So I’ve decided to do NaNoWriMo.

For those that have no idea WTF I’m talking about, it’s basically a writing challenge. Write a novel a in a month, with a novel being defined as a 50,000 word (minimum) story. I’ve decided to use it as a chance to connect a series of dreams that has actually been haunting me for the last seven years now.

It’s also tied into a charity, whereby you can sponsor my efforts, with the money going towards writing programs for the young and troubled (like myself when these dreams originaly started).

If you want to sponsor my writing of Penitence & Therapy, please click here.In the meantime, please enjoy my first 4,000 words or so, that I wrote this evening before dinner.

Some of you may recognise the two rather obvious main characters. This is done purposefully as an in joke between myself, and the person who is slated to draw this in its graphic novel form.

Penitence & Therapy – Beginnings

Consciousness flooded back.

Bright, fluorescent light assaulted her eyes as the panic slowly rose within her.

Ropes dug into her wrists and neck, and she thought how this couldn’t possibly be as bad as it seems on first impression. The ropes felt fibrous, rough, not like the normal smooth nylon she was used to that would sensuously rub across pressure points and vital arteries on her delicate, creamy wrists. These ropes were not sensual at all, and this puzzled her. That the ropes could feel so cruel, so ancient and careless, was a new experience for her.

She attempted to piece back the last few… how long had it been? She didn’t know, and suddenly the puzzlement was replaced with worry. She fought to recall the last moments before she’s initially blacked out, clawing at her own mind, like a grizzled miner would chip away at a rock face he’s been told is certain to carry precious stones or gold.

Why was she here? She’d been at the club. She must have been at the club, as her ears whined like feedback from a fried speaker system. By the long, high pitched, C sharp howl in her ears, she knew she must have been at a club. She also knew that if she didn’t start listening to something else soon, the sound would surely drive her mad.

The ropes dug in cruelly. Stray fibres poked into her raw flesh, like hundreds of tiny checks of her diabetes pen all at once. Each individually not unpleasant, but as a whole, unbearable. She attempted to shift her wrists in such a way as to reduce her discomfort, but only succeeded in pulling the ropes that little bit more taught, that little bit more painful as the hundreds of stray fibers pricked her delicate flesh, and into the tissue beneath.

Why am I here she wondered again, unsettled panic rising at the same speed as the bile in her constricted throat. Was I drugged?

She choked out a strangled “Hello?”, and the ropes pulled tighter.

Whoever had tied these knots was clearly expert at it. Not that uncommon, considering the clientele of the particular club she’d been at. She briefly considered that perhaps she had gone home with someone for some play, and they’d taken things a little too far.

No.

That couldn’t be right. The whole setting was too awkward. Too unsettling. Too much like a cheap horror movie filmed in Cardiff. The single, painfully bright fluorescent bulb, one of those new coiled energy saving ones, coupled with the chair she was tied to being the only piece of furniture within the narrow cone of lied it spewed forth in that sickly whiter-than-white glow. A cheap chair with a cheaper girl tied to it, and a cheapest, barren concrete floor underneath the both of them. It was all like something a third rate novelist would begin a crime story with.

Oddly enough, that thought comforted her. She assumed that if she’d only been kidnapped, or was being kept as some sick arse-hole’s plaything, oddly enough, she could deal with that. Psychotic killers and monsters that flayed you alive didn’t really exist in the way that they did in B-horror.

“My dear!”

The voice from behind startled her. She jerked around in an attempt to see who it could be, who had taken her prisoner.

A costly mistake. The rope around her neck dug in deeper, restricted further, bound her tighter. Choked her.

Suffocated her.

Stopped the flow of precious air to her lungs, and oxygen to her brain.

I’m blacking out, she thought as she began to giggle to herself.

She’d been wrong in her assumption.

The stench that assailed her nostrils was terrible. Corrupt, foetid air slammed her senses and made her vision swim back into focus again. The smell of a heroin addict in the final stages, a wino that had been left to rot, a carcass. Her eyes swivelled down and she could finally see her tormentor. Or a part of them at any rate.

