(tw: gore, child death)
I didn’t wake up until the sirens sounded, around half past six in the morning. The commotion had, it turned out later, woken several of my neighbours long before the emergency services arrived, but I live on the ground floor, and the screaming came from ten floors up. I might have slept through it even if it was right above me; the area I live in isn’t horrible, but a few of my neighbours get rowdy when they drink. I’ve got used to tuning it out. This time, though, it sounded like real trouble.
I grabbed my coat and slippers and emerged into the hallway, blinking, hoping that whatever had summoned the sirens wasn’t a fire. I couldn’t see or smell any smoke, and the vehicles outside were police and an ambulance, so I and my cats were presumably safe. Pity I couldn’t say the same for whoever had had to call them, I thought with a pang of sympathy. My other ground-floor neighbours were emerging too, the Browns next door rubbing their eyes and Mr Adebayo from across the hall yawning, and none of them seemed to know what was going on. Must be upstairs. I was the first one to the staircase, keen to find out what I could.
I passed the first floor without incident, joined by another couple of rubberneckers on the way. I was relieved when my friend Lucy Hawley met me outside her flat on the second floor, as curious and confused as I was. She’d been among the first to welcome me to the building; at sixty-ish, she was like an aunt to me, and she didn’t have a lot of local relatives, so I’d taken to dropping in to visit her once or twice each week. We exchanged pet-sitting services for my cats and her terriers, and she tried and failed to teach me to knit. I was glad whatever it was hadn’t happened to her.
“Luce! What’s going on?”
“No idea, love,” she said, tugging her dressing gown tighter and pushing her glasses up. I noted she was too distracted to tell me not to call her Luce. “It’s upstairs. I was just going to see if anyone needed help…”
We both knew we were really going to see if there was anything worth gossiping about. If the ambulance was involved, there wasn’t likely to be anything we could do to help. Still, plausible deniability makes the world go round. “Uh, me too. Let’s both go…”
The police and paramedics had already charged up the stairs ahead of us, and a slow trickle of residents followed them. We passed several floors without stopping, more people joining the flock as we went, and around the eighth floor we could more clearly hear the screaming. Well, not so much screaming anymore. It sounded like the screaming had already happened, and now the suffering person had run out of breath. Now the sound was reduced to keening, a throaty wail of misery and fear. I shivered. This must be serious, I thought. Major accident? Fatal accident? Surely not murder…
The tenth floor is the top floor of my building, and the trickle of people formed a pool there, a crowd around the door of number 105. That was also when I noticed the smell. Metallic, warm… You all know what blood smells like. This wasn’t just blood, though; it was a fresh meaty smell overlaying something foul. Something or someone had been outright gutted.
I’m quite short but quite strong, so I was able to push through the scrum and peer into the flat. I couldn’t see anything much from the front door, but I could hear that the wailing sound was coming from inside, presumably from one of the residents, accompanied by another voice - female, probably an officer or paramedic - trying to soothe them. I tried to remember who lived here. An old couple, I could guess from the decor and the photos on the wall, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember their names. I only knew people on the lower floors well.
Next to the photos on one wall was a splatter of something dark. The hallway wasn’t well-lit, but I knew it was blood. It looked like it had sprayed out from the open doorway across the hall. Must have been from a high-pressure artery to reach that far, if it came from inside the room. The screaming was, so I presumed the blood had.
The wailing voice was, I was able to tell now, that of an older woman. I peered around the doorway, knowing it was wrong to snoop but unable to stop myself - I mean, would you be able to? I’m not unfamiliar with gory visuals, but it’s different in real life; I had to swallow back vomit. The closest I’d ever seen to the inside of that room was a photo of a stable in which a horse had had a high-pressure nosebleed, more blood than a human could even hold sprayed up the walls and pooled on the floor, and even that didn’t come anywhere near. Nosebleeds aren’t, shall I say, chunky.
When I was able to focus on more than just the red mess, I registered the people in the room. One was a paramedic in a dark green uniform, soaking and turning black around the trouser cuffs where they brushed the floor and her legs where she sat on the soggy mattress, smeared with red where the inhabitant of the flat had hugged her. The inhabitant in question, a twiggy old lady, was covered head to toe in gore all up her front and her right side. Most of the mattress and the thrown-back blankets were soggy with it, but there was a big patch on the sheet and pillow with minimal splash damage. Whatever had happened, it had happened while she was still lying in the bed. The other side of the bed was scattered with meat and shredded fabric, the sheets and blankets torn by a great force. A glass had been knocked right off the bedside table and shattered. As far as I could tell, the other person in the bed (probably the husband, the wispy-moustached man in the photo in the hallway) had simply exploded.
