Just as that glob of chilly was enough, but the time it sat hardening was not enough.
Of course, then fourteen-year-old boy did shove the forty-five year old former beauty queen, when she slipped and bumped into him. Perhaps it was only natural reaction from the pushing and shoving that he regularly encountered in the hallways of his high school. Muscle reflex. It could also be the blame of puberty not properly communicating the truth of his strength.
Nevertheless, the act appeared heinous for all in attendance. Three legal adults immediately scolded him, and in turn, his parents scolded them for scolding their child out of turn. If one were to count the seconds it takes to ramble off a few obscenities, then what happened next is far less surprising given the miniscule amount of time that the transaction occurred.
The forty-five year old woman struck her head on the corner of the poured concrete countertop (a recent renovation to keep up with the trends of the moment). It fractured her skull, snapped two molars free, and caused her to bite through her tongue—though not enough to sever it. She bounced, rather than crumbled, and once again, a seemingly natural reaction to push back occurred. This time from the fourteen-year-old’s mother, who happened to just spill a red merlot down her chest. She didn’t let the woman fall unaided. Instead, she rather rightly slung her hands beneath the woman’s back in an effort to catch her.
But for that moment, gravity and rash instinct worked against her. The wine glass shattered between the tile and vertebrae. The stem punctured a kidney. The mother’s knees soaked in the sudden flow of blood, but she was still wet from the spilling of her wine glass, and took no notice of the puddle where she knelt.
The anger and shock in the kitchen had not subsided. It peaked.
A men’s size 12.5 wide shoe stepped on the forty-five year old’s ankle. The crunch was lost in the commotion, and there was already too much pain on the woman’s face.
“You’re stepping on her foot!” the forty-five year old’s husband said in the only gap for silence, as they all had to breathe. He was shaped like a barrel-suited man. He sprung from the knees and rammed the other man into the kitchen island—butcher block, but nearly as sturdy and painful as concrete. They men grappled and heaved from side to side, until they toppled onto the women on the floor.
Cabinet doors bounced and cracked. Disharmonious moans and gurgling masked the pitter-patter of dog paws.
Spunk still couldn’t get to the chili on the floor. She lowered her head and almost backed out of the kitchen commotion, but something shiny caught her eye. The entire pot of chili remained in a crockpot on the counter.
Detective Benner cocked an eyebrow, or should I say re-cocked his eyebrow?
“It’s not blood on the dog’s muzzle,” I said.
“Well, I’m going to let forensics be the judge of that,” Benner said, discarding my account. He wasn’t the first police officer to look at me as if I were insane. Though there were plusses and minuses to the thought that he could be the last.
“Detective Benner, the dog did not eat those people.”
“Okay, then what did?” It was barely a question. The sarcasm was so thick that my only form of retaliation was to answer the question as if it weren’t rhetorical.
“Don’t you feel that unease in your chest? Your heart, I can hear it, I can see the throbbing vein in your neck. It’s something primitive, you know?”
“Look, I appreciate your help on this case, but I have a lot of procedures I have to do while the scene is still mostly fresh, understand. Anything you can note and email me, please do.” Benner handed me his business card. His thumb covered most of the card so that his email address was all I could see.
“We know these things. Our genetic code has refused to forget them. Their very presence heightens our base survival instincts. Sets us on edge. I know you are not truly agitated with me, Detective Benner. It’s this thing. It is still here, in this very house. At this very moment.”
“Great,” Benner said, but not to me. His hand was raised and he fingered another uniformed police officer over. “Beagle, take Mr. Harrold here and check the outside for any signs of a break in. Animal feces too, right, Mr. Harrold?”
“Why—” In the moment I turned to see who this Beagle was, Benner leapt out of earshot. There was no reason for me to say anything, unless I planned to shout it, but my voice was never one to favor a raised tone. It seemed to embarrass me at anything much more than a whisper.
“You some kind of animal expert?” Officer Beagle said as we walked out of the living room and onto the screened in back porch. But he kept talking before I could answer. “Maybe that dog has been killing people before, got a real taste for it, has a whole bunched holed up in the crawl space? Wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve read a lot of weird stories on the internet, kept waiting for the one I’d get to experience. Wife will probably think I’m making it up. Half the stuff I read online, she says is a lie. She always asks me, ‘did you read that on Yahoo?’ It’s my homepage, of course, I did. You know, I once tried to write stories. Be an author. They tell you, that truth is stranger than fiction. When you want to write fiction, you have to base it on truth or it won’t be believable. But in reality, fact is, the stuff that really happens in this world is playing by whole other set of rules. It’s all unbelievable. Yeah, it doesn’t surprise me at all that a family dog snapped and killed its masters and visitors. You know they have feelings, right? Dogs get depressed just like we do. After 9/11, a lot of the dogs they used to…”
“It wasn’t the dog,” I said. For once, the crack in my voice helped parlay my demand of shushing.
“It’s a cover up,” Beagle nodded. “Someone is only trying to frame it on the dog. The nerve of some people!”
“It is not people.”
Beagle blinked.
I continued, “Do you normally feel this uptight? You don’t normally talk this much—only when you’re nervous.”
