Chapter 368 - Two Days Prior, Part 2

Five feet away from the front porch, and already she was halting in her tracks.

Something was in the air, Intermixed with the smell of warm sunlight, freshly trimmed green grass, and every other normal scent of a normal afternoon day, she could smell it… seeping out from the gap in the closed doorway.

The abnormal.

A foul odor pungent, invasive, and very much repulsive… but mostly it smelled like shit.

It probably was shit.

Flesh rotting, blood congealing, marinating… of all the smells she smelt, she could do a whole lot worse than just shit. 

Irene resumed her pace, her every step closer to the door with the utmost care not to make a single sound. In the shade of the porchside, there was no sunlight, no smell of green grass. There, the odor only intensified. 

There was nothing, with her ear pressed hard against the door. No footsteps, no voices, not even the house made a noise. Inside, no matter how hard she strained her hearing, the otherside beyond seemed only to lie rife with dead silence. 

The only noise after was the subdued rattle of the doorknob as she slowly swung the door open. 

It was dark. Thick blinds blocking sunlight. Lightswitches flicked off. There was not even the glow of a television screen… mostly due to the fact it lay in a blanket of shattered glass scattered across the floor.

One foot forward, her gun was in her hands. Another foot treading deeper, and she aimed the barrel forward. Third step, fourth step, nothing sprung out at her from the darkness. 

Not that she was expecting something to even try.

The hard crunch of broken glass followed her along past the living room. Aside from the broken television, and a few household objects strewn and scattered laying lopsided or also on the ground, everything else was the picture definition of normality.

Wooden shelves and wooden drawers, and even shelves on top of drawers. Portraits on walls, candid photographs framed and hung. Some would just have the man in it, others had the smiling faces of two children beneath the man's own - and in every one of them, he always looked the same… he always looked normal.

Now he might not ever be again… 

A clangor erupted from somewhere deeper within. On pure instinct, Irene whirled left, pointing her gun onto the empty space of a dark narrow hallway. Then from the same place that clangor sounded, a voice emerged.

"Are you the person that brings the brown boxes?"

It was a polite question, a polite voice… completely devoid of the malice, the malevolence from the voice she heard from over the phone during the days prior. Yet even then, there was no mistaking that low husky rasp in his every syllable.

With the element of surprise gone, Irene didn't care for her heels clacking loud in the stillness as she strode closer towards the voice, all the while that foul stench permeated stronger as she did.

Before long it brought her traversing through another doorway into a bedroom, and then, there, by her feet, rolled over a little tin can… dented in places, with bloodied teeth marks imprinted onto the roughly creased label wrapper.

"Wait a minute," spoke that voice again, just mere feet away now, in a quizzical tone. "Weren't you a man yesterday?" 

Irene lifted her gaze just a little bit further forward and the first thing that met her eyes was a pair of bare feet caked in grime and dirt. From where she stood, it was like looking down upon a corpse. 

Only this was still living, still speaking… through lips dribbling out a glistening crimson red, the man spoke to her once again, pointing a long dirty fingernail at the indented metal can.

"Hey since you're here, can you open that shiny thing that has food inside for me? I think my mouth isn't strong enough to do it. Probably too weak from opening the others..." 

The man was just a hunching, slouching, figure on the floor. Not bothering to sit on the couch nearby, or even on the bed - it seems no one that cared enough bothered teaching him common etiquette. 

Irene kept her gun up, pointing and unmoving squarely at his forehead. A normal person who would have screamed, would have been trembling, coming face to face with the barrel of a gun.

But he, still sitting slump, merely cocked his head at her.

"Oh, you're holding that 'gun' thing, right?" The man said, as if he was simply admiring its cold metal sheen. "I've been told by someone that guns can be particularly dangerous when used on humans."

"Yes," Irene cocked her gun. "Humans." 

At the sound of her voice, the man's wrinkled half-closed eyes seemed to glimmer, and then he smiled… baring at her red teeth, with swollen gums perforated and bleeding.

Slowly, he began to rise to his feet. 

"Detective, detective," He said wryly, wobbling once with a step forward. "I believed I made it clear you and yours would be left well alone so long as you leave us alone, didn't I?" 

"I still had questions." She said, glancing quickly left.

'Well, you've never answered mine." 

"And I don't intend to," and then just as fast, she looked to the right. "Tell me, how many of you did Jay make?" 

The man shambled closer, the smell of feces and waste more intrusive than ever before, as if the stench had been soaked into the fabric of his stained, wrinkled clothes. 

"I think it's just me," said the man, scratching at his stubbled chin which upon closer inspection were red and raw. "Probably would have taken too much effort nurturing more than one. Lots to learn, right?" 

"Good, that makes my job a whole lot easier then." 

The man feeble chuckled. It was a familiar chuckle, the same unnerving awkward attempt at laughter she'd heard over the receiver all that time ago.

"Are you going to kill me, detective?" 

Irene replied as soon as he finished. "Yes, I am."

"But why would you do that?" said the man, contorting his brows and arching his lips in what seemed to be a skewered attempt at expressing sadness. "That doesn't seem like the right thing to do. I have a family, you know?" 

"No, this man had a family," Irene responded coldly, her eyes briefly veering again to another framed picture of the man, with two kids propped atop his shoulders. All three smiled back at her. "Jay, and by extension, you, were the ones that took that away from him." 

He took another step, frowning even more. "But I've just learned so much…"

"Clearly you haven't learned enough…" Irene wrinkled her nose. "Can't shower, can't walk, can't even open a tin can, can you?" 

"Oh, but on the contrary, I wager I've learned quite a fair amount in my short time being here. The Succubi, for example, Jay made sure I've been taught a fair bit about them," He leaned in close, breathing loudly and hoarsely through large open nostrils. "But he's never really delved too much into just how nice they really smell."

Then, suddenly, like a switch flicked to the inverse, the man's bloodied smirk faded fast, and the look in his eyes within rapid blinks shifted to one of confusion and terror.

"Wha - what? What is - ?" 

Those rapidly shifting eyes immediately froze, catching sight of Irene. He proceeded to ignore the gun pointed squarely at him, uncaring, and no hesitation, he plummeted to his knees hard, seizing both her wrists in a tight suffocating grip. 

"Please help me!" He shouted, bloodshot eyes welling heavy with tears, sputtering both spit and blood across her face. "I-I don't know what's happening to me! It's not me! It's not! I can't move, I can't speak! I don't know what's going on! Save me, please… please! Save me! Please! I have kids for God's sake!" 

He sucked in a deep breath, wasting no time to spur out another deafening barrage of pleas and pleads, but then before he could even get the first words out… the switch was flicked again, and his hold on her wrist came lax.

The man fell with the back of his head colliding against the floor where he lay sprawled and limp for the next few seconds after. Once again, Irene thought to herself that he could very well have passed off as a dead body, that he might as well have been dead.

Only, unfortunately, he still wasn't.

Through closed damp lips, another silent chuckle sounded in the quiet, before they parted open once more into a wide, amused smirk.

"Oh, whoops," the man said, slowly slouching himself back upright. "I didn't know a Succubi could smell that overwhelming. I think I nearly lost myself for a second there. But now that I do, I don't think that'll work on me anymore." 

When he stared back at her, it was as if she was staring at a totally different individual. The way his eyes drifted lazily, curiously… so lost in its own fascination.

"We learn something new everyday, don't we?"