The paramedic noticed me and stood up to shoo me out, yelling something about contaminating the scene, but I was already gone, running downstairs. Even after less than a minute in the flat, it took half an hour to get the smell of death out of my hair.
#
The old lady upstairs, whose name I later found out was Mrs Mabel Langley, wife of the extremely late Gerald Langley, was taken away as soon as the paramedic calmed her down. The whole building watched in silence as she was half-carried out. I felt like a vulture, but there wasn’t much I could say or do.
Over cross-stitching (Lucy) and coffee (me) that evening, Lucy explained a little more about what was going on. She knew everyone in the building much better than I did and had called the hospital to ask after Mrs Langley and check if she was up to receiving visitors.
“Poor dear was questioned by the police, can you believe it?” she said, tutting. “The doctors had to sedate her, and no sooner was she awake again the officers grilled her as if she did it!”
“Really?” I frowned. I was sitting on a big cushion on the floor so Lucy’s two Scotties could rest their heads on my lap, as they often did. I scratched their ears and they huffed at the smell of my cats. “How did they think she even managed that? I don’t even know what happened, I don’t think any human could have pulled that off.”
“Quite right, love, and at least they worked that out quick. She’ll be in the hospital for a while, though.” Lucy’s sewing hand stopped moving and she gazed into space. “Might not ever come out. She’s eighty-three and had a nasty shock.”
“That’s understating it,” I said. “Do they know what did cause… whatever that was?”
“Gas explosion, I think the officer said.”
I just looked at her. “This building doesn’t even have gas, it’s all electric.”
“I did tell him that, love, but once he got the idea in his head, he didn’t want to let go. Like a dog with a bone,” she said and nudged one of her dogs with her slippered foot. “I’m sure there’ll be a proper investigation, something will turn up.”
Ever the optimist, I thought. I was still curious, but she didn’t want to discuss it further. It clearly upset her, so I didn’t push, and the conversation moved on to her plan to get everyone in the building to sign a card for Mrs Langley.
Mrs Langley did indeed die in hospital within the week, but by then we had other problems.
#
“Murder! Murder!”
It was three days after the explosion incident, about half past six again, and I was already awake this time. I’d had trouble sleeping since I walked in on the remains of Mr Langley, visions of burst bodies dancing in my head, and I was cuddling the friendlier one of my cats while sipping camomile tea, hoping that would let me get a little sleep before I had to get up for my shift at noon. No such luck, I thought, as I heard the cries from the hallway. I was much more hesitant to investigate this time, not wanting additional nightmares. Mr Adebayo’s door across the hall opened and I heard his accented voice soothing whoever was shouting. Within ten minutes, sirens were sounding again.
Once the sirens were off and the shouting had quieted, I peered outside through the peephole, not planning to go snooping again but too curious to leave it alone entirely. A police officer was interviewing a resident I did recognise this time - Tommy Greenwood, from nine floors up. He worked at the same cinema I did - he was my supervisor. Decent guy. He and his partner Hardeep lived with three foster kids in one of the larger flats. Or there were three. As I watched, paramedics wheeled a covered gurney down the stairs (our lift isn’t big enough to fit one) for the second time this week. There was blood soaking through the sheet, but whatever lay under it at least still looked kind of body-shaped this time. Shaped like a small body, and somewhat misshapen.
I kept on watching until more police officers came downstairs, leading Hardeep. He was cuffed, and he looked shellshocked; eyes wide with tears building up but not falling yet, mouth hanging open. Behind him, trying to cling to the officers’ legs, went the ten-year-old boy and five-year-old girl. The thirteen-year-old boy, then - Graham, his name was. Damn. I wished there was an equivalent for agnostics of crossing oneself, or that I was wearing a hat to remove.
I stopped watching when the officers led Tommy outside too. The white guy remained uncuffed, I noticed. Huh, cops really can be bastards… Ah, maybe I’m making too much of it. Maybe it was just that he was more visibly hysterical and was the one to greet them. Doesn’t really matter now.
According to Lucy, and my and Tommy’s other co-workers, he and Hardeep both went through questioning but were released due to a lack of evidence. There was no obvious murder weapon and no sign of a break-in, so the men were suspected, but the boys had been foster kids from troubled homes, and the dads had installed a lock on the boys’ door to make them feel safer. The room had been locked from the inside when Tommy had found the body - they’d had to break in. The other boy, who shared the room, reported sleeping uninterrupted until Hardeep took a drill to the door handle plate and woke him up, at which point he saw the remains. I don’t know if the poor kid will ever recover.
