~ABOMINABLE MURDERER~
Part II
"…Vlad? That does sound familiar" Vivek frowned.
"Urado. Vlad. What are even those…" Rajat remarked.
"The Impaler."
Both turned to look at Tasha in surprise.
"What?" both cried at the same moment.
"The only Vlad I've ever heard of is Vlad the Impaler," she said, turning to Vivek. "Don't you remember that movie we saw together?"
"What movie?" vivek asked in confusion.
"The horror movie, I picked us to watch on our date night. " Tasha explained while filling him the details.
"oh..that one" Vivek tried as he remembered watching something like that long ago.
"But that was just the movie right? It's just fiction." Rajat tried reasoning out.
Tasha nodded her head in disagreement.
"It wasn't just a movie; it was inspired from real life incidents. I.." Tasha began to explain as embarrassment crept over her face, "I'm quite fan of these stuffs (she smiled embarrassedly while vivek snickered at his nerd girlfriend over her obsession over paranormal stuffs ) actually after the movie, it peeked my interest and I researched the history of it," she closed her eyes in thought as she tried to remember the details she had so meticulously looked up for her interests. "Bram Stoker was the author's name. The vampire Dracula in the book was a character he invented it was published in 1897, but there was a bit of basis in reality. The actual person was Vlad Dracula, I think it was. I can't remember everything exactly, but I do know that he was called Vlad the Impaler because he liked to execute people by dropping them onto huge spikes and watching while they died." She explained.
"…sounds like a very pleasant guy," Vivek mocked.
"But yeah. That's the only Vlad I know of," Tasha shrugged, though she still looked thoughtful. "Not that it helps us a lot, really. Vlad the Impaler lived in Europe or something." But she was still tapping her chin, a classic gesture that indicated that she was thinking.
Rajat was on his feet, gathering the portrait and aged paper to take with them. He was going on instinct a great deal tonight, but there weren't many other clues left to him in this situation. "Let's get going," he said. "We need to find Tarika."
The three of them headed out of the library, and found stairs leading down, back to the ground floor. But as they started to descend, Vivek froze, his hand on the railing, his feet on two different stairs. He actually went two shades paler. "Tasha..Sir."
They stopped and glanced at him. "What's wrong?"
Vivek looked around, his head moving slowly and deliberately. "…there's something else in this house. And I think it's quite near us. Right here." His eyes were enormous, almost fearful. His gaze trailed across the wall, moving down along the line of the stairs until they stopped about two-thirds of the way down the stairwell. "There." He started moving down the steps, purpose written into his face.
While Rajat and Tasha watched, Vivek dropped to sit on the stairs. He seemed to be fiddling with the wall. It took them both a moment to realize that it wasn't just another piece of paneling in the wall.
It was a door. And Vivek was struggling with the handle.
"What the hell?" Tasha muttered just loud enough for Rajat to hear it Rajat rushed to Vivek's side to help him. It took the both of them several seconds of hard pulling to wrench the curved handle downwards and push the door open. The handle actually slammed down suddenly and the door flew open; Tasha nearly went tumbling forward into the black space beyond it. They immediately started coughing at the cloud of dust they inadvertently stirred up.
Vivek switched on the flashlight built into his watch and covered his mouth and nose with his sleeve as he peered into the darkness. "There's something back here. A room…a big room," he muttered, leaning in a bit further. He did have one moment of hesitation before he made his decision. "I'm going in. You guys can wait out here, or you can come with me."
Though he tried to sound like the idea of wandering into the dark passage alone didn't bother him, he was inordinately relieved when Tasha shook her head. "There's no way in hell we're letting you go alone. The three of us are sticking together." Rajat nodded.
They slipped through that opening and into the space beyond it. Vivek went first, and then Tasha, and Rajat last. Vivek kept a tight hold on Tasha's hand until all three of them were safely on the ground. They left the door open, though the light from that opening wouldn't stretch very far. But now they could look around a bit more easily.
They had crawled into a small room, with a stone floor and dust and cobwebs everywhere. There was a door in the far wall, and some sort of boiler or furnace in the corner. Tasha summed it up very nicely for all of them when she said, "Well. This is pleasant."
Armed with the small beam of light from his watch, Vivek wandered around the perimeter of the room. There wasn't a great deal to see, but he kept shining his light on the wall, as though looking for any openings or trick latches. He paused when he got to the furnace, and dropped his light to shine down on it. Then came the strangled cry. "Sir!"
Rajat and Tasha were across the room in a heartbeat, and Tasha immediately jumped back with a gasp when she saw what was down in the area usually reserved for the furnace's fuel.
Bodies.
Two dead bodies, both covered in blood. Their throats were viciously slashed. Judging by the state of the bodies, they had died relatively recently, but neither the three of them could bring themselves to actually check for the state of rigor mortis or any other indicating factors since that was not their area of expertise but Tarika could have done it but unfortunately she was missing.
