Serial Killers

A while ago, I entered this story into a competition and lost. I then entered it to a few magazines. Serial killers are a hard sell so I decided to put it on my website. Feel free to let me know what you think about it in my guestbook.

The Blanket Man

4,476 words - Speculative/Horror Fiction

Detective Mike Carlton couldn't sleep, staring at the ceiling and using his imagination to make pictures from the fine cracks and splinters in the ceiling paint. When the phone to his right rang violently, he was glad of the interruption. “What?"

“Mike: it’s me. There’s been another murder.”

Mike rubbed his forehead before pinching his eyes shut. “Where?”

“The old city, same place as the others.”

“Give me twenty.” He hung up and heaved his body to sit. He tasted salt and foulness as he licked his arid lips. His eyes stung and muscles juddered.

He stood up, showered and retrieved his gun and holstered it around his neck. He grabbed at his badge from a rococo telephone table and left the apartment as he did on any callout.

The early morning was crisp and sharp on the skin. His outdated Mitsubishi was little comfort but he made good time to what used to be the Roma Street side of old Brisbane; a shrine to the deceased. After the corpses were retrieved from the bombed wreckage, not another brick was touched and old Brisbane stood derelict, broken and uninhabitable. On occasion, they find the remains of a body or an animal, and will do so for years to come. Hundreds are unaccounted for.

He arrived at the corner of George and Ann Streets where the carcass of the State Law Building blocked his path. Three hundred souls lost.

He parked and retrieved his torch from the glove box and made the rest of the way by foot. The night was as black as the well to hell and even with a torch, the walk was difficult. A thin footpath had been cut through some of the larger structures to allow salvage groups passage after the bombings. The city was riddled with such passages like a huge maze of death.

It took time to get to Roma Street and walk through the rubble and concrete remains to where a group of people were huddled together near platform 3. He approached them quickly and authoritatively.

“You’re late,” said Detective Holler.

“She’s not going anywhere,” Mike said as he glanced at the body. “Same M.O.?”

“Victim died from multiple stab wounds and slit throat. No witnesses.”

He walked around for differing viewpoints. The site was dusty and flat and made it a little easier than a body on the rocks or hidden under debris.

“Same weapon?”

“Looks like it,” Holler replied. “The Coroner’s yet to examine the body, but at a guess, it’s the same.”

Mike walked around the corpse. She looked identical to the others: the girl was around twenty five to thirty years of age, blonde – they were always blonde – and very athletic. Weight approximately sixty five kilos, height five ten. Pretty, and across her neck, a wound large enough to fit his hand in. Through the spill of blood, he saw the ribbed cartilage pipe of her trachea which reflected his torch light back at him.

He lifted up the hem of her red dress to reveal three fat stab wounds in her stomach, same as the others. He blew out his cheeks.

Holler stepped aside to allow him to walk around.

They were all hallmarks of the killer’s grim calling card. “Nothing new?” Mike asked.

“No. Her name’s Helen Camp from New Farm. She had a Queensland Government tag, money and a broken mobile phone. The Government’s been contacted to get an address.”

“Don’t get me involved in that.”

Something in the distance caught his eye. He thrust his head up and stared into the inky blackness and beyond the columns of light that shone bright from their torches, at the endless pile of bricks and mortar which constituted so many instant coffins when they tumbled. It looked like a figure, he was sure, but it disappeared as he saw it.

“I’m going for a walk,” he told his beleaguered colleagues before leaving with a thin sigh.

It was oppressive and dark beyond his field of vision; a physical black barrier. Half of the stairs remained erect. The scene ahead was a wasteland of bricks and concrete, difficult to negotiate in the day, almost impossible at night. He studied every brick before stepping on them, too familiar with the painful twisting of an ankle on an uneven surface. His progress was definite and slow and he hoped that if it was a person, they would still be there when he arrived.

The air smelled of sulphur and excrement. Sixty metres to his right was a small fire which the local homeless shared. Rats scurried away as the flashlight beam danced over their furry bodies, and the new moon offered little to help him. He reached a large mound of concrete which used to be the steps leading to one of the derelict train platforms. It seemed no different than any other lump of large concrete.

He jumped backwards with a, "Jesus!"

