FURY

DB WATERS

He coded in, drove to the call-out’s address, and soaked the tidy gravel driveway in blue light. Revolving half-moons flashed from his car in the black sky and picked out his boss, Lynn. She looked strange and maybe that was when he realised none of this was going to be routine. Automatically, he put on the whites. He pulled on his gloves.

It seemed to him he had arrived to find the scene already set. Lynn was curled up tight like a foetus, crouched down on the concrete step by the property’s entrance, her arms wrapped around her knees as if locking her body into itself. Yet it all appeared very ordinary: newish, bright, clean. A modern estate. But it was gone three in the morning and, even now, cautious yellow slits of light had arranged themselves in the curtained windows opposite; enquiring eyes had begun to stir.

As he composed himself for the task ahead, he felt an attraction to the place take hold. He cleared his throat in the moist air and at once a dull weight acknowledged itself and squeezed down upon his chest. But its meaning, and possibilities, remained hidden.

He stared in silence at the property, as if in submission.

It seemed to him, as he gazed at the house, that he was simply revisiting a familiar place. A crazy thought. This was a new house. He had to remind himself of the fact. But immediately within him a voice countered: a new home, yes, but built on old soil. And he recalled the almost reckless haste that had brought him to this place tonight. As if he had sensed the evening would yield a vital, dense new experience he must give himself up to. Or get back in touch with.

Noting the hastily cordoned-off area around him, he tested his gloves, smoothing the thin rubber all the way down his fingertips as the chill air silenced his thoughts.

He made his way towards Lynn to report in, and approached the splintered remains of the front door. It presented to him a twisted mess, torn away from brass hinges that gleamed like curls of old butter. A uniform was already with Lynn and, as he approached, damp spirals from the polystyrene cup of coffee she was clutching were snatched by the black air and quickly erased. She’d managed to spill most of the drink anyway, he could see, and a pattern of sickles had indented the soft surface of the cup.

He started to speak, but stopped. Lynn looked up at him, exhausted. Her mouth was moving, and he saw the tight flesh of her jaw-line working up and down (lifting that familiar dark mole on her cheek, up and down, like it was some kind of tired optical illusion, he thought) and then realised she was repeating the same line over and over, murmuring to herself.

“I’m sorry . . . so sorry . . . this doesn’t usually happen . . . I’m sorry . . . so sorry.”

The uniform tried to offer comfort as Lynn shot him an odd look that was part wounded, part embarrassed. He didn’t like it. That mangled, twisted-up door before him, the look from Lynn, and the too-tight closeness of the gloves he knew he must wear. Somehow events had started to coalesce into obscure patterns he found threatening. And he longed to be inside. He longed to connect to the night’s work: the damage, the crime, his justified place in it all.

“Old soil, yes,” he heard himself say, and immediately felt foolish. He forced himself to focus.

He noticed how Lynn—when she’d driven up to the call-out’s property— hadn’t bothered to keep her own lights flashing. It was a small thing but it told him that Lynn hadn’t taken the call-out too seriously—not at first anyway. She’d probably suspected the usual, predictable domestic. Only it hadn’t been that at all; and now, as he snatched a quick look down at her, he felt sorry for her, and it was then he realised how Lynn, sitting perfectly still, had carefully drawn her feet away from a messy circle that spread before her like syrup. She’d been sick, he observed.

“Do you need anything? I have spare gloves if—” she said.

“I have everything I need,” he answered, reluctantly turning his hands away from the gaze of the house so Lynn could see them. She nodded.

He arched down and slid past her and what remained of the shattered front door, and bent his way inside. It was, he felt, an almost apologetic kind of welcome—the ruined entrance, the need to be on his guard against injury. Even so, he saw his fingers spread out to touch, and perhaps stroke, the walls that greeted him, and he appreciated how they granted their support to his unsteady movement. It occurred to him he was grateful and he didn’t find that strange.

Without delay, and out of sight, he dispensed altogether with the gloves, peeling them off his fingertips, loosening their unreasonable grip until, finally, they dropped to the floor. He did not care. He was glad. He was glad because his fingers, freed and already reaching out to touch, would now be able to make contact with the real essence of the house.

