Second Circle

Prologue: The Fool

Prologue: The Fool

Dr Grant’s world had descended into fear and agony.  He watched helplessly as each of his fingertips were nailed to the floorboards with black iron skewers.  Blood poured from his split nails to mix with the vomit and tears.  He had bitten off half his tongue after the second finger and almost choked to death before managing to cough it out; his natural survival instincts cutting through the single thought that had pulsed  through his mind since the torture started, ‘Let me die.’

*

John arrived at the house ahead of his team.  Word had been sent to the regular police to stay away from this one.  He still wondered what line they spun in command to keep them at bay.  The house was in darkness.  The front door at the end of the garden path closed.  They already knew he was here, he could sense it, no need for stealth.  The old wooden door swung into the hall with a single solid kick, splintering on its hinges and raining red stained glass onto the tiled floor.  A short sharp squeal greeted his arrival and he automatically drew his pistol and aimed into the darkness as it echoed around the house.

Golden light from the old Belfast street lamps fell weakly past the broken entrance and he could barely make out the beginning of a staircase a few feet away.  The house was cold, too cold for a hot summer’s night and as the chill ran through him he could feel the gun shake in his grip. 

Keeping his pistol firmly locked in front of him he stepped back across the threshold into the warmth of the night to regroup.  Reaching one hand down he slowly removed a short wooden branch from his pocket along with a fine gold chain which he awkwardly managed to wrap around the branch three times.  He brought the branch up beside the pistol and moved forward.

On passing the door once more a second squeal rang out, louder than the first.  John dropped to one knee, his back to the wall; it seemed to be coming from upstairs.  He aimed in that direction and tried to calm himself.  The chill came back fast and he began to shake violently with the cold.  ‘Shit, stay calm and get this right first time.’ He drew a large figure of eight in the air with the pistol and branch outstretched before him and muttered a few words under his breath.

The shakes subsided and he stood up, back still to the wall.  The sound of furniture being dragged across a floor upstairs broke the silence.  ‘Fuck.’ He quickly tried the switches in the hall, but the power was out. ‘Fuck’.  He checked his pistol to make sure the safety was off, fixed his grip on the handle and ran as fast as he could up the stairs into the pitch black of the landing, creaking loudly on every step as he climbed, and climbed, and climbed.  Up too many stairs, far too many for a house this size until eventually reaching the top and tripping on the last invisible step he fell head first and full force across the narrow corridor and through an unlocked bedroom door.

John hit the ground hard with his left shoulder, but managed to keep both the pistol and branch together in front of him.  ‘Shit.’ The room he had fallen into was large and unfurnished apart from a single chair in the far corner.  A long window ran the length of one wall.  No curtains allowed some illumination from the golden lamps in the street, more than enough to witness the horror that lay before him.  A man, outstretched, covered in blood, twitching.  His lower jaw had been ripped from his head and now rested on his chest.  His legs were together but his arms and hands were wide open as if he had been crucified to the floorboards. 

John jumped up and saw that the man was surrounded by a triangle of white powder.  He took a step closer and noticed what looked like a small cloud hovering just above the head of the body. The chair moved. ‘Fuck!.’ John fired two shots, but they went high and hit the far wall.  A young girl screamed and half jumped, half crawled out from behind the chair, landed beside the twitching body and covered her head with her hands.  She looked like she might be about ten years old.  John aimed at her head. 

They stayed like that for while.

Then. The body on the ground started to convulse violently, the whole body bouncing up and down, apart from the hands which seemed joined to the floor.  The bloody detached jaw fell from its chest and rolled out of the triangle, stopping when it hit the girls trembling hands.  She screamed again, and this time she didn’t stop.  John motioned for the girl to come to him, but kept the gun on her.  She looked at him and ran forward, straight towards him, then past him, screaming down the stairs.  He chased her, the staircase had shortened and he bounded down it in a few steps. The girl was just in front of him and about to the cross the entrance of the house when a figure stepped into the hallway, grabbed her and covered her mouth, muffling her screams for the short seconds it took to completely incapacitate her. 

John looked at the woman before him and the child now fallen at her feet, ‘I had it under control.’

‘You were sent here on reconnaissance John, not to start a fucking war. Do you know how hard it will be to keep down media attention with gun shots in the city?  Is this house even secure? The woman took out a radio, ‘I need a clean-up team in here now and I need the press team up to speed by the time we get back.’