LITMIR.BIZ

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nothing. Somehow he knew the horror still waited for him – somewhere, until he finally, almost crawling now, made his way back to the front door and the foot of the staircase that looked like a mountain. As he reached out to grasp the bannisters he saw the bloody handprints for the first time. They reminded him of the sort of prints young children made with paint, but the marks on the wall opposite had no such childish innocence as a long trail of smeared blood led his eyes back to the summit of the carpeted cliff.

      The way ahead warped, constricting and elongating as his injuries threatened to overwhelm him, forcing him to his knees as his eyes tried desperately to close and surrender his body to blissful unconsciousness, but from some depths of humanity, a spirit to help his fellow man drove him on. It forced him to breathe in deeper than he’d ever done before and steady himself against all the pain, shock and blood loss as he literally began to crawl up the stairs one by one – each effort making him grimace and call out, begging for the strength to conquer the next step until somehow he found himself at the peak – on a hallway floor covered in thick, plush carpet where he collapsed, fighting to stay in the world.

      If he stopped now he knew he’d at best pass out, so he pushed himself from the floor and sat with his back supported by the wall as he panted uncontrollably, fighting the nausea, his face ashen white, his lips turning grey as the blood flowed steadily from his body. He should have stopped and tried to shore up the wounds in his back, but he wasn’t thinking straight any more, trapped as he was in a spiralling nightmare where nothing looked real or made any sense. Summoning his last remaining strength, he got to his feet, hunched and buckled, but at least he was walking.

      The first door he came to was only slightly open, with the terrible telltale bloody fingerprints smeared on its panels and frame. He took one deep breath, sending searing, burning pain through his back, but with it came a moment of clarity as he carefully pushed the door open and stepped inside. The air rushed from his body when he looked at the bed and saw the body of a girl no more than twelve years old lying face up on the bed, her unseeing eyes staring at the ceiling, arms crossed across her chest as if someone had posed her – tried to make her violent death appear peaceful. Only a parent would take such care after death. He thought of the man he’d beaten almost to the point of killing him. He was convinced that the life of the girl on the bed had been taken by her own father.

      Although he already knew it was pointless, he staggered to the motionless figure and tried to find a pulse in her throat, but it was as still as a dead songbird. His eyes scanned her body, but could find no obvious sign of a wound other than reddening around her neck that would soon turn to widespread bruising. She’d been strangled. He swallowed deeply before stroking her brow and walking falteringly from the room, the blood from his hands mixing with the smears already on the walls as he tried to steady himself during the short walk to the next bedroom where the bloody handprints were heavier than anywhere else. He eased the door open and stepped inside. The approaching sirens wailed as if in mourning in the streets outside, but he couldn’t hear them.

      The woman who he assumed was the mother of the family lay on a double bed soaked in blood, as were the tangled sheets twisted around her tortured and mangled body. He stepped closer and could see she’d been stabbed more times than he could count – in her chest, neck and face, her hands and arms too covered in slashes and stabs as she’d tried to save herself. He remembered the bloodstains on the door of the other room and realized she must have been killed first – the father, the madman, killing her to stop her trying to save the children. King looked into her face – her eyes still wide open in horror, her mouth frozen in a twisted scream as she’d realized she could neither save herself or her children.

      ‘Jesus Christ,’ he managed to say before giving in to his swelling nausea and vomiting on the floor. His stomach continued to retch even after its contents had been violently expelled, the dizziness pulling him to the floor where he rested for a few seconds before he tried to flee the room, half walking, half crawling, when the sight of something froze him in his tracks: a foot on the floor protruding from the other side of the bed.

      Again he used the wall for support, sliding along it until the boy’s body came into view – lying on its side and, like his mother, heavily soiled by his own blood. Best he could tell the boy was fourteen or fifteen. King closed his eyes for a second and imagined the boy bursting into the room and seeing his own father slaying his mother – his bond with her so strong that he sacrificed his own young life to try and defend her from the wild animal his father had become, but it had all been in vain. The unarmed boy had had no chance. King opened his eyes, unable to comprehend what state of mind the man he’d beaten could have been in to butcher his own son and simply leave him dead on the floor of the bedroom as he went in search of his sisters. He fled from the room backwards – his eyes never leaving the boy on the floor by the side of his parents’ bed.

      Back in the hallway he struggled past the family bathroom – breathing heavily with relief as he realized it held no more horrors. But there was still one room he’d yet to visit and now it beckoned him, and although in his subconscious he was aware of approaching sirens and the sound of urgent radio chatter, the only thing that existed in his world was the door to the room. So he staggered forward, his youth and strength keeping him on his feet, though even they were rapidly failing now.

      He knew he had only seconds before he surrendered to the blackness, falling more than walking to reach the door and push it open, the lack of any blood marks giving him hope that his living nightmare would end in an empty room of normality, but as he fell inside he realized the cruelty of life and death had saved the worst till last – the eerie peacefulness somehow making what he saw even more harrowing than what had gone before.

      The pale young girl, no more than six, a perfect, younger copy of the girl who’d fallen into his arms outside, lay still and staring on her bed, flanked by two empty, perfectly made beds either side. The beds of her sisters – one already dead and the other barely alive. The father’s first victim. He’d taken the time to close her eyes and straighten her clothes before going in search of the rest of the family – no doubt planning equally clean and peaceful deaths for her siblings. But the mother was always going to feel his rage, and when the son fought back everything had changed.

      Without warning King’s legs buckled and he fell to his hands and knees, but even they could no longer take his weight as he collapsed onto his side, knocking the last of his breath from him as his eyes flickered and closed. At last the darkness came and took the nightmare away.

       2

       Nine months later

      King sat in front of his computer inputting yet another crime report into the Met’s CRIS system, feeling as bored and frustrated as he’d felt for the last few weeks. At first he’d been happy just to be back at work instead of climbing the walls in the hospital and then in the small flat he shared with his partner, Sara Taylor, a fellow police officer also based in Newham Borough. But now being stuck in an office was more than he could bear and he was longing for the streets. He was still treated as something of a hero after what had happened, but he knew that reputations didn’t last long in the police and if he didn’t make it back to the streets soon his peers would start to consider him as little more than a civvy – police slang for a civilian employee – who was no longer capable of the task of being an officer. He had to get back in the action, even if it meant lying about his true physical and mental state – even if it meant not telling anyone about the nightmares that plagued most of his sleeping hours.

      The phone on the opposite desk rang loudly and made him jump. He hoped no one had noticed as he watched the civvy speak curtly into the phone before quickly hanging up and looking across the computer screens in his direction.

      ‘Apparently the Chief Superintendent will see you now, Jack,’ she told him, smiling. He smiled back and practically leapt from his chair. This could be the call he’d been waiting for – the green light to return to the streets.

      As he hurried through the main CID office he almost bumped into Detective Sergeant

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