Quantum Nightmares, page 10
Baby Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo.
“Dispatch. 23,” McCann said into his shoulder.
“23, dispatch.”
“We’re on location. I’m ‘bout to knock but the music is blaring, and I doubt if they’ll hear. I’ll keep you informed.”
“Copy, 23.”
McCann stood at the bottom of the steps. A thick blanket prevented prying eyes from looking inside. They looked at each other, smiling, acknowledging the irony of having a Baby Shark blanket covering the glass. McCann climbed the steps, Perez by his side, an odd mixture of adrenaline and anxiety mixing in her blood, tingling her fingers and toes. She looked at McCann and nodded. He knocked. Waited.
He knocked again louder. And again, nothing. One more time, he knocked. And he got the same result. He tried the door. It was locked. He looked down at Perez, her neck straining to meet his eyes. He gestured his head to the left. She nodded.
They descended the steps and peeled off, McCann right, Perez left. They went around the trailer, searching for unusual activity, but there was none to be had. They met in the middle. Perez was getting worried. From all outside appearances, there was no cause for worry. But there was something severely wrong here. Of that she was certain.
“C’mon,” McCann said. They went to the door on the right and knocked. Twice. Thrice. But all they heard from the inside was Baby Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo.
Perez jumped the steps. “Wadawe gonna do if they don’t answer?” McCann knew from her voice and demeanor that she was worried.
“Wadaya think we’re gonna do?” he said, smiling at her. She smiled back. God, he loved that smile. He would do anything to see that smile every day.
They went to the back door and knocked.
McCann leaned his head and spoke on the walkie. “Dispatch. 23.”
“23, dispatch.”
“We’re gonna breach,” he said. “You wanna send some backup?”
“23, dispatch,” Franny said. “Trackin’. Go for breach. Backup will be there shortly.”
McCann looked at Perez who had this look in her eyes, wild and unhinged. Despite her small stature, or perhaps because of it, she was the toughest and strongest person he’d ever met. He may not be the one she went home to every night, but she was his ride or die, now and forever.
She closed her eyes and rolled her shoulders, a familiar gesture she also did when she was getting annoyed. How many times had he seen her do that? How many calls? McCann laughed lightly and said, “Easy there, tiger. We’re not going to Ed’s tavern.” She opened her eyes and let out a loud guttural laugh. It was another inside joke, one of the many they shared together. Her smile was brilliant under the soft lighting. Her posture loosened. She needed that.
“Okay. I sweep left, you sweep right.” She nodded. “And don’t do anything you can’t come back from.” He held her eyes, nodded seriously then. “Forty-seven days. Remember.”
How could she forget? She’d be on a sandy beach somewhere in the Caribbean, ordering drinks from the swim-up bar and getting couples massages with AG Bane.
McCann knocked one more time for the birds.
Baby Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo.
He took a step back—his shadow casting on the wall, short and small, completely disrespecting his 6’4 stature. Then he put his size 13.5 boot through the cheap door. His leg shot through and got stuck. He jumped up and down on the other foot as he tried to maintain balance. Perez wrapped her tiny arms around his back and pulled hard, her laughs barely audible under the blaring music.
Working in tandem, McCann was able to free his leg. Pieces of refurbished wood hit his chest and fell to the ground. He laughed. She laughed. And if not for the loud noise informing those inside that they had visitors, they would’ve laughed and shared a beautiful moment together, adding the lovely memory to a long list of lovely memories and another inside joke that they both cherished dearly.
Later, his eyes said.
He stuck his hand through the hole, unlocked the door, and threw it back. A foot in the door, his feet stopped working and his heart sank.
The trailer had an open layout, with a massive living room that was easily half of the 1200-sq footage claimed in the title, with a small kitchen to the left which bled seamlessly into the dining area.
To the right, a narrow hallway led to three bedrooms and one bath. But, in typical trap house fashion, the open layout seemed convoluted, the floor covered to the ceiling in boxes and crates and tools and electronics and toys and any innocuous item one could fathom.
