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spookyspaghettisundae · 1 year

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Ignoring the Whispers

Bright daylight painted the sky deep blue. Yellow police tape fluttered dreamily in the breeze.

Just another beautiful day in a haunted neighborhood.

FBI agent Derek Wells ducked underneath the crisscrossing lines of yellow tape, entering the abandoned home with cautious steps. Broken glass crunched underneath his shiny shoes. Agent Parker paused by the entrance, letting her gaze sweep over the surrounding neighborhood.

Enemies close, spoke whispers in her head. So very close.

“Earth to Special Agent Parker,” said Wells, peering back at her from inside.

She stared at the neighboring home across the street: idyllic, roomy, and expensive. Plenty of trees and green wherever she looked. A tall white fence shielded the property from prying eyes.

Everybody in the suburb of Manor Park Knoll lived on stacked bank accounts. A quiet street. Police must have responded quickly.

“Hello-oh?” asked Wells. “You zoning out again?”

Parker stared at a patch of asphalt on Central Avenue. A spot where she expected to see a shiny black sedan.

Instead, she only glimpsed an empty spot. People rarely parked on the curb in a neighborhood like this.

Yes, there. Look. The absence of something to come.

Listen…

“Seriously,” Wells said. “I’m starting to worry about you.”

The chugging of an engine, struggling to start. Listen. You will hear it soon.

She ignored the whispers and turned. Wells’ right hand twitched. The last time she had seen that twitch in his digits, he had drawn his gun. Shot her doppelganger on a truck stop parking lot.

His big brown eyes scanned her up and down.

Awaiting her next move.

He is no enemy.

“Yes,” she finally replied. “I am zoning out. Hearing whispers.”

Wells cocked his head and frowned.

“Still? What are they saying?” The frown transformed into an uneasy smirk. He emphasized his next words for comical effect. “Are they telling you to kill? You know, I’d like a little heads up if they are.”

Parker did not find it funny, nor did she laugh.

She shook her head and swooped underneath the police tape, following Wells inside.

“I’m trying not to listen to them, though they seem to be warning me of a presence that isn’t here. Or—not here yet.”

With that, she took a wide step to avoid the broken glass from a vase on the floor. Then realized there was no broken vase on the floor. She felt lightheaded. Like the first precursor of an oncoming headache.

Not here… not yet. Listen.

“Maybe you need to lay off the coffee,” Wells said.

He awaited no answer. Scouted ahead. Paused mere steps inside a roomy den, branching away from the hallway.

“Or maybe we need more of it,” he muttered.

Appalled at the crime scene clues unfolding before his eyes, he grimaced.

Blood splatters had dried all over the floor, furniture, walls, and ceiling.

A chunk of something that must have been dried human flesh still clung to a wall at the bottom of a brown streak, as if glued into place.

“This is where Agent Bennet was murdered,” Wells mumbled.

He took up position halfway into the room, shot glances back and forth until it felt right, then posed like a shooter, aiming with a finger-gun at one of the walls. Shooting an imaginary target.

“Bang. Bang. Bang,” he mumbled, voicing each pull of the invisible trigger. “Incident report says he was shot three times. Close range. Point-fifty Action Express.”

“The killer used a Desert Eagle?” Parker asked, examining other splatters.

The carnage painted in blood echoed multiple murders. More than one person had been slain in this den. Someone’s head had crashed into the TV screen, leaving a shattered electrical husk behind. White tape outlined two spots where investigators discovered adult bodies.

“They found no empty casings, so the killer either collected them before leaving, or used a revolver.”

Parker stared at the dried splatters, spellbound.

Making sure. Making sure they wouldn’t find it.

“Find what?” Wells asked.

“Huh?”

Parker blinked.

“You mumbled something about, ‘making sure they wouldn’t find it’ or something like that. That the whispers talking? Y'know, I mean it. I can go out and grab us more coffee if you need it.”

Parker swiveled and braced herself against the doorframe. Staving off a brief spell of dizziness.

This was bad. She felt a skeptical frown from Wells, his gaze drilling into the side of her head.

“I’m trying to ignore them, but they are becoming more… intrusive,” she breathed. Then… after a weary sigh…

Are you okay?

She answered, “I’m okay.”

Almost at the same time, he started asking, “Are you o—” The words died in his mouth. A different question arose yet stayed unvoiced.

“This is also where Betty Colliers was slain in the first killings. Where was Agent Murphy killed?” Parker asked instead.

