Lockwood & Co.: Case Files

Case #3: The Vanishing Hitchhiker

I've never had a problem with the gorier cases. As my tenure of working as an agent progresses, my tolerance to gore has become pretty much unlimited. With one exception.

Ones with hundred-year-old victims were not too bad, and if the body was the source, that was easier to stomach. The skin is mostly shrunken down around the skeleton, and the blood that remains is dried and brown. The hair looks like stringy yarn, and the face looks like a sun-dried raisin. Far from pleasant, but something you have to get used to in my line of work. But when the victim is fresh, like I suspect it to be in this current case, things are different.

When a body is newer, the skin remains smooth, and it looks almost alive. The eyes look like they could open any second, the hands look like they could grab at you on a moment's notice, and the legs look like they'd support the weight of the person as they stand. I've found plenty of newer murder victim's before, but the unnerving stillness of the shell of a body left behind is what I hate. They still look functioning and alive. Even for someone as steeled to this as me, it's still more unsettling than any Visitor.

Our victim this time was a young woman around twenty who went missing two weeks ago. Her name was Lisa Cornell, and she was reported missing when she didn't return home from her hike to her mother and father. They suspected she was hitchhiking because of the fact that she'd crashed her car that past month, and often times arrived home driven by someone else. Search parties went out during the day, steering clear of the area at night, because who knows what type of phantoms lurk in the forest after dark. But then, all hope was lost. Oh no, they didn't find the body. That was still unaccounted for. What they'd found was what the body had left behind.

A family with a young girl was driving through the area at night when the child had spotted a figure in the woods. She screamed, causing her father to stop the car. It was Lisa alright. Devoid of color or life, but there. At least, this is the description George gave us over breakfast that morning at 35 Portland Row. Luckily, the car sped off before the Spector could charge them.

But we didn't have any form of vehicle to make a speedy escape in, my friends and I. All we had were our rapiers, salt bombs and flares, emergency tea, chocolate, and double mint gum, and last, a grumpy old skull. It was becoming nighttime as our cab sped off, the driver remarking that he'd send someone by morning to get us before departing.

"This should be charming," Lockwood said, looking into the treeline.

The forest was clad in black and blue hues, the spindly tops of the trees crowned with gold from the setting sun. It looked as welcoming as it did foreboding, as counterintuitive as that is. Like a witch's cabin that smelled of cookies, but when you went inside, only death awaited you. To cut it short, I'd seen plenty of haunted forests before, but this one seemed to stretch endlessly. What seemed like miles of trees stretched along the roadside, and that sense of dread when you know someone's died in a certain location filled my lungs like water.

"Charming," I echoed, "Yeah."

The sun was setting fast, and the first prickles of stars began to scatter across the sky. I pulled my parka around me more tightly to avoid the chill that the autumn night brought, zipping it up to my chin.

"Let's get started, then, "Lockwood said cheerily, "George has already briefed us on what to expect, so we're pretty much set. No splitting up. One of us could get lost, so holding hands would probably be the best way to avoid that. Holly, you go with Lucy and I'll-"

Holly looked at me then at Lockwood before smiling politely in that way that she does. "No, no. I'll go with George. You go with Luce."

I gave her a quizzical raise of the eyebrow, but Lockwood merely nodded. It was this again. The same thing she'd done before, a multitude of times. She had to be up to something, and I knew it, but every time I brought it up, she'd pretend she had absolutely no idea what I was on about.