Hell's Detective

Prologue- The Things in the Walls

Sarah Brumley had just finished her supper when the strange man came to the door. She was sitting in the lounge, brushing knots out of her doll's hair while her father lay, draped over the couch, like a rather fat cat. Her mother was in the kitchen, fretting over tax returns. Sarah's mother always found something to fret over, even things that didn't really matter. It was just a mother thing to do, she supposed. She didn't know where Charlotte, her sister, was, but then again, no one ever knew where Charlotte was. She distanced herself from the rest of the family like they had the plague, preferring things like phones and friends and boys with silly hair-cuts over them. 'It's just a phase she's going through,' their mother would say. 'She'll break out of it once she gets older.' Sarah doubted that somehow, but she didn't say so.

There was a knock at the door, and her father huffed in annoyance. His belly wobbled as he pushed himself off the couch and stumbled over, muttering something about 'damned salesmen.'

Mr Brumley was a very particular man with a very particular lifestyle. He liked to come home from work at five o'clock, traffic permitting, and have his dinner at five-thirty on the dot. Then he liked to sit on the couch and watch Dorrington Street, a boring show about boring people with boring lives living on a boring street, and during this time no other human being was allowed to do anything that would draw his attention away from it. Rest assured, when Mr Brumley got up from the couch, he was not a happy man.

The man at the door wasn't ordinary, that much was for sure. Sarah could see it, and she knew her father could see it, too, because he took a wary step back as if he was preparing himself to slam the door in the man's face and hide behind it. He was tall and unusually thin, black, stringy hair sticking out at odd places on his head, like the hair on Sarah's dolls. He had a black bowler hat and overcoat on, but by far the strangest thing about him was the fact he was wearing goggles. Not the swimming kind, either. But thick, steel ones with black lenses. He held a leather bound bag in his hand, the kind Sarah's dentist always carried around with him.

"Good evening," Mr Brumley said cautiously.

"Is it?" the man said. "I honestly hadn't noticed."

"Er...Can I help you?"

"No, but I can help you." He pulled his hand out of his coat pocket. "Abner Ingleseid. Exterminator."

"Right," Mr Brumley said, shaking it.

"It seems you have a termite infestation," Ingleseid said solemnly.

"What? No, that's impossible. We just bought the house." Mr Brumley's throat wobbled like a turkey's as he spoke.

"Well, that was silly of you, wasn't it? May I come in?" Without waiting for an answer, he marched past Mr Brumley and into the house. Mr Brumley scurried after him.

"You don't really look like an exterminator, if you don't mind my saying," he said.

Ingleseid turned and studied him for a moment. "You don't really look like a lawyer."

"How did you know I was a lawyer?"

Ingleseid ignored him. "So, how long have you had the house?"

"We moved in last week. The landlord was desperate to get rid of it. The last tenant, he -well- he disappeared."

Ingleseid rapped on the wall with a gloved hand.

"Yep," he said knowingly. "Definitely infested."

"How can you tell?"

"It's obvious, isn't it? Look at the walls."

Mr Brumley did. "They look normal to me."

"Nope. I know normal walls. These walls are infested."