There was an electric generator on the left, which was reported stolen the night prior by Fred Astaire on 1st avenue. Car radios and GPS systems and jewelry. They’d found who was behind the rash of robberies that’d hit the small town. But that’s not what caught his attention.
The ceiling was caked in a thick yellow film, a dreadful combination of tobacco smoke and meth smoke with splashes of red interspersed.
A rat with a five-inch tail navigated past a stack of DVDs and ran toward the bedrooms.
The air was hot, humid, the smell toxic, unbreathable (literally). On the dining room table that connects the kitchen with the living room, there was an elaborate contraption of clear tubes and beakers running up and down, swooping left and right into vats like some eccentric game of mouse trap. On the left, bottles of Drano and other cleaning products. The right side was reserved solely for the main ingredient: Sudafed. Boxes upon boxes stacked together to form a mountain— Mount Decongestion.
All of it made for a scene straight out of Hoarders, but it still wasn’t the reason McCann’s feet stopped working at the doorway.
The reason his brain refused to tell his feet to take a step—he would later admit as he drank himself into oblivion—was fear, pure and simple.
Perez bumped into him, then pushed past him, gasping, and wrenching when she saw what had McCann so shook. But instead of fear, a primordial mutation activated some ancient maternal gene inherited from her animal ancestors and her body injected with anger, adrenaline. Purely instinctual, she took off running into the hallway, bumping into a stack of old Maxims and Playboys.
McCann wanted to follow Perez, but he couldn’t take his eyes off it, the horror of it, the untenable horror. He closed his eyes but that only seemed to make it worse, pictures flashing seemingly on a beat to the music, the fucking music burning into his ear canal and settling in his brain, mixing with the vision like a macabre, synchronized Christmas light show.
Baby Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo.
He opened his eyes, searching for the stereo that delivered the vile song, a song that would henceforth activate his PTSD and send him into an immediate and unforgiving panic attack which could only be alleviated with alcohol and copious amounts of benzos—Xanax. Klonopins (forgotapins as he would come to call them), Valium .… All of them? Yes, doc, please—that the precinct shrink will later throw at him after declaring him unfit for duty and putting him out to pasture, medically retiring him at thirty-three, broken.
The sound system was immediately to his left. He lunged forward and kicked it, breaking the expensive-looking face. But that’s all it did, break the face. The music still surrounded him, coming from every angle, mocking him, haunting him. He looked up at the corner and realized it was a state-of-the-art Bluetooth system worth, easily, a couple of thousand bucks. Janet probably got it for an eight-ball from one of her slaves when they stopped by with one of those tote boxes.
And that’s when McCann realized that the cult that was slowly forming on the corner lot at Happy Homes Trailer Park was being fed an endless supply of meth by Janet Bigelow. But she wasn’t selling it, she was cooking it. That’s why traffic was at a minimum. That’s why they couldn’t pull someone over as they left and with the threat of prison force them to make a controlled buy from her. That’s why Jerry feared for his life, and rightfully so. He’d bitten the hand that fed him, literally. Him and at least thirty others.
McCann pivoted and unplugged the device, but even then, he still heard the catchy song playing in the background of his damned soul, distant, obstructed, almost as if it was playing in the other room.
McCann realized it was coming from the next room.
Baby Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo.
“Shut the fuck up.” In the twenty-six years that McCann had known Perez, she’d screamed like that only once before—thirty-four days ago, right before she slammed the head of a man twice her size through the driver side window.
Women are more emotional, McCann thought in the back of his mind. That’s why men make better cops.
A sudden fear washed over him, a fear that Perez would do something stupid, that she would do something that she could not come back from.
He turned toward the hallway and saw it—
“The music made her do it,” Jerry’s words rang in his mind.