A small figure, no larger than a child, moved away from him. He heard it say, ‘Oh!’ and followed the child as quick as he could, seeing it scuttle into a broken section embedded in the wall. “Hello?” he called.

A low pitched squeal reached his ears. “Anybody there?” With his free hand, he removed and uncocked his standard issue Glock 9mm. “Hello?”

He heard a whimper. It sounded frightened, young and female. “It’s the police,” he said with invested authority. “I won’t hurt you.”

The sound died with a gradual breath. He afforded more concentration and picked up a light, almost inconceivable breathing sound. The surrounding gloom was affecting his tiring eyes, casting dark shapes where there were no shapes to see. He edged forward. “I’m coming towards you. There’s no need to panic. I want to ask you a few questions, that’s all.”

He could feel his heart pounding as he inched his way closer, hands trembling in anticipation. Then, a small head appeared in front of him – he drew back and shone his flashlight.

She was no more than fourteen with grimy skin and hair plastered to her face with what looked like blood or mud. Her clothes were filthy and simple and as tatty as her hair. Her eyes screwed themselves together until he removed the beam from her face, and she clambered out from her hiding place, nimble as the child she was.

“What are you doing?” Mike asked.

“I thought you might be him,” she said.

“Him?”

“The blanket man.”

He edged forward, trying not to startle the girl. “Does the blanket man want to hurt you?” He reset the hammer on his gun and re-holstered it.

She nodded. “He’s a very, very bad man. He hurts people like Auntie Helen.”

“You knew the vict … Auntie Helen, did you?”

“Uh-huh. She was my friend, but the blanket man said she was a very, very naughty girl and did things that good girls shouldn’t.”

“Like what?” he asked.

She shook her head from side to side, never losing eye contact. “I can’t tell you. He said not to.”

“So the blanket man hurt her?”

“Uh-huh. But you won’t hurt me, will you?”

“No. Never,” he affirmed. “I don’t look like a blanket man, do I?”

“No,” she replied, “but you do look like a teacher.”

He allowed an inched smile before asking, “Do you know the blanket man?”

She nodded. “He tells me to bring them here.”

“Who?”

“People. Women, mostly. Women who look like Auntie Helen. He said if I don’t, I’d end up like the rest of them.”

“Where is the blanket man?” he asked

“I don’t know,” the girl said, and there was a sadness in her eyes..

Mike sighed. “Do you know where I can find him?”

“No,” the girl replied, “but I can show you.”

Together, they ambled through the fractured city and towards the Brisbane river. The cold morning served to hinder their progress as they clambered over the remains of commercial tenements. He rarely travelled any further into the old city’s south, and had difficulty in keeping up with the young girl who seemed as spry as a rabbit, picking her way through the destruction. He was one of the few who believed the whole city should be cleared and rebuilt, but fifteen years wasn’t long enough for the vast majority of the public to forget.

“How far is it?” he asked, puffed.

“Not far,” she replied. “He lives in a little house near the river. It’s very smelly near there.”

Christ! he thought. All the murders, all those families he had to explain death to. The horrors in his nightmares: tonight, they may find some peace.

The cold pinched his skin a little, but the exercise kept him warm. He could feel damp patches of sweat on his clean shirt. The girl stopped next to a pile of debris next to a cracked kerb and waited until he caught up.

“What’s your name?” he asked, heart already throbbing.

“Jessica. What’s yours?”

“Mike. So, Jessica: where are you from?”

“I live here,” she answered in a matter-of-fact tone. “I live here with my friends.”

He swiped away sweat from his forehead. “Are there many of you?”

“Lots,” she said. “Most of us were left here or dumped. We take turns looking for food and water and helping the blanket man. If we don’t, he’ll kill us. He’s already killed Jack and Sarah.”

Mike hunkered down on one knee so that he could look into her eyes. “Does he have a name? The blanket man?”

“That is his name.”

“Well, what does he look like?”

“I dunno,” she sulked, wiping away her mottled hair from her eyes. “He always wears a blanket around his head. That’s why he’s called the blanket man. And it’s a real dirty one, too.”

“Have you ever seen him kill someone?”