“A person at least could have done this one, I hear,” Lucy told me later.
“An axe, I heard it was, or a gardening tool,” a co-worker agreed. “Chopped his poor little body right up. Arms and legs and head hacked right off. Dental records identification and they had to find all the teeth first.”
Whisper campaigns continued to blame Tommy and Hardeep even after the investigation turned up nothing, and they moved out within three days. Tommy never showed up for work again, and according to my manager, he’d requested a transfer to somewhere at the other end of the country. I couldn’t blame them at all.
#
You might have grasped by now that I’m incredibly nosy. I prefer to think of myself as an investigator. You can also tell that I’m into weird occurrences. This was certainly weird, and I couldn’t resist at least trying to spot a pattern. I settled down after work with a pile of Post-It notes and set to work writing known facts on them and arranging them on the coffee table.
First off, Mr and Mrs Langley. I couldn’t see any possible way she could have done it. A bike pump wasn’t exactly going to work that well, and anything which could have caused poor Gerald to detonate so violently ought to have injured his wife as well, plus the blood spatter pattern I’d seen suggested she’d still been lying down when he blew. I didn’t want to intrude on their closer neighbours by asking directly, but from what I’d picked up via Lucy and her friends, she’d had no reason to want to kill him anyway. Tommy and Hardeep technically could have killed Graham, but, again, I didn’t see why they would want to. Neither of the households involved had any obvious reason to have harmed the other either - maybe even guessing at that was a stretch, but I was really flailing for theories.
If there was a supernatural or otherwise weirder explanation, I couldn’t imagine what it was. I’d heard of spontaneous human combustion, but the victims hadn’t burned, and I’d never heard of it being contagious. Graham didn’t even live in the flat directly below the prior victim. I did make a note to ask Lucy if they knew each other, but it felt flimsy.
I went to bed, the cats piling up around me. I guess they sensed I was frustrated - and, I have to admit, worried. Possibly not worried enough. My last thoughts before I fell asleep were “Two people aren’t enough to form a pattern,” and the very next morning, there was a third.
#
The third case was another brutally violent killing, but according to the news and the gossip, the body was more or less in one piece this time. The papers and news sites were able to go into more detail than about Graham’s since the victim wasn’t a minor, and I read those instead of bothering Lucy, who was getting understandably upset by now - unlike my introverted self, she knew these people. College student Jessie Takahashi was found in her bed around noon after she failed to turn up for class, with what the autopsy described as crushing injuries. Most of her bones were broken and her chest cavity had burst. Like the others, she’d died sometime in the early morning, and there was no sign of any break-in. She lived eight floors up.
People were starting to get seriously frightened. Some of the building’s inhabitants packed their cars that very day; the Browns took their baby and fled to her mother’s place, and Jessie’s flatmates found temporary digs elsewhere. My dad called and asked me to come home for at least a while, but I refused. I wanted to at least try to figure out what was happening, and if the pattern held, I had at least another week or two before I had to worry.
Lucy didn’t leave either. She didn’t talk about it, but I got the impression she had no local family to move in with. I suspected that was why she was so fond of me. She didn’t have local family and I didn’t have local friends. We fit together pretty well.
“Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence… you know that one,” I said, scrawling more Post-Its as she sat in my armchair, cats sniffing at her feet. “So I think we can say this thing is definitely moving down the building…”
“Dear,” she said gently, “I’m not sure you should be messing around with things like this. The police will-”
“The police still think it was Hardeep! Racist f-” I snapped, and stopped. “Ugh, sorry. Didn’t mean to sound angry at you, it’s just… yeah, we’re all on edge. You more than me. I’m sorry. But the police aren’t helping, and I don’t think they can. This is kind of beyond their pay grade. The most the cops deal with in our area is usually a drunk driver or domestic disturbance. No one’s been murdered here in decades, and I’m not even sure this is murder.”
“Well, if it isn’t murder…” Lucy gulped, struggled to speak, and sipped her coffee to clear her vocal cords. “If it isn’t murder, and you’re implying it’s something… stranger… perhaps you still shouldn’t be messing around. What if whatever it is doesn’t want the attention?”
I scoffed. “Well, in that case, it shouldn’t be attracting so much attention, should it?”
“Sweetheart.” Lucy sighed. “You know what I mean.”