All she could really see were arms that seemed impossibly long, and a rough shape beyond the darkness. The arms ended in hands that were just obscenely long, with finely manicured, black painted nails. Shiny. How they caught the light. How they reflected light of themselves and the paperclips between them.

“Wh- who are you?” she rasped against the ropes that crushed her vocal chords.

“Oh, my dear,” the voice chuckled softly, “I am your dearest, closest friend.”

She could almost believe that. There was something about the voice that seemed so calling. So familiar. For a moment, she almost forgot the predicament she was in, the biting ropes, the bizarre setting. For a moment, the stench was gone, and it was replaced with the soft inviting odours of vanilla and soft leather. Odours she remembered from her child hood. And the voice. The way it called her ‘dear’, like her grandfather always used to in his kindly tones.

It all snapped back too suddenly, and the vile stench was with her once more… But that voice. Honey smooth with a trace of that nowhere accent that is neither American, nor British, Nor Canadian, nor anywhere. It just is. And the deep baritone. Like the perfect radio announcer that would make you feel secure, even during the most horrific of reports. Like the safety one gets from the authoritarian voice of their grandfather.

“Why am I h-here?”

The obscenely long hands on those impossibly long arms were unfolding the paper clip now.

Her throat was suddenly dry. She blazed with heat and fear. Somehow, she knew what was coming, although her conscious mind would not, could not, let her realise it fully. Not yet. A few more moments of blissful ignorance, god please, just a few more…

“What are you doing?” The pain in her neck was excruciating now, but she had to know “What’s that for?”

“My dear, it’s for you. It’s a gift for you.”

“It’s what?”

“It’s what you, my dear, have always wanted.”

The hands held one of the the straightened paperclips by the very end of the shaft between a graceful, yet hideously elongated thumb and forefinger. “Allow me to show it to you.”

“No!” She cried, closing her eyes tightly all of a sudden “I don’t want to see it! Not again!”

“Oh, but I believe I must insist, my dear.”

She could feel the pressure of a single, small shaft against her eyelid.

“Oh god, “ she whispered, “Please, no… don’t…” Small star patterns began radiating from that single point behind her eyelid.

“Tsk tsk, no, my dear… There is no god here” replied that perfect voice, as the paperclip quickly slid between her lids.

It happened with such speed there wasn’t even time for the anticipated pain to register. She thought she caught a glimpse of her faceless attacker in that brief moment before it all went dark for the last time. Before the pain, the blissful, terrible pain began, making her buck hard against the ropes, causing them to tighten even further against her limbs and throat, cutting off her ability to cry out or even swallow.

She thought she saw some gibbering horror, from a before time. Or perhaps her brain merely supplied that image so as to match the horror that only her mind could now scream against, and the only sense left to her was the sound of her own flesh being torn, and that long, high pitched, C sharp howling.

---

“Sick mother fucker…” Harvey spat out.

He kneeled beside the chair, looking up at the victim, his heavy policeman’s leather jacket creaking as he leaned  in. The sensible jacket that shielded him equally from bad weather and badly thrown punches. It hugged about his shoulders like an old friend, sneaking up behind after a long time apart. Warm, secure, tight. Emotionally fulfilling. Secretly satisifying.

“Vertier, thoughts?”

“Hmm, I think you should stop eating so much on the fucking job, because you’re getting crumbs on the evidence.” Trey said, as he walked up behind Harvey, his long coat swishing in the mild breeze rolling in through the open door, across the floor and out the window on the other side. The breeze was shockingly cold. Trey left his coat hang open as a matter of policy, as he steadfastly believed that form was function.

“Smoking or eating. Take your pick.” Harvey’s voice dripped with sardonic glee.

