House of Cthulhu Ch. 02

That's why it had to be this particular parlour! Nowhere else a body could be disposed so easily!

Sibyl nearly jumped to the opposite wall at the rapid knocking to the nearest window. Then she recognised the face on the outside and came closer.

"What are you doing here?!"

The tall windows could not be opened, but the glass was thin enough to talk through it without raising one's voice too much.

The boy was clearly out of breath.

"They are coming! And they surely have called for reinforcement!" he gasped.

Crap!

"It's okay; you bought me enough time."

"What?! Get out of there! Now!"

Sibyl just shook her head. She had to know. Full stop.

"But there's no need for them to see you," she told the boy. "You really helped me here. Go now. Go!"

For a moment Sibyl thought that the boy would refuse, but then he answered:

"I'll be waiting behind that statue from earlier. Try to get there."

"Yes, yes. Begone!"

His partly moonlit, partly shadowed face disappeared.

Loosing no time, the black-clad girl run down the corridor towards the heavy door. As she hurried through it, the hissing sounds increased once again. Sibyl saw chairs to both side of an aisle leading towards an entrance area. So she was inside the crematorium now. Since the services for inhumation as well as for cremation were held at the Cemetery Chapel, this was just an adequately arranged room for the mourners as the coffin was passed on to the actual cremator area by the means of a sluice in the wall. A wall with a door. Doors did not seem to trouble the grotesque nightly visitors -- this one was unlocked, too. Her hand bearing the gun tightened its grip involuntarily.

~

Immediately, Sibyl spotted the vile forms of the last two Screechers. They were standing in the middle of the cremator room, next to the still hissing, now rumbling, sometimes gasping leviathan that gave this room its name. Eldritch light sputtered from the heat-proof window in the cremator's hatch. Suydam's body, or whatever had been mistaken for it, was burning.

The two remaining shades screeched at her when they noticed the latest arrival to this macabre event. Sibyl slowly closed in, her USP aiming at the one in front. The Screechers moved away from the oven in a circling manner, always keeping the same distance to the Nightbringer. Time wasn't on her side, and Sibyl would surely not let these freaks come between her and the sole door. But before she could do anything about it, the Screecher closest raised one of its misshapen hands and pointed at her. What it uttered then made the woman's intestines rebel in disgust. Although repulsively far away from anything a human larynx could create, Sibyl recognised the noise for what it was: a laughter of hateful utter mockery. Then, with flapping cloaks, the two shades rushed across the room and out of the door. Only seconds later, she heard them screech one last time somewhere in the parlour.

The cremator was an old and particularly ugly construction, with countless oxidised pipes running to, around and away from it. Its main burner was still working, so the body inside was not yet fuelling its own destruction. Sibyl hunched down before the oven door, raising a gloved hand to shield her face from the immense heat radiating trough the poor insulation.

Beyond the window, shrouded in orange of an almost physical quality, lay a burning human shape, head towards the door. Sibyl forced herself to get closer, so her dry and blinded eyes could receive the one clear image, the confirmation she both needed and feared so much.

Somewhere in her mind Suydam's face reappeared, reduced to a monochrome portrait by the night vision gear she had used to watch him. It grew sharper and sharper still; his jawline, his aquiline nose, the high forehead...

The picture faded, Sibyl slumped back from the cremator.

The body being cremated in yonder primary chamber, with flames lapping at the boiling, but otherwise undamaged head, was that of C. Howard Suydam.

~

Sibyl hadn't bothered trying the crematorium's exit and loosing precious time doing so -- the Screeched had not used it either, meaning it would still be locked. So she had made it to the showroom with the coffins as she heard the policemen reaching the front doors.

That's it...

They would find the front doors unlocked, enter the vestibule, then come through the second set of doors into the hall, trapping her. There was only one thing left to do for her: getting rid of her gun. Sibyl had a permit to carry a weapon, but following the law of this country only a specific weapon. Alas, not this specific weapon. Her USP wasn't even registered. To be precise, her USP didn't even exist...

Within seconds Sibyl got out of her coat and her holster and wrapped the latter in the former.

