Read by Tim Larkfield
The torrential rain sounds like gunfire as it clatters against the roof of the blood-coloured Austin Allegro. I wipe the condensation off the window and stare at the crumbling mansion. The building looks enormous – stretching as far as the eye can see in all directions. Half of the windows appear to be broken and the ancient brickwork looks chipped and rancid.
The driver – a bulbous elderly man in a shabby manservant’s suit – unclips his seat-belt and turns to face me.
“Shall we?” His Westcountry accent is thicker than cow-shit.
He removes his rain-splattered glasses and wipes them on the threadbare suit.
“An old war wound, Mr Rey. I lost three toes in ruddy Somaliland. The stumps hurt like buggery on wet days.”
He fishes a long, rusted key out of his jacket pocket and slides it into the lock. The door creaks open with an infernal sound.
“After you, young man.”
*
Inside, the lobby gives off a faint sickly smell. Where you might expect to smell dust-streaked antiquities, there is only a pungent undercurrent of wasted flesh and untreated disease. A frail old lady melts out of the gloom and offers me a liver-spotted hand, which I shake gently.
“Mr Rey, I presume?”
I nod and she flashes me something yellow, half-resembling a smile.
The candle she is holding with her other hand casts shaky shadows on the mildew-spotted walls.
“Evelyn Charterhouse. Pleased to meet you. How was your journey?”
I glance over my shoulder, reluctant to offend the manservant, but he has already disappeared.
“Does he even have a licence?”
She chuckles drily.
“Musgrove grew up on the farm next door. Over the years he has performed a variety of tasks for my family. He grew up driving jalopies and tractors across muddy terrain. He didn’t drive on a dual carriageway until he was in his 60s. I have to say, it is not one of his strengths.”
I stare at her blankly.
“Come. Let’s get down to brass tacks. My dear brother is missing and time is of the essence.”
I trail behind her, looking at the family portraits that line the hallway.
She points at the first painting. It depicts two unappealing, jaundiced-looking babies in frilly smocks. Teary-eyed and snotty-nosed, aghast mouths curled in protest.
“I was the older twin by two minutes. I think it gave my brother a complex – hardened his competitive streak.”
The man sat alongside them is ruddy-faced, big-boned, prematurely aged. The mother does not seem to appear in any of the pictures.
“Our father was a brutal, remote figure. After our mother was committed to the East Plymouth Lunatic Asylum, he grew more brutal. More remote.”
The deeper into the building we walk, the older the twins appear. The effect is unsettling. The children both have the same severe widow’s peak hairline, the same piercing stare. It cuts through me, even when rendered on sagging canvas.
“My brother and I had wonderful games of hide and seek in this building as children. I still remember Musgrove’s poor mother chasing after us in her scuffed court shoes and threadbare housecoat. How we used to laugh. One afternoon she slipped on some of my brother’s lost marbles. Cracked both kneecaps and fractured a hip. Died from a weak heart during the operation to repair her legs.”
She turns and grins shiftily at me.
“Don’t mention it to Musgrove. He loved that woman dearly.”
Evelyn Charterhouse pauses at the end of the corridor and turns to face me. In the half-light, her gaunt face looks sinister, bloodless.
“I would like to hire you to find my brother, Mr Rey. He has gone missing ...”
She opens the oak door with a theatrical flourish. The brass sign reads Charterhouse Family Museum.
“… in this very building.”
*
“My sources tell me that you hunt monsters for a living, Mr Rey?”
I shrug. “I track down sex offenders and wrongfully discharged psychiatric patients for money.”
Her eyes gleam.
“I understand you were the man who apprehended the Bone Daddy.”
I nod, modestly.
“Is it true that he was more animal than human? My brother would have enjoyed a creature such as he in our museum.”
I shrug again. He was a middle-aged man, who got caught trying to sell some poor fucker’s small intestine in a pub, out of an oozy Morrisons carrier bag.
“And the Plastician? An absolute beast of a man by all accounts.”
The Plastician? He was an aging ex-con with dead eyes and arms half-rotted with eczema.
I clear my throat. “Don’t believe everything you read, Ms. Charterhouse.”
“Oh, please call me Evelyn, young man. We don’t stand on ceremony around here – do we Musgrove?”
Abruptly, Musgrove appears, wheeling the clattering, wonky-wheeled tea trolley into the museum. The decrepit manservant pours me and Ms. Charterhouse strong-looking cups of tea with a trembling, arthritic hand.
“I was an intrepid soul, Mr Rey, but monster hunting was no job for a lady. Father forbade it – enrolled me in secretarial college. He saw that as a suitable job for a delicate young woman. Of course, he insisted that my brother follow him into the family business – salvage, looting, racketeering. He was a sickly child, and father was terrified that he would turn into a damned sissy.”
I nod, sympathetically.
“Not the marrying kind. That was what people said about my brother. Cruel, wasn’t it?”
I scratch my jaw. “I was married once. It didn’t last long and it wasn’t much fun. Trust me, it’s overrated.”
She leans into me and squeezes my bicep. “Oh, you are quite delightful, Mr Rey!”
I glance into the murky interior, but I can’t make out a fucking thing.
“My brother was an incredible man. He even has a room named after him in Torquay Museum. More of a supply closet, I suppose, but we were terribly proud nonetheless. That said, he always insisted that we keep the true treasures for ourselves.”
I sniff at the smell that is competing with Musgrove’s eye-watering aftershave. It’s like a mixture of old soap, dead lice and parasitic gut infections.
“Mr Musgrove, if you would?”