The look of contempt would have hurt if Harvey hadn’t been on the receiving end of it at least daily since he had first been partnered with Detective Trey Vertier. Four years is enough time to know the nuances of most people, especially those you ended up spending nearly as much time around as a wife, and these two spent even more time together than that. Harvey scoffed. At least his wife had the good graces to actually be the one to get coffee once in a while. But they knew each others mannerisms, had settled intellectual and ideological differences long ago, and bore no grudges against each other for being what how they were.

“Detective Vertier is right, sir. You’ll contaminate the evidence. It was bad enough last time when the lab had to filter out half a dozen of your butts from the others in evidence.” A constable sidled up beside them, hands filled with outlining tape and numbered cardboard triangles to place down where notable items were found.

“Mallory?”

“Yes, Detective Bradson?”

“It’s pretty easy to tell which butts are mine because they’re always black. In future, shut up please.”

This last was said with the level of irritation normally reserved for those that are perpetually chastised. Harvey didn’t care to deal with subordinates further at this point. He’d hunkered down on his haunches, chin resting on palms as he looked up at the body, trying to figure out what was wrong here. What was different here.

What was different here?

The knots.

Those damn knots.

It was the third one already. Three people dead, with nothing to tie them together, other than their killer. The knots were the same every time. Home made rope. Expert ties. And the knots were the bloody same… every… bloody… time.

Like a scout that had just lost it, and thrown their three fingered salute to the wind. The kind of scout that would push an old lady into traffic.

“You still didn’t tell me what you think, Trey.”

“I think we’re obviously dealing with the same suspect as the stoner and the suit from the other week… but you’re already thinking that too. Hmm, the knots. This guy’s into kinkier shit than I am. Kind of ironic really.”

The junior officers on the scene raised eyebrows, but knew better than to comment. Personal lives were always good fodder to keep a mind off a crime scene as horrific as this one, as there was always a good laugh to be had with who’d accidentally said what to whom, and what trouble others had gotten into with their sexual intellectuality or peccadilloes. But some people’s personal lives managed to bring thoughts right back to the things that were attempting to avoid looking at, let alone imagine. Both Detective’s Bradson and Vertier had… interesting personal lives. That is, if department rumour was anything to go by.

Mallory had already placed the white, plastic tape in, and was now putting the markers down over straightened paper-clips. Another nondescript constable bagged and tagged them, before taking them over to Lee, who worked lab.

“Sick mother fuckers” the constable echoed, nodding towards Harvey.

“Good taste in victims clothes though,” Trey commented “the fishnet top would definitely have fit me better though.”

Harvey’s eyes swivelled away from the macabre figure and over to Trey “Haven’t you wandered why the perp’s bothered to put that, and her jacket, back on after removing organs?”

“I… no, actually.” Trey rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I kind of assumed that this had been done with the clothes still on.”

“Except that’s impossible.”

“Yeah, I thought so too… except look here.” Trey pointed to the upper arms and waist. “There’s no tension marks in the material which would indicate someone redressing the victim after they’d become immobile. And-”

Harvey cut him off “-and how would they place the ropes back in the exact same points as they’d been in before, to same same level of tension required to produce this kind of wound pattern, after putting the clothes back on. I picked it up too, from the ropes, after I said that.”

Harvey picked a card out of the breast pocket. “What the?”

The card was the same size as a regular business card, but no self respecting business person would have a card like this. Black, glossy, bizarre half faded images that looked like some kind of satantic ritualistic diagram. A flyer for Cenobyte. A gothic-industrial nightclub, so it said.

“Fucking weird.”

“No. Fucking weird is that dead dealer we found last year with the live hamster inside him. This is Patrick Bateman territory.”

“I’d say more along the lines of Pinhead.”

They looked at each other and grinned.

Mallory walked up behind them, the soles of his cheap patrolman’s shoes sqeauking against the smooth, wet concrete floor. “Detectives? Lab’s pretty much done here. They’ll say they’ll get the results to you ASAP. Lee said that if it’s like the last two times, they’re not expecting to find anything.”

