Station Bay Police Station
It was early evening in the city, and leaves drifted across the streets in a chilly wind that foreshadowed the perfect atmosphere for the coming Halloween one month early. A discarded newspaper bearing sensationalist headlines of occult happenings in the city, not the least of which was speculation tying the mysterious fog leaks to the brutal string of serial murders, was caught on a handrail that divided a white marble staircase down the middle. The deck at the top was an enclave into an architectural overhang supported by matching marble columns evocative of ancient Greece, and it was within the doors of this place that the atmosphere among the night shift workers on Station Bay’s law enforcement payroll had become akin to that of an emergency storm shelter waiting for the big one to blow over. Everything was somehow too stilted and chilly within the labyrinthine rooms of the precinct’s main building, not at all helped by the disorienting convolution of the back halls that had yet to be corrected by the renovation staff. The building had been a storage facility once upon a time, and wentgone through a few other stints that saw the rooms gutted and reworked many times.
It was disorienting for rookie newcomers in theiron their first few weeks, but it was something they got used to over time. Tonight though, it seemed unsettling, as though footsteps echoed too loudly in the disused corridors. There was sufficient central heating going into the holding cells - prisoners had human rights, after all - but the walls seemed to absorb the heat. The lights, save for a few flickering overhead bulbs that were reserved for backup power, had all gone out on the cell block, plunging the captives into a disquieting darkness.
Lester had just made his rounds through the supply room and run stock on the cleaning equipment supplies, grumbling to himself all the while. They were down a custodian as of a week ago, and never seemed able to keep one around for any longer than a few weeks anyway. The closet where the mops, plastic push carts, and cleaning chemicals were held was built into a wall at the corner of one of the empty hallways, and here the lights had burnt out too. Lester found himself looking up at the far end of that hallway every other second, it seemed, and he couldn’t get out of there fast enough once he had finished his business with the clipboard checklist. He power-walked to the help desk office as briskly as he could without humiliating himself by going any faster. He just wanted to be far from the back of the station.
The main office where Wilcox sat behind a computer screen, a filing cabinet and unsorted plastic supply bin at his back, was brightly lit and welcoming. The floor here was cushy carpeting, a burnt auburn color that lent a sort of rustic charm to the place. Overhead, spanning the archway of the junction into the other rooms of the facility beyond the immediate entry room was a bright blue banner with cursive yellow text reading “The SBPD gives you a warm welcome from the bottom of our hearts!”. It was a party decoration meant to welcome in the new guy, but that whole celebration had been put in the icebox for a few weeks thanks to some obstructive paperwork errors delaying his transfer. All the same, Lester found the bright primary colors a reassuring sight.
Wilcox’s desk also had a stapler on it, and an apple with a few bites taken out of it. It lay there, forgotten on the stout mahogany desk. It had begun to turn yellowish brown as it oxidized in the open air, still covered in flecks of Wilcox’s saliva. Lester chose not to pass commentary on the abandoned snack and volley their usual banter. It felt somehow inappropriate, as though he would be trying to pave over the air of dread that demanded respectful silence. He didn’t like the cold chills he was getting, and he fetched a cigarette from his breast pocket to calm his nerves, frowning with dismay to find that his cheap gas station lighter had run out. He gauged whether or not he could afford to interrupt Wilcox, whose sleepless pudgy face was buried deeply in the blue glow of his computer screen. His large fingers were pecking away at the keys incessantly. Nervous compulsion and addiction won out.
“Cox, you got a light?” Lester broke the rhythm of the keys.
Without looking up from his computer, Wilcox shook his head. “No. The missus is cracking down on my cigar habit, keeping a lighter around is just unnecessary temptation and teasing.”
Forest, one of their younger officers, was at a long table surrounded by cushy chairs in the tiled waiting room, his boot-clad feet propped up on the wood. His small hands were running through slicked back hair that was oversaturated with gel, and the sharp fragrance of cologne blanketed him. He looked back over the lounge chair’s shoulder to put in his two cents, sensing the right moment to strike.
“She’s worried about the wrong things. If your health is any concern to her, she’d do best to stop feeding you those lead bricks she calls casseroles.” Forest said with a half-cheeky grin.