Listen. You… listen.

“Yeah. The first killings involved no use of firearms. All committed with objects from around the house, all blunt force trauma.” He paused. Pointed. “The blood over yonder on that wall says a fourth shot was fired in the second killings, but it didn’t slay Agent Murphy. Not in here.”

Wells took the lead, guiding them back out of the den, through multiple doorways, across the hall, through a spacious dining room with overturned chairs, more doorways, stepping over two sets of human body outlines drawn onto the floor with white masking tape—one of a dead child, the other of Winston Colliers.

Then they wound up in a huge kitchen area.

Look. Look at the footsteps. At the doors.

Parker paid attention to the blood splatters; scanning the trails left behind. The pictures took a clearer shape before her inner eye, eerie afterimages—shadows—briefly illuminated by flashes from crime scene investigation cameras.

Ghosts.

Her own thought. Not a whisper. Sometimes, we find the ghosts and give them voices.

She paused by the white outlines on the hardwood floors. Something wielded with unnaturally great strength had beaten down Winston Colliers, then killed Adam Colliers, taking turns to bludgeon them to death.

They had begged while crawling away from their ruthless killer.

Days later, Agent Murphy had fled through the crime scene, leaving a bloody footprint every time his left shoe touched down—injured from being shot by the killer in the second incident. One such shoe print was right inside the white lines marking where Winston’s body was found.

Murphy had limped his way to the kitchen.

Wells gestured to the dried signs of carnage there. Agent Murphy’s brains had painted half of the stark white kitchen furnishings in a muddy brown stain. He had crashed into the island in the center of the kitchen space, where more splatters marked the area around a sink, some of the blood even having dried on a stray cutting board on the counter.

A knife was missing from a knife block.

Look.

Something was amiss—not the murder scene, but the tracks. Someone else’s shoe—a sneaker? The shoe had slipped somewhere in a puddle of Murphy’s blood. Just a bit—the tip of a sneaker. Distinct treads, carrying a specific imprint with their rubbery bottoms. A running shoe.

Trailing away from where the fight had ended, several wide steps away.

“Does something smell like rotten tomatoes to you, too?” Wells asked. He sniffed.

The glow of the refrigerator engulfed him as he opened it and checked inside. Glass bottles clinked.

More images flashed before Parker’s eye.

Listen.

“Just me?” Netting no response from Parker, Wells sighed. “Not coming from the fridge, anyway.”

Too engrossed in those mental images, Parker reconstructed the events. Still blurry.

Like a Polaroid photo slowly coming into focus as it developed.

The killer had disarmed Murphy. The streaks indicated how his service weapon had skidded across a pool of his own blood, stopping somewhere underneath another set of cupboards. Gone now, evidently, likely contained in evidence lock-up. Murphy had wielded the kitchen knife as a last-ditch effort.

“Knife is in lock-up,” Wells said, almost as if having read Parker’s mind. “Was covered in Murphy’s prints, Betty Colliers’ prints, and nobody else’s.”

Had she whispered out loud again?

He added, “Agent Murphy presumably survived a bullet to the head right there but took another three bullets to the sternum and heart. That’s why I’m thinking the killer collected his own bullet casings.”

Parker followed the sneaker print. Subtle. Pointed. Slender.

A running shoe. Brand unclear. It looked familiar—like she had seen it before, somehow.

She put her weight on her heel to hide where she was going.

“Seriously, what is that smell?” Wells asked, sniffing again.

With only the prints of eight steps to go by, Parker followed. She crept through the door to an adjacent laundry room, which led to a huge garage, currently housing a vintage sports car, a brand-new Honda, and a Ferrari. Everything smelled like bubblegum and cleaning detergents.

No more blood trails beyond the door to the garage. The concrete grounds of the garage looked pristine.

“You notice something the local P.D. missed?” Wells asked from behind her, peeking over her shoulder.

Look.

“All vehicles are accounted for, right?” Parker asked.

A door.

A cold breeze swept inside from the open garage doors. It carried the scent of motor oil and grit.

“Yeah. None stolen. Nothing taken from the house, or at least nothing anybody could find. This whole thing stinks of a mob-style hit job, given what little we know about Colliers and the witness protection program he was in. Makes the second set of murders way weirder, though. Unless…”

Parker studied the door, connecting the laundry room to the garage.

“Unless they knew something about the program,” Wells finished his thought.

The door… a door…

“Whispers, again?” he asked.

