The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [8]
And they listened.
There were no sounds. No cries. No Wraith-child.
Yet.
“I heard it once,” Matthew turned to them, prematurely disappointed at the inner calm. “I heard the crying. I swear to God. I passed by here a day last week to check it out....”
Dabby cowered back. “And...?”
“Hearing those cries made me forget I even planned on stopping at all. I kept going. Hearing them was good enough.”
This would surely have frightened away the girl if not for the sly impression Matthew was pulling her leg. “Hearing’s not good enough now, though, is it?”
“Whaddya think, lunkhead?” he chided. “We’re goin’ in.” Feeling all the bolder, Matthew crouched over and into the perilous wooden porthole.
The girl responded with confounded silence, gingerly removing her grey cap, lowering it down before her as though lowering the safety bars of a rollercoaster car.
And Nigel was no longer smiling at all.
***
For as long as any of the children remembered, this had always been the local haunted house. Its prolonged desolation had fostered a progeny of wild hearsay, though not much different than the unsettling gossip it knew back when it stood as purveyor of lower-class apartment dwellings.
But until the rumored ghostly cries, it had never known murder. Not like this. Not like the corpse of the young man discovered twisted and slumped against the muddy overgrowth of hedges at the building’s most remote side. The man’s head had been found resting sideways and sunken into the mud, appearing to almost float within the basin of blood formed by its shallow imprint. The real treat that impressed the coroner, however, was how the face of the skull had been crushed so far inward that the nose played peek-a-boo with the back upper neck in protruding cartilage.
No evidence of a weapon. Not one hint aside from the very corpse itself, betrayed the identity or methods of the force behind it. No one had seen the ill-fated prey wandering about before-hand, and no one had heard his screams. No one would know anything, period, until the officials and authorities chose to release this enigma from its bottle.
But it wasn’t due to the grisly shape of the corpse or any of these trivialities that enforced their decision to wedge the cork in tighter, and to keep it that way. What concerned certain authority figures most were the numerous, bewildering footprints all about the hedges. Clusters and trails of tiny footprints no larger than those left by a child.
In their eyes, these puzzling leftovers were no more made from a ghost than they were a Wraith-child. And whatever they were made from, it was somewhat unlikely that the makers of the prints were responsible for a slaying of such proportions.
For one thing, the prints had not appeared at all until six hours after the body was gurneyed away, at a time when surveying eyes were about to reap the misfortunes of having turned their attentions elsewhere. For another thing, these authorities claimed to know what it was that made those prints.
***
They were within the shadowy labyrinth now, sidestepping bits of decaying lumber and exposed dusty wiring wrenched from the structure’s inner framework, the results of previous intruders’ scavenging the grounds for useful hardware.
The inner reaches of the apartment building provided a perfect eerie landscape for the alert imaginings of neighborhood children, and the three huddled close as they inched across concrete and torn carpet. They carried with themselves no flashlight and regretted not having prepared for the unexpected, not to mention, numbly enough, the degradingly obvious. Luckily enough, streams and jets of mild sunlight managed their invasion through boarded window cracks and sections of missing brick within the walls. Partitions between the rooms had somehow crumbled, rotted through, or fallen prey to the mallets of vandalizing pranksters. Portions of ceiling had fallen through, providing partial glimpses