Wolvesbane: Chapter 4

[TheDarkPrince]

At one o' clock the next day, I was on my bike, riding towards Mahogany Drive. I was exhausted. I had hardly slept the night before, due to nerves. But I had worked out what to say to the police around the site. Thanks to the information the estate agent had given me, I had manufactured a passable excuse to get inside. If my luck was good, in fact, there may not have been anyone outside the house at all, and I could slip in and out undetected. As I drew closer to the house, however, it became plain that there would be no such luck. There were two uniformed detectives in the alley between Numbers 37 and 39, searching (fruitlessly it seemed) for any hints to Tom Grest's death. To be honest, I was amazed, the police hadn't thought of looking in the houses around the scene of the crime.

I skidded to a halt outside the alleyway, making the two detectives look up. On closer inspection, they looked even more exhausted than my Dad. "Piss off kid!" one of them snarled. "Can't you see that this is the scene of a crime? We're having enough trouble figuring this out as it is, and having bloody teenagers running around under our feet doesn't help!" I was taken aback, I have to admit. I hadn't reckoned on anyone around the house being overly glad to see me, but at the same time I hadn't expected such a violent reaction either. All the same, I had to stick to the plan. "My name's Paul Johnson," I began.
"What, you want a medal or something? I told you, piss off!" I sighed. Tough nut to crack, this one. "My parents owned this house until a month ago. They left recently because of the murders going on around here." The detective's face darkened at the mention of the murders. OK, bad move. Putting that though in his head was obviously causing his tolerance - if you could call it that - to wane. He must have had a stressful couple of months. I went on quickly, before he had a chance to start yelling again. "The thing is," I said hurriedly, "that we moved out so fast, we left a couple of things behind. My Dad left behind a briefcase that was important to his work. His boss nearly raised the roof when he found out he'd forgotten it. Said he'd fire him if he didn't get it back A.S.A.P. So we came back here for today, just my Dad and I, so we could get it back. He's tied up with his work at the moment, you know, phone calls and stuff. So he sent me to get it." I drew to the end of this well rehearsed anecdote, praying the two detectives would buy it. For the moment, the angry detective stayed silent. I could tell that he was inwardly debating whether or not to take me seriously. However, the second detective, smaller and - judging by his grey hair count - older than the first, stepped forward. He also looked a fair bit less agitated. I mentally breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe this guy would be a little less hard to convince. Oh how wrong I was. The first words that passed through detective number two's lips were: "What does your Dad do for a living, kid?" This question caught me off guard. "U...um..." Pathetic. I racked my brain for a plausible answer. "Government," I blurted out. "He's a member of the Scottish parliament." OK. That hadn't gone down too well. The older detective surveyed me with barely disguised contempt on his face. I hadn't reckoned on this being so difficult. Getting in and out of the house was supposed to be the hard part. "No," he said finally. "This is the scene of a murder, and the last thing we need now is teenagers asking to be let though. Now get lost. You're wasting our time." Ok. The time had come to beg.

"Please," I whimpered, trying to make myself look as pathetic as possible. Which wasn't easy given how nettled I was feeling. "I'll be in and out in ten minutes, I swear. I just need the briefcase, that's all. You won't even know I was here." The second detective turned around, a look of stubborn resolution on his face. "I said no and I meant it. I don't care who your Dad is, you're not getting in here." As much as I wanted to get inside that house, I know when I'm beaten. There was just no shifting these two.. It looked like I would just have to leave this case to the police. But just as I got ready to give in, help came from the last place I expected: the first detective. "Let him in, Will. It'll be easier just to give him ten minutes inside the house than stand her bickering over it all day." If I had beleved in God, I would have praised Him. I might just get in after all! As hypocritical as the first cop was being, I couldn't have felt much more warmly towards him at that moment. "Are you crazy!?" exclaimed detective number two. "Allan Ross will dance on our graves if he finds out we let a bloody teenager through here!"
"Ten minutes isn't too much to ask," said the first detective fairly. "Come on Will. Just once bend the regulations a little. Let's just let him through and get rid of him." The second detective's shoulders fell, acknowledging defeat, and he once again turned to face me. "Fine," he grunted. "You can have ten minutes. But any longer and we'll have you down to the station faster than you can say "civil liberties." Got that?"
"Great. Thanks. I'll be out in a moment," I babbled. I was almost numb with relief. That hadn't quite worked as well as I'd hoped - now I had to get in and out in ten minutes - but at least I had got past the police without following a course of action with a nine in ten chance of me getting shot. I walked up to the front door, and looked at my watch. Quarter past one. That meant that I would have to be out by twenty-five minutes past at the latest. Not the length of time I would have liked for a proper investigation, but it was the best I had. Thirty-nine Mahogany Drive was a fairly small, semi detatched house. That was good, not that much to search then. I stretched out my hand and finally, after weeks of waiting and scheming, I turned the doorknob of the mystery house.