The front doors were opened. Additional moonlight fell through the stained glass of the inner doors. Rays of golden white. Rays bluish white.

The nearest coffin gleamed in polished black, resting waist-high on a moonlit catafalque. She forced herself to open it carefully to avoid any noise, not just hastily pushing the lid away. The black leather bundle with its incriminating content disappeared into the velvet cavern. However, the cliché of hiding a firearm inside a coffin was lost on Sibyl right now.

Silhouettes in the moonlight.

Under dark grinding the lid moved into its original position. Sibyl backed off from the coffin and into the corridor the very moment the doors to the vestibule opened.

"Stop! Politsei! "

Once more she rushed through the heavy door at the end of the corridor, this time heading left. It was just for good measures to try the crematorium doors, the whole action was mainly for luring the police as far away from her little arms cache as possible. She ran down the aisle and reached the double doors (despite all the haste she came to notice that the doors sported similar glass inlays as the ones at the parlour). She pressed one handle down. Locked. She pressed the other handle down. Locked.

"Stop it right there, lass!"

Double-crap.

She turned around, slowly, showing her hands the whole time.

"That's enough!"

She stopped. The constable was closing in along the aisle. The second policeman remained standing near the corridor's door, securing his comrade. Two SIG Sauer were pointed at Sibyl. Estonian police standard issue.

The first one paused several paces away from her, never stepping in his partner's line of fire.

"Face towards the wall, kitten," he commanded, and Sibyl followed his order.

"You got her?"

"I got her."

She heard his gun sliding into its holster. It was clear to her, though, that the other pistol was still aimed at valuable parts of her body. And that wouldn't change too soon, given the unclear situation the policemen had found.

"Hands behind your head, fingers interlocking. C'mon, c'mon!"

She obeyed. Sibyl expected to be frisked next, but then the constable grabbed her right wrist.

"I'm cuffing your hands behind your back now, lady. Work with me, and I'll be gentle. Resist, and my baton will be playing xylophone on your ribs."

This was not an empty threat. In this city, arrested people often nursed some broken bones or ended up suffocated while lying hogtied on the ground with several policemen kneeling on top. Around here, proper police work wasn't yet interfered by the delusions of some permissive bleeding hearts.

Sibyl felt steel closing around her right wrists. It took her quite an effort to surrender her other hand, but she liked her ribs the way they were. She was cuffed with her palms facing outwards, making the bonds quite effective and quite intimidating. The rigid connection between the cuffs was formed as a grip, allowing the "handler" to easily apply force and -- combined with a kick to the back of the knee, for example -- make one's shoulder joints produce funny sounds. Sibyl felt pretty helpless now.

At last he patted her down. Sibyl didn't think this was the standard order of steps during an arresting, but who was she to tell him how to do his job?

"What the—"

He pulled the blade out of her boot leg. From further behind the second constable whistled approvingly.

"Not very ladylike to carry such a thing," Number One stated. "We better tighten your cuffs a little bit more."

Sibyl hissed as the steel bit deeper.

That bastard hasn't double-locked them.

The numbness was already spreading from her fingertips as he hauled her away, one hand at the grip, the other on her shoulder, deliberately ignoring that he caused the cuffs' edges to jam into her wrists.

If there's anything else I can screw up this night, just give me a call...

~

In Custody

The chair was bolted to the interview room's concrete ground. As they had placed her onto it, the constables had pulled her arms over the broad backrest and secured the cuffs' rigid grip somewhere near the seat. Then they left together with the stern-looking policeman in plain clothes who was obviously now in charge of her.

To say that her posture was uncomfortable was not an understatement, but a downright lie. There was no flexibility, no give whatsoever in the cuffs, and anything else than holding her forearms absolutely parallel made the clutching edges bite even harder into her wrists. The unnatural position of her arms forced Sibyl to bend slightly forwards, while the backrest was pressing into the hollows of her elbows. Whenever she straightened up to get some strain off her back, she put stress to her shoulders in return. If intended or not, this turned out to be nastier a predicament than it would seem to an onlooker. And the fact that she was already held in the windowless room for a considerable length of time surely contributed to it.

