Hello everyone. This is the first part of my new book Wax which will be coming out sometime in the fall this year. In these difficult times , I thought it would be nice to share the entire book with all Medium readers to give them a little bit of horrifying joy whilst stuck at home. Subsequent parts will be published roughly every week until the story is complete.
Enjoy.
Prologue
“Let me ask you the question again,” the thinner detective tapped his pen impatiently on the desk and played irritably with the black tie that hung limply over his pristine white shirt. “What happened last night? Where are your friends?”
“I don’t know where they are. Well, not all of them,” the girl replied. Her young, wide blue eyes stared into the space between them, barely registering the two policemen in front of her. With a shaky wave of her hand, she swept dirty blonde hair from a bloody brow and hooked it behind an ear.
The thin policeman gave her a frustrated look as he pressed his elbows deeper into the grey laminated surface of the desk, “So tell us about the ones you know about. Where are they?”
“Dead,” she answered with a calm voice.
The man straightened and glared at his colleague, a slightly chubby, grey-suited gentle man leaning on the wall on the righthand side of the room. They exchanged a brief unspoken conversation before the fatter of the two men spoke for the first time, “How did they die?”
The girl screwed up her nose and twitched her cheek, “Different ways.”
“Was it in the fire?”
“No… maybe… I don’t know.” she shook her head.
The thin detective waved his hands in exasperation. “Well, which is it? No or maybe?”
“One of them may have,” she paused, “All of them may have.” She shook her head again and with another weary wave of her hand brushed more dirty strands of blonde hair behind her left ear.
“You need to start making sense missy…” the thin detective snapped but was immediately interrupted.
“We know you and your friends,” the chubby detective leaned forward without moving away from the wall and glanced at a piece of paper on the desk, “Mason Sullivan, Jessica Clark, Christopher Palmer, Ashley Hutchinson, Emily Westwood And Matthew Johnson were at the old abandoned Museum on Elm Tree Lane. What were you doing there?”
“It was a party.”
“A party? In a condemned building?”
“Yep.”
“I thought you kids were supposed to be bright. Aren’t you all at college?” he didn’t wait for a reply, but his voice remained calm, “Partying in a dark, dangerous building doesn’t seem like the smartest thing to do?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“A good idea?” the thin detective couldn’t hide his frustration any longer. “You want us to believe that six intelligent, and judging by some of these surnames, wealthy kids broke into a derelict building to party on Halloween? A year after one of your friends disappeared and we have a killer on the loose?” Once again, the fatter detective calmed his colleague’s anger with a wave of his hand.
“It’s a tradition,” the girl replied weakly.
“A tradition to act stupid?”
“No,” she glared at the space in front of the thin detective, “A tradition to party on Halloween.”
“Whose idea was it to go to the museum?” the fat detective asked, still trying to keep the conversation civil.
“Why does that matter?” for the first time the girl looked directly at the two detectives through dirty mascara stained eyes.
“Well, you broke into it. Oh, and it burnt down,” the thin detective slammed his hand on the table with frustration. “How can you sit there and ask why it matters? Everything matters, young lady. Your friends are missing, and you’ve just told us some, if not all, are dead. The building you were partying in is a pile of ash and you look like you’ve just come back from the mall.” His description of the girl’s demeanour was an exaggeration. Her jeans and t-shirt were dirty and torn and she had cuts along her arms and face, some of them deep enough to need stitching. She had certainly been through something.
The fatter detective moved from the pale cool of the wall and walked towards the growing anger of the table. “I think we need a little brake. Detective Walker and myself are going to go get some coffee. It’s been a long night and I think we need a little fuel.” He gestured to Walker who returned an angry look before standing with a frustrated scrape of chair on floor and headed towards the door. With a calming smile stretched across his lips, the larger detective looked back at the girl, “Would you like anything young lady?”
“Water,” she replied without looking up.
“Ok. I’ll get you some from the cooler. We’ll be gone just a few minutes.” He some more and with that the two detectives left the room, shutting the door behind them and leaving the girl alone with her dark thoughts.
***
Outside the interrogation room the detectives moved towards the reception area along a short grey corridor that stopped at a large white door. A broken sign that should have said ‘Waiting Area’ commanded those approaching to ‘Wait’, which the detectives duly complied with as they turned to each other.
