25 Feb Octopus Man

Being a police detective means you see a lot of horrible things.  Things you can’t unsee.

They haunt your dreams at night, and the images spill over into the daytime.

Waking nightmares – ever hear of those?  I get them all the time.

Pretty soon, every time you close your eyes, you see a flashback of something awful.

An icepick through an eye socket.

A hammer drill invading someone’s skull through their ear canal.

Bodies missing pieces.

Cadavers of all shapes and sizes, colors and creeds.  Some killers don’t discriminate.

Most do.

Did you know that serial killers predominantly murder only those from their own race and social standing?

There are numerous motives that drive them: financial gain, thrill-seeking, revenge, love, hate, or even the simple desire for attention.

I don’t think the Octopus Man ever wanted the attention, though.  I don’t think he killed for any reason other than because he could.  And because he was good at it.

Ever hear of outliers?  He was an outlier.

In many more ways than one.

* * * * * *

It was late spring, and Hollow’s End was blooming.

The smell of wet dirt and growing grass and flowers hung sweetly in the air as I got into my car, the sun still asleep behind the horizon.  It was nearly 4 AM, and I had been awake all night.

It was something about the most recent case that was bothering me.

The murders that had occurred the night before still didn’t make any sense.

I don’t know if I intended to drive over to the house on Calvin Crescent.  Part of me thinks I just left to go for a drive, to clear my head and try to think it over.  My best ideas often come to me while driving.

Despite my exhaustion after having denied myself sleep (in favor of crime scene photos and witness statements), my eyes stayed open without effort.  The rain-slicked street unfurled itself from the darkness in front of me, the old Mercury’s headlights illuminating crumbling laneways that crisscrossed the town.

Calvin Crescent seemed to beckon me, and I found myself turning the steering wheel in ever-tightening concentric circles, bringing me spiraling closer and closer to the blood-stained home as I thought things over.

No forced entry or exit.

No murder weapons found.

No witnesses or suspects.

No fingerprints or video footage, despite a myriad assortment of security cameras functioning at full capacity.

What was I missing?

The Thompsons were your everyday, run-of-the-mill family of four.  They went to church on Sunday.  The boy played little league on a team called the Wildcats, and the father was the coach.  The mother was a member of the church women’s league.  The daughter was involved in gymnastics and ballet.

Why the hell would anyone want to kill them?

The coroner was doing his autopsy, and the report would be available that morning sometime.  I would go there and see the man himself as well.  Dr. Strange – as the other cops called him.

No wonder I couldn’t sleep.  The day was going to be jam-packed full of mental torture and gore.  The doctor liked to torment me with his Socratic method of explanation through question and answer.  As if it was my job to work for every single bit of information he had to give me.  The man was a sadist.

But at least he would give me clues.  Things that I could work with.  The 48-hour window was closing.  After that, the chances of solving the case became more and more minuscule by the minute.

Nothing bothered me like having no leads in a fresh murder.  It made me feel inadequate.  Stupid.  Like I had missed something.

The worst part was this wasn’t the first case like this.  In the past several years, there had been more homes with dead families inside.  No suspects or murder weapons found.  The same situation was repeating itself over and over.  The events coming closer and closer together.

It had to be the same guy.  But I was the only one who would admit that.  I wasn’t supposed to talk about it publicly.  Serial killers aren’t great for tourism, after all.

The car came to a stop in front of a wide bungalow with red siding and a big maple tree out front.  Hedges concealed the windows from the eyes of nosey neighbors but also made it easy for things to happen inside unwitnessed.

I got out of the car and closed the door quietly and carefully behind me.  Making my footsteps soft and soundless had once been a challenge, with my wide frame and tall stature, but I had learned to do it effortlessly over the years.

Still, despite my stealth, I felt a tingling on my neck like eyes watching as I approached the sentry.

Knocking on his car window, I saw him jerk awake with a start, and he rolled down the glass to look at me.

“Geez, man, you scared me!  Where the hell did you come from, anyways?  Frickin’ ninja.  Don’t you sleep?”

“Couldn’t turn my mind off.  Thought I’d get an early start.”

He looked guilty for a second, knowing what my next question would be—knowing that I had just caught him unawares.

“Anybody coming or going?”

Killers often returned to the scene of the crime, but in such a small town, they would stick out like a sore thumb, especially this time of night with no one on the streets.  Assuming the night watch was actually watching.  We did have access to the cameras both inside and out—the ones installed by the late owner of the house.

“Nobody.”

