The Menace: A Thriller

Chapter 12

Chief Blake Cutter was at the wheel of his Dodge Challenger, siren going, portable cherry-top on the vehicle’s roof painting the night a vivid red. Buford PD Detective Janet Hodges, in the rider’s seat, was working the radio for him.

“The two units patrolling the grounds,” she told him, “are still not answering.”

“Damn,” Cutter said.

Due to the alert the PD and their expanded staff on loan from various area suburban departments were on, Cutter had been able to quickly round up three patrol cars to make the high-speed, sirens-and-flashers trip to the Ryan estate on the northern outskirts of Peachtree Heights.

“They’re only checking in on the half hour,” Janet said, trying to reassure Cutter but obviously not all that reassured herself. “Probably nothing to worry about. They’re just patrolling the grounds like they’re supposed to.”

“They missed the last check-in,” he said. “Let’s hope they’re just screwing off, hearing a suspect’s in custody. Smoking, standing around talking. Not... in trouble.”

“They’re probably fine,” Janet said.

At least only a few cars were out at this hour, and those that were quickly pulled over and got out of the way of the screaming cop caravan.

“Probably,” she repeated.

The heartbeat in Richie’s ears seemed steady and strong. As he listened, he continued speaking to his friend, who seemed to hang on the boy’s every word, even though grinning as if everything Richie said was very funny.

“If Dad would just listen,” Richie told the mummy, “we’d show him you’re alive! He doesn’t think you’re my friend. He thinks you’re a Halloween skeleton or something. He thinks it’s just make-believe, us being pals.”

Sighing, the boy in the Six Million Dollar Man pajamas withdrew the stethoscope tip from the bony torso’s chest and said, “If Dad would just listen through this, he’d know! And you’d be his newest patient. He’d give you vitamins and medicine and help you walk again. Then we could really be friends. You could tell us things about the first time you were alive. It would be so cool.”

With a sigh, Richie slipped the stethoscope earpieces out and allowed the device to remain slung over his neck and dangling down, and got to his feet.

“If I were a doctor,” he said, “I’d help you. If I were a real doctor, like my daddy. Right now I guess I am just playing. But I’ll get Dad to listen to your heart beating tomorrow. I promise.”

He took a moment to listen for that rustling again and didn’t hear anything. He wasn’t afraid. Mice or insects skittering around up here were nothing a boy his age should be scared of (he told himself). But if that was a squirrel or raccoon or something, he should probably tell his father and leave it for him to handle. Wild animals could have rabies, Dad said.

As he looked past his Aztec pal seated near the start of the storage area’s center aisle, Richie decided he better be getting down to his bedroom. He’d never been up here in the middle of the night before. In the daytime, sunlight came in the windows at both ends of the attic, and that single hanging lightbulb kept the work-out area plenty bright. All the exercise equipment was kept shiny and clean, and his dad had mopped and scrubbed around. It had made that part of the old attic seem new. But the rest had seemed ancient even before an Aztec mummy had been added as a sort of guard at the gateway to all that junk.

Right now, though, harmless things in the other half of the attic were making shapes that didn’t encourage sticking around. Gauzy moonlight turned some things — stacked boxes and trunks and suitcases and chairs and duffel bags and clothing bags and old wooden crates — into mysterious silhouettes. Others — like the artificial Christmas tree and the old horse-head rocker and a busted screen door and spider webs and open beams — wore shadows like spooky garments.

“I better go to bed,” Richie told his friend. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

A distant siren made him jump, and the boy laughed at how silly he was being even as he moved more quickly toward the stairwell. But the siren was getting louder, and he paused. No, not just one — it was sirens. Was there a fire somewhere near by?

That was when he heard the soft, high-pitched voice.

“Where are you going, Richie?”

He turned back, frozen there. He looked at the grinning, seated mummy.

Had his friend finally spoken to him?

Roy was dreaming about Helen and their honeymoon in Hawaii, but Richie had been in it too, building a sand castle while his parents in swimsuits watched him as they lapped up sunshine and the foamy tide rolled in as seagulls cawed. But then the seagulls cawing turned into the gathering sirens he’d managed for a while to incorporate into his dream, and he sat up in bed, sharply, alarmed. Moments later — in part because of how he’d reacted — Helen was sitting up, too, eyes wide, ears perked.

