Switchback. Ch4 pt1

Leyton Falls

Later that same day

Peter Ferris, a simple man caught between his morals and the desperate love he had for his child, stood with his back pressed hard against the morgue’s iron gates. His heart thumped and his breaths were short and sharp as his eyes flicked left and right in the hope he’d see no one, moreover, in the hope no one would see him.

          In all his thirty-two years, Peter had never considered himself brave, or to be any particular kind of hero. But to do what he was about to do didn’t take bravery, it didn’t take guts or daring, nor did it take any particular kind of heroics, it took something far greater than all those things put together, it took love, and that was something he had in abundance for the little girl he’d come to collect.

          The task he was about to undertake, and the unholy ritual to follow, scared him, but he was determined to see it through regardless of his fears, which, at thirty minutes to midnight, he had little time to consider. Thirty minutes to get in, get his daughter, get out, and get back to the house, and then do what needs to be done, or it would all be for nothing, or worse than nothing, if the crazy old woman was to be believed, and Peter believed her.

Three weeks ago he visited Mrs Evans in the sanatorium to ask questions about the house he’d purchased from her through her solicitor. At the time she seemed to have all her faculties more or less intact, she articulated well and she seemed sincere. But before he got to ask any of his questions, she insisted he listened her story, a story she said no one there believed. Apparently, they thought she was crazy. So, for the following two and a half hours, Peter sat and listened. His opinion of her at that time changed with every passing minute, and although she looked and sounded rational, what she had to say left him in no doubt why she was in such an institution in the first place. In his opinion she was crazy, so he never bothered to ask his questions regarding the house; he didn’t think the answers would be worthwhile.

          Two weeks later, whilst tearing wood panelling from the walls during renovations of the upstairs rooms, Peter uncovered something the crazy old lady spoke of, something that made her claims not so crazy after all. Something, if he remembered correctly; she referred to as “The Twins”. That night, at the allotted time of one minute to midnight, and just as she’d said it needed to be done, he tried it out on his daughter’s favourite doll, a hideous-looking two foot clown with a worn and cracked enamel face which she insisted on calling Mister Cheeks, due to them being bright-red and bulbous.

          After he’d followed her directions, all the cracks and faded paint, and even the doll’s torn and tattered clothing were repaired. The doll looked brand new again. Its eyes gleamed bright-green, and, as ridiculous as it might sound, almost looked alive. And so, logic being what it is, if it worked then on an inanimate object like the doll, then why shouldn’t it work tonight, on his dead six-year-old daughter?

          The bolt cutters he acquired that afternoon from Randall’s Hardware were heavy, cumbersome things, and as he positioned the jaws on the padlock that held the thick, rusted chain across the two gates, he took one last look around before he closed the cutter’s jaws. Then something happened that hadn’t crossed his mind. The oversized padlock succumbed to gravity and dragged the hefty chain with it, each of its links rattled on the iron railing as it slithered its way to the ground like a dead metal snake. An alarm going off couldn’t have made more noise. He looked about, watched for lights going on in nearby houses and listened for sounds of the curious, but other than a dog barking in the distance and a million crickets vying for the attention of a mate, the night’s warm air remained unruffled.

          Peter pushed one of the gates open to hear a soft, two-tone squeak; he tossed the bolt-cutters aside and hunkered down as he crossed the small dusty car park to the morgue’s rear entrance. Once there he stood beside the door and put pay to a small pane of glass with a quick jab of his right elbow, he reached in being careful not to catch himself on the broken glass and unlatched the door.

          Seconds later he stood inside a narrow hallway where the robust stench of industrial disinfectant assaulted his nostrils. He aimed a small pocket-torch along the floor and followed its plate-sized disc until he reached the door of the room his little girl would be laid in. He gripped the steel handle and its cold response surprised him, no doubt a reflection of the room’s temperature he was about to enter into. The handle gave with ease and he swung the door open until the inner handle caught with a light click on the tiled wall behind.

          Side on before him was a stainless-steel platform with a shallow slope sunken into a tiled block of concrete. To his right were three porcelain sinks and a four-foot long flat work surface, and all so clean it didn’t look like it had ever been used. To his left stood six silver drawers, two columns of three from the floor up to around chest-height. The torch’s beam flicked over the small square doors where he found no recognisable form of identification, each of the drawers showed only a letter followed by a number, A1-A2, B1-B2, and so on. The first three drawers he pulled on were empty; they slid with relative ease, but the forth held a little more weight.

          He looked to see a white linen sheet covering the tiny body from head to toe, and as the drawer came to a sudden stop, an arm slipped from beneath the sheet. On the middle finger he saw the heart-shaped ruby ring he’d given Elizabeth as a birthday present only sixteen hours earlier. As a tear rolled over his cheek he wanted to peel back the entire sheet to see his daughter’s face, but couldn’t. If this didn’t work, if for whatever reason the night turned out a failure, he didn’t want that memory to haunt his every waking moment. Her blonde hair and the most radiant of blue eyes -just like her mother’s- and her perfect complexion along with a smile that never waned, were the memories he kept and wanted to hold on to.

          He lifted the small corpse from its stainless-steel bed and expected rigor mortis to be a problem, but it wasn’t. He’d heard somewhere, or maybe he’d read it somewhere, that rigor mortis was a stage that passed after so many hours, but he had no idea how many. He shoved the drawer shut a little too hard with his knee to hear it clatter on its runners before it boomed in the empty space around him. He waited a few seconds for the echo to subside before he left the room to make his way along the hallway and back to the rear entrance.

          Before he opened the door to the deserted car park he stopped to look through the hole his elbow had made. The dog still barked and the crickets still cricketed, but there was a new sound that held his attention. Somewhere in the distance and headed up the hill toward the morgue was a car, its engine noise and the grinding of gears getting louder, nearer. Someone had obviously heard the sound of the chain and called Mitch, the Leyton falls’ sheriff. A few seconds later the car stopped just short of the open gate, where it remained concealed behind the eight-foot-high stone wall which encircled the morgue. One of the car doors opened but wasn’t closed again, and the engine still ran.

          A silhouette appeared at the gate that still lay open, but he couldn’t tell who it belonged to. It wasn’t the sheriff; this guy was taller and a lot slimmer and looked very unsteady on his feet. Probably a consequence of the bar he’d just left, and was now looking for somewhere to relieve that consequence. He hadn’t noticed the open gate he walked through, nor the chain and padlock that he tripped over in the dark. Peter could only stand and wait as the drunk went about his business in the shadow of the gatepost. He hoped he’d be quick about it, but no matter how quick this guy was going to be, it was time Peter could not afford. He struggled to push his left wrist far enough out to catch what little light he could on his watch, 11.48. Twelve minutes left before this deed had to be completed.