Parker shook her head.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Look, I know we’ve had a serious brush with the unnatural already—well, twice, counting what you described from the cafe’s backrooms—but I am concerned that some part of your experiences may be, well—”

“Special Agent Wells,” Parker said. Sharply. “You overstepped your boundaries when you read my file. But I’m not going to hold that against you. Instead, I ask you. Did you find any indication of mental disorders in my psych eval? Or was there something else you read in there—about my childhood diagnoses—that makes you question my mental stability?”

“No.” He rolled his shoulders with a sigh, venting some tension.

“Know this, then. I cannot tell where my gut instinct ends, and these whispers begin. But if it’s any consolation, I’m trying to ignore them.”

“Okay—okay. Look, I’m sorry I said anything. I’m gonna take a leap of faith with you and take your word for it. We’re partners on this case, and if I can’t trust you, I can only trust myself. Two brains are better than one, after all, and I got a sinking suspicion that we need to be watching each other’s backs on this.”

“Special Agent Wells, please, do not relax. I’m also asking you to stay alert. My experience with the occult may be limited, but I know enough to be concerned. There is a distinct possibility that someone or something is invading my mind and—at best—trying to influence me, or, at worst—attempting to assume complete control over me. If the worst comes to pass, you must be ready to neutralize me.”

His entire body turned rigid with a new wave of overwhelming tension.

Wells glared at her. Shook his head.

“Neutralize? Wow. Y'know, if you there was another clockwork robot masquerading as the real Agent Parker, I wouldn’t be able to tell you apart now.”

As always, Parker avoided eye contact with him. Now, she turned her back on him entirely.

She said, “Let’s just stay focused. Focus on the job.”

Icy. Cold.

That hurt…

A wave of that frosty air hit Wells, whose voice shuddered from her reply. He shifted his weight uncomfortably and reached out. His hand hovered behind her shoulder, stopping short of resting there.

“Hey. Ugh. I’m sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Quinn, I’m sorry.”

“Agent Parker, please,” she muttered, focusing on the door between the laundry room and garage. “We’re not that close, so let’s at least try to maintain some level of professionalism.”

The heat of his hand withdrew. She pushed and pulled the door back and forth. The hinges did not squeak. Silent in every motion.

You… listen…

And the tracks ended there. Right at the door.

A door.

“No eyewitness accounts of any unidentified vehicles driving off?” she asked.

It took Wells a while to answer. Parker found him staring into a laundry hamper, lost in thought. Then he slapped the lid shut on the hamper and cracked out a quick reply.

“None. A neighbor two doors down heard every shot, called local P.D. immediately. Didn’t see anybody leaving the premises.”

Parker brushed past him, stopping to peer out the kitchen windows. A lush green backyard sprawled there, lined with trees and thick underbrush. The only thing that stood out was an expensive-looking playground set, barely used.

She peeled her attention from the garish yellow and red and blue colors of the plastic slide and dome-shaped jungle gym.

“I wonder,” she murmured. “What if the killer never left?”

Wells blinked.

Parker absently pointed at the door to the dining room. “How did the first responders discover the Colliers in the first place? What did the investigators conclude? Before Agent Bennet and Murphy died here, that is.”

Wells’ eyes widened. He snapped his fingers and shook a fist, following her train of thought. “Coroner’s report said Betty Colliers was stuffed with parts of a grandfather clock—”

“Which, knowing what we know now, means Winston’s wife was not Betty Colliers, but a clockwork doppelganger.”

Both agents spoke simultaneously.

“Where’s the real Betty Colliers?”

Parker’s eyes flashed with excitement. “They must have missed something.”

Beware. Doors.

The rising volume of Wells’ voice mirrored her growing enthusiasm until abruptly stopping. “Maybe there's—aw shit—”

He unholstered his gun in a flash. Tapped its side twice with an index finger. He used no words. But his eyes spoke volumes of their own, saying, “Eyes peeled. Killer might be here.”

Parker returned a curt nod and drew her pistol.

With pounding hearts and stances as stiff as taut steel wire, they shuffled quietly through the small mansion. Pointing their firearms through doorways, inching along walls, only to pop out around corners, scanning each nook and cranny of every room.

Scouring the entire building from bottom to top, they snuck their way upstairs after scouting the ground floor, searching everywhere. Opening closets. Peering into bathrooms. Never blinking. Cautious at every doorway they crossed.