I did. I sighed too, then covered up my notes and changed the subject. She was a little cool with me when I left, and while we chatted when we ran into each other, I didn’t go over to her place again for the duration, nor did she come to mine. I regret that deeply now.
#
I was right about the pattern. The next time took much longer, five days with no incident, until another sudden dawn-hours death, seven floors up. I stopped trying to watch the emergency services do their thing when I noticed the crowds had significantly thinned. By now, everyone still in the building stayed locked in their flats when the disasters occurred, as if by avoiding any sight of the danger they would avoid it striking them. Or perhaps they were just bored, especially by the fifth time. Even the ambulance didn’t turn on their sirens anymore, and they took longer to arrive after each call. No sense in rushing in and disturbing the neighbours when they knew the victim was beyond helping.
I kept up with my notes, combing news articles and eavesdropping every chance I got. It was harder now I wasn’t talking to Lucy about the topic, but, while I wasn’t as friendly with everyone as she was, I can at least be a good listener. The attacks, if that’s what they were, each occurred within a week of the last, though the specific length of time varied. No pattern in terms of age, gender, race, or other similarities between the victims seemed to emerge. The victims were not necessarily in the flat directly under the last one but were always on the next floor down. No sign of outside interference was found, nor any direct evidence that other humans did it. The fourth victim seemed to have been bludgeoned about the head and ribs and gouged open as if they’d been attacked by a bear. The cops put out notices asking locals to watch out for any rogue bears and quizzed all the county’s zoos, as if bears could have got in and out of the building. Apparently, they were getting as desperate for answers as the rest of us.
The fifth victim upset everyone afresh. That one was a new baby, her regrettably stubborn parents waking for the early morning feed and finding her face bruised and her throat and arms cut, or possibly clawed - the hypothetical bear, after all, was still at large. I tried to bring a sympathy bouquet and found the death had been their cue to move out at last, though I felt it was too late by now. Their floor was, if the pattern held, done with.
The sixth victim was bruised but not broken-boned and marked with small, shallow cuts that didn’t even hit any major blood vessels. The reports claimed it looked more like crush injuries again than a beating, as if something heavy had pressed down hard on top of her, but not been dropped hard enough to break anything. The cause of death was determined to be suffocation.
The seventh, though, died as strangely as poor Mr Langley had. There were some bruises and scratches, but no serious wounds. The cause of death was listed as suffocation again, but it was described in the paper “as if the air had simply disappeared from his lungs”. By this point, they weren’t even hiding the sensationalist details.
The cops, by this point, turned up to the building every day to request that everyone leave, but they made no move to forcibly extract us, and that was strange too. Don’t they force people to evacuate during earthquakes and such? I could think of two possibilities, both of which I diligently noted down in my Post-It map. Possibility one, something supernatural was going on to block the authorities from reacting appropriately. If you’ve read Hitchhiker’s Guide, you might remember the Somebody Else’s Problem field. I mean, if I was a freaky supernatural killer, I’d make sure I had something equivalent in place, wouldn’t you?
Possibility two, the authorities knew exactly what was going on and didn’t want to prevent it. That was even more frightening, and it split into two possibilities of its own; either they simply didn’t care (the theory most of the political types I knew on both ends of the spectrum would probably jump to), or they saw it as a necessary sacrifice to prevent something worse. For the first time in my life, I was starting to think maybe I didn’t want to know something. It’s only any use to know about a problem if there’s something you can do about it, and petition signing to salve my conscience wasn’t going to cut it here.
I’d refrained from discussing the matter with Lucy ever since Jessie’s death. I didn’t want to upset her further than the deaths already had. It was clear she was frightened, but still, she hadn’t gone to a hotel or anything, and that added to my suspicion something might have been pushing people away from caring as much. Then again, people will often assume it couldn’t happen to them until it does, and who was I to judge? I was still in the building too. Maybe she just wanted to provide support to her remaining neighbours, or a buffer - the more people remained, the less chance any one person had of being the next to die.
Still, I didn’t want to discuss my theories online, though by now various Facebook and Reddit communities had brought the topic up. As well as curious, I’m painfully introverted and rather old-school about internet safety - no revealing my name or location. Mentioning that I lived in the death building would be a great way to get mobbed and to effectively doxx myself. I settled back and read the discussions without contributing. No one had any solid theories anyway. It was ghosts, aliens, or bioweapons… None of the ideas had much backing them up. I talked them through on the phone with my parents, and they agreed with me. Then they begged me to come home, over and over, and every time I’d beg them for just one more night.