I decided not to scold him; for all I knew, he had actually been doing his job, and I really was just that good.  But it didn’t sit right.

Leaving him in his car, I approached the front door of the house, taking careful, quiet steps.  Why did I feel so nervous suddenly?

Opening the front door with the key, I went inside.  It was dark, and I turned on the light in the entryway and looked around.

Nothing had been moved as far as I could tell.  The blood pooling on the floor of the kitchen could be seen from the doorway, and I walked further in to take another look around the murder scene.

Three of the family members had been murdered in the kitchen.  Judging by their positions and how they fell, it appeared that they were engaged in normal everyday life.  The mother and two kids had sharp objects inserted through their ears which caused the fatal damage – I assumed without a look at the autopsy report –  judging by the blood which had pooled around their heads like halos on the floorboards, dripping out of their ears.

The bodies themselves were gone now, and all I had was the blood-soaked silhouettes that outlined them.  And the memories that would stick with me.  The images of them I could still see clearly.  Perfectly.

None of the neighbors had heard a scream.  No one saw anybody coming or going from the house.

It was like a riddle.

The father was found separately, down in the basement in his office.  Normally he would be a prime suspect.  But he had no defensive wounds and no suspicious blood spatter.  Furthermore, video footage from a security camera showed him in his office the whole time when the murder occurred.

In the video footage, he steps out of the image for a second as if he heard a noise; then, his body collapses to the ground from out of frame a moment later.  Blood spills out of his ear and pools on the floor all around him, same as the others.

I looked at the steps leading down to the darkness in the basement.  My whole body said not to go down there.  The lights were broken like someone had thrown a rock at them, so I had to pull out my flashlight.

Taking a few hesitant steps down into the moist air of the lower level, I reminded myself to breathe.

Keeping to the outside of each step, I managed to avoid making any noise until I got near the bottom, and one of them creaked loudly.

Why was I trying to be so quiet?  The house was empty, right?

The question squirmed in my mind, but I couldn’t answer it properly and had to continue to ignore it.

Just respect for the dead.  That’s all.

But the bodies were gone.  So who was I trying to be quiet for?

My flashlight beam was insufficient in the darkness, and I moved slowly through the stacks of old crap that crowded the floor everywhere in the space at the bottom of the stairs.

Ahead, through the narrow path between the junk, was the laundry room.  I walked towards it and felt my heart jackhammering in my chest.

The laundry room was empty, of course.  The furnace room to the right was empty as well.

I went through the door that led into the den and past that was the office where the husband had been murdered.

Part of me really didn’t want to go through that door.

Shining my flashlight beam inside, I saw dingy, mildewed floorboards.  An old TV and stacks of magazines.  Old computer parts, stuffed animals and board games.  It was a junk room, by the looks of it.

The perfect place for someone to hide.

But we had cleared the house.  There was no one there.

So why did I feel like there were eyes on the back of my head, watching me at all times?  The back of my neck tingled like there was someone staring at me so intently I could feel it in my flesh.

And just then, I heard a voice from behind me that nearly caused me to jump out of my skin.

“What’s up, boss?”

I turned around and saw the officer from outside was standing in the doorway to the den.

“Jeez, kid!  You scared the hell outta me!  What are you doing down here?  You’re supposed to be outside watching the house.”

He looked at me funny.

“What do you mean?  You just waved me in from the front door.  I saw you.  Figured you needed a hand moving something.”

“I didn’t wave at you from the front door.  What the hell are you talking about?”

That was when I saw the shape behind him.  It was camouflaged and blended almost seamlessly with the darkness.  The air rippled and shimmered like the air above asphalt on a hot day.

Tentacles wrapped around the young officer – Gary was his name.  The colors of the strange alien-looking appendages changed to match his uniform almost instantaneously.  One of the tentacles probed up and into his ear, like a kid giving a Wet Willy to an unfortunate classmate in school.

“WHAT THE F-” he managed to get out only those two and a half words, and then I saw blood begin to jet like a fountain out of his ear.

He collapsed to the floor loudly, with a dull thud that rattled the floor.  Blood began to pool around his head, and he was completely still, not breathing.

In the doorway to the den, I could see the shimmering outline still.  The form of a man, almost, but not quite.

His movements were quick and deliberate.  As he ducked into the laundry room, I could see the colors of him blending and changing quickly, almost but not quite catching up with the background as he moved.  The man – or whatever he was – appeared to be wearing some sort of ultra-high-tech military equipment.

At least that’s what I thought at first.