Beagle swallowed his words, curious what I might say next.
“And I don’t raise my voice like that unless I’m agitated. It’s in the air like an impending thunderstorm. But it is not at all like static electricity or the scent of rain. It’s heavier, mustier. Like the troubles of the world have been conspiring to make you their next victim.”
“W-w-what is it?” Beagle asked.
“The first. The prime horrors that humankind battled before they took the throne as the dominant species on earth. Just like you imagined that dogs might rise up and attack their masters, some prehistory remains in your sub consciousness that recalls when people were the dogs.”
“Are you like some kind of college professor, Mr. Harrold?”
“I was a doctor once. Orthodontist,” I said. “That is why I can assure you that those bite marks did not come from a Labrador retriever or a human.”
“Yeah, but what? What then?”
“There is no scientific name for them yet. No, science is a natural defense mechanism of humanity. It allows many to say this is because of that and that’s that. But true science is open-ended. It recognizes that things change, that there are always variations and new reasons to consider in our hypothesis. But to simply say something doesn’t exist because there is no evidence that can be cataloged yet is not real science. It is the science that is part of a belief structure, a reliable crutch to deny the one thing humankind truly fears—the unknown.”
Beagle nodded and withdrew.
My voice cracked before I could say what I soon forgot I meant to say next. I saw it on his face. I’d let my anger get the best of me and I ranted, building a brick wall of disbelief one brick at a time.
“Primes. I call them the primes. I have studied them for six years and have over three complete case studies that would close a few unsolved murders if my words weren’t regarded as poppycock. Should I got back to college and study and get my doctorate to prove I’m capable of being believed? No. Because you can feel it. You can feel it in your chest, it feels…”
�
��Like giving up…” Beagle whispered. “Like I should just give up.”
I nodded. “The primes…a prime is here.”
“H-H-How do we catch it?”
My cheek twitched as I tried to stifle a smirk. He wasn’t the first officer of the law to believe me, and I hoped he wouldn’t be the last. But what I told him next, I knew would rattle his faith in me.
“The primes were once the top-of-the food chain. But when humankind rose up against them, the few that have survived, have only done so by staying in the shadows.”
“The crawl space!”
I shushed him. “Figurative shadows mostly. They suffer no aversion to the light. Today’s incident was early afternoon, not the broad stroke of midnight! They are predators of convenience.”
“When we’re not expecting it,” Beagle said, nodding incessantly.
“Precisely.”
“Then, they, it, it’s just one right? Well, it wouldn’t attack now, because there are so many of us and we have guns. It knows we have guns r-r-right?”
I nodded, that disgusting grin on my face could not be flattering. I had crooked teeth that I had always tried to hide with a bushy mustache, but I could feel the breeze drying my lateral incisor, which meant a couple others must’ve been showing as well.
“So it’s h-h-hiding somewhere?” Beagle said looking even above me at the ceiling fan. It turned slowly from the wind and nothing more. Then Beagle’s eyes lit up. “The crawl space!”
I face palmed. “If you must check the crawl space, then check the crawl space. What is it with you and the crawl space?”
“People always hide things there,” Beagle said. “Like it’s not obvious. Kind of like my pops and his porno mags between the mattress and the box spring. It’s like the first place you should look… I think. I applied for detective school. But I read it in a book I once read when I thought I could become an author, I told you about that right and writing…”
“You’re doing it again,” I said.
“What?”
“You’re letting the presence of the prime control you. Ease back. It’s good to be on edge right now, but use that heightened ability to protect yourself. Don’t allow your defense mechanisms, like talking too much, to rule you now.”
“Right. You’re right. I should warn Detective Benner.”
“No. You will be wasting your breath and what precious little time we might have to actually catch and kill this thing.”
“He believes you though right?”
I didn’t tell Officer Beagle that he was naïve. That he had been used to entertain my nonsense. I needed him to believe me, so that meant I had to inflate his ego. “That’s precisely why he picked you to help me. He said you were his best man.”
“Of course he would say that. Everyone loves Officer Marcum because she’s so smart and tough and got high marks. You know, that’s all on paper. I bet she’d be crying if she were here right now. Between you and me. I’m not a sexist by the way it’s just that…it’s like they treat her special because she is a girl rather than…”
“Forgive my wording. Your detective did not say ‘man,’ he did in fact say best officer.”
“B-B-But I’m not. Who am I kidding? If this thing is really like some kind of thing that hates humans for the longest time. How do I kill it? I barely passed my last shooting exam. We need to get help.”
“Officer Beagle! This thing is more afraid of you then we are of it!”
“But you saw that kitchen in there. I though there were only three people, but there were four, right?”
“Six by my count,” I said. “And it did that to them when they were at each other’s throats. It seized on the same opportunity you’re now giving it by being wishy-washy about your pride. You wear a badge! That takes far more courage than most jobs in the world. Any day can and will be your last.”
“Oh God, that’s the one thing I try not to think about. It’s why they took me off traffic duty. I couldn’t pull no one over no more.”
“Again, Officer Beagle, all these emotions, they’re stimulated by the prime’s presence. You are stronger than you can imagine. People, people without guns, and all of our modern technology overcame them thousands of years ago. They’re the equivalent of an animal with rabies.”
