csi (creepy spooky investigations)

a sort of comedy horror story that is slowly changing into a real scary piece

1

 

There had always been a large flow-through of residents at number 28 Herringpot Avenue, and if anyone had thought to ask why over the years they would probably been met with basically the same answer: Evelyn Crouch and her son Daniel. These were not nice people, not in the biblical sense, nor any other sense that might sound sensible. The fact that they weren’t really anymore was merely but a side issue.

            Mrs Crouch – for starters – would never be described as an oil painting by her neighbours. Not unless the painting were some sort of Piccasso-istic nightmare brought to glory on a canvas. Imagine a short, fat Siamese Fighting Fish with arms and legs instead of fins, foul temper permanently set to SEETHING and even fouler mouth set in a perpetual snarl and a sharp, shrill voice that cut through the air with cries of:           

            “ DanIEL! What are you doing that for?”

            “ DanIEL! You rotten mongrel! Get in here!”

            “ DanIEL! Put your CLOTHES back on NOW!”

            “ DanIEL! TAKE MY CLOTHES OFF THIS INSTANT YOU….”

            … get the drift.

            Daniel himself looked sixteen or so, but was obviously struck by the same stick that had afflicted his mother, whatever that had been. At night, if you listened close enough in the wee hours, you could hear her bemoan the curse that had been cast upon them, and hear her curse the world itself for not caring, or even wanting to.

Daniel liked to dig holes in the yard for no real reason - except perhaps for his mother to fall into – after which he ran around yelling like a loon that he had caught an elephant in a trap. He also liked to cut down recently planted saplings and removing his clothes the minute his skin felt a drop of rain, or birdshit, spit or any other form of moisture. The sight was not pleasant.

            The Crouches favourite family pastime was peering out of their respective windows, scowling out at a world that didn’t understand them – and frankly didn’t really want to bother trying - and shouting obscenities to the general population should their eyes stray across the boundary fences of the Crouch Estate. A firm favourite was often heard from Mrs Crouch: “ Good looks are free, y’know.” It wasn’t until the most recent resident moved in that anyone actually said anything back.

            On a balmy Sunday afternoon the first sally was fired across the dividing fence.

            “ Good looks are free, y’know!”

            The other neighbours would have heard this, like they had a thousand times before. Perhaps they crossed themselves or tut-tutted, or thought unkind, unchristian thoughts. But without fail, they all would have switched off their hearing, therefore missing out on what was to follow.

            “ You’re telling me good looks are free, are you?” a voice, thin and reedy, with a  touch of a nasal twang asked.

            Anyone listening would have heard a large raspberry being blown, followed by Daniel’s voice egging his mother on.

            “ Hur hur hur. You tell ‘im, mum. Good looks are free, eh? Hur hur hur.”

            If those same people had been listening, they would have then heard the following.

            “ I see. Well, if good looks are free, then why are you both so bloody ugly?”

            From there, whomever might have been listening – brain engaged or not – would have heard a blood-curdling scream of rage from Mrs Crouch drowning out Daniel’s “Whut?”, four minutes worth of ranting and raging in which several plates were hurled about followed by two loud dull thuds that rattled the windows in their frames. The dead, that being the operative word in cases like this, silence.

An hour later and there was a new TO LET sign in the front yard of number 28 Herringpot Avenue.

 

 

2

 

            David Tratter had never been bothered by haunted houses. They were a kind of hobby for him. He’d investigated dozens, looking into the what-fors, the where-bys, the who dunnits and how-cums the vengeful spirits were known to get up to in their day to day un-lives. De-lives. Whatever. The Crouch house was a little different in that it was neat and tidy for a haunted house, almost to the point of anal-retentiveness. Where usually it was dust and cobwebs, the odd spider, rat or bat as well as slowly drying ectoplasmic residue, here there was a place for everything and everything in its place. Not counting the two dead-uns lying in their respective rooms, of course, now dead undead eyes staring upward into the great mystery that awaits all of us. That was out of the ordinary.    

            Tratter looked out the window into the neighbouring yard. From the position of the dead-uns, the holes in their foreheads, it was obvious even to the untrained that the shots had come from there. He saw two officers dressed in shirtsleeves, with their caps on their heads and gloves on their hands, extendable bludgeons at the ready, slowly walking down the fence-line, looking for anything that could contain a clue. Tratter himself didn’t hold much hope.

            His field of vision sharpened and Tratter inspected the glass of the bedroom window, solid and perfectly streak-free. Neither shot had harmed either window, leaving the assumption that the killer had been inside the house with the victims. That kind of thinking was fine for an ordinary sort of investigation. This one was going to be one of the other kind.

            Footsteps on the carpet behind caught Tratter’s attention. He turned to see another officer there waiting with his notebook open, waiting expectantly. Tratter nodded for the man to speak.

            “ Spoken to the neighbours. No-one heard anything out of the ordinary.”

            Tratter bobbed his head around on his shoulders like a bird wondering if the worm was worth eating.

            “ So what have we got?”

            The officer consulted his notes.

            “ The recently re-deceased are Mrs Evelyn Crouch and her son Daniel.”

            “ Evil-lyn,” Tratter said.

            “ Sir?”

            “ Evil-lyn. You said Evelyn. It’s pronounced Evil-lyn.”