My first impression of the house was that Mr and Mrs Johnson had moved out in something of a hurry. For God's sake, there were still pictures hanging in the hallway! These murders were causind one hell of a panic. I moved stealthily - I was still thinking about Adrian - down the hall and entered the kitchen. A disgusting smell hit me like a brick wall. I looked around wildly for it's source, and quickly located it. The Johnsons' fridge stood in the corner of the room, and judging by the way the smell worsened as I drew nearer to it, they had neglected to empty it before they left. There was no way in Hell or Earth I was going to open that fridge. I moved through here quickly, as I was beginning to feel slightly nauseous, and ran through to the living room. This room was devoid of furniture, but the walls remained papered, and the floor carpeted. It seemed that my first impressions had been correct. The Johnsons had left in one hell of a hurry. However, still no clues linking Adrian to any of the murders. Nothing particularly interesting at all, in fact. I was disappointed. I checked my watch again. Two of my precious ten minutes had already expired. I had to get moving.

[TheDarkPrince]

I made a speedy search of the ground floor bathrooms and the entire top floor. Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. It looked like I had been wrong. There was nothing here that looked remotely suspicious. It seemed the murders had nothing to do with this house at all. At first I was disappointed, but that soon gave way to relief. This meant I was totally clean. I had nothing to do with the murders one way or the other. I couldn't get dragged into it. My watch now informed me that I had used up six minutes. Plenty time to get out and please the detectives waiting outside. I stepped out of the final room I had searched (the master bedroom) into the upstairs hall. The hall seemed pretty derelict. The celing was slowly giving way to dry rot, the wallpaper was torn, and it seemed that Mr Johnson had spilled some paint from the master bedroom onto the carpet when he had been painting it. Wait a minute... I looked closer. I'm no expert on shades of red, but I was pretty sure this wasn't paint. It was deep red, the colour of blood. OK, now I was suspicious. I was pretty sure that Mr Johnson didn't paint his house with bodily fluids. Now that I looked, there seemed to be a trail of the claret along the carpet. But it abruptly stopped halfway down the hall, with no sign of where it had gode. Unless... I looked up. Just as I'd thought. An attic. Slowly, with every cell in my body hoping that I wouldn't find what I thought I would find if I went into that attic, I reaced up and prised the trapdoor away from the ceiling. With a creak usually reserved for bad horror films, it opened and a stepladder unfolded itself from the trapdoor. I forced myself to walk up it. With every step, the voice in the back of my head screamed at me to make a break for it while I had the chance. When I looked back on it, it had a lot of sense, that little voice. But, being curious by nature, (obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have been in this situation in the first place) I climbed the ladder anyway. What an idiot I was. For the second time since I had entered the house, a foul smell reached my nostrils. The bloodstains seemed to be thicker up here, and closer together. They seemed to lead towards a box at the back of the attc, which, I noticed, the smeel seemed to be emanating from as well. The box was made of roughly cut wood, as if it had only been crudely built for some unpleasant purpose. I knew, with a strange sense of precognition (or rather apprehension, but that's what it felt like) what i would find if I opened that box. Common sense told me to stay away at all costs, but I just had to know for sure. Feeling as though each foot was a lead weight, dragging me back from that box, I forced myself to walk towards it. The smell right next to the box was incredible. It seemed almost as if the box, in its own way, was trying to make me stay away, screwing up my face against the reek, I lifted the lid. I had to stuff my fist in my mouth to stop myself from screaming. Just as I had guessed, a corpse inhabited the box. It wasn't a fresh corpse either. It was partially decomposed. The eyeballs had melted, and the flesh was rotten, a pale green, and was beginning to hang off the bones. What was worst though, was that it wasn't a whole body. Large chunks of the torso had been ripped off, and the left leg was gone altogether, the bone viciously snapped in two. Despite the gruesome disfigurements which had befallen it, I had no doubt who the corpse had been. The skull grinning up at me, I had no doubt, belonged to Tom Grest.

[TheDarkPrince]

The chapter you've all been waiting for, ladies and gentlemen. My wrist doesn't hurt any more. It's lost feeling altogether...

[SnakeFire]

Yay! I was waiting for some dead people, lol.

[Trunksangel79]

Good chapter.The last part was kinda of creepy.

[TheDarkPrince]

Thx everyone. The chapters will go pretty slow from now on, 'cause I have exams in a few weeks, so I'll be spending a lot of time revising. It'll all be over in a little over a month.