“Animal control. I’ll radio for animal control.”
Just then, the window thumped.
Beagle jumped, and in keeping with the facts, so did I.
But it was Detective Benner on the other side of the glass. He yelled, “Any signs of a break in?”
Beagle was out of words, and it seemed as if no matter how long he let his mouth gape, new ones weren’t going to fill it.
So I said, “We’re still checking.”
And the detective went on his way, eager not to have any more dealing with me.
I grabbed Officer Beagle by his shoulders and tried to look into his eyes instead of his crusty nostrils.
“Come, when we trap it, you will be the hero.”
I don’t know if that simple dialogue actually made Officer Beagle follow me, but he did. Out of pride, hope, or basic job description, he followed me down off the porch.
Lattice secured the damp red clay beneath the porch. Nothing too big was getting in with digging a hole to crawl under. Enough daylight made its way beneath to point out a couple of PVC pipes and old deck boards that had long been forgotten.
Grass clippings stained the lattice, and were freshly coating the lawn. The reason behind the gathering at the victims’ house was not divulged to me, but it did appear that the utmost preparation in lawn care was provided for the event. Even a few of the shrubs had been recently trimmed. I saw their discarded branches in a wheelbarrow parked next to the air conditioner around the side of the house. The same side of the house as the locked half-door that led to the crawl space.
“It’s locked,” Beagle reiterated, even trying with all his might to yank the lock free. “How big are these things, could it have squeezed in this crack like snakes and salamanders do?”
“To big for cracks and crevices,” I assured him. I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t actually seen one yet, that would discredit me too much, and I still felt Beagle needed to have every ounce of a faith in me and himself. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I wanted to hurt him. Kind of the way one wants to spook kids who have been acting up—at least that’s how my father had raised us. Whenever we did something bad, he had a spooky story that made us think twice about it.
I still stuttered before I open a mailbox. I can still picture the same mutated hornet that my father said stung his Aunt Flo to death…and that was such a simple error on my part. I had just left the door of the mailbox open one day, and for that I’ve suffered a lifetime of trauma. There were other things he said to me that reduced me to borderline obsessive compulsive.
But I was sane, even in times such as this, when my heart raced, and my throat felt drier than my scratchy, jittery eyes, I knew if I just stopped and thought about it, it would all make sense. I could use reason to brush aside fear. I could analyze my fear, compartmentalize it, and remember—I’m only afraid because long ago there was only one creature on earth that threatened the rise of humankind. The primes.
One of them was very near to us. With every step of growing anger, resentment and a need to act out in survival, I knew I was getting closer. Like that child’s game: hot/cold. It was getting hot—quite figuratively.
But Officer Beagle got hotter.
I had only taken my eyes off him for a moment. When I turned, he thrust against me. The radio on his chest smacked my lowered chin.
“You aren’t some specialist. You don’t work for the department. You’ve lured me out here. You’ve lured me away for one more kill before Detective Benner pieces together your crime inside. Ha! I should’ve known. You see. I became a police officer because when they say you should write what you know, well I didn’t know nothing worth writing about. But police see it all. All they need to
see to lose and gain faith in humanity. Well, Nothing I’ve seen so far was worth writing about. Even the dog theory made enough sense that it wasn’t going to crack my writer’s block. But you! You monster! Trying to trick me!”
Sweat came off him like a sheep dog coming in out of a rainstorm. He spit, too, but my face and lips were so wet, I couldn’t really discern between the two bodily fluids.
“This is the prime!” I screamed.
But his grip cut the range of my voice. I gagged as he squeezed my neck and forced me on my knees. He could’ve forced me to the ground, but he paused to draw his firearm.
The cold metal of its fabrication pressed against my temple. My flesh warmed the muzzle. My veins throbbed beneath it, putting up more of a fight than I myself could muster.
I spoked through gurgles. The lack of oxygen severed the care of whether or not my words were understood. All that remained was their necessity—as if my life depended on it.
“I’m not going to kill you,” Beagle finally said. He slammed me to the ground, and climbed on my back. One knee dug into the back of my neck, pressing my face past the soft but itchy grass to the dry dirt and tiny pebbles below. Another kneed found my coccyx. I squirmed and he rode me like a seesaw, wrenching my arms around my back. He tried to cuff me. But the nerves broke him. He was like that old saying, ‘all thumbs.’ He dropped the handcuffs on me twice. Then I heard them land in the bush behind me. It was at this moment, that all the pressure on my back and neck vanished.
Beagle yelped.
I covered my head—out of the worst possible instinct. Covered it! Buried it in the sand and cried. The prime was upon us. I just knew it. Everything in my biology raged like an air siren at the end of days.
Then I was grabbed, shook from side to side. I screamed and mumbled pleas and half-prayers.
“Get up, damn it!”
I whacked my chin on a gun holster. The pistol still buttoned securely within.
My tear and dirt stained faced looked up at Detective Benner but my fear was not so easily subsided.
“Are you okay?” Benner asked. “Hey, look at me. What the hell happened?”
9 Tales Told in the Dark 22 Page 2