She nodded with all the reservation of a frightened child. Her face looked disturbed and her eyes fell away from his. Regardless, Mike knew he had to ask: “Tell me what you saw, with Auntie Helen. Tell me about what happened to her.”

A tear fell from her face and splattered against the dusty floor. Light from the torch failed to reveal much else about her except for the look of forlornness on her innocent face. He had seen that look so many times before. It was a look of sadness and disinterest in life; a look of knowing that the true meaning in life was to survive it. The same look he had seen on so many during the war.

 Jessica said, “I told her my brother had fallen on to the old tracks and I couldn’t find my parents. That I thought they were dead. She took my hand and I led her into the old part of the train station. She talked about her day. She talked a lot. I really liked her. She treated me nicely.

“We looked around for a while until the blanket man turned up. He took Auntie Helen and told me to leave – I usually do, but I wanted to know what he was going to do. He had this really big shiny knife which he took out of a big case and he killed her with it then he tried to cut her head off.” Jessica stopped as an emotional choke grasped her. She sniffed aloud and rubbed her eyes.

Mike placed a hand on her shoulder. “If you help me, I’ll kill this blanket man for you. I’ll make sure that you or anybody else comes to no harm. Okay?”

She looked back at him. Tears ran down her face leaving dirty traces on her cheeks. “You can’t kill the blanket man. He’s a monster.”

“Monsters can be killed. It’s my job. Now – when Auntie Helen was hurt, what did he do next?”

“Nothing. He dropped her and walked away.”

“And the knife?”

She shrugged. “Dunno.”

He shuffled and looked at the inky black sky for whatever type of inspiration he thought may be up there, before coming back to her attention. “Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh. Can you kill him? The blanket man?”

There was a pang of doubt in the back of his mind; doubt he couldn’t form into words, he said: “Yes.”

A scream pierced the air from the right. A scream of anger or frustration or of instant panic, as muffled as a tortured plea through a thin pillow. Jessica lunged at Mike, wrapping her tight arms around him. He felt her face on his and her voice whispering, “Turn off the light! Hide! It’s the blanket man!”

Mike’s heart beat hard as he extinguished the beam. His eyes darted over the decay of the city but in the poor light of the new moon, he saw very little. It was dark enough to almost touch, wrapping itself around them and squeezing. Mike picked up the little girl and dashed to an alcove to his left, sitting in the corner with her on his knee. “Be very quiet,” he told her. “Don’t make a sound.”

“Okay,” she whispered back as she tried to force her trembling body deeper into his for protection. “I promise I won’t make a sound. Never.”

Mike focussed his eyes on the labyrinth created by concrete columns, brick alcoves and demolished walls. It was too dark to notice moving shadows and he gripped his gun in one hand while holding Jessica in the other. His ankle ached from walking over old Brisbane.

The darkness seemed to press on his eyeballs as he searched for that sneaky shadow or freaky movement; watching for Jessica’s monster, the blanket man.

Moments passed with the shallowest of breaths, but nobody appeared. He wiped his bottom lip with his tongue and whispered, “Are you sure it was him?”

“It was him!” Jessica replied with a stress in her voice which convinced him more than what she said. “That was his call for me. He’s looking for me.”

“Can you see him?”

“Uh, no.”

She was now shivering in his arms. He hadn’t noticed it until he realised it wasn’t cold enough to warrant it. “I need to follow him, Jessica. I have to know where he lives. Our experts believe he might have other people like Auntie Helen hidden somewhere.”

“I told you I know where! You don’t have to follow him, but follow me – I’ll show you!”

“Jessica, look. I have to do this alone. If I take you with me, he might get you. Do you understand?”

She pulled him closer to him, her warm lips brushing his chilled ear.  She whispered, “Don’t leave me.”

He had to force her away from him like she was an over-excited puppy dog, coaxing her with his voice. “Jessica, I have to … you must stay here and hide … I’ll come back for you when it’s all over. I promise.”

It took a few minutes of constant reinforcement until she succumbed to his words, allowing him to put his face in front of hers so their noses almost touched. “I promise,” he repeated.

In the meagre light, he saw her nod. She turned and pointed. “He lives that way. By the river. There’s three windows and a door. The windows have wood on them. I hate that house. That’s where Jack and Sarah died.”

