PART ONETHE LIFE BEFORE
APRIL 20, 1969
There’s a corpse in the bathtub.
She’s leaning against the wall, legs dangling over the lip of the tub. Dumped there, looks like.
She’s been stripped nude, save for the pillowcase pulled over her head. A clean, almost glaringly white pillowcase, featureless other than the huge stain of dark, sopping blood in the center. The topography of what was once a face presses out of the middle of the dark, wet stain. There’s so much blood the fabric clings to what’s underneath like a second skin, leaving hollows where the eyes, the still-screaming mouth had been.
More blood trails out from under the pillowcase in thick rivulets, down her neck, across her chest, clotting along the basin of the tub. Stains smear the areas around the body like an aura; bloody hands having done bloody work.
Other than that, Sheriff Brannigan thinks, it’s a pretty nice bathroom. At least compared to any bathroom he’s ever had.
His policeman eyes pick up plenty of details that tell him a more nuanced story. The actual-gold soap dish by the sink is speckled brown with tarnish and scum. The cream-colored hand towels have a weather-beaten thinness to them. The room is like a despised relative in some opulent family: richer than sin, but not a lot of love to show for it. Exactly what you might expect for the fourth guest bathroom on the third floor of this dizzyingly large mansion.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?… The joke passes through his mind like a bit of trash blowing down a deserted street.
He’s a thin man in his fifties. His sheriff’s badge gleams like the edges of the dead woman’s pillowcase: too bright, too clean for this room. His face is slimy with sweat. He’s not having a good day.
The world has gone unnaturally quiet. Moments ago, it was chaos, but now … only the sounds of his pulse, his breath, coming in, going out, in unconscious, tidal sway. It was as if when he opened the door to this room—
there’s a corpse in the bathtub
—he’d entered a bubble and now only he and this dead woman and this inauspicious bathroom existed.
Sheriff Brannigan stares at the woman, leans toward her. He’s gripped by a sudden, strong urge to reach out, yank that pillowcase off her head, get that awful unveiling over with and confront her face-to-almost-face. He doesn’t. He knows the horrors waiting underneath that fabric all too well. He’s seen it dozens of times on dozens of morgue slabs and in dozens of crimes scenes already. Plus, his arms are beginning to feel strangely heavy and useless. So he settles for just … staring.
The dead woman doesn’t appear to mind. Hopefully, she’s past caring about such things now.
He stays this way for a long time, hands on his upper thighs, bent at the waist, regarding the body as if it were a work of inscrutable art on display—maybe it is—when a harried voice shouts from down the hallway.
“We found him! Sheriff!”
Brannigan doesn’t jump. He doesn’t twitch. Going by his body language, he doesn’t appear to register a thing. The bubble around him doesn’t burst so much as it begins to dissolve.
Bit by bit, reality reestablishes itself: the commotion downstairs, men shouting and barking orders, and worst of all, the screaming. Not a scream of pain or anguish—it’s the scream of madness, an insane child realizing his favorite toy has broken.
And underneath all that, the bubbly counterpoint of a radio blaring pop music.
“We found him!” the voice yells again, louder, closer. One of his deputies, running into the room, panting either from excitement or exertion. “We—” The deputy breaks off, seeing the scene in the bathroom: the dead woman, the sheriff, bent as if ready to whisper something only for her benefit.
“Sheriff?… You okay?”
Brannigan doesn’t turn around; something is squirming under the red center of the pillowcase and it’s pulled his attention. He knows what it is, even before it emerges from the bottom of the pillowcase: an ant, curious and probing. This house appears to be full of them, and why not? Good eats aplenty around here. Ants were a common enough sight at scenes like this (more common outside, but there’s something appropriate about this mansion, for all its façade of respectability, being so infested). They were drawn to the blood, and they could interfere with your forensics, but what could you do? If your murder scene had an ant problem, you might as well try to shoo sand away from the beach. Or maybe the sheriff is simply as past caring about such things as the dead woman is.
“Sheriff Brannigan?” his deputy repeats, concerned.
“How many does she make?” the sheriff asks at last, not taking his eyes off the shifting, pulsing stain. A second ant soon follows the path of the first, tracking along a rivulet of blood. The squirming underneath the fabric continues; there are more. So many more. “Is she the ninth? Tenth?”
“I-I don’t know, Sheriff. But, but we found him! The guy, the, the—well, we think the guy. Come on!” The deputy makes a futile gesture toward the doorway.
This woman is actually the seventh body they’ve found in the mansion so far—six of them women, all stripped nude, all with something like a pillowcase pulled over their mutilated faces, matching the modus mortis of the dozens of other women they’ve been finding around town for the past several years, all unidentifiable. The seventh body was an exception on both counts: he was male and he was all-too-easily ID’d, despite the visual handicap of him missing most of his head.