He felt himself yield to it, wanted to.

And all the time the house, opening up generously before him, took him deeper within itself. The walls supported him, steadied and orientated him, and he took encouragement from their silent help. He dipped his head.

Around him, ribbons of POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape looped and fell like half-hearted birthday banners across the gaping entrances and exits; and he thought how they might remain exactly as they were until, like his gloves, they too would prove superfluous.

As he moved forward he reached inside his overall pocket for a handkerchief as the pungent press of something irretrievably decayed affronted his senses. Fresh white paint—how old was the place? One year? Two at the most?—had already turned grey in patches and he thought of mushrooms, mushrooms smudged against paintwork. But he could offer no explanation.

Taking in the entrance hall, with its mould-ridden walls, it seemed to him they had somehow become animated. He tried to concentrate, reason it out. Usually, crime scenes gradually became accounted for; he knew that. If not explained in full, at least hypothesised. And where a hypothesis could be put forward, a case could be built on, worked on, pushed to conclusion. But here was different; here made him feel something was jammed hard in the machinery of logic, blocking progress.

He made himself focus. As he approached the kitchen he observed that all the lights throughout the property had been turned on. He hadn’t needed to touch a single switch. The light immediately relaxed him, bathed him in its brightness, and again he felt the yearning to submit.

The kitchen took him in.

For a moment he flinched, had to turn away. But then a fizz of static erupted from his radio and distracted him for a moment; he bent to answer it. It was Lynn’s voice. She was still outside. Her voice was all quiet and subdued and she told him:

“Two upstairs—main bedroom, turn right at top of staircase. The other two—”

“Yes?”

“Other two—one—a teenage girl—she’s against the bathroom wall and—”

“Against?”

“Just listen. The boy—the little boy—he’s—he must’ve been—moving across the landing because he’s high up—he’s close to the ceiling.”

Lynn wasn’t making much sense. Obviously she was still unwell. A sudden, nagging panic started to needle somewhere behind his eyes and he wanted to be gone. But he couldn’t leave. He couldn’t just wait outside, like Lynn. Instead, he came to understand what held him there, and what would inevitably follow. For he knew they waited for him upstairs. Lynn had told him so. But he had known it anyway. He was sure he had.

His attention turned back to the kitchen and the scene that, before Lynn’s call, had defied his understanding. But what he had seen there wouldn’t be unremembered, even though he had tried to immerse himself in his usual procedural duties. Everything hung in jagged strips. The kitchen cupboards, the doors and drawers, all smashed beyond recognition. Some pieces that remained of an old oak Victorian dresser had escaped, thrown out across the floor like lumps of giant broken biscuit. An old heirloom perhaps, he wondered, and gazed down at the thing, saw how it had been made to crumple in upon itself like sheets of crunched brown paper. Everything around him—the neat rows of matching units that hid away the utensils, the solid black lacquered door that led to the living-room close by—had been meticulously pulverised. Bare wood gaped, exposed and livid in its stark freshness; a reek of fresh pine perfumed the air from splintered remains that had been torn open.

The room had been attacked—even the fridge too, he noticed, stunned by what had unfurled before his eyes. Something had hit the room’s contents from the outside, with immense force, as if punched, causing the kitchen units to shatter inwards.

Slowly it occurred to him: a deranged man, in possession of a hammer, might easily—

No. Not a person. He gazed harder and came to see why. Tins of food from ruined storage units had spilled out in a semi-circle across the shiny plastic kitchen floor, oozing like sea waste. A colourful tide of oils, vinegars, various smashed jars and twisted bottles of sauces—already congealed in places—reflected towards the ceiling the image of his own face.

Yet most of the ruined tins and cans had actually been forced further back into the dark recesses of their cupboards rather than spilt out into the room. He peered closer. Bits of mangled tin, glass, cutlery, plastic bottles had been driven through the backs of the cupboards; he drew himself down, eye level, and saw the gaping wounds in the flimsy pine panels, exposing the bare brickwork on the other side. And that was where the tangled objects had finished their journeys: embedded within the wall itself.

