Sleep-starved and still aching from his exertion, Richie was irritated by the bright overhead light swaying in his bloodshot stinging eyes. His hands were cuffed, and he was seated on a hard metal folding chair against a barren table. Across from him was an officer, waistline stretched from one too many generous helpings of decent meals, mustache bristly and twitching. The pig reeked of mixed whisky and coffee. Richie bit back the impulse to ask for a cup of joe himself, wanting no favors from these pieces of shit. He didn’t do anything wrong, and they had nothing on him. The hard stare of the inquisitor though told a different story.
“Don’t you lie to me. You know why we’re here, don’t you?” the man said gruffly.
“Jaywalking?” Richie quipped.
The large man stomped his foot under the table, a gesture of abuse conveniently hidden from surveillance camera recording by the obtrusive table. Richie grunted, folding his stomach onto the table involuntarily. It shouldn’t have hurt that much, but his foot was worn out, and the pig’s boot was thick and heavy.
“The junkie. Why’d you do it?” the man demanded.
Well, as long as it was all out in the open.
“Why? Why do you think? Fucker jumped me! It was self-defense.” Richie said.
“Self-defense, sure. Well, you sure made your point. You’re in deep shit, kid.”
Richie blinked slowly, his own lids agitating his dried eyes each time. “What? Does he want me to foot the medical bills or something?”
“Cute. Try funeral expenses.”
Richie’s jaw fell open. “Get real. This is a joke.”
The man slapped a folder onto the counter and flipped through its contents. “This is very real. The man is dead, and you’re facing first-degree murder charges. Have a look, see if it jogs your memory.” the man flopped a photo of the crime scene over to Richie.
Richie tentatively pawed the photo closer to himself and looked upon it. He instantly felt the urge to blow chunks again, one hand coming up instinctively to cup his mouth, the handcuffs linking his wrists forcing him to yank his other hand up as well. The body was that of the same vagrant alright, but not as Richie had left him. The junkie was sprawled out on his back, his entire torso from waist to chest raked with what looked unmistakably like the claws of some giant wild animal, like a cougar or a grizzly bear. There were four grisly streaks slashed up his body, so deep that they looked like they opened up slotted windows into the man’s entrails. The marks were so vicious that it could be assumed at a glance that the slashes had been powerful enough to break right through the ribs. Richie was responsible for one side, but the other had been untouched - the severance had all been under the killer’s own cutting power. The slaughtered vagrant’s eyes were glassy, frozen in a permanent look of suddenly sober, sheer mortal terror, his mouth twisted in a silent scream.
Richie balked at the interrogator. “You’ve got to be kidding me! You think I could have done that?!”
The cop slammed his fists on the table in anger. “You were found with a switchblade on you!”
“It was a pocket knife, the kind with a corkscrew and a fucking nail file in it! Look at that guy, he looks like he got gutted by a freaking bear! No ordinary guy could have done this with anything short of a four-pronged machete or something! Let me out of here!” Richie protested in a horrified ramble.
Jesus Christ, was whoever or whatever did that nearby the entire time? Could it have just as easily been me?
The cop showed Richie his own mugshot collage, complete with the identifying photos they had taken of his bare upper torso. Richie looked over his own sprawling tattoo work. The Chinese dragon carved in ink started at Richie’s back, coiling around his torso and splitting around his shoulders, serpentine necks spiraling around the length of either arm and terminating in horned, trailing-whiskered dragon heads at his wrists. The pattern continued down about his pelvis, branching and coiling around his legs as well, where the bodies ended in slender tails at his ankles. The whole of the twin dragon construct was dyed in vibrant azure blue. On Richie’s chest, at his right peck, was the brand of the entity’s name - “Seiryu” - in Japanese kanji, the variant by which Richie knew the name of the mythic Azure Dragon. 青竜.
“What’s with these fancy tattoos? You some kind of Yakuza, or something?” the man continued to grill him.
Richie shook his head. “If I were, I wouldn’t be a gutter-rat swiping bread loaves out of garbage bins for a living, I’d be in a $3,000 suit ordering someone to kick your ass from the top of my luxury Tokyo suite, you braindead hick!”
“Watch your mouth, brat.” the man stomped Richie’s foot under the table again. “And quit playing dumb, we both know this isn’t about one tramp in an alleyway. These wounds - they’re identical to the ones left behind on a trail of ravaged corpses left strewn about the city. Witnesses placed you running in a panic from the scene of the crime before you took off to the rooftops and bounded out of sight. We found your vomit all over the damn guy, how much more evidence do you want thrown in your face? And these knuckles-” the cop roughly grabbed Richie’s cut hand, “line up perfectly with the pile of chompers laying next to the poor bastard.”
Richie yanked his arm away. “Hold up, a trail of bodies?! I haven’t been here a couple of weeks yet!”
“So you say, but you’ve got no proof, no alibi. No ID, no track record - nothing. What are you doing here in the first place, according to your ‘wrong place, wrong time’ story?” the man demanded.
Richie’s throat closed up against his near-slip of the tongue that he had in fact had run-ins with the law, and just took a little vacation to let the heat die off. It was true, but it painted him in a suspicious light, so he wasn’t sure if it would be better or worse for his case to lie.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
“I’m a displaced person, no home, no relatives, no connections. You wouldn’t find an ID on me no matter where you looked, I’ve been on my own as far back as I can remember.”
“And how far is that, punk?” the cop asked.