Wilcox chucked a crumpled up ball of paper at Forest, and it whiffed just over his head. “Don’t impune my wife’s cooking, pup.”
“Actually, we still have a few helpings left in the break room fridge, if you’re hurting for dinner.” Lester joined the band wagon, though his insides were still squirming, and his smile felt painfully forced.
Wilcox’s face wrinkled over with couched disgust. “Not hungry.”
“Uh huh,” Forest snickered. “Yeah, thought so.”
“If you have nothing better to do, Forest, go relieve Dean of his shift.” Wilcox growled.
Forest shrugged and begrudgingly swaggered out of his chair, starting in the direction of the cell block where Dean was supposed to be on guard duty this time. The cells were sturdy enough, but it was deemed a not overbearing extra precaution to keep an eye on the prisoners more regularly as of late, on account of many of their new visitors being stark raving mad, or animalistically violent.
Usually both.
It wouldn’t do to let them harm themselves or each other. This evening there had been no such trouble, but the pair of stoners they’d picked up off the streets rambling about monsters in the fog and streaking, oblivious to their own nakedness, had raised some red flags that warranted concern. Wilcox had meant to grill them a little bit about these things himself, but the task of manually backing up an entire catalogue of corrupted digital files had fallen into his lap. The organization and virtual cleanup really should have been the Chief’s job, but he was still in the john, presumably straining some new hemorrhoids into existence as he was gripped by constipation.
Forest thought it best not to give Wilcox grief. He could see the stress in his eyes, and the sweat beading up at his pores, and felt a minor twang of sympathy for his elder officer. The wind outside was beginning to pick up, and was soon howling, rattling the windows. Although none of them had spoken to each other about it, each man in this room felt the oppressive atmosphere of the wind, and the choked anticipation of some kind of incident beginning to churn. As such, they all wanted to keep busy, and quiet their minds.
Forest passed through the gate under lock and key that admitted him into the basement stairwell, where the holding cells had been moved to during the renovation process that was indefinitely stalled on the upper level. The flickering darkness felt thick and syrupy. At the end of the hall lined with bleak cells on either side, Forest came to the watch desk.
At the table he found not Dean, but Randal, his sun-beaten red face having taken on the peaceful look of a sleeping infant as he slumped in his chair. His hands were folded over his chest, and he was snoring loudly. Forest could clearly hear the man’s minor sleep apnea in choked snorts and fits that punctuated the snores. Forest saw that in front of the man sleeping on the job was a glossy magazine whose contents he didn’t have to second guess, and a white coffee mug whose contents had gone cold. The mug sat unbuffered on the table, and Forest felt a twinge of irritation. If he had told Randal once, he had told him a thousand times to use goddamned coasters. Who did he think had to iron out the rings they left around here?
The ostensibly intoxicated nudists they had bagged had not stirred yet, and Forest assumed them asleep at the moment, but the one other prisoner being held right now, Old Man Hendricks, was crouched like a wrinkly, crude-looking goblin on his messy bunk. The repeat offender who had to be scooped, drunk and spewing slurs, out of the gutter more often than not had a mirthful gleam in his beady eyes despite his glaucoma giving them a milky white look, and the pinkness of his face from hard liquor had not yet faded completely. Hendricks clawed a pointy, arthritis-morphed hook finger at the sleeping Randal as though he were the funniest sight in the world.
“Reckin the lad’s sleep noises are going to bring the roof down on our heads before the storm does, eh Woodsy?” Hendricks chuckled.
Forest only rolled his eyes at the man’s malicious nickname for him and spoke that “On that note, you may be right”, before taking his heavy black flashlight off his utility belt and slamming the bottom of it down hard on the guard desk.
Randal, his chair backed up against the concrete wall where the basement cell block ended, startled awake and tried to stumble backward, managing only to partially tip his chair before it hit the wall and stopped, and Randal banged the back of his head on the hard stone. He cursed loudly and gripped the back of his skull with both hands, counting to ten in his head to focus through the pain.
Hendricks was cackling up a storm in his cell at Randal’s mishap. “Uh oh, poor boy went ahead and fell asleep in class! Yer gonna get yer knuckles slapped with the yardstick and a dunce cap shoved on yer dandruffy skull!”
