Descent into the Gloom

Descent into the Gloom





Detective Andrews’ eyes shot open as ice cold water licked at his feet, the sensation that came with it shooting through the entire length of his body. He squirmed in his restraints, alarmed, disorientated, panicking. His pupils enlarged, retracted, and enlarged again. The scene before him was unclear, a mess of dim light and collages of strange blurred shapes, dancing and looping, like the insides of a clear lava lamp. Everywhere, navy blue, black wisps, pockets of bleakness. And yet, a structure. A surrounding frame of metal, sealing in the portrait, the jamboree of colours and light, as the discombobulated figure gazed on.

Low and behold: a roof, above the detectives head. A floor, by his feet. A hard seat, formed around his buttocks and back. Detective Andrews was in a car, his own Ford Sedan by the looks of it; the faint dangling figure of a crucified Jesus confirming this. But what was going on? Where was he? And what of the strange colours, the blend of dark blues, the shadowed wraiths that lurked behind the windscreen? Suddenly, he became aware again of the water by his feet, the stinging of it, lapping at him like tongues of liquid nitrogen, now a few more inches higher, a few more inches closer to killing him.

His car was halfway under the Irvine River.

Screaming and kicking and punching followed, vain flails of his arms that suggested temporary insanity and a lack of reason. Still restrained by his seatbelt, he scratched at the car windows, clawed the rear-view mirror from its place, and kicked in the glove compartment as though the car was of sentience and hell bent on killing him, all the while hollering under bulging eyes like a madman, unheard to the rest of the world under the suffocating weight of the ocean.

Okay, Andrews thought to himself in the darkness, trying to regulated his panicked breaths, fully aware that this vain activity was wasting precious oxygen, and that this would not bring him any closer to escaping his predicament. He had fallen asleep at the wheel, going over the bridge from Anderstone to Little Neath. Working late again, it wasn’t the first time his eyelids had fluttered dangerously as his car made its way under amber streetlights. On more than one occasion he had woken up to find himself beginning to swerve towards the side of the road, provoking a slap on the face to awake himself, and a little self-discipline. What am I going to do? He panicked, the water sloshing against his shoes.

Andrews had been a part of the force for twenty-five years now, longer than his marriage had lasted, longer than he wanted to stay there. A thick, stereotypical police moustache had lain across the top of his lip for about the same time. “I’m a detective,” he had explained to his wife when she had asked him about it, “so I need a moustache, right?” A single daughter, a thief, a carjacker, and intent on ruining his life, lived in his home for thirteen years before she and her mother had fled from him not long after the divorce. Andrews never liked his daughter from her teenage years onwards, and could not help but think that he had been sharing his house with a criminal rather than a child, her antics sometimes crossing past adolescent misbehaviour by a long, long way.

Suddenly, Andrews became aware of a sweet smell of aftershave, an intrusive aroma that was not his own. He twisted his torso in fright and raised his hands to defend himself against his attacker, the shadow in the rear seats - but there was no-one there, the intruder a figment of his imagination. The smell suddenly became familiar, though its origin remained a mystery. It must have been his own, although for some strange reason he doubted this, his mind a mess of thoughts and panic. Although a strange thing to think of at a time like this, Andrews could not picture the brand, the name, or the bottle.

As though just realising that he were still buckled in, the detective unlatched the seatbelt and sent it whipping back into its holder. Liberated, he went for the car door handle, discovering with blind man's fingers that it was no longer present. He turned to the passenger side of the car, and was greeted with the same thing. A pit of gloom bubbled away in his stomach as he realised that all the doors were the same, their handles replaced by an emptiness, their liberty being a restraint in itself, the same going for the window winders - they rotated loosely and easily, their connection to the windows themselves severed. Letting out a growl of rage, laced with panic, Andrews leaned onto his back and lifted his legs, gathering all the strength he could muster. Grunting and now sweating, he kicked out with both feet, slipping across the glass with a squeal and a skid mark of water. He tried again, and again. However, by the fourth kick, his determination had died out, His own strength being nothing to the immense water that pressed against the window.

The detective swore in frustration and fell back, defeated, his legs plopping into now shin-high water and reminding him that he had a rather short time limit. He opened the dented glove compartment, several of its contents spilling out into the water as though it were throwing up from the agony of Andrews’ blow: dental floss, a roadmap, a lighter, a black marker pen, a bottle of soda, some napkins. All useless. No, wait; that heavy plop. His industrial torch! Thankfully waterproof. He flipped the switch and the inside of the car exploded with light. Thank God! Suddenly, his panic-blunted mind suddenly sharpening, he visualised the contents of his boot. He hopped into the rear of the car with the torch in hand, and peered over the seats excitedly. A half-empty bottle of water and an old bike wheel lay nonchalantly buried in an assortment of old, soggy magazines and paperwork. Andrews screamed and slammed his fist into the window in rage. It still didn’t break.