The old man nods and cranks a wall-mounted lever. The hidden wiring crackles and the museum wing is flooded with dusty white light as somewhere a generator starts to hum.
I step up to the glass cabinet.
“This was my brother’s first major find. 1963. A mermaid that was entangled in a net off the coast of British Honduras. He had a knife-fight with two local fishermen, brothers-in-law, for the creature. He greased a few palms and returned from the Americas with the mermaid – still breathing – in the swimming pool of a cruise ship bound for Copenhagen.”
I press my nose up against the glass. The hair looks like straw, the torso withered, the tail desiccated.
I’m not sure what to say, so I say nothing.
Evelyn gestures towards the next exhibit. “My favourite! The gift that keeps on giving!”
I glance at the sunken, ashen-skinned figure in the cabinet. It is the only one actually manacled to the back wall.
“This one has been in the family since 1967. My brother wrestled this monstrosity into a burlap sack just days after attending Papa Doc Duvalier’s 60th birthday party in Port-au-Prince. My brother had a rudimentary grasp of French – at best – and accidentally drank three goblets of blood during the festivities.”
Evelyn’s eyes twinkle.
“The zombie reanimated seven times during the flight home. A drug-plane flown by a disgraced CIA pilot. My brother used a screwdriver to penetrate different parts of the monster’s brain stem. It took several attempts before he was able to subdue the creature.”
Musgrove passes Evelyn a partially-defrosted mouse from his breast pocket. Holding its tail, she dangles it between the bars in front of the zombie.
After a moment, its eyelids creep open, revealing bright yellow eyeballs, and droop closed equally quickly.
With a jerky, snapping movement it snatches the mouse from her fingers with its jaws.
A thin trickle of black blood crawls out of the corner of its uneven mouth and down its discoloured jaw. A snaggletooth incisor protrudes from its lips.
“What the actual fuck?”
No one responds.
The features on the next exhibit are too rotted to be truly discernible, but the flowing black cloak pinned to its bony shoulders gives me an inkling as to what it is supposed to be.
“My brother obtained this vampire as recently as 1992. He broke into a tomb guarded by a pack of Carpathian mountain dogs. Strangled them with his bare hands. Fractured one of their skulls with an uppercut. He kept it alive with a rudimentary drip-feed fashioned out of a fountain pen and a quantity of his own blood. He wanted it lucid, not brain damaged, so he could perform his own experiments in our laboratory.”
She gestures vaguely towards the ceiling.
“It’s on the fourth floor of this very building – not that I have left the ground floor in over a decade.”
I shuffle down the corridor, keen to get this over with.
“Who the fuck is she?”
The final exhibit piece is an elderly woman – dressed identically to Evelyn Charterhouse.
My host’s rheumy eyes twinkle.
“My sister, Eve, was a wonderful woman, Mr Rey, but she never did share my anarchic sense of humour.”
I turn to face Evelyn. She looks wraithlike in the flickering candlelight.
“At an early age we realised that we were ill-suited to our expectations, so we swapped identities. My sister got to travel the world, in search of monsters. I got to wear the finest lingerie outside of London and pleasure married men on the back seats of their automobiles. It was a blissful existence for all concerned.”
Evelyn runs a spindly hand through her hair and the grey, wispy wig comes off in her fingers, revealing a pale, blotchy scalp.
“Evelyn?”
“It’s a boy’s name, Mr Rey! It’s difficult to believe, but some of the most brutish men I spent time with in the 1970s were named Lesley.”
“How did she die?”
Evelyn smirks.
“Unnatural causes.”
Musgrove lurches towards me. I slam an elbow into his lumpen jaw to keep him at bay. The old man shakes his head sadly, spits a bloody tooth into my half-drunk teacup and offers me a gummy smile.
“Do you worst, Mr Rey. I did my National Service in British Malaya – I’ve experienced far worse than that.”
I raise my boot and kick him through the cabinet, his bulbous skull cracking the glass.
Evelyn steadies herself against the tea trolley and removes a pearl-handled revolver from under the cloche.
“My sister used this gun to execute four cannibals in Equatorial Guinea in the early 1980s. She lost two fingers to leprosy on the same trip – including her trigger finger.”
Evelyn titters and then aims the weapon at me.
“I do wish Eve were here to see you become our latest exhibit, Mr Rey.”
Evelyn squeezes the trigger and the gunshot shatters the murky glass of the display cabinet behind me, the bullet embedding in the zombie’s shoulder.
I step towards Evelyn and remove the gun from her clammy, trembling hand.
“I must say, this little game was fun while it lasted.”
“If you say so.”
Behind me, I hear the crinkle of dead flesh. The snap of ancient joints. The jangle of rusted chains. A guttural growl from a clotted throat.
I check the barrel of the gun. One more bullet.
Evelyn cringes away from the zombie. I consider putting one of the poor specimens out of their misery, but think better of it, and stuff the revolver down the back of my jeans.
Evelyn shrieks as the monster claws at her wrinkled skull. I slam the oak door closed, and twist the rusted key in the lock.
Behind me – not for the first time – the dead whisper my name.
(c) Tom Leins, 2020
Tom Leins is a crime writer from Paignton, UK. His books include Boneyard Dogs, Ten Pints of Blood, Meat Bubbles & Other Stories, Repetition Kills You, and The Good Book: Fairy Tales for Hard Men.
Tim Larkfield trained at the Poor School and has also worked as a BBC journalist. Acting credits include the title character in The Signalman by Charles Dickens, Victor in Noel Coward's Private Lives, a prison guard in Alcatraz, and an SS Officer in Werewolves of the Third Reich.
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