“What?!” Harvey asked, frustratedly. “What about th-” He stopped mid sentence, stood up and shouted to the back of the room, where Lee was slowly loading things into the evidence cases before taking them to the lab. “Lee, what the fuck happened to that claw we found in the suit’s hand in that second one!? It looked like someone half tried to crucify the bastard!”

Lee waited patiently as Harvey stormed over.

“Ahhh, Detective Bradson, it wasn’t an animal claw. It wa-”

“Like fuck it wasn’t! That thing was a god damned talon!”

“It was,” continued Lee, louder this time “an aloe vera thorn.”

“Aloe vera? Like the crap they put in sunscreen?”

“Yes. It was in the report I sent to you and Detective Vertier. If the victim had run through the property next door, which had a succulents nursery, it would not be entirely infeasible.”

Trey cocked an eyebrow “Except that the autopsy said there hadn’t been a struggle, just like with the stoner kid. And this girl doesn’t look like she put up a fight either.”

“So perhaps the perpetrator placed it through the palm.” Lee replied calmly.

“No,” Harvey mumbled, pulling out a cigarette “the wound had too much force for something methodical like that… fuck…”

“Well, whatever. This is why you guys are the detectives. I’m going to get back to the lab and sort this one out. Remember to tell the coroner’s boys to send her to me when you two are done.”

Lee closed the current case and started hauling them over to the car.

Harvey and Trey turned back to the corpse.

“I’m still having trouble getting over the bite marks around her eyes…”

---

“Coffee?” asked Harvey, as he pulled off his gloves, finally giving up on the scene.

Vertier was already leaning against the door frame of the ramshackle building, a look of boredom on his face so complete it could have been mistaken for a contemplative state. Beams of sun poking through the clouds reflected off the occasional dust mote that got left to float before the next gust of breeze took it along to the next point on its journey.

“Only if you’re buying” came back the reply.

“I still don’t know how you manage to be so flip about shit like this,” Harvey commented as they headed to one of the countless dismal chain cafes that were now unavoidable, the smell of over roasted coffee assaulting nostrils like corpses left at the site of an arson. The face Harvey made at the scent was not far off from one that would rest on the face of such a grisly victim. “This is the third one already, and we still don’t have a clue about it.”

“It’s not too hard. I just tend to think most of those cunts deserve what’s coming. Makes this job easier.” Trey said this with the shocking callousness of one who genuinely believed it. “I don’t know how you manage to walk a scene without some vaporub on your lip.”

“Those scenes are nothing. I’ve got a dog.”

They stood in line, contemplating their choices. They both knew that the marketing was all there was to the difference between the supposed roasts. Even casual examination of the coffee dispensers  would show almost know difference between the beans in the different options available, regardless of the prosaic descriptions of the supposedly cosmic differences between breeds, roasts and grinds. The smooth ground, darkly roasted, Guatemalan blend presented the deep colours of fine antique mahogany, carrying a flavour both rich and velvety, imparting a symmetry to the palate with it’s strong finish, designed to round off a meal whilst you speak with friends of years gone by. Conversely, the coarse ground Mocca Kenya had a light tan hue reminiscent of farming earth clods, brought about by the endless sun and pristine air of verdant Africa, imparting near fruit flavours on a mellow, creamy after taste that is best enjoyed on an autumn afternoon whilst one tarries in a garden before a dinner engagement.

Or so the menu read.

Once you put cream, syrup, sugar and sprinkles in the stuff, it was all the fucking same, wasn’t it? Not real coffee. Not coffee like one could get at a dingy lane way cafe where you were still allowed to smoke a god damned cigarette. Not even coffee like you could reasonably expect to get at a roadside diner in the middle of the night, with the grit of the rind magically managing to get through the filter and scratch at your throat while the caffeine from such a potent mixture wired your brain so hard and fast your eyes would twitch. No. This was a soulless, mass produced sludge, designed to be acceptable to those with neither discerning taste, nor a life that had allowed their tongue to appreciate the bitterness of the drink as a commentary on its own past. This was something that was acceptable to school girls, prattling on to each other as they tweeted bitchy comments about the very people they were smiling a, agreeing with, right in front of their faces, so their other friends could see their real thoughts at such mundane and insipid conversation.