There had definitely been a toolbox in there, definitely before he had left his house for that hell-hole of a village. He had tuned up the engine a little before he left, using his wrench and his pliers in the process, two tools that would have been apt for breaking out of this death-trap that he had somehow found himself in. And there had definitely been a crowbar in there two, he remembered seeing it as he slammed the boot shut before setting off on his way to work, it had been in there for months.

Andrews had tried to ignore it, to deny the fact that he was here through no fault of his own, but the evidence was mountainous. Missing door handles should have been enough to enlighten such a detective as himself, but the panic and hysteria had caused a great haze over his thoughts, a haze that had only slightly parted, though enough now to allow him to realise exactly what kind of situation he had ended up in. He had not noticed that the handles were missing when he had entered the car and pulled the door shut, and he had not tried to unwind the windows, it being a cold day and his air conditioning sufficing. If only he had stopped off for petrol, or perhaps a bag of crisps, he would have noticed that something was wrong with the car, and been able to pre-empt the situation.

And now he could remember it, remember the harsh bang as all four of his tyres had violently blown out together, the shriek of metal against road, and the sudden swerve as his car toppled into the water. Only a stinger strip could have taken all of his wheels out at once, a stinger lain down by the very same man who had sabotaged his car earlier.

Detective Andrews had woken up in the middle of his own murder and cover-up. He fell back against the rear seats, defeated, his feet plopping into the dark water. Suddenly, now that he was no longer lashing out or trying to escape, he became aware of a feeling of great pressure, as though the car might cave in under the weight of the water at any second; and the sound, a bleak humming of great depth. Why would someone do this to him for no reason? Why would someone want him dead? Perhaps, he thought, he had gotten a little more closer to the truth behind the Little Neath murders than he had previously realised. Perhaps, the killer had been right before his eyes, provoked by his questioning, and he didn‘t even know it.

The Little Neath Butcher, they had called him, estimated to be male due to the sexual violence that had been inflicted to his victims. He had tallied up a total of seven kills by the time Andrews’ car had sailed over the bridge and into the water, seven young and attractive girls. College girls mostly, or at least of college age. All the victims were not raped, but instead stripped of their clothes and their insides, leaving their bodies a half-deflated and empty mess. It was a horrific sight, enough to provoke vomit from the young deputy, Michaels, and the unlucky citizens who had stumbled across each one.

So they were the clues he had to work with. That was everything Andrews knew, apart from the fact that the organs were never found, perhaps hidden in a different location, bunched up like a messed-up charm bracelet, or inside the stomach of some demented psycho. This was the victim’s calling card: the theft of the victim’s organs. Not all of them, though, just the heart, the pancreas, and the gall bladder, the rest discarded across the floor in a mess of bloody tendrils and leaking bags. It was suggested, due to the specification of the missing organs, and the size of both the pancreas and the gall bladder and the precise and clean cuts that severed them from the rest of the body, that perhaps the killer had a history of medical profession, or at least a knowledge of biology. However, that was as far as the detective had reached with the investigation; he had gotten somewhat negligent of late, and that meddling FBI agent, Harris, seemed to know what he was doing anyway.

The water was well-up his shins now, almost at chair-level. Nervously, he lifted his legs up onto the passenger seats and embraced his knees in a foetal position, long limbs of darkness shadowed across the roof behind him. Who had he interviewed in the past day? It was obvious that one of those people had been the killer, and that they had panicked at the thought of being compromised by Andrews after the questioning, even though the detective was nowhere near that stage in the case. He strained hard, the immense water pressure seeming to squeeze back, the creaking of the metal around his car having a little something extra to say too. There had been seven people he had interviewed at the request of agent Harris, and he had gotten paperwork on each of their histories. Most of them had checked out fine, and he didn’t suspect at the time that any of them were capable of such a horrific act of violence.

Little Neath’s GP, Dr Richard McDonald, obviously chosen as a suspect because of his medical history, had been one of the more pleasant people that Andrews had interviewed that evening. They had parted with a handshake, and the balding man had wished him well with the case. Andrews crossed him off the list, a definite no, too nice a guy, too happy a life. The nurse, an old, slow-talking woman of mundane conversation, had been far too afflicted with arthritis to even stand a chance of being a suspect, let alone commit a murder. At her present rate of movement, it would have taken her an entire night to afflict just one of the murdered women with half the mutilation they had sustained. Also a definite no. Both of the village’s medical professionals had been deemed innocent within an hour.