Later on, I did research and found that no technology existed that even came close unless it was highly classified and far beyond the current prototypes.

The only thing that looked remotely close to what I had seen that night in that basement on Calvin Crescent was something I discovered eventually on a nature program on television.

It showed footage of an octopus, blending seamlessly with its environment and moving through the water effortlessly and with hypnotic movements as the colors shifted and matched the background exactly, but with a moment’s delay.  The memory came flooding back to me instantly.  The image was the same.  The shimmering, shifting colors that blended perfectly after a moment to adjust.

That was when I started to call him The Octopus Man.  Years later.

But in that moment, he was a phantom.  A ghost who had just murdered a cop in front of me and then disappeared into the shadows of the basement like a specter.

I was terrified, and that is not something that I experience often.  It had been trained out of me with years of experience living in deadly situations.  Basking in them like a hot bath and soaking in them.  Danger is part of the job description when you’re a homicide detective.

But how the hell do you fight something that you can’t see?  Part of me knew somehow that he was human.  That he was killable.

And that he needed to be killed.  Or he would kill again and again.

“Heh, heh, heh,” I heard a raspy chuckle from the laundry room.

I drew my gun and tucked the flashlight under my chin, desperate to maintain my light source while calling for help on the radio.

The radio which should have been on my belt was not there.

It had been with me when I entered the house.  But it was suddenly gone.  Vanished like the phantom who was still laughing at me from the shadows.

Moving slowly, with tentative and cautious steps, I walked through the doorway leading back to the stairs.  My first goal was to stay alive and call for backup.  Even when I was younger, I never tried to be a hero.  That’s a good way to get yourself killed in this business.

The laundry room was immediately to my right, and I shone the flashlight and pointed my gun along with it, hoping he wouldn’t be foolish enough to attack a man with a gun pointed straight at him.

But then I heard a noise above me, like suction cups quickly sticking and unsticking.  Then a thump behind me like a person had been hanging from the ceiling and dropped down in the darkness to land on the floor.

I spun around, and the gun and flashlight were knocked out of my hand by a heavy appendage, rough and somehow slippery at the same time.

Falling to the ground, I rolled quickly, knowing somehow that to stay still would be my death.  My instinct proved correct as I heard a slamming sound where my face had been a split second earlier and looked over to see the floorboards cracked in a spider-web pattern where something heavy had just been brought to the ground.

The bastard was trying to kill me; there was no doubt about that.

His form color-shifted as it seemed to float over towards me, not walking like a person but gliding across the floor as he approached.

He picked me up and threw me across the room like a rag-doll.

I landed hard on a wooden chair which broke into pieces on impact.  Landing hard on the floor, I opened my eyes to see him slithering towards me again.

My hand felt a sharp piece of the broken chair and I seized upon it, desperate.

Without being sure of where or what I was striking out for, I thrust the sharp piece of broken chair leg into the air, hoping not to miss.  Knowing that to miss would mean my death.

But I didn’t miss.

The chair leg disappeared into him, and a spray of black, tarry blood, like ink, poured from the wound.  The black arterial spray covered him and made him visible to me for a moment before he escaped.

He expanded and seemed to grow in size, puffing outwards like a black parachute in the night.  Tentacles whipped around the edges of him, flailing and whipping in the air around his form.

He wailed and shrieked a blood-curdling scream.  I was terrified and unsure what the hell this thing was that I had just stabbed in self-defense.

Would it kill me now, as it had killed the others?

With its true form finally revealed, I was no closer to knowing what it was than when it had been invisible.  It truly looked like a demon sent from hell.

I thought it would come for me and take my life, but the thing seemed to only want to get away in that moment, hurt perhaps for the first time in its existence.

It jumped up into the air and clung to the ceiling like a bat, then scuttled away and disappeared up the stairs.  I heard the front door open and close a moment later, and it was gone.

The images are still burnt into my memory to this day.

I’m retired now, but I still have nightmares about him.  About it.

There are a few perks to being a retired detective.  One of them is that you get a heads up sometimes when things are happening out there in the underworld of our city.  Especially since my old partner is the lead detective on the case in question, I hear a lot that the public isn’t privy to.

Like how there’s been a new string of murders.  They fit an old pattern of a killer who was dormant for years.  One who was never captured.

No forced entry or exit.

No murder weapons found.

No witnesses or suspects.

No fingerprints or video footage, despite a myriad assortment of security cameras functioning at full capacity.

I know who the killer is, though.

The Octopus Man is back.