it was soaked in the darkest red blood he could ever remember seeing. He shook the image away and pushed the fingers of his other hand firmly into the side of the girl’s neck, feeling for a pulse from her carotid artery. After a few seconds he found it – weak, but there – enough to spur him into tearing the bottom section of her dress clear and using it to press hard on the only wound he could find – a deep knife stab in her abdomen. He placed the little girl’s own hands across the desperate bandage to provide some weight and breathed a sigh of relief as the bleeding seemed to slow, although he knew that her only chance of survival was to get her to an A&E unit as fast as possible. Suddenly he remembered his radio – pressing the transmit button, he steeled himself to speak.
‘Officer needs urgent assistance and an ambulance on the hurry up at 15 Gillett Avenue.’ He waited for the response from Control.
‘All units, officer needs urgent assistance at 15 Gillett Avenue. Repeat, officer needs urgent assistance at 15 Gillett Avenue.’ The female voice was then instantly followed by a cacophony of voices and call signs accepting the call to urgent assistance before Control spoke again. ‘914, are you injured at all?’
He managed the smallest of ironic laughs as he looked at his bloodstained hand before answering. ‘Yes,’ he spoke into the radio. ‘Two, maybe more stab wounds.’
‘Where have you been stabbed?’ Control demanded.
‘In the back,’ he stuttered, his strength failing, giving him the urgency to press on. ‘I have to check the house.’
‘Wait till we get back-up to you, 914,’ Control insisted. ‘Stay out the house until we can get you some assistance.’
‘I can’t,’ he told them. ‘She said “They’re inside”. I have to know.’
‘Wait for back-up, 914. Stay clear of the house.’ But King wasn’t listening any more as he dragged himself to his feet and stumbled towards the doorway and the darkness beyond.
He steadied himself against the frame, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dimness, trying to blink the increasing amounts of sweat away before staggering inside, moving from room to room, quickly scanning each, but finding nothing. Somehow he knew the horror still waited for him – somewhere, until he finally, almost crawling now, made his way back to the front door and the foot of the staircase that looked like a mountain. As he reached out to grasp the bannisters he saw the bloody handprints for the first time. They reminded him of the sort of prints young children made with paint, but the marks on the wall opposite had no such childish innocence as a long trail of smeared blood led his eyes back to the summit of the carpeted cliff.
The way ahead warped, constricting and elongating as his injuries threatened to overwhelm him, forcing him to his knees as his eyes tried desperately to close and surrender his body to blissful unconsciousness, but from some depths of humanity, a spirit to help his fellow man drove him on. It forced him to breathe in deeper than he’d ever done before and steady himself against all the pain, shock and blood loss as he literally began to crawl up the stairs one by one – each effort making him grimace and call out, begging for the strength to conquer the next step until somehow he found himself at the peak – on a hallway floor covered in thick, plush carpet where he collapsed, fighting to stay in the world.
If he stopped now he knew he’d at best pass out, so he pushed himself from the floor and sat with his back supported by the wall as he panted uncontrollably, fighting the nausea, his face ashen white, his lips turning grey as the blood flowed steadily from his body. He should have stopped and tried to shore up the wounds in his back, but he wasn’t thinking straight any more, trapped as he was in a spiralling nightmare where nothing looked real or made any sense. Summoning his last remaining strength, he got to his feet, hunched and buckled, but at least he was walking.
The first door he came to was only slightly open, with the terrible telltale bloody fingerprints smeared on its panels and frame. He took one deep breath, sending searing, burning pain through his back, but with it came a moment of clarity as he carefully pushed the door open and stepped inside. The air rushed from his body when he looked at the bed and saw the body of a girl no more than twelve years old lying face up on the bed, her unseeing eyes staring at the ceiling, arms crossed across her chest as if someone had posed her – tried to make her violent death appear peaceful. Only a parent would take such care after death. He thought of the man he’d beaten almost to the point of killing him. He was convinced that the life of the girl on the bed had been taken by her own father.
Although he already knew it was pointless, he staggered to the motionless figure and tried to find a pulse in her throat, but it was as still as a dead songbird. His eyes scanned her body, but could find no obvious sign of a wound other than reddening around her neck that would soon turn to widespread bruising. She’d been strangled. He swallowed deeply before stroking her brow and walking falteringly from the room, the blood from his hands mixing with the smears already on the walls as he tried to steady himself during the short walk to the next bedroom where the bloody handprints were heavier than anywhere else. He eased the door open and stepped inside. The approaching sirens wailed as if in mourning in the streets outside, but he couldn’t hear them.
The woman who he assumed was the mother of the family lay on a double bed soaked in blood, as were the tangled sheets twisted around her tortured and mangled body. He stepped closer and could see she’d been stabbed more times than he could count – in her chest, neck and face, her hands and arms too covered in slashes and stabs as she’d tried to save herself. He remembered the bloodstains on the door of the other room and realized she must have been killed first – the father, the madman, killing her to stop her trying to save the children. King looked into her face – her eyes still wide open in horror, her mouth frozen in a twisted scream as she’d realized she could neither save herself or her children.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he managed to say before giving in to his swelling nausea and vomiting on the floor. His stomach continued to retch even after its contents had been violently expelled, the dizziness pulling him to the floor where he rested for a few seconds before he tried to flee the room, half walking, half crawling, when the sight of something froze him in his tracks: a foot on the floor protruding from the other side of the bed.
Again he used the wall for support, sliding along it until the boy’s body came into view – lying on its side and, like his mother, heavily soiled by his own blood. Best he could tell the boy was fourteen or fifteen. King closed his eyes for a second and imagined the boy bursting into the room and seeing his own father slaying his mother – his bond with her so strong that he sacrificed his own young life to try and defend her from the wild animal his father had become, but it had all been in vain. The unarmed boy had had no chance. King opened his eyes, unable to comprehend what state of mind the man he’d beaten could have been in to butcher his own son and simply leave him dead on the floor of the bedroom as he went in search of his sisters. He fled from the room backwards – his eyes never leaving the boy on the floor by the side of his parents’ bed.
Back in the hallway he struggled past the family bathroom – breathing heavily with relief as he realized it held no more horrors. But there was still one room he’d yet to visit and now it beckoned him, and although in his subconscious he was aware of approaching sirens and the sound of urgent radio chatter, the only thing that existed in his world was the door to the room. So he staggered forward, his youth and strength keeping him on his feet, though even they were rapidly failing now.
He knew he had only seconds before he surrendered to the blackness, falling more than walking to reach the door and push it open, the lack of any blood marks giving him hope that his living nightmare would end in an empty room of normality, but as he fell inside he realized the cruelty of life and death had saved the worst till last – the eerie peacefulness somehow