So he dipped a cautious hand inside one of the broken units and pushed his fingertips towards the back until he felt rough cool brickwork. There his fingers traced the outline of what was, he assumed, the irregular shape of a crumpled can so perfectly smooth against the wall that it was impossible to detect any protrusion at all. It appeared that the wall had simply taken the object into itself.

Once more the smell of something damp and decomposing chased him, breaking down the clean spaces of air around him, until he withdrew his hand from the shattered cupboard, coughed, and spluttered into the hankie. Soon he recovered. The smell was already less offensive to him. Perhaps the house had made him accept its scent?

The fridge caught his attention. Wrenched free, flung onto its side. He bent to examine its wide-open door and the plastic-coated wire shelves crushed somewhere at the back like bleached bones. The light remained on, shining a dim halo of cool blue around him. He gently tugged for a time at a bent white spoke of the shelving until he realised just how lost in thought he’d become. He was unable to pull it free. The spoke had been driven cleanly into the white flesh of the door. Like everything else he’d witnessed, it all lingered, deliberate and stubborn, on the other side of understanding.

Then he wiped his fingers clean with a small tremble. After a moment, he wiped them again. He assumed they’d become smeared with something from the fridge. But as he watched the red scratches darken and bleed, he simply smiled—grateful that he could move so freely over the surfaces of the house with his uncovered hands. He accepted that he must have contaminated the crime scene, but it wasn’t important. What was important was protecting the house, being welcomed by it and part of it.

Soon the stairs were upon him.

He turned towards them and watched as they curled out of view like the sketch of a question-mark.

Half-way up he noticed the brightly coloured things dotted about at random against the wall; they followed him up as he climbed the stairs to the landing above. Bright things—plastic—and driven firmly into the wall like nails or screws. Then he ran a hand, shaky and oddly dissociated from the rest of himself, along the whites of his overall until he located the pocket, found the crumpled handkerchief within, and thrust his fingertips into its softness. A little blood soaked into it.

With his other hand he reached out and touched the coloured dots in the wall. Botched DIY. He nearly smiled. As he reached forward, and a part of him still wished to understand, he saw them for what they were: pieces of old toys from a children’s playroom. He touched them, their tiny smooth protrusions, and noted their sheer unlikely reality. One piece immediately before him had grown into something not plastic at all as he carefully reached out. He teased a grip of sorts around it with his fingers. And instead of plastic, dusty fur revealed itself. He tugged at it a little harder; with his fingertips he scratched away, until slowly his excavation was complete.

Tiny loose nuggets of plaster fell away; the air around him shaded into delicate lemon columns that trickled down to the carpet.

Quickly, he forced the thing free. Hadn’t Lynn mentioned something about a young lad in the house? So, then, he stood there, midway up the stairs, and in his hand a steady unblinking eye gazed up and met his own. It held him. He stared down into the palm of his cupped hand. And all around him it was quiet, the air as if holding its breath, as he looked down at the indelible softness resting in his palm. With a flood of tenderness that returned unwelcome layers of memory, he found himself regarding a nearly intact teddy bear.

He paused to study the bear, its staring eye, and could shape no better explanation: it had been pressed into the wall. Or drawn there, like so much else.

And he wondered: where on earth was Lynn? Why wasn’t she back inside by now?

Things couldn’t have happened, at least not the way he had seen them, and for the briefest instance he feared himself for tolerating whatever was here that had so thoroughly denied him the judgement and grasp he required. It seemed that the longer he spent within these walls the less sure of himself he became.

He ignored the rest of the bright dots embedded in the staircase wall, ignored their closed-off histories and private meanings—had the tiny objects once brought pleasure, how much had they been played with? Against his will, he stretched out an arm to straighten a wonky picture as a soft clump of light brown strands tumbled down from behind the frame. A twisted nest of dead hair, human and glossy, rested at his feet. And once more against his intentions, he bent down to it and touched the small greasy bundle . . . and cried out in disgust as he felt its recent warmth.

Bloody fingertips dug deep into the handkerchief he clenched in his pocket. After a moment, and ignoring the hair, he tried to re-insert the teddy bear back inside the hole in the wall. But it fell out and he didn’t try again. He wiped his fingers against his handkerchief.