“That’s close,” she said.

“And getting closer.”

He threw back the covers. “I’ll see what’s going on.”

Leaving the guest room, he went across to the master bedroom and got into his robe and, sockless, stepped into his shoes. Then he unlocked the nightstand drawer, taking out a .38 revolver, which he loaded up from a box of bullets also in the drawer.

Helen, in the doorway slipping into her dressing gown, nodded to the gun and said, “Where did you get that? And those?”

“Blake loaned it to me. I asked him to. He gave me a box of ammo, too. Don’t be mad.”

As he slipped past her, she said, “I’m not mad, I’m relieved. Those sirens are coming our way!”

“I’ll go downstairs and grab a flashlight and see what the hell is going on. You check on Richie.”

She nodded, paused and said, “I wish you had another one of those,” pointing to the weapon, and went to see about their son.

Richie walked slowly back toward where the mummy sat near the aisle of the storage area. The sirens were screaming now and the window at that far end seemed to have been raised and made a pulsing red hole in the house. The shapes of the spooky storage area were almost glowing red now. Maybe there was a fire — and it was up here!

The sirens stopped.

Part of the boy was thrilled that his friend had spoken to him. But part of him was scared, more scared than he’d ever been before. He couldn’t help it. After all, his friend really did look like a skeleton in a fancy collar and a wispy dress.

Richie did not get right up close to his friend, the way he often had before, and didn’t sit down in front of him, either. Hearing his friend speak changed everything. Part of him had thought the mummy being his friend was make-believe. He hadn’t admitted it to himself, but part of him thought he was pretending.

So he kept about six feet away.

“Richie! I said, where are you going?”

His friend’s lips didn’t move. Well, of course not. His friend didn’t have lips. But the voice was coming from that direction.

And if his friend could speak, that would show his dad that a dead man didn’t have to stay dead just because he died a long time ago.

Right?

“It’s late,” Richie said, nervous. “I’m supposed to be in bed.”

“It is past your bedtime, Richie.”

And about half-way down that center aisle, a small and yet broad-shouldered figure jumped out from behind the boxes and crates. The pulsing light filling the window was at his back and outlined him in red, leaving the rest of him draped in black shadow. He was no bigger than a child of four or five, but his shoulders were broad, his arms long and held out as if about to hug. His feet looked real big. Were they bare?

“Who are you?” Richie asked.

“My name is Dennis.”

“You don’t belong here, Dennis. You musta sneaked in.”

“I did sneak in.”

Dennis moved a little closer, still in the aisle and its shadows, though.

“Are you a kid?” Richie asked.

“No. I never got to be one.”

“I don’t understand.”

Dennis moved a little closer.

“I never had what you had, Richie. A real home. Real parents. Isn’t that sad?”

“It is sad, but it’s not my business. How did you get in?”

A long arm flipped back toward the red-flushed window. “Through there. But I can’t go out that way now. The police are outside.”

“I thought it was firemen. I’m glad there’s no fire. But why are they outside?”

“Because they’re looking for a killer.”

“Why are they looking here?”

Dennis didn’t answer unless that smile was it. He moved closer. The light from the hanging bulb finally reached the front of him. His hair was black and frizzy and wild and long, his eyes big and black and bulging, his nose flat, his teeth crooked, his smile a grin worse than the mummy’s. He was in a loose black shirt that hung down over stubby legs in black shorts with his feet bare and big, his arms and hands and feet like a monkey’s. He looked squished.

“Richie, we’re two of a kind, you and I.”

Richie was backing up slowly. “I don’t think so.”

“I really have nothing against you,” Dennis said, and he sounded almost sorry. “Let me make this quick...”

And Dennis ran at Richie.

On the porch, coming out the front door, Roy almost collided with Cutter. A policewoman in plainclothes, who Roy would learn was Janet Hodges, was just behind the chief with a revolver in hand.