Randal, feeling a little hot under the collar in mixed embarrassment and anger, took his old-fashioned billy club from his waist like a sidearm and clobbered it hard against the bars.
“Quiet, you old gink!” he snapped at Hendricks.
That started the suspected druggies ranting and raving again in subdued psychosis, and Forest pinched the bridge of his nose. “You went and woke the kids.”
“Fuckin’ hypocrite, who slammed my desk to wake me up?” Randal glared.
“On the subject, I’ve got two questions. Well, a question and a statement, really. First thing I want to say is that if you keep sleeping on the job, we’re going to toss you in one of those cells when you’re conked out one of these days and take bets on how long it takes you to notice. Onto the question, where's Dean? He was supposed to be on shift tonight, not you.” Forest drilled him.
“I ain’t the kid’s keeper. I think he wanted to go to the breakroom, he’s probably still holed up in there.” Randal said, the reek of cheap whiskey from a concealed flask wafting out on his breath.
“Thanks for the update.” Forest clapped his shoulder and turned back the way he came, audaciously snatching up the man’s girlie magazine on his way out, to stuttered protests.
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Forest found Dean, the only man on the force in Station Bay who looked younger and more boyish than himself, in the breakroom as promised, eyebrows furrowed under the bright fluorescent lighting of the room as he worked diligently at a piece of canvas. The vending machines and coffee pot were both untouched, and Dean was so focused that he didn’t seem to notice Forest’s presence yet. The latter crept up behind him somewhat casually to peak over Dean’s shoulder at whatever he had been working on.
Upon the canvas, in dark pencil shading, Dean had illustrated the profile of a wiry, tall, lanky man wrapped in the garments of some kind of archaic court jester. The sleeves and leggings were striped in black and white, and a similar repeating pattern, this time checkered, ran across the main body of the cushioned shirt. A conical hat with a black branch and a white branch dangled small bells from the tips of either end, and the face was hidden behind a plaster-like mask of some kind in the shape of the classical theatre Comedy face. Only a few locks of soft-looking hair hung free of the hat and mask, lightly shaded in what Dean assumed to stand in for blond or light brown. Narrow, pointed clogs adorned the small feet, and the hands were all but swallowed by the ruffles and frills of the overly long sleeves. The most distinguishing feature of the strange character, however, extended the reach of those hands well past their forms. Adorning the fingers, affixed to some kind of gauntlet on either hand locked at the wrist by bracers tucked under the sleeves, were four long, hooked blades each, looking like vicious two-foot claws.
When Forest finished digesting the imagery, he found a conversation opener to address to Dean and break the eerie silence of the younger man’s artistic focus.
“You take an interest in comic book art? Or is that some kind of Halloween costume design?” Forest asked.
Dean didn’t startle from the sudden address. If he had jumped, his pencil tip might have accidentally flown to the top corner of the page, ruining the picture with an unseemly black line that couldn’t be cleanly rubbed out by eraser. The young officer only spoke back to Forest without looking or taking his hands off his work.
“Neither. Revising the forensic sketches of our lead suspect in the slasher killings after reviewing the reports.” Dean said.
“You can’t be serious.” Forest looked incredulously at the composite. “Unless you’re implying this guy fancies himself a gaudy supervillain or something.”
“Truth is often stranger than fiction.” Dean shrugged.
“If you were going to duck out on guard duty to touch up the suspect profiles, why on God’s green earth did you stick a slacker like Randal in your place instead?” Forest asked.
“The cells have bars, I don’t think the prisoners are going anywhere.” Dean said. He dropped the pencil and reached for a nearby glass of water to wet his drying throat. “They’re safer inside, I think, than outside, at this point. Poison gas leaks, a rising crime rate, some kind of new drug craze or mass hysteria going around about monsters and ghosts, and a rash of horrific murders, all in one season. When I swore to protect and serve, I didn’t expect a sixty-car pileup in nonsensical citywide problems like this. I could have taken being a mall cop and made up my wages in day-old cinnamon rolls tossed out by the vendors over this headache. We aren’t staffed with enough guys to tackle all of this shit at once, not by a long shot.”