The stairs guided him further up.

At the top he turned right, and just as Lynn had warned him, the first thing he saw in the main bedroom ahead was a shape that had perhaps been the mother. The door was swung viciously back and he entered swiftly.

As he approached it, the shape drew him into the room and he was about to call it in (for Lynn would need more details, they’d need to arrange the photos) when he found himself transfixed by the image before him. The corpse of the woman—it rested about eighteen inches or so above the carpeted floor—had been hurled there, driven into the wall. The bones squeezed to strips of splinter and folded into the hard surface like lengths of damp paper pressed down and smoothed flat.

As he stood there, the sense of grim motive that dwelled within the walls shaped into clarity for him and he saw how everything had repeated itself in the house. Objects, toys, people. It was the same thing. He imagined the fury.

He didn’t want to run his fingers against her, and resisted. The torn tissue of the skin, her flattened innards, still clung to the semblance of a recent human form. But the wall had taken her in, absorbed her, and it was not possible to detect where her human presence ended—and the grasp of the house began. Appalled, his fingers slowly reached out and touched it.

And he had to admit, it was wonderful, admirable.

He patted the wall with gentleness and the wall repaid him with a dribble of dark red from the woman.

The rich gag of blood overwhelmed him, and he had to move away. That was when he noticed the husband. He turned away. He certainly tried to turn away. A twisted knot of elbow suspended before his gaze gave one final, impossible twitch and then was gone. White plaster closed over it, and then there was nothing. He was no longer horrified.

The radio buzzed alive and a different reality intruded. It was Lynn.

“Something’s not right. Get out fast!”

Then the line was broken up and she was lost.

But there was no danger. The family, he reasoned, were dead, after all. What could Lynn possibly mean? All was well. Yes, he answered himself, firmly. All was correct. He didn’t call her back.

A moment passed before the radio, snatched from his grasp, slammed hard against the unclean carpet. He stood and watched the thing. Watched as his radio was swallowed into the bedroom’s surroundings like some kind of jungle animal that had crept back into its jungle camouflage. He felt calm, ready. And then it came fast: an intense ache that first built somewhere near his shoulders; so that he collapsed to the floor, attempted to crawl out of the room, back towards the top of the stairs, though he didn’t know why. Then an exquisite agony of brisk breaking inside him, of quick snapping. The forensic whites that had protected him became dark with maroon dots that seeped through the fabric. Yet the injuries, if injuries they were, failed to register any pain. In the house, an eager weight pressed down until his consciousness turned to a grey smudge.

They released him some weeks later. Starched white sleeve of the concerned nurse, her sleeve had somehow got in the way of the swinging door as he turned to leave.

He tried to remember. Remembered someone’s sharp voice when it had already been too late. The voice warning him that something had gone wrong, urging him. Get out fast, it had said. That woman’s voice on his radio annoying him. Yes, that had been it. As if she hadn’t any confidence in him to take control of the situation—or to take care of the house. But it’d been him, not her, who had borne witness within the property back then.

It all seemed long ago. For now he was walking away from that hospital, unreal and lost to himself, as he made his way to the house. The call-out’s house. Summoned once, now summoned again.

Only there was no house.

He stood in an empty space instead.

After a moment he welcomed the old sensation. He sensed a sudden, clean reality as something began tearing, gnawing at his insides, and he knew he would never leave, not again. This time his connection to the place was fuller, stronger.

He couldn’t explain it; he only knew it was somehow linked to this place, came from here. And still it grew: this eager biting away at something deep within himself. Soon the implosion would be complete.

But then his arms were flung forcefully across his chest, and made to press hard there as his limbs, hideously, continued an insane inward journey, thrusting ever deeper in a fatal contortion. Until they were completely drawn within his body, and he had folded into himself.

Sometime later, the neighbours exposed a tiny curled mass of dead and twisted limbs. The police were called. Close against the earth, they found him, his fingernails encrusted with dirt, and heavily soiled. As if he had been frantically fending something off—or embracing it.