Bad Cop had come in quite a while ago, asked her for her lawyer's name and telephone number, but had considered removing the handcuffs to be outside his province. Sibyl had bridged the time by clenching her hands into fists and relaxing them again in an attempt to get some feeling back. Then, eventually, the door opened anew. The policeman returned, followed by a slightly younger colleague in his early thirties. The former had a seat at the spartan table, facing her with his "You do not know yet how much fun I can have with a stun gun"-expression.

Good Cop threw a file onto the table and walked over to Sibyl, holding the keys to her fetters out as if he were about to propose to her.

"I reckon you don't want to spend the rest of the night in steel cuffs."

Sibyl resisted the urge to rub her wrists as she finally ("Finally!") was able to bring her arms around to the front. So she just laid her hands on the tabletop and glanced first at Good Cop who took a seat to her right, then to his dark-haired partner. She was bound to notice how his eyes followed the curves of her Vestis, which in turn followed tightly the curves of her body.

"Do you see something you like?"

"I'm just admiring your outfit..."

"Be my guest," Sibyl snarled.

My tax money at work...

He made an indeterminate gesture.

"Since you are wearing all black, you must be a mourner. Overwhelmed by grief, I suppose, to visit a grave at such a late hour."

"Well..." Good Cop contributed while starting a completely unnecessary search through his papers.

"And since you have forgotten your isikutunnistus, we had to verify the personal data you had given. Hence the little delay." Of course she hadn't forgotten her identity card; Sibyl hadn't even considered taking it with her in the first place.

"Well, Sibyl -- you don't mind if I call you Sibyl, do you? We try to keep things informal around here."

"Is it part of keeping things informal that my lawyer still hasn't arrived yet?"

"The traffic in this city... an eternal vexation."

"At half past one in the night?"

Good Cop ignored her last remark nonchalantly whilst Bad Cop was still busy looking intimidating.

"May I ask you about your profession?" the younger one continued, most likely having the answer Sibyl had given to that very question not an hour ago on the sheet before him.

"I am working for the Anthropological Society."

"You are an anthropologist?"

"I am an assistant to Doctor Albert Grau."

The Good and the Bad exchanged glances. Grau's name was known. The former mayor had once called him "a stalwart pillar of this city". Sibyl reckoned that had been before the good Doktor had hove his contender into the guild hall at the next election -- a move that had ensured the disappearance of many a question concerning certain activities of the Society.

"So, what kind of anthropological research did you perform on a graveyard -- at midnight?"

~

"Why were you on that cemetery?"

"What business did you have there?"

"Please explain it to us once more, please."

Again and again they asked. And again and again Sibyl fed them the same lame story: She had climbed over the graveyard wall to take a shortcut. She had passed the funeral parlour. It had struck her odd that the cremator was working that late. She had found the doors ajar. She had run from the constables because she was afeared not to be believed.

"The policemen at the scene stated that the door, though unlocked, was closed."

She must have pulled it shut behind her.

"When the sounds came from the crematorium, why did you check the parlour's doors first?"

Careful here! If she stated that the doors of the crematorium were locked, they would ask her next why she had made a run towards them in the end. So Sibyl played it safe:

The entrance of the parlour had been closer, and she had mistaken the buildings for one unit.

"When you noticed the working cremator and the door ajar, why didn't you call the police?"

Because she had forgotten her mobile phone on her dresser.

"Together with your isikutunnistus."

Exactly.

"You have a pleasant voice, preili Sibyl," Bad Cop remarked. "A warm timbre. Ever thought of doing some audio book stuff? Reading fairy tales?"

She frowned at him. However, there wasn't much more he could do than trying to provoke her. They had nothing to disprove her pleasant-voiced fairy tale.

~

"Feeling bullshitted, is it just me?"

"She's lying big time", his black-haired partner growled.

They had left the interview room to have a quick word in the corridor.

"Preliminary report says 'no evidence of forced entry'," he continued. "Owner of the parlour says 'I cannot explain how this is even possible'. Bloke in charge of the crematorium says 'what he said'."

"Oh, for crying out loud! There was a burning body in that thing!"