The baby was on the coffee table, naked and disemboweled; the large intestines, a long thick wet rope strung five feet toward the ottoman where it wrapped around the neck of Janet’s four-year-old daughter, her little eyes bulging, unblinking. Blood covered everything in a five-foot radius. There was blood on the floor, on the couch, even splashes on the ceiling. McCann couldn’t fathom how so much blood came from such a small body, then he realized that the body attached to the four-year-old seemed …
A blanket was draped across her chest, covering her lower half, which seemed to lack a certain degree of dimensional mass, dropping off at the hips to the same level as the ottoman.
Baby Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo.
This from Janet in the back room.
There was a loud smack, the deep resonance slapping down the narrow hallway. “One more time,” Perez screamed. “Say that shit one more time and you’re fucking dead.”
Janet found a loophole. She didn’t say the words, instead she hummed the tune. “Hmhm hmhmhm hmhmhmhm hmhm hmhm …”
“That’s it.” A loud smack. Another one. Then the paralyzing sound of the hammer of an unseen gun cocking, shaking McCann’s knees, making his legs wobbly, a decibel measured in terror alone.
“Don’t do it, Dani,” McCann screamed. He ran with noodle legs toward the hallway, stumbling into the couch, the dead children a few feet away, and though he didn’t want to look at the mysterious bottom half of the four-year-old, the need was far greater. He yanked the blanket off.
Everything below the upper thighs was missing, sloppy jagged cuts made by a serrated blade, blood soaking through the ottoman and onto the floor.
“Hmhmhm, hmhmhmhmhm, hmhmhmhm …”
Smack. Grunt. Maniacal laugh.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Perez cried.
Thud. Moans. Humming.
“Hmhm-hmhm hmhm hmhm hmhm hmhm hmhmhmhm …”
Incoherent whispers.
The incoherent whispers scared McCann to his core.
“No, Dani.” If not for McCann being intimately connected to Perez ever since she moved in across the street when she was five, he might’ve mistaken the whispers as a hissing radiator, rustling leaves, rats scurrying about; but he knew that it was in fact Perez praying to be forgiven of her sins.
A dreadfully accurate image slid into the screen of his mind’s eye: Janet on her knees, hands behind her back, eyes big as tire hubs, bleeding profusely from several head wounds, and Perez standing over her, gun aimed at Janet’s head with one hand, and with the other, rubbing her Saint Mary pendant, the one he gave her when they graduated high school together.
“Every time I touch it to pray, I’ll think of you,” she’d said, “so that you and Mary will forever be with me, watching me, guiding me, protecting me.”
Girls are just more emotional than guys.
A passing thought, whimsical, automatic. Oh, but even he knew that was bullshit, because even then, and even though he didn’t see it with his own eyes, he knew the love of his life was mere seconds away from spraying Janet’s brains across the cheap vinyl walls that were coming apart at the seams; he couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride as the moon’s rays cut through the partitioned window, meeting the pendant’s silver surface before bouncing off in an array of oscillating slices that shimmered and shimmied about.
“Dani.” McCann turned his head and vomited as he ran down the hallway, coffee and donuts trickling down the wall. He stopped at the end of the hallway. Four doors, all left ajar, teasing him with options. He pushed the first one open, a bathroom. He was surprised how clean it was given the state of the rest of the trailer.
“Answer me, Dani,” he screamed as he careened down the hall.
He was about to throw the second door back when he heard unhinged laughter—the laugh of a mad person—from the door at the end of the hallway.
Then, Baby Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo.
A loud, deafening bang, followed by a soft thud.
Ringing silence.
“Dani?” Hesitantly, McCann put a finger on the door and pushed slowly, walking into the room with maddening slowness. Janet splayed out in the middle of the room, brains, and blood all about her, hands over her head, a bloody saw to her left, rudimentary painting of massive, cartoonish shark teeth covering the lower half of her face in what appeared to look and smell like kiwi. It would later be determined that she didn’t kill her children in some drug addled, violent killing spree. She killed them by accident. She was just trying to get them to go to bed and she used the shark bit as a way to relate. When they didn’t believe she was a real shark she fetched the dull saw and proved them wrong.
Perez was standing with her back toward the door, breathing heavily, gasping for air, crying, gasping, crying.