Forest shrugged. “Well, the intelligence bureau has a wrap on the spills, you don’t have to worry about that. They’ve got a similar problem all the way over in Africa, Cameroon I want to say. There’s this big lake that’s got an active magma pocket under it releasing concentrations of carbon dioxide gas. Last time it got released all at once, it blanketed the ground and asphyxiated everyone in the area. Some places are ticking timebombs like that. Natural caves too. That’s why miners used to take canaries down with them, to sniff out fumes and take the hit for their overlords if it meant early detection.”
Dean screwed up his face. “Those two deadbeats we’ve got in the cells, the ones you or someone else is going to have to go put back to bed in a minute here, they keep going on about the fog. From what I can make out of their delirious recountings, they saw dark shapes in the fog that looked like they were trying to get out, but the fog was blocking them. The way they described it, you’d almost think the fog had layers with their own directional and spatial rules. What I can’t get out of my head though, or write off as temporary drug-induced psychosis, is how disturbingly that description overlaps with the reports we’ve been getting called in like a flood lately. You heard the Chief barking over the phone to quit yanking his chain, right?”
“Housewives hysterically shouting about gremlins leaving footprints on the counter, and the like? Yeah, I’ve indulged his venting a bit here and there. You think there’s a connection?” Forest said.
“Yeah. I don’t see what all the witnesses making these claims have in common - young, old, man, woman, poor, wealthy - or what they would have to gain from corroborating the same wild goose chase story for an elaborate practical joke though. It’s easy to look at a couple of baked nudists littering the park and dismiss their babbling as hallucinations, but what are the odds everyone who’s cooked up monsters in their heads while tripping out only did so when the fog was around?” Dean asked.
“Easy, don’t forget this is toxic fog we’re talking about. Say your witnesses get a little too close, they get one too many whifs of the stuff, and they get unbalanced and start seeing things.” Forest said.
Dean didn’t look convinced. “Do I need to tell you I’m getting a creepy feeling about this place, lately?”
“How do you mean?” Forest asked.
“Well, back when I lived on the west coast, San Francisco wasn’t such a far drive off. They were running tours of Alcatraz at the time, and I had an afternoon to kill. I didn’t much care for that place, that prison.” Dean started.
“We’re hardly different, why not go talk to those guys in the cells?” Forest chuckled.
“No, man, just listen, ok? Alcatraz was the best of the best for the worst of the worst at the time, a maximum security prison designed to break the wills of even the toughest inmates. The bay currents and the coldness of the seawater deterred swimming to freedom, but what was worse was the treatment of the prisoners. Anyone who stepped too far out of line could be expected to be thrown in a strip cell, and by that I do mean in both senses of the word - first, the poor sap was stripped of his clothes, then the room he was locked up in had no furnishings either. It was completely stripped of bed, sink - anything. Even the toilet was just an inglorious hole in the ground. Anyway, one of these cells was 14D. They let us walk in and out of the cells ourselves, to check out the interiors and really soak in what it would have been like to dwell in those holding chambers. These were men who had been shut in and had their wills broken, and to sit where they sat was to feel what they felt. Despair like that doesn’t wash away easily. I think it tends to get recorded, stained into the stones themselves.” Dean’s face had taken on a pale, waxy look, his eyes haunted as he attained a kind of entranced perfect recall.
Forest bade him go on, finding himself drawn into the vortex of Dean’s words and not understanding why.
“That’s why you get cold spots. Ever feel a cold spot in a room? You’re walking, and all of a sudden you pass through what feels like a static, invisible waterfall of ice. That cold bites you down to your core. They’re everywhere - abandoned houses, graveyards, uncharted wilderness - anywhere bad things might have happened or blood may have been spilled, you’re sure to find spots that don’t feel quite right, like how you can tell when someone’s watching you. You know how the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and you feel just like a helpless little kid again? Well I walked in 14D and it wasn’t just a cold spot, it was a whole plunge. That room reeked of some seriously bad juju. Damn near had a heart attack. It no longer mattered that it was still the middle of the day, or that there was a tour group and a tour guide not a dozen feet from me. It was dark, and it was cold, so cold, like the stones in that cell ate the light and the heat. Sure enough, our tour guide gets around to telling the group one of the more popular accounts of alleged hauntings in the prison. Now I don’t know if I believe in ghosts or not, but I know I believe in cold spots, and I know I trust my instincts. A man had stayed the night there for some kind of infraction, and he spent the whole night stranded in the dark with the lights shut off screaming about how something with glowing red eyes was trying to kill him.”