Eventually, I promised I’d leave after the next death, hopefully leaving a safety gap. The next one would be on the second floor, leaving time for a first-floor death too before anyone on the ground floor was in danger. Hopefully. I kept my fingers crossed that the pattern wouldn’t break. But time passed, and no one else passed with it. No emergency services arrived to take bodies away, and people from the upper floors started to move back in, assuming the danger was over.
A full week passed from the third-floor death, then another. I started to think the deaths were over too. Even my parents relaxed a little. I lost interest in my Post-Its; with no new evidence, I couldn’t possibly solve the puzzle. I admit I was peeved by that - ever tried to do a crossword with some of the clues torn out or smudged? (I still hold some resentment toward my sister over that April Fool’s Day.) The news stopped mentioning the building at all and the online discussion died down.
I regretted how I’d upset Lucy. From what seemed like the end of the story, it was easy to reflect and think that I’d been overenthusiastic about the tragedy. I’m not an actual detective, and I could see it was legitimately hurtful to her to hear me talk about the events like they were a game with an easy solution she wasn’t trying hard enough to help me find. I know I do sometimes get like that. I suppose it’s easy not to take deaths personally when you’re young and it’s hard to register that you will ever die.
I bought a small bunch of carnations as a peace offering and, in the late morning, before I had to start getting ready for work, I climbed the stairs to her flat. The halls were quiet, no more shouting kids or arguing drunks. It was exactly how I’d wished it would be before. Damn, did that sting.
“Lucy?” I knocked on her door. “Lucy, are you in there?… Luce?” Once again, no reprimand came. I tried again, eventually resorting to “Lucinda!” like I was her mother. Full names, always a bad sign. I giggled madly to myself when I realised I didn’t know if she had any middle names. It seemed funny at the time.
I wanted to get in and check on her, but the locks in our building aren’t the kind you can pick, even if I knew how. She didn’t answer her phone for me, either. I called the landlord’s office, and they called her, then when she didn’t reply to them either, they called the maintenance man to take the handle plate off. I lurked in the hallway until he arrived, feeling unpleasantly like a spy again. There was no crowd around me, no stink of gore, but also no soothing paramedic or massive crisis, no attention paid, just me and the maintenance guy with the drill. I can’t help but think Lucy deserved more drama than that for her send-off. Yes, you probably guessed already that she was dead, but let me describe how it happened.
I entered the flat. No blood, no one crying or arrested. No one lived here but her. Her dogs were okay, and they fussed around my feet, yipping and demanding to be fed. Her bedroom door was closed, so they didn’t know what had happened to her. I entered and burst into tears when I saw her. I knew she was dead, though she looked like she was simply sleeping. At least she had that. No mess. No damage at all. When I talked to the hospital later, after the police checked out the scene perfunctorily and the body was examined, they reported that there wasn’t a single mark on her anywhere.
#
It’s now the week after that, and I’m writing this from my parents’ house, sitting on my childhood bed with my cats beside me. I attended Lucy’s funeral, along with a couple of her relatives who came over from Australia or somewhere. The Scotties are okay if you’re worried - I couldn’t take them but the Kennel Club has special pedigree rehoming services and they have their doggie birth certificates, so hopefully, they’re being fast-tracked to a new pet parent. As for my neighbours, I think everyone’s moved out of the building now. The ones who came back after the first exodus have gone again, and no one else is moving in. I suspect it’ll end up being demolished. No one wants to risk it again.
Lucy wasn’t the last straw on that, either. She’d be mad about that, I think, not getting to be the last warning… Anyway, a couple of people stayed on the lowest two floors. I moved out the very next day. Curiosity isn’t worth my life. Some people are dumber or more stubborn or more curious than I was. I know, because yesterday, I checked the news and there was a little footnote article mentioning that the last man still living on the first floor didn’t die; he disappeared entirely. He’d been awake, too, unlike the other victims. When the police investigated, they found he’d dropped a coffee cup, and the contents on the floor were still warm.
I have no idea what caused all this. I don’t think I even want to, anymore. I just want it not to get me. I don’t know what its goal is, but its method involves eliminating people, and it’s getting better at it. My advice is, if two strange deaths happen in your building or on your street, be safe, and leave immediately before the third. I’m not sure if we’d even ever know about what happened to whomever it took on the ground floor, if anyone was still there, or if anyone goes back. If it could make the last victim disappear entirely, and it’s honed its skills so rapidly, what are the odds that it could make it look like its next victim never existed?