye-socket to make sure the pain never lessened, Doctor Rufus was stripped. It wasn’t his clothes, she cared about though. Nobody had wanted to see tubby Doctor Rufus naked in decades, not her and not her mother. What she stripped away from him was his flesh, flaying him alive. Tearing it back in inch wide line after inch wide line. Slowly and – from his cries – horribly painfully.

  She didn’t stop until he was just red and dripping flesh. The Marscht had let her know that he’d actually died about mid-way through. (Alice was more attuned to the moment of passing now, to the exquisite pleasure of it.) Shock making his over-strained heart give out, she guessed. But she wanted to finish the job. Just in case there was some residual pain centre left in him somewhere. Besides killing this Doctor Rufus made her so happy.

  Dropping his skeleton with a clatter to the floor nearly made her laugh out loud. To scream with glee.

  Then, however, she stopped.

  Too many walls had been knocked down and the building was starting to collapse. She could hear the crack of the masonry, the crumble of bricks, but she ignored them. Everything around her was still. None of it was going to affect her. With a pleasurable gulp, The Marscht curled itself around her again and waited.

  They both waited, sharing a smile of anticipation.

  Chapter Twenty

  Now what?

  This thing – this Marscht – that was part of her, wasn’t sated. It wanted more.

  Once again though, she fell still and tried to find herself in this mess of warring compulsions. To locate Alice Whitstable again in the phenomenal craving to kill and wound.

  The Butterfly Clinic was crumbling. There were no sirens yet in the distance, but they’d be coming soon. Fire engines and police cars full of men with their own latent, harmful desires.

  What would she do then?

  This Marscht had always been here. It had forever been at the fringes: the dark part of mankind. Now Alice had endowed it with form. Her wants and needs lent it shape. It was part of her and she was part of it, and there was no limit to what it could accomplish. No longer would it be a random force of chaos. She could do anything she wanted with it. Focus it anyway she chose.

  Now though, she stopped it. She restrained it.

  All it would take was a flutter of her mind and it would destroy the town of Dorking for her. Nothing was needed from her beyond the whim itself and The Marscht would move on and annihilate the suburb of Worcester Park. Then wipe the whole city of London from the map.

  Yet for now, she calmed it.

  She whispered that it should listen to her, that it should take a pause. And as big and powerful as it was, it obeyed.

  For now, anyway.

  Her eyes closed and she reached out into the rest of the world. Trying to sense it all anew.

  All her life she had been shunted into the background and ignored.

  Well, they sure as hell were going to listen to her now.

  Epilogue

  Amongst the rubble, an old tape whirred.

  Doctor Penhaligan’s voice didn’t exhibit its normal cool, in fact he seemed worried, on edge.

  “Please, Alice, you have to talk to us. It disturbs me that you have become silent, that you don’t even seem to recognise Paul’s picture anymore. You need to talk to us and tell us what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking. Talk to me, please. If you don’t, well, matters will be taken out of my hands. You won’t have me to protect you any longer. You won’t have this family around you. They will take you away from us, Alice. You won’t have your nice room at the clinic anymore, you won’t have our attention. Please, you have to tell us if you’re still in contact with it. If you can feel anything. As if you can sense it there in your mind – if you can get even the faintest grip on it – you may not realise this, but we may very well be able to change the whole world.”

  A plea from the author

  If you enjoyed Certain Danger, could you please take the time to leave a short review of it on Amazon?

  Reviews are the lifeblood of an indie author. They make the difference between scrabbling along and actually making a living out of our writing. So, if you’re able to find the time to leave your thoughts on Certain Danger – or any of my other Ghostly Shadows tales, long or short – then I would be tremendously grateful.

  Kind regards,

  FRJ.

  Certain Danger is the second in F.R. Jameson’s Ghostly Shadow series.

  Check out the others today!

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