"I really, REALLY want to go home now," Vivek swallowed hard, turning away from the sight. "We need to find a way out of this hellhole. Now. Bring the local police back later to check this place out. Or better yet, demolish it down once we have investigating every inch of it ."
Meanwhile Rajat scanned the area and found a door on the far side of the room.
The door in question was old; the knob actually broke off in Rajat's hand, and the door itself swung open very slowly, emitting a loud, ominous creak from the rusty old hinges. Tasha couldn't keep herself from commenting, "Good omen, huh?" When Vivek glared at her, she shrugged.
"What? If we were watching this in a movie, this is where I'd be screaming at the leads not to go in the room" Vivek answered her glaringly.
The door opened onto another short hallway, which led to some sort of entryway or foyer. It was certainly one of the strangest layouts any of them had ever seen, and Rajat had once watched the travel documentaries about the mystery house, Winchester Mansion, California. This horrific place made about as much sense architecturally as that place did. Then again, there weren't any bodies in the Winchester House .
The three of them walked towards the mouth of the hallway and the room that lay there, sticking very close together, when Rajat suddenly stopped again, perhaps a meter or so from that opening.
"Sir?" Vivek asked, giving him a curious look.
He didn't seem to hear the question. His eyes were focused intently on a door on the right side of the hallway just up ahead.
"Somehow this doesn't feel good.." Rajat answered while keeping aside the unsettling feeling he had in his guts. "L-let's just check, we have to find Tarika," Rajat said a quiet reminder of their main objective right now. Once they had her back with them, they could focus on their other goal: finding a way out of this strange place. He was still trying to remember if they had actually seen any doors or windows that led to the outside and tried to remember the layout so that they don't keep circling the same place again and again.
Obeying Rajat's strange orders, they carefully pushed the appointed door open and looked into the room beyond it. Vivek's flashlight swept over the room, illuminating some things in there. A large chair, covered in dusty and faded maroon upholstery. A small table, lying on its side. A fireplace, ornately carved from white stone. And a wardrobe against the wall…
A cold chill ran through Rajat as he opened the wardrobe and felt around inside it. It didn't take long before he felt something strange under his fingers in the bottom corner. A slight application of pressure sounded a click, and he felt the back of the closet swing open.
Before he could say anything, a rush of air swept past the three of them, and it was all Rajat could do to avoid gagging when he got a whiff of it. It was old and musty and smelled strongly of blood. He froze at the mysterious draft and the awful smell, swallowed hard, and felt the strange, inexplicable need to remind himself that there was no such thing as ghosts.
…but if ghosts did exist, this certainly seemed like the kind of place where they would hang out.
"Vivek?" Rajat said quietly after a moment. "What's next? Do you have any idea?"
A beat of silence, tempered only by their breathing. He fell quiet for a moment, and then shook his head. "I don't know. I don't know what's next."
"Let's keep going," Tasha said after a moment. "I think we will find Tarika somewhere here."
They walked down the corridor. It was a short tunnel of perhaps fifteen feet or so. They emerged at the other end, apparently outside. The ground was an odd shade of brown, and they were surrounded on either side by tall hedges, like the kind one would find in a hedge maze. And the whole place carried a nauseatingly heavy scent of blood.
The three hurried through the maze, barely speaking to each other at all. They don't seemed to know, which way to go, and were ending up circling again and again to the same spot. Each turn they would take hoping they would find a exist would turn out Dead End. Their CID instincts were not coming use to this maze however, it was getting hard to identify which way they had passed before, all the routes and turn were looking similar. The fog, the green walls, the bloody scent was making them all sick but they knew that had to keep going, they had no choice but to press forward.
After a quiet long time (or so it seemed, in a strange way), they found themselves staring up at the aforementioned building. It was made of wood, most of which was faded and rotting, and the door directly ahead of them had once been painted white, though it was now peeling, and the worn wood was clearly visible. It seemed that this was their destination.
"What's now?," Tasha said softly. Rajat moved forward and took the dubious honor of opening the door. The knob must have been rusty; it resisted a bit before turning in his hand.
What lay ahead could have been someone's house; the initial glance almost reminded Rajat of the layout of Sherlock Holmes Museum at England, with the stairs to the left of the entryway. They moved inside, looking around in search of any clue; Tasha moved ahead, staying well within sight of the two men.
"Vivek?" Rajat asked, watching as Tasha opened a door and peered inside. "Anything?"
Before he could answer, Tasha gasped.
The two officers were at her side in an eye blink, Vivek grabbing her arm with intent to shield her from whatever lay inside. But the sight made even the experienced officers freeze and stare in horror.
…
AN: So how was it? Do share your review about this one.
AND a BIG THANKS for all the reviews!