“She’s not telling us everything Bob,” Walker spoke with frustration and pointed an agitated finger at his colleague
“I know. I know but she’s scared shitless and tired. Snapping at her ain’t gonna make this go any easier,” the detective called Bob poured water into a paper cup from a cooler sitting in a small windowed alcove overlooking the town’s Main Street.
“You think she’s scared? She looks pretty cool to me.”
“Don’t let that staring into space shit fool you. I’ve seen that look before. She has PTSD.” In a previous life Detective Sergeant Robert Hester was Gunner Sergeant Robert Hester of the 4th division of her Majesties Northumbria regiment. He’d served with distinction in both Afghanistan and Iraq where he’s seen enough horrors to last a lifetime. But he was a tough son of a bitch and found it easy to dust himself off and go again. He couldn’t say the same for those he’d served with. For some it took years of violence before they broke. For others just one incident — a squad member with a leg missing; a friend with a sniper’s bullet in their throat; a civilian family in pieces after a stray drone attack. There was no rhyme or reason why they would snap, but the look on their face was always the same: a vacant expression, like they were hiding from what was happening, or at least trying to. These were the ones that cracked, the ones who buckled under the darkness when the horrors finally took hold and the pain embraced them.
Detective Walker leaned against the wall and sighed, “These kids are still missing. They could be alive. How do we know she’s even telling us the truth?”
“I don’t think she’s lying.”
“You think they’re dead?”
“She didn’t say they were all dead, but I don’t think any of them are walking out of those ashes, do you?”
Walker reluctantly shook his head. “So how do we play it?”
“We give her space to breathe and tease the story from her. Whatever’s happened will come crashing down at some point and she’ll break. We need to get as much from her as we can before that happens without bringing it down prematurely.”
“Hey Sarge?” the nasal voice drifting towards them was that of Marcie, the stations secretary, who’d crept up behind them in her usual stealthy manner.
“What’s up Marcie?” Hester snapped.
“The girl’s mom is on the way. We just got through to her. She’s a teacher at the local college. She’s the one whose husband…”
“How long?” Hester cut her short, they didn’t have time to listen to the middle-aged secretary’s gossip.
“About twenty to thirty minutes judging by where she lives. Are we calling a lawyer yet?”
“No. She refused,” Walker responded tersely.
“With her mom on the way, don’t you think…”
“Thank you, Marcie. Let us know when Mrs Thorne gets here.” Hester interrupted again. She was right. It wouldn’t look good if they interrogated the girl without legal representation, but she was over the age and had refused when asked. Besides, something was wrong here, and they needed her to talk before a lawyer clammed her up.
He turned to Walker, “So we have twenty minutes.”
“That’s not gonna be long enough.”
“It’ll have to be,” the stubble prickled as he stroked his chin. With a final nod to his partner and a deep breath, Hester headed back towards the young girl.
***
“Here’s your water miss,” Hester placed the paper cup on the table and perched himself on the chair opposite the girl, his partner taking the chair next to him. With a tentative hand the girl sipped from the paper cone, her mouth flinching as the liquid passed over a deep cut on her lower lip.
“That must sting,” the Sergeant pointed towards the wound.
“It’s ok,” she muttered and drank further.
“Are you sure you don’t want a paramedic to take another look at you?”
“No,” she snapped, “I’m fine.”
“Okay, if you say so,” Walker quickly shuffled a handful of documents from the desk and laid them in a row face up on the table. Photographs of six young men and women stared up at the girl. “Are these the friends you were partying with?”
She didn’t look, her glazed eyes continued to stare into space.
“Are these your friends, Sam,” for the first time Hester referred to the girl by her first name. Her forehead flinched. “Sam?” he repeated.
Without moving her head, she quickly glanced down before answering weakly, “Yes.”
“We need to know what happened. We need to know if there is anything we can still do to help your friends.” Hester was really tugging at the girl’s heart strings now. If the girl had any feelings, she’d talk.
“You can’t,” tears welled in the corners of her eyes.
“But we have to try.”
She looked down at the pictures again, this time with more purpose, as if she was forcing herself to look. Slowly her eyes ran over each in turn before pausing at the picture of a boy called Mason. “Where do you want me to start,” her voice was calm again.
“How about at the beginning,” Hester sat back in his chair.
“Okay,” for a moment the detectives would swear the girl smiled before her face cracked and the story began.