The Bad One arched his back until it created a popping sound.

"They have all the papers; the corpse was scheduled to be cremated yesterday. They just 'forgot' it."

"And they also forgot to put it in a coffin."

"According to the guy, it was for some religious reasons that—"

"Bull. Shit. And it doesn't end here; I called that Anthropological Society."

"In the middle of the night?"

"Believe it or not, someone answered and confirmed the girl's story: She had worked late at a private collector's place which happens to lie somewhere south of that fucking graveyard."

"I believe it not."

They walked down the corridor to a small kitchen. While pouring some thin coffee into nicked mugs, the older policeman stifled a yawn.

"I trust you called said collector, too?"

"No," the younger man moaned, "I already know what I will hear..."

He switched into a comical, high-pitched voice, imitating no one special.

" 'She worked late here, and when she left she said she would maybe take a shortcut, because she was tired. In fact she was already sooo tied this morning that she forgot her isikutunnistus and her mobile phone on her dresser.' "

"So we let her go?"

"That, or we put her on the rack," Good Cop sighted, allowing the titillating thought to manifest in his mind for a moment.

"Grau..." his partner mused into his mug. "So that fossil's still alive. He must be well over a hundred years old."

"Whatever. Let's deliver her the good news."

"Yeah. Night shift coffee tastes like piss anyway."

~

"I know what you sought in that morgue," Good Cop claimed. Sibyl was already down the short flight of stairs in front of the police station. The night around her had maybe another hour or so before dawn would start bleeding out from the east.

"Is that so?"

"A young, healthy woman like you, always working with those mummies." He was presumably confusing anthropology with archaeology. "It is only natural that you are in the mood for something fresher from time to time, something stiffer."

Sibyl almost gave in to the urge to spit into his face.

Good Cop meanwhile seemed to realise that his mummy-line wasn't exactly a winner. He turned to the trusty "We will watch you"-attitude:

"You can go back now and continue your search for the Missing Link."

"I will. And if you have an afternoon spare, I can run some tests on you on that subject."

Normaly I come up with such lines only when it's too late!

However, she would had forbeared from formulating it whilst still being handcuffed down in that interrogation room.

Good Cop gave her a pissed look, then entered the building without another word.

~

Around next corner, Sibyl started to run. Since she had been set free again, she had the reasonable hope to find her gun still hidden within the coffin. Down the empty streets she ran, beneath looming architecture and the still deeply black sky, never slowing down.

~

The parlour doors were unlocked, the police seal broken. Still trying to catch her breath, Sibyl assured herself one last time not being followed, then entered the building for the second time this night. Running almost five kilometres in heavy boots and tight leather trousers wasn't an activity to be found on her regular training schedule any time soon. She forced her breathing to calm down, only to notice how hard her heart was beating. Whether from exhaustion or excitement she knew not.

A coolness spread over her face as the sweat was drying up. The broken seal indicated that someone had been in here after the police. Sibyl listened into the darkness. Nothing. Just her own breath. Her own heartbeat. The torrent of her blood in her ears. Her boot heels made dull sounds on the marble floor as she neared the three displayed coffins. In the middle, set back towards the wall, waited the black one on its catafalque.

Sibyl frowned. Something bright was standing on the lid's sable surface, a little white tent. As she closed in, she recognised it as a card made of thick paper, folded to stand upright.

That wasn't there before.

It might have been there, and she just hadn't noticed it in her haste. Yet it would surely have fallen down when she had moved the lid. Sibyl snatched the card from its place. It was indeed high-grade paper, meticulously printed with basic product information. She brought it closer to her eyes in order to read in the dark:

Eternal Comfort deluxe, followed by a constallation of digits proving that death costs more than just one's life.

Sibyl turned the card around, and her pounding heart skipped a beat. Handwritten on the backside were the words...

I found your coat.

Meet me at the old roundhouse, same time.

Andrus

"Please no. Nonono! NO!"

Sibyl pushed the lid away, not caring when its edge thumbed onto the floor with considerable force. The coffin was empty. No matter how deeply she scrabbled about in the unblemished velvet, there was no coat and no holster. No gun.