“It’s okay, Dani,” he said stepping forward. “You got her. She can’t hurt anyone else.” McCann hugged Perez gently, squeezing. “It’s okay,” he said.
Hmhm hmhmhm hmhmhm hmhmh …
Perez started humming absently, eyes vacant. McCann shook her but she only stared at him with big empty eyes and kept humming the song; a song she would never stop humming, not through any of the psych evaluations, not through any of the court proceedings, no matter how much McCann begged, she kept on humming her way to a free stay at Happy Family retirement home for the rest of her life.
Attorney General Bane never visited her, nor did the twat fiancé. But McCann did, he visited her every day, no matter how much it broke his heart. She was his ride or die.
One hand washes the next, now, and forever.
She’d sit there, staring off in the distance, a heartbreaking placidity to her face and eyes, humming along to the permanent elevator music in the purgatory that had become her life.
Hmhm hmhmhm hmhmhm hmhmh.
Black-Eyed Children
“BLACK-EYED CHILDREN.” That’s what residents of a small rural community just outside Pekin, Tennessee has taken to calling them. Named so for their dark, seemingly soulless eyes. “Eyes that’ll make ya believe in the devil,” said Dorothy Boyd, a retired English teacher from Pekin High. But Dorothy wasn’t the first to report such peculiar occurrences, and it seems she certainly will not be the last. Reports have been trickling with alarming regularity concerning these terrifying, otherworldly encounters.
The modus operandi? A simple, neighborly knock. That’s right. A knock. But like all knocks, these ones, too, beg an answer. It is an answer that this seasoned reporter isn’t wholly sure we’re ready for. The consensus seems to be that these black-eyed children initiate contact by knocking on the door at all hours of the night, asking to enter the house and use the phone, using any number of fabricated emergencies as an excuse to get their foot in the door and wait for their parents. But it’s not what they’re saying that is disturbing so many Pekin residents, it’s their appearance and demeanor that has so many people concerned. And perhaps more shocking than their appearance … is their disappearance.
Monica Krutsch, an owner of the local bakery, had this to say about her encounter: “They knocked on the door and asked to come in, but in this really scary, really monotone voice, almost like they was robots or somethin’. They said they were in an accident down the street, and I thought they were just frazzled. Ya know? Like in shock or somethin’ like that. But just as I was about to open the chain link, somethin’ deep inside urged me to turn the porch light on and that’s when I saw ‘em for what they was.”
What’s that?
“I reckon they’re demons. Yep. Demon is the only word that comes to mind. I felt, in a very profound sort of way, that if I let them in, they were gonna eat my soul. I know that sounds a bit dramatic, but it was like I could hear their thoughts, feel their intentions, sense their evil.”
What happened, next?
“Well, there was no way I was gonna let ‘em in after seeing those eyes. Not alone, anyways. So, I ran upstairs to get my husband—who was madder than a rattlesnake that married the garden hose that I woke him—and when we came back downstairs, they was gone. Both a’em. Just like that. Poof. It was as if they was never really there. The thing of it is, though, they was there, and we had the first heavy snow fall of the year that eve’nin—six, seven inches, thereabouts—and there shoulda been a buncha footprints scurrying about this way and that, but my steps and entryway were nothing but untouched virgin snow. Clean as a hound’s tooth it was.”
Mrs. Krutsch isn’t the only person to report such oddities in the presence of black-eyed children.
“They said they was stranded by the side of the road,” said Justin Thompson, an auto-mechanic at Jerry’s Auto, who incidentally recorded his interaction on a doorbell camera.
“They said they needed to use m’phone. But somein’ didn’t feel quite right ‘bout ‘em, ya see? Somein’ ‘bout their faces and in their mannerisms and whatnot was all … wonky. But they was still jus’ kids and my dearly beloved Betty would roll right on over in her grave if she saw me shut the door on a coupla defenseless kids on account that they scared me to the dickens. And they did too. Scare me that is. Ain’t afraid to admit it, either.”