Breathless minutes later, they paused on their way back through the second story hallway.

“There’s a room missing,” Wells hissed. “Floor plan don’t add up, no walk-in closets between the bedrooms to account for it.”

“Could be electrical or plumbing,” Parker whispered.

He shook his head. Jutted his chin out at a tall cabinet in the hall.

She followed his gaze. Noticed what he was hinting at.

A spot on the floor. Scuffed marks on the hardwood. Subtle. Someone had moved the closet repeatedly.

Exchanging a glance, they approached the cabinet with silent steps. The only thumping came from their beating hearts, the rushing blood in their ears. Peeking into the crack between the back of the cabinet and the wall from both sides.

A door. Hidden right behind it.

Wordlessly, they moved in sync. Quickly cooperating to move the towering piece of furniture. Too heavy to lift, they ended up dragging it. The wood groaned and moaned underneath its massive weight.

If anybody had been hiding in that hidden room still, they knew. Now they knew someone had found it. Then again, if anybody had been hiding in there, they couldn’t have moved the cabinet in front of the door.

Such thoughts circled the minds of both FBI agents, a conversation left unspoken. They paused by the door, flanking it left and right. After a nod in agreement with one another, Parker pushed it open, and they both aimed their guns inside. The door slammed against a wall, causing glass panes in wooden panels to shudder and rattle.

Darkness. Motes of dust danced in the natural light pouring in.

Plastic clicked in Parker’s hand—her flashlight switched on, with which she shone a bright cone of light inside.

Glass display cases and shiny objects within them reflected the illumination. Shelves, dressers, more furniture; all stacked and lined with books and countless objects. A small museum.

It smelled of dust.

And blood. And death. A woman’s body lay in the far back of the narrow chamber. Motionless.

Wells pawed around for a light switch and found purchase. A warm chandelier on the ceiling flickered to life, casting a warm glow from a dozen tiny bulbs.

Both agents flinched as they finally got a good look at the contents of this room. It resembled nothing else throughout the abandoned home.

Though a creepy crime scene overall and the murders notwithstanding, everything else in the house looked clean. Well-organized. Unpersonal. Big windows, lots of light. Few family photos, all of them sporting feeble smiles, and few other items to tell any personal stories about the family of four who once inhabited it.

This room, on the other hand?

A door.

This room painted a drastically different picture.

A window.

Plates on display in a glass cabinet featured swastikas, painted in black and gilded with the finest of brushes, crafted by skillful hands. An old black military uniform dressed a mannequin, crowned by a red-and-white-and-black swastika flag hanging above it on the wall. Helmets, officer hats, and firearms that looked like relics from World War II had been neatly arranged in another vitrine.

An entire private museum of items, all taken straight out of Nazi Germany.

“Good lord,” Wells whispered.

Though no threats responded, the two agents snuck inside, carefully scanning every corner, aiming down the sights of their guns as they paced through the room.

Parker holstered her pistol.

Wells cringed, recoiling at the smell rising from the dead body. Parker, on the other hand, crouched right beside it. She focused her flashlight on the corpse’s head.

It looked like a mixture of mashed potatoes, jam, and paste. It reeked faintly of decaying cabbage and rotten meat.

Wells said, “Well, crap. Looks like we found the real Betty Colliers.”

“Blunt force trauma to her parietal cranium,” Parker commented. “Multiple blows, from the looks of it. One took her down, the rest finished her off. Great strength behind every strike, suggesting a male suspect—”

“Or a doppelganger. That doppelganger of yours was freakishly strong,” Wells interrupted her. He holstered his firearm as well, then pointed to a black phone on a small dresser near the body. “Check it out. Blood sprayed on nearby furniture, but no blood on the phone. I’m no gambling man, but I bet she was using that when the killer brained her.”

Parker nodded and rose to full height again, casting another glance in the round. The flashlight clicked between her fingers, then disappeared in her pocket.

She sighed.

“We can only speculate what happened here. Actually, I feel like we now know even less than before.”

Wells grimaced as he studied the collection of Nazi paraphernalia. Cutlery, jewelry, clothing articles, notebooks, pamphlets, maps—all marked with Nazi swastikas, symbols of the Black Sun, Schutzstaffel ornaments, items all clearly hailing from darker days in history. A series of black and white photographs told an indecipherable tale.

While he tried to keep his gaze away from the corpse, he failed to hide his disgust at the rest of their current environment.

“What’s your theory?” he asked her. He clenched his jaw.