A true Nescafe moment.

Harvey snarled in disgust at how much his world had changed in a decade “White coffee, medium, no sugar”.

“Vente-supremo-latte-sans-sucrose!” shouted a waitress so bohemian and outre, as to be totally nondescript. Harvey winced. It was bad enough when politicians and lawyers used weasel words.

“Do you want any flavour or whipped cream with that?” She asked in a voice so saccharine it was probably carcinogenic. Trey smirked as Harvey’s eye noticeably twitched and he moved on to wait at the service counter before the bewildered girl could even ask for his name.

Trey leaned on the counter, and lightly placed a finger under the girls chin to drag her attention back to him. Maintaining eye contact with the waitress, but in a low, quiet, clear voice clearly designed to be heard by those most likely to be irritated by the words “I’ll have a grande-shockolate-chaud-avec-vanille-et-sucre… with whipped cream… and when it’s ready you can call for Trey.”

Harvey’s eye twitched again as the girl blushed.

---

They sat in one of the plush booths. The booths were comfortable enough to sit in for the length of time it might take one to slowly sip at a coffee and eat a slice of cake guaranteed to place one into cardiac arrest twenty years before the steadily dropping average age, but any longer than that would cause pain. An hours stay in one of the ergonomically designed things would most likely cause serious damage to the lumbar region.

They pulled out their PDAs. Old models they would be the laughing stock of the techno-savvy younger generation, but they were serviceable. They still had physical keyboards, even though both units technically supported touch screen interfaces. They pulled up their notes, and set their PDAs to pair so they could trade. Photos, notes, small audio clips containing personal thoughts on the scenes, victims, information gathered so far, all flew back and forth between their devices in a flurry of radio-waves. It was a grim irony that the hand scrawled notes that each had written into their devices were still illegible to anyone but themselves. Harvey’s PDA kept attempting to switch to Arabic language character sets when he attempted to get the device to turn his writing to text. Comedic value of that aside, the contents of those hand scrawled notes, the photos, the dictaphone recordings, were grim indeed. Gallows humour was the best spin that one could put on the smirk that crossed Trey’s face. Sad indifference for Harvey’s.

“Ok,” sighed Harvey as he rubbed the bridge of his nose “the more we get, the less it makes any sense… Am I the only one that feels this way?”

“Mmm, yeah, but no. You’re right though. The more we get, the more we’re not getting. I’m getting jack of this shit.”

Trey took a pull on his ‘drink’ before continuing “No DNA evidence. No fibre evidence. No prints. It’s like this guy’s watched every fucking episode of Law & Order and CSI, then checked off everything that you can actually look for at a crime scene and made sure it’s not there.”

“Mmm,” Harvey agreed, nodding into his mug of what he really wished to be coffee “plus we’ve got no motive, no notes or clues left behind like a ‘smart-than-thou’ psycho fuck would leave behind. Nothing tying the victims together, either. He’s like a fucking ghost, this guy.”

They both stared at the table for a few moment, as Harvey drummed his fingers against the poorly polished surface. He beat a repetitive tattoo. One beat, three beats, four beats, one beat. Over, and over, like the catch to some half remembered rock song. His poorly cut nails dug small rivets in the cheap surface coat of the soft wood, his drumming growing harder, faster, as he grew more agitated by the whole situation.

“Shit!” Harvey grunted, grimacing into his coffee.

“Yeah, it kind of is,and this case is frustrating too” replied Trey “Let’s go back to the office and look at the case file. Maybe we missed something.”

Harvey sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

You might also like to read:

1. Penitence & Therapy pt8
2. Penitence & Therapy pt5
3. Penitence & Therapy pt6
4. Penitence & Therapy pt7
5. Penitence & Therapy pt3

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