Now, that strange man, the one with the greasy fringe and the glass marble eyes, he had been something to look at. Alexander Linwood, his name had been. He had been pleasant enough too, offering the detective to join him with a cup of tea - but still, there was something strange about him; his manner of speech, his facial tic, the fact that he wore too much aftershave and made Detective Andrew’s nose itch, though not enough to provoke suspicion, just enough to make Andrews want to fly through the questions and get out as soon as possible. And he did, stopping off once more before heading home, at house of the elusive Mr Tregaskin, widow of the Mrs Karen Tregaskin, where the questioning began to get interesting.

Mr Tregaskin had not initially allowed Andrews to enter his premise, but rather held him at the door, demanding a search warrant. When the detective informed the widow that he had no intention to enter the house without a permit, and would happily ask the questions from the overgrown and neglected garden, or even through the window should the man wish, Mr Tregaskin unlatched three locks and stepped aside as the peeling door swung open. Andrews entered the house and made his way to the sitting room.

Andrews gave up his second attempt at trying to kick the window in, and returned to a sitting position, panting and frustrated. The cushioned rear seats of the Sedan had soaked up water like a sponge by this time, drenching the seat of the detective’s trousers and his back. There was a thump, and all of a sudden the car’s descent came to a sudden stop; the vehicle reaching the bottom of the water. Just how deep was the Irvine River anyway? It felt as though he had been sinking for hours, though it had probably only been for a few minutes. Lifting himself from the wet cushion, Andrews sat on the top of the rear seats, where he could escape the water for a few moments longer while he worked out who the man responsible for his murder could have been. It was funny, Andrews had always distrusted cars in general, often referring to them as wheeled coffins, and now here he was, trapped under tonnes of water, his metaphor taking a surprisingly literal turn.

Mr Tregaskin’s home had been bleak to say the least. The windows were shuttered; the light fixings, bulb-less. Torn furniture surrounded a battered television that screamed with static as though it were actually in the centre of a circle of vicious Indians than sofas. Broken chairs and tables piled up high in front of where Andrews assumed a window was, like some kind of jutting barricade against the daylight, a single slit of dusk penetrating its defences and fanning out across a mangy rug with a glowing orange aura.

The detective took a seat on the chair beside the impatient widow. He began with the preliminaries: what’s your name, where do you work, etc, managing to irritate the man grossly without any real effort. By the time he reached the real questions, his subject was in an even fouler mood than before.

“Where were you at these times on these dates?” Andrews asked, before reading out a list of the hours and days in which the victims had been missing before being found dead. Mr Tregaskin responded with a burst of anger.

“How do you expect me to remember where I was on these days? Every minute is the same to me; every hour, a year of pain. I can’t provide you with that information, officer. I really can’t.”

“What about on the most recent killing? September 12th, two days ago, between the hours of seven o’clock and nine. You don‘t have to cast your mind back that far for that one.”

“I told you, I can’t distinguish different times from themselves anymore, not since Karen died. I was here, no doubt. I rarely leave my house. Only to get food usually, although I don’t know why. Sometimes I think about just staying and starving to death. Now, is that all officer? Or have you more pointless questions that I wont be able to answer?”

“No,” the detective had replied, yawning, “that’ll be all for today.”

And that was it. That was all the clues that he had on who had made this attempt on his life - an attempt that would no doubt be successful - although it seemed pretty obvious who the proprietor was: Mr Tregaskin. If only he had stayed and asked more questions! The vampire no doubt left his house at night to stalk his pray, killing the innocent girls and infecting them with the darkness that had consumed his own mind since the death of his own wife. It was a sad affair, and one with no real bad guy if you thought about it. Another mind claimed by society; another monster forged through tragedy.

In fact, thought Andrews, I bet if I check these records, the guy’ll have a history of mental illness. Turning to the boot, torch in hand, the detective began to fish through the soggy paper until he came across a limp folder. Opening it, he pulled open the drenched pages until he came to the file of Brian Tregaskin, the ink wet and running, but still somewhat readable. He ran a surprisingly steady hand down the page, and came to rest on a section of what was essentially a synopsis of the unfortunate man’s life.

After the death of his… was admitted to Bethlem Royal Hospital following a violent outburst in a grocery store during the same month in which he assaulted two young women and threatened to kill them. He was released four years later on... returned to his old home in Little Neath. Mr Tregaskin has... diazepam... by Dr Richard McDonald.