She shrugged. “Clockwork doppelganger of Betty Colliers invades the Colliers home, sent by the same people who sent my doppelganger after us. The clockwork murders the entire family. Then, someone kills the doppelganger? Or it self-destructs in the living room once its job is done—we don’t really know how they operate. Or…”

Doors. Windows. All alike. Passageways. Pathways.

Parker sensed the precursors of a migraine. She pinched and rubbed the bridge of her nose.

Listen.

“Or?” asked Wells.

Look. You are being watched.

“Let’s say there’s another actor in this scene, someone we’re not considering. A Mister X if you will. Mister X shows up last. Maybe Betty Colliers survives—manages to kill her doppelganger, like you got mine—then Mister X kills Betty—right here.”

Parker pointed at the phone on the table.

“Okay, so, Mister X closes up this room and evades arrest somehow. Local police and the CSU comb this place—completely miss this room. Real Betty is still rotting in here even after they clear out,” Wells said.

Parker continued theorizing, “Then Agent Murphy and Bennet show up, investigate the crime scene the day after. Mister X ambushes and kills them both. Disappears from the premises without a trace.”

No. There is a trace. The shoeprint. Parker’s own thoughts? Or the whispers?

The door. The whispers. Some of it.

Parker lost her trail of thought.

Wells grunted and crossed his arms. “Still doesn’t explain the disappearing trick. I was kind of expecting one of those secret passageways, you know, like in those old murder mystery flicks? And… what about all this crap?”

Parker followed his gesture. She was uninterested in the Nazi collection. It inflicted deep discomfort and only added a puzzle piece she couldn’t attach to any others. At least not yet.

“Impossible to say if there was any connection. Until we figure out why Colliers was in a witness protection program, well, I’m not sure we have any leads whatsoever.”

“So, someone was either protecting a bona fide Nazi, or someone in the Colliers family had a real unhealthy obsession with this shit,” Wells muttered.

You are being watched. The door.

Window.

Parker looked around.

Look.

The secret room was windowless. The only natural light entered from the single only door they had stepped through.

Wells cringed as he caught another glimpse of Betty’s mashed skull. He groaned in disgust.

Parker stepped outside. When she peered outside the window at the end of the hallway, across a trimmed green lawn, past idyllic row of trees—

A shiny black sedan. Sitting on the curb. Where she had expected it to be. Where it did not belong.

It hadn’t been there before.

You are being watched.

Parker’s sharp eyesight caught a figure fidgeting behind the steering wheel: a man dressed in a black leather jacket.

“Parker?” asked Wells. A million miles away. A distant voice, slicing through the haze of Parker’s concentration. “Check this out…”

Parker thumbed the curtains to the side, allowing her to stare through the second-story window. At the man in a black leather jacket, sitting inside the sedan.

A man in black. Like the man Steven had described in his letter to her. The man looking for the book.

It had to be.

She bolted. Ran. Her footsteps thumped down the stairs, leaping several steps at a time. Wells shouted something in surprise behind her, though she was now deaf to the world, focused blindly on a single task.

To catch this mystery man in black.

Their only living lead. A connection, a source of answers.

Perhaps their Mister X.

Dark bags underlined the eyes of the man in black—eyes going so wide she could see the white in them as his eyebrows shot high. He ducked behind the dashboard. The vehicle’s engine chugged.

And chugged.

Parker cut across the ridiculously large front lawn.

A hand slapped the shoulder of the man in black—a slender, feminine hand. A hand that gripped with fierceness. Shaking his shoulder.

He was trying to start the car with a pair of exposed wires from the ignition, rather than with a key. The car repeatedly failed to start. Chugging and choking and dying.

Only a few steps away, the man in black ripped his door open and fled across the street. A split-second later, a woman dressed in a brown tracksuit ripped open a backseat door and chased after him.

Wells shouted again—from far behind Parker—but she was not going to slow her sprint.

The man in black’s attire surprised Parker, because he was wearing jeans crudely clipped above the knee with scissors, exposing pasty white thighs and calves. He tripped and stumbled while he ran away, enabling the woman in brown to run ahead of him.

They fled across the street. Parker chased.

The woman in brown yelled at the man in black to hurry. They all charged towards the house on the other side of the street. The tall white fence. The woman in brown practically flew over the fence like a trained acrobat, disappearing on the other side.

The man in black scrambled, barely making it over in time. Parker gained ground on him, just two steps short of