Mayor Victor Cross. The man whose third-floor guest bathroom they were currently standing in.
Another high-pitched, manic shriek floats into the bathroom.
The guy
The guy who did
A quick mental flash—the headless mayor on the bedroom floor, the mayor they had just been meeting with before the screams began and the train of the world derailed, as well as the hastily written note that same mayor left on the floor by his body—and just like that, the sheriff remembers who he is and what he’s here to do. He shakes his head, snapping it back and forth. It helps a little, although his arms still feel dipped in concrete. The left one in particular irregularly pulses with dark, painful alarm.
We found the guy who
“Right.” The sheriff clears his throat. He sees an ant on the floor and stomps on it. “Thank Christ. Where is he?”
The deputy makes a face, half-grimace, half-plea.
“He’s in the walls.”
Another high, wail of insanity curls through the massive house.
* * *
The sheriff and his deputy tear out of the bathroom and throw themselves down the stairs. They pass paintings and lamps. Huge framed mirrors. They pass the giant master bedroom on the second floor, where the headless body of Mayor Cross lies next to a shotgun and a piece of paper doused in blood and gray matter. The sheriff doesn’t see more than the man’s legs through the doorway, but that note is emblazoned onto his mind, indelibly, as if written by flashbulb:
“i knew”
The sheriff’s lips curl in a grimace as they pass. He hates this place. Not just this mansion of horrors but this whole damn town. One of several tiny communities under his county purview, coming with the job the way unseemly in-laws come with a marriage. He knows some of the town’s history—enough to have a bad taste in his mouth anytime he’s forced to visit—so the way this day has developed has of course been a shock, but not necessarily a surprise. There’s always been an evil energy in the air here. A poison. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to breathe right now.
Brannigan and his deputy have almost made their way to the first-floor landing when the sheriff feels his heart lock in his chest. His lungs fill with sand. The pain in his arm grows new rows of teeth and bites down hard.
He wheezes: “Wait, wait. I gotta … I gotta sit down for a sec.”
He puts a sweaty hand on the immaculate wallpaper, slowly eases his way down the steps, and sits on the bottom stairs.
“Do you need—?” his deputy starts to ask.
The sheriff angrily waves him away. Go do your job, the wave says. I’ll be okay, his expression tries—fails—to add.
The deputy obeys, and Brannigan watches him continue on past the stairs and through a doorway. “I think something’s wrong with Sheriff Brannigan!” the deputy is calling. There are a lot of men around—the whole countywide ad hoc task force Brannigan had assembled over the past few months showed up almost instantly when the call went out—but most of them are too focused on the task at hand to hear the deputy.
One man has come out to stare for a moment, though.
He’s handsome and young, perhaps in his early forties, with ginger-red hair. If Brannigan is remembering correctly through the painfog, this man is actually a local here. That they’d received a few volunteers from this town should’ve perhaps softened Brannigan’s opinion of the place … except all the men give him the same, uneasy feeling. In fact, looking at this deputy now (His name also starts with a B, doesn’t it? Burke or Burman or something.) Brannigan feels his gorge rise in disgust. Or maybe he’s about to puke from the pain. He’s not even sure; his body begins to feel like someone else’s.
Another shriek peals through the building. The red-haired deputy snaps to attention, but instead of running to the direction of the noise, he bolts up the stairs, pushing past the sheriff, like a man who just realized he’d left the gas on.
For the moment, the sheriff is alone again.
An ax smashes through wood in another room. On this side of the wall, a small shelf of porcelain figurines vibrates with the impact. The figurines scatter from their perch, several shattering on the floor.
The sheriff watches this, feeling oddly light and detached. Once, when he was a boy, he’d visited California with his family, and there had been an earthquake. The moment before the tremors felt similar to this: a tingling, stomach-floating, physical premonition. His arm throbs, at once dull and sharp, razor blades wrapped in wool.
California was a fun trip. Janie was alive then. Before her husband drove the two of them off the highway into that ravine. We’d had no idea what was coming for her, did we?
Why am I thinking about that?
A strange voice he doesn’t quite recognize answers back: Because we are only our memories, Owen.
Sheriff Owen Brannigan hears the sound of men—his men—pushing themselves into the hole in the wall. The radio must be inside the walls, because as soon as they break through, the blaring music gets even louder. Brannigan has never liked that rock and roll crap. It’s dissonant and charmless and too juvenile by half. But he recognizes the next song as it starts.
Copyright © 2022 by Nat Cassidy