Andrews sighed and dropped the chunk of wet paper into the water. He knew the truth, several hours too late, now that the water was halfway up the backrest of the seats, and now that he was shivering with death’s gradual approach. Why couldn’t he see it before? Because he had wanted to go home, the need for sleep had been consuming him, and he had been selfish with that, wanting to return to his empty house with its empty rooms where life had once stirred once upon-a-time. Not that he missed his wife and daughter, he was glad they were gone, and somewhat apathic towards everything as of late. Lesley’s pedantic and patronising nature had gotten right on his nerves, and his only child was essentially a criminal. Hell, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she turned out to be the Little Neath Butcher.

All Andrews had been doing was running errands for agent Harris ever since he came to town two weeks ago after the third murder, and in those two weeks he had lost his already dwindling passion for policing. Contemplating everything he had lost, his life soon joining them, he began to slide down the chair, his stomach slowly submerging in the water. If only he had done something, maybe he wouldn’t be in this mess, and maybe he would have been able to save the lives of many other young girls to come. Detective Andrews leaned his head against the window and sighed.

That aftershave again, strong and familiar, almost imposing, as though someone had held the open bottle to his nose. He rubbed his face as though to wipe it away, to erase the smell from his mind, because there really was something ominous about the aroma, something not quite right. And why couldn’t he remember what the fragrance was? If he had slapped it on this morning, and no doubt every other morning for some time, surely he’d know what the brand was, or at least the bottle. God, this situation really was messing with his mind.

Click. A light came on in Andrews’ head. A really bright one, freezing all motor functions and making his jaw drop open as though some tight hinge had suddenly loosened. The aftershave, it wasn’t his own, it was the same one that he had smelled earlier today during his questioning, the one that the killer had used excessively - perhaps to cover up the smell of festering organs. It had irritated his nose, harassed him into leaving his questioning early. Alexander Linwood. It was he who had sabotaged the detective’s car and removed the tools from his boot, leaving only the aroma of his over-zealous aftershave usage - after all, it had only been around half an hour since he left the home of Brian Tregaskin - then the killer must have made his own way to the bridge and waited for the same vehicle that he had subtly dismantled parts of earlier. Andrews, his hand and mouth still wide with shock, slapped his own forehead and moaned in horror and disbelief.

The water, now level with his chest, brought Andrews a gift. The wad of stained files, floating before him like an offering. He took it in trembling hands and pulled handfuls of paper-mache away until he came to Alexander Linwood, its page a mess of mascara and tears. A single line stared back at him, as clear as day, almost untouched by the inky blackness.

… studied anatomy for three years at Glasgow University, but was kicked out in May of 1964 after...

The gob of soaking paper fell from Andrews’ hand with a plop, the torch following it, lighting up the body of water magically. A knowledge of the human anatomy. The detective shook his head disbelievingly, the water now lapping at his throat like a freezing turtle-neck. He had solved the mystery from the confinement of his wheeled coffin, though no-one would ever hear the life-saving information from him, the killer remaining free to continue with his dark work, and more women free to fall and be opened to his bloody hand.

Or would they?

Andrews leapt forward to the front seats, pushing past the icy water and searching for something that had fallen from the dashboard when he had opened it. Dipping his head underwater, he began to search through the flotsam and jetsam as they passed through dark tentacles and shadows, punctured by the light of his fading industrial torch. A photograph of himself and his wife, laughing and in love, floated by like a ghost of happier times. He pushed it away and continued on his search. A torn and empty condom packet spiralled and twirled as though showing itself off (that little...!). He waved that away too. Finally, what he was looking for drifted into view as though it were waiting a while before revealing itself dramatically and just in time: the black marker pen. He snatched the hovering form and emerged from the surface into the shrinking space of air. Dizzy with a lack of oxygen, he pulled the lid from the pen. The tip well-protected and still operable, he began to write onto the white roof of his car in thick, bold lines: Alexander Linwood is the Little Neath Butcher. Got too close to the truth and paid for it. Stop him before it’s too late.

Satisfied with his message, Andrews submerged his head under the water and gazed up at the words from below, still highlighted by the industrial torch. They danced for him, stretching and shrinking and wobbling happily and cheerful and determined to do the job he had left for them. Don’t worry, they seemed to say, we wont let you down.

As Andrews neared darkness, feathers of black reaching from the borders of his vision and growing like ink droplets in water, the words above him began to look less like words and more like tendrils, squirming and twitching violently as though they had turned on him. The detective turned his head from them, praying that they would find his car, that his message would stop the Little Neath butcher, and that his death would come quickly and painlessly.

The air turned sour and painful in the detective’s lungs, burning like an inhalation of acidic fumes. He let it out in a frenzied volley of bubbles. The ice-cold gloom rushed excitedly in, dying to play with his insides, killing him instantly.










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