How far was it? Richie realized he didn’t have an answer. He couldn’t remember a time before age twelve, give or take, and he’d already been on the streets by then. Did he come from a home and a family originally? Had there been a time before the concrete jungle wilds? Something felt terribly familiar about this entire situation all of a sudden. He clutched at his head as a white hot pain seared it from the inside. He had the fleeting memory of a kiss on his forehead, of being pushed out an aperture of some kind - a window? - and then of his eardrums ringing with the thunder of gunshots.
His consciousness swam, fading in and out under the sudden dreadful heaviness of the dissociative attack. He only distantly made out words like “later” and “observation”.
When he fully came to again, he was sitting on the cold hard slab of a detention cell, looking through black iron bars at the far wall of the jailhouse, where the opposing row of cells stared back at him. His head still pounded relentlessly, but at least the cuffs were off and he could now clutch at his splitting skull. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he remembered a guard who should have confiscated his scarf tossing it about his face instead, advising him to make use of it and spare the state the trouble of convicting him. Richie’s face shifted into a bitter grin as he held back hot tears at the cold injustice and absurdity of his situation.
“All over fucking bread.”
At some point, with nothing better to do than wait, he laid down, and an uneasy sleep claimed him.
He stirred to the unsettling sound of metal scraping metal, and of sparks grinding out into cascading orange waterfalls. He looked up in time to see a set of four gleaming steel claws with curved tips, each blade two feet long easily, dragging across his bars, attached to a gauntlet enclosing a fist to whose arm it was attached was sleeved in black and white stripes. Alongside the scrape of the talons, Richie also distinctly heard the tinkling of small bells. The lights overhead flickered, then in a succession of square by square down the corridor, went out, plunging everything into darkness.
Richie woke once more at the break of dawn, clammy with a sheen of cold sweat.
Just a bad dream. Or maybe sleep paralysis.
But it felt like whoever was on the other end of those claws was still in the jail with him. It felt like they were still in his cell with him, breathing hotly down his neck. So much so that Richie jumped with a frightened start when a door at the end of the detention block opened with the harsh buzz of the security auditory system, and an officer strolled up to his cell with harsh gestapo footfalls whose boots echoed frighteningly off of the floor and through the acoustics. His nightstick rapped at Richie’s bars.
“Ok, get ready to come on out. You’re being released.” the cop said indifferently.
Why? After such an exhaustive night of questioning and the panicked episode it had propagated, why was he summarily being let go? Had they found the actual culprit within the space of that night?
Richie would later learn that it had in fact been three whole days and nights since he was imprisoned, passively integrating the information as he stumbled through the release process and was reacquainted with his confiscated items. Against his better judgment, he’d been inclined to ask why.
“Another murder was committed during your stay. We apologize for the mixup.”
Yeah, we’re real sorry, take your shit and get out. Richie got the message loud and clear. So, he did indeed get his shit and get out. He didn’t bother following up on any shallow gestures toward talking to a lawyer or voicing any complaints, he was a nobody with no legal representation anyway. At least three hots and a cot had come out of it, he shrugged off the indignity. A cot that damn-near broke his back to be sure, but whatever.
Richie thought about finding a bench to sleep on when he remembered the apartment complex, and that memory in turn stirred the sudden crashing return of the impossible tunnel to the foreground of his mind.
There hadn’t been anyone there with him in the alleyway when he knocked out the crazed junkie, he was sure of that much. Even if they had been just outside the alleyway mouth or a little ways from it, he surely would have noticed someone with twenty four inch finger swords lying in wait to spring an ambush on unsuspecting prey. Those claw marks, they had to be identical to the talons Richie had been graced with a visit by the other night. Whoever the killer was, were they mocking him by showing him how powerless he really was? Had they somehow broken into the jail to menace him solely because of that?
No, it was impossible, perish the thought, Richie tried to convince himself as he shook out his head. He saw the claw marks on the victim’s body, and his imagination conjured up an idea of what could have done that in his head while he slept, stressed out and scared in his cold cell under the pitiless watch of tin badge tyrants harassing him. To get in and out of either the alleyway or the jail with no one noticing a thing out of place that quickly, someone would need more than just inhuman speed and dexterity. The distances and obstacles were just too great and impassible without some kind of way to circumvent them.
Some kind of shortcut. Richie realized with a cold chill.
Like the kind provided by that impossible tunnel. Richie was brought instantly back to his thought about the vagrant marking his territory with his own piss like a wild dog, about people putting up fences to mark their claims. Richie had waltzed uninvited into a place he didn’t understand, and it seemed all too likely now that that place had already been found and staked by another. Richie had the horrible sensation of having encroached on a vicious predator’s natural habitat, and of being marked for it.
It’s not possible. Just some kind of fucking fever dream from that junkie scratch on my fist.
The hazy venture through the tunnel may have been forgotten, but the sound of those claws on the bars, and the sinking instinct in his gut both felt very real now. Very real.
“No. No! It isn’t real. No way no how whatsoever.”
Yet, needling curiosity compelled him to take this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion. If there wasn’t an impossible tunnel in the fence of that old complex - indeed, if there even was a hidden complex to begin with - then that begged the question of what he had actually seen. He still had business with those apartments though, as the seclusion, quality of shelter, and proximity to superb growing conditions for self-sufficiency of food and materials made it too good to pass up.
Or did that make it too good to be true?
There was only one way to find out, and Richie would, if only to silence the not-so-subconscious voice in his head nagging him that there was a monster prowling neverland.