“And?” Forest asked finally, hanging on Dean’s every word.
“And they found him dead the next morning. Strangled. The official cause of death that was ruled was suicide, but I don’t see how that could have been. You don’t see the kind of bruises you get on your neck from being throttled if it were self-imposed. Without an external component, like a plastic bag or a noose, it’s impossible to suffocate yourself just by grabbing your own neck or holding your breath. Even if you manage to muffle the burning pain in your chest, you just run out of oxygen and pass out. Then your body breathes again automatically while you’re passed out. This was no suicide. This was murder - by a ghost or a demon, or by something else I don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing,” Dean said. “After hearing that story, it felt like the cold of being in cell 14D was back again, and like I’d never left it. That chill followed me home. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, about what that sucker could have been seeing in his final moments, and in the hours before. On nights like these, when it’s dark and stormy, and there’s menace in the air, I feel like I’m back in that cold spot. I like my job how it is, where we know we stand outside the bars, and the bad guys are locked up inside. A man you can cuff and toss in the slammer. Ghosts and the like don’t belong to the physical world, and you can’t just lock them up. It isn’t fair. They’ll come right back out through the walls. I didn’t used to think of the precinct like that. But lately, this doesn’t feel like our building anymore. It feels like we’re somewhere else now, and I don’t like it one bit.”
Forest wasn’t sure what to say. He numbly swallowed back spit that had collected in the back of his throat. Then, he broke the silence.
“That’s a good one, Dean, real ripper.” he clapped the younger man’s shoulder. “Had me going a minute. Sheesh, you need to lay off the horror stories.” Forest helped himself to the coffee pot, found the batch had gone cold and sour, and started fresh. “It’s just a little stormy weather and a few gas leaks, that’s all.”
Dean held up the composite sketch he had drawn of their suspect and raised his eyebrow.
“A killer, now that’s different. You said it yourself, right, Dean? Ghosts can’t get locked up in a cell, but a man is different. He’s flesh and blood, same as you or me, and we know where we stand. We’ll catch him, and put this long nightmare to bed. Bet on that.” Forest said.
Half of him realized that his show of false bravado was meant as much to convince himself as it was Dean. All of a sudden, Forest himself felt that the station had become one big cold spot.
Back on the basement cell block, Randal found a situation on his hands. The streakers were definitely awake again, and erratic. The elder of the two - brothers, brown hair and blond hair - was gripping the bars with white knuckles clenched, face pressed up against them with eyes wide as saucers. His mouth was a quivering line of fear.
“Copper, listen, you got to let us out of here, man! You don’t know what’s coming!” he cried out hysterically. “Please, please! It isn’t safe, he’s going to get us!”
Randal scoffed, but felt a chill despite himself. “Settle down, no one’s going to get you in there! You’re in the safest place you could be.”
The younger brother was recessed into the back of the cell, huddled up hugging his knees in the corner and rocking back and forth, muttering. “S-scary. Here, h-he’s here already… coming… something coming…”
The elder brother suddenly picked up a simple wooden writing chair they’d been allotted and slammed it against the bars with a thunderous crash, repeating the process of banging on the bars till the seat had shattered to splintered rubbish.
“Hey! Knock that shit off!” Randall stumbled over his own seat, bumping the table with his knee.
The man at the bars thrust his arm in between them, outstretched as far as he could go, grasping and pleading for the key. In the corner, the younger one was weeping uncontrollably.
Across from them, Hendricks threw a pebble at Randal’s back. “What kind of a motel you running here, you right blue varmint? This ain’t no nuthouse, stop them boys hollering like that!”
Randall smacked Hendricks’ cell bars with his billy club again. “You just can it, you quack! Lemme think.”
The sun-weathered cop began backing away from either cell, shuffling away from his guard watch sitting area in a haze of uncertainty and anxiety. This was irregular. For all he knew, the kids might be having some kind of adverse reaction or medical issue, not just a psychotic breakdown. His mind was made up for him when the older brother started banging his head against the bars.
“Let us out of here!” he cried out.
Randal’s face drained of color. “I gotta go get the Chief…”