“He’s in the house,” Cutter said tightly. “There’s a ladder up to the window on the east side. And we’ve found four dead officers in your maintenance shed, stacked like cordwood. Dennis Lee is here and he’s gone kill-crazy.”

“Shit,” Roy said, the revolver in hand and pointing upward. “Both Helen and Richie are in there! I sent her to check on him.”

Roy took the lead as they ran inside and started up the stairway, fast.

“If he’s after Richie,” Roy said, “that attic connects directly to his bedroom.”

They found Helen in Richie’s room, trying to open the attic door, the child not in his bed, the covers stirred. Holding back hysteria, she said, “Something’s jammed up against this goddamn thing!”

Roy put his shoulder into the door and it gave a few inches, then wouldn’t budge any farther. They could hear the groan of the wood and something metallic on the other side.

Cutter put a hand on the father’s shoulder. “Keep at it. I’ll send a man in with a battering ram, and in the meantime, I’m going up that ladder.”

Roy nodded and tried again.

Cutter ran out.

A few minutes earlier, Dennis had charged at Richie and the boy backed up quickly into the work-out area. He looked frantically around at what he might use to defend himself or maybe put between him and his attacker. Then he kicked a barbell, right in the middle of its steel shaft, sending it rolling at the fierce little intruder. But the agile brute jumped it like a hurdle and came on ahead, terrible teeth bared, fists high and waving, like some attacking native in a Tarzan movie.

Most of the equipment was light and Richie was able to pick up the weight bench at one end and thrust it toward his attacker, who backed away from the boy’s blow, but then grabbed onto the thing and wrested it from Richie’s grasp and tossed it onto the rowing machine, bending the device into a pretzel of shiny steel. Richie grabbed up the jump rope and whipped it at the intruder, who just grabbed it and flipped it away.

Richie put the treadmill between him and Dennis, who came at him and, in so doing, stepped onto the rubberized surface. The boy hit the switch and took the world out from under the deadly little man. When Dennis landed on his behind, Richie laughed, forgetting for a moment that this was no game, and scrambled behind the stationary bike as his assailant came storming over, eyes wild, spittle flying, and Dennis grabbed the bike and tossed it, sending it rattling down the stair well, where it lodged against the door and — in what for the attacker was a happy accident — locked them in.

Sgt. Jackson was on the other side of that door now, and he said, “Something’s blocking it — let’s take this thing off its hinges.”

“I’ll get a hammer and a wedge,” Roy said, and went quickly out.

The noise up there was clamorous and beyond unsettling. The mother looked at the officer and neither could say or do anything but join each other in frustration and fear.

Outside, Cutter was scaling that ladder, revolver in one hand making it a slower go than he’d like. Below, Janet Hodges held the ladder for him and watched apprehensively.

Richie was running out of things to get behind or to hurl at this small, unstoppable monster. What was left but to hide? He ran from the mini-gym toward the aisle of the storage space, hoping to conceal himself or make himself harder to catch, but before he could do either he tripped and skidded and almost hurled himself into his seated friend, who seemed to be an amused audience of one at this contest.

Instead he landed at the skeletal feet.

“Please,” he said, almost crying. “Please, please, please help me. Protect me, like Uncle Pete said!”

He could hear Dennis coming, cackling with mad laughter, bare feet slapping the wood-plank floor, which creaked in protest. The boy closed his eyes.

And when he opened them, he was looking into his friend’s eyes. Eyes that began to glow. Glow as red as that window had got when the police cars arrived.

And the mummy came to slow-motion life, rising on its ancient bony feet, and Richie could hear its heart beat loud and fast and louder and faster and faster and faster, and the mummy’s bony hands reached out and clutched the menace’s throat and lifted him from the floor like a nasty squirming and screaming child and walked him down that central aisle through all that spooky stuff and tossed him out the window, taking broken glass and wooden framework with him, his shriek like another siren in the night.

Dennis Lee flew over the head of Chief Cutter, who’d been just a few rungs away from that window, and reflexively ducked when the menace went windmilling out, long dark hair streaming, clawed hands seeking something to grip and finding nothing but air, the whites of his terrified eyes showing all round.

Then the ground came up to greet him, breaking the neck of a murderer and putting the tortured child within out of his misery.