Despite her protests, he left Jessica in the concrete alcove where they first met, and followed her general direction towards the river.

He stumbled through the swampish darkness of night, not wanting to use his torch for fear of giving away his position. Morning was still an hour or two away from breaking and he could almost smell the dawn fast approaching. The homeless littered the ruins as if the catastrophe had just started. They looked like dead bodies which the council didn’t pick up. It was unnerving. Doubly so considering the general absence of light. Ironically, it was that same absence which concealed him.

He was approaching the Brisbane river. The acrid smell of sulphur was starting to overpower his sense of smell, and he recognised the ruins and the pinpoints of light from across the water.

The house was in front and there was no sign of light. It was how Jessica had described as he approached. It was more of a large derelict outhouse, remaining standing by the weight of its own roof. There were three windows bordered with planks of two by four and a closed door to their right. It had a presence to it; a feeling. A trickle of apprehension crawled down his spine.

With gun in hand he eased himself to the broken window nearest the door and peered in. It was incomprehensibly dark and the stench of decaying flesh made him gag. His insides wanted to turn themselves inside out but he swallowed three times in succession to keep it in. He held his breath and tried again.

It was a normal house from what he could see, although abandoned. There seemed to be various adjoining rooms and he couldn’t see the back wall of the room he was looking into. He took a deep breath, opened the door and slipped inside.

The gloom was morbid and silent enough to turn a man deaf. After four steps on soggy carpet which squished like frogs underfoot, he came to a table filled with what looked like bottles of water. Next to it stood an old blue eski, for whatever purpose it achieved. Straight ahead of him he noticed a large box freezer which was large enough to store two dismembered adult bodies.

A soft, quiet sound caught his attention. It seemed to emanate from behind the wall to his right, perhaps in another room or outside. The house felt ominous and old, as decrepit as the city it bordered. A tinkle of rain started to patter on the roof, but he heard nothing else. The smell of the house was overpowering and he found it difficult breathing.

The tinkle became louder and faster, sounding like small ball bearings being dropped on corrugated iron, the sound resonating around the empty house. It boomed around the room and stayed heavy in Mike’s ears. It became too difficult to distinguish any other noise after mere minutes, and Mike found himself on edge, trying to focus on anything around him, anything other than water splashing against the house, but he couldn’t.

He reached for his torch and flicked it on, the beam striking the inanimate freezer. Down its countenance, from the lip of the lid, he noticed a trickle of what looked like dried blood or rust running down its side.

The darker boundary of his mind prompted him to open it; to look inside and see if anything extraordinary was stocked up in there.  

Something sharp whisked by his face and stung him like a whip. His torch hand went up and tenderly touched his cheek and felt moisture. It was too thick to be water. His eyes danced around the room but he saw nothing or nobody. His heart raced so violently, he could feel it against his breast. A movement distracted him and he spun on the ball of his foot, raising his gun and aiming ahead.

When it happened, it hurt more than he could have ever imagined. He had never been stabbed before. At first, it felt like somebody punched him, but then he felt the cold, sharp pain of a blade stab into his body three times.

He stumbled to the freezer, the torch hitting the corner of the lid and slipped from his hand and landed on the floor. It rolled around in random semi-circular patterns. The shadows caught a silhouette of somebody weaving in and out of the light which soon disappeared back into the shadows. An optical illusion?

“Who’s there?” he demanded, pulling himself to his feet. “I’m a police officer. Come out.” The grip on his gun intensified to the point of pain.

He looked at his torso and the three punctures evident in his stomach. One large, dark smudge covered his stomach and it felt icy cold. He placed his remaining hand on his wet shirt and felt the warm stickiness. As the light circled back towards him, he saw red rivulets dropping to the floor in splats and the untidy contrast of crimson against the mustard shirt like a broken fountain pen on blotting paper.

Leaning on the freezer with his buttocks, he allowed panic to set in. His body was weak and the blood free flowing. He crept to his knees and stayed there, eyes trying to focus on anything else in the room except for the table and the bottles of water. His knees became sodden from the water on the floor. He had no means of communication or calling for help and doubted that people ever came this way. Like the rest of old Brisbane, there remained desolation.