            “ You knew them, sir?”

            Tratter shook his head.

            “ Only by reputation. Read the file. It’ll make sense there.”

            The officer nodded and consulted his notes.

            “ You’ll know then that they were originally murdered in this house by the then Mr Crouch, who by his own admission had nothing left to lose and was sentenced to hang within a week of being caught?”

            “ Of course I know that. It’s Academy learning in the first year. Gedownan Crouch was to be hung by the neck until dead, therefore losing any passage to Up There and suffering eternal damnation down here. But the rope broke. Three times. It was decided that maybe the Powers That Be thought he’d suffered enough having to live with them for ten years and he was allowed to move up north.”

            “ Yes, sir. I’ve taken the liberty of having a local crew up there go and speak with Mr Crouch. We should have a report back this afternoon, tomorrow morning at the latest.”

            “ Make it this afternoon. I don’t want this one hanging around too long. The flies are descending as we speak. Anything at all from the neighbours?”

The officer consulted his notes again.

“ No-one paid that much attention. Pretty much the same as always, as a lady down the street said. Until they hit the floor, that is.”

            Tratter nodded. The dead being killed tended to make a lot of noise. The officer continued.

            “ Lady across the street thought she saw someone in the yard a little while before it happened. She also though it might have been the shadows.”

            “ Unlikely,” Tratter said. “ They haven’t played together in years. I think one of them’s dead.”

            “ Sir?”

            The officer looked puzzled, not getting the reference. Tratter waved his hand to urge the man on.

            “ CSI is on the way, sir. Due in about ten minutes. They want the area secured and clear when they get here. They want a clean environment to take valences and run spectro’s.”

            Of course they do, thought Tratter. CSI. Conjurers and Spectors Investigations team. The A-Team.

            “ Fair enough,” he said to the officer. Seal it up, put a lid on the neighbours. Try not to give them a headache this time. If anything’s found I want to be told immediately.”

            The officer touched his hand to the brim of his cap.

            “ Sir!.”

            He snapped closed his notebook and left Tratter to his thoughts.

            C.S.I this early on in. Just what I need.

 

 

3

 

            “ So I says to ‘im, I says, Well show us yer muscles, then.”

            “ And did he?”

            “ Did he what?”

            “ What?”

            “ Exacerly.”

            Terry Porter shook his head and went back to concentrating on what he was supposed to be doing, driving the van in such a way as to be inconspicuous. This didn’t stop his passenger, Ron “Wellsey” Wells form continuing on with his tale.

            “ Nah, he didn’t.”

            Terry sighed quietly with relief. Without trying, he’d managed to derail Wellsey’s train of thought, though what it probably needed was total shunting. Hard to believe this was the same man who could sniff out a clue and run down a perp better than anybody alive or dead on the squad. Much of what he’d done in the past was Academy training now, with bits of wisdom handed down from year to year, like:

            If you wants to catch a dead-un in his tracks you got to learn to think like one.

Or:      

             There’s no corpse more dangerous than one with nothing left to live for.

            On the face of it, they made absolutely no sense at all, but if you got into this line of work it could save your life, whether you had one or not. Terry firmly believed that if Wellsey had not been as good as he was at his job he’d be somewhere quiet pushing up daisies, or in a gutter somewhere cadging smokes and crusts of bread. Oh yes, he had talent, did young Wellsey. It was just that he’d rather piss it up a rope somewhere than actually achieve something and advance his position. Bloody waste was the phrase often used around the office. Waste of talent, waste of a mind. Bloody waste of time.

            But Terry’d had harder jobs than this. Ferrying Wellsey from crime-scene to crime-scene and making sure he didn’t nick anything while he was there made the day a lot of GO GO GO. No rest for the wicked, rarely a moments break, except for tea-oh and lunch and maybe a nap afterwards, but damn it was interesting work. Read the papers. Regular folk in Terry’s world thought they got up to some tricky stuff with cars and bombs and guns and stuff. Bloody magicals could be down right evil with their potions and spells and what have you. Why get your hands dirty and leave incriminating evidence like fingerprints and tyre tracks and stuff when for a few quid you could turn someone inside out with an incantation. Put enough effort into it and the results could be quite…well…messy.

            But that there was Wellsey’s forte, solving the unsolvable crime. The regulars got first crack at it, and when they gave up it was CSI’s turn. When they came up empty, they called Terry, who dug Wellsey out of whatever bar he’d taken root in and off they went to save the world one more time. It was hard to put a pinpoint on which witch did what, or which mage was where when it happened. Wellsey’s foggy but sharp brain took in all the seemingly insignificant facts, a few rumours and some wild guesses and pieced them all into a convincing case.

            “ I reckon you’d be better off if you was watching the road rather than the inside of your eyelids, old mate.”

            Terry snapped his eyes open and swerved the van to miss a tree that had jumped out at them. “Road” was one of those subjective things in CSI. The ‘road’, as in the actual tarmac was maybe 100 feet below on terra firma. The ‘road’ the van travelled on was anywhere the van could fit that didn’t include passing through a solid object, solid being another one of those subjective terms.

 

Author's Note

let me know what you think. go your hardest

Reviews

[Yaooooooo]

Very well written..
Keep up the good wrok and feel free to send me a request...
Thanks for sharing,
One!