His head swayed a little before dropping to his chest. With what mental strength was remaining, he willed himself to finish what it was he had started, and he knew that the three stab wounds were the same as the other victims. Whoever did this to him was the Puddle Murderer. There was one other wound which remained to fit the profile.

“I’m here,” came a little voice.

Mike recognised it. “Jessica?” he called.

The rain crashed against the house as she walked through. Her clothes were soaked to her skin and her hair looked streaked. He could read in her face that he over-estimated her age. She was perhaps eight or nine years old.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to tell him. It’s my job. He might kill me.”

“Who?” Mike winced. “The blanket man?”

“Yes. I told you he was a monster. Did you see him?”

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

“You’re dying, aren’t you. He near killed you and you’ve not seen him yet.”

“I’ll be fine. Just a scratch.”

“You’re going to die, aren’t you?”

“No. Now don’t worry, okay? Things will be fine.”

“No,” she told him. “No they won’t.”

Mike looked up at her, and for the briefest of moments thought he was a sneer. She dripped rain everywhere and didn’t seem the least bit uncomfortable. “Why?” he asked.

A scream filled the house, identical to the muffled yet strained scream he heard in the city, but more guttural with an edge of frenzy. The kind of scream you hear in your nightmares when you’re buried alive and can’t get out.

“He wants me to leave now,” Jessica said. “He wants me to leave you so he can show you what he does.”

“I don’t understand,” Mike replied. “What do you mean?”

“I mean: he will show you what he does with naughty people like you. Dirty people. Like Auntie Helen. The dirty girl.”

“Jessica,” he wheezed. “Helen wasn’t a dirty girl. Do you understand? Your blanket man – he’s the unclean one. He’s the one we have to work against! Do you understand?”

“No.” Her large eyes were blanked, almost drugged.

“Can you help me?”

“No.” She left the dim room and stepped back into the rain and closed the door behind her with a screech of wood.

Mike breathed hard. His strength was almost gone, and his arm fell to his side. All the will in the world couldn’t raise it again, and he feared the moments to come.

A figure stepped in front of him. He heard feet squish on the wet floor. Accompanying the figure was a rancid smell of rotten steak and off-garlic and other rancid odours which his nostrils tried to avoid describing. The figure was bulky and tall and wore old clothes and boots. Wet and dried stains ran down him: stains like blood, urine and vomit. Thickly wrapped around his head was a large dirty blanket and he held what looked like a sword in his hand.

Mike gave a last-ditch effort and raised the gun, his finger attempting to clasp the trigger. But the blanket man was stronger, wrenching the weapon from his grasp quicker than he could shoot. His strength and speed was beyond human, and Mike felt a panic rise up in his soul. He also felt an emptiness around the man; a vacuum which shouldn’t exist around a person. An anti-aura.

“Who the hell are you?” Mike asked, his panic growling in the pit of his stomach, but he already knew.

The blanket man whisked the knife near his face and stepped back. Blood dripped to the floor from the weapon and when Mike tried to speak, he gurgled. His hand checked his neck and found a wound as large as it was deep.

Shocked, he stared up at the blanket man. They were locked in a frozen moment, captured like an emotional photograph between killer and prey, and it didn’t take long for the fatal injury to send Mike reeling to the sodden floor with his last spasms of life.

That same shrieking scream pierced the air and filled Mike’s soul with an incomprehensible dread. His attention turned to the door which again opened.

Children, small and young, filtered through the door. Jessica was one of them and Mike gurgled for her to help him, but it was pitiful. Eight, ten – as many as perhaps fifteen children of the same age surrounded the blanket man, each touching his exposed fingers as they passed as if they had a common bond.

They formed a semicircle around him before casting their eyes down at the detective. In unison, they covered their wet faces with their hands and peered through their fingers so only an eye could see, chanting, whispering, although their voices were so tiny against the lashing rain, it was impossible to comprehend what was being said.

In the splayed light from his torch, Mike saw his own death.

The blanket man dropped the knife a metre from where he lay. The weapon clattered around his head and Mike saw his face looking back at him from a silver streak on the blade.

As the life flickered out of his body, the blanket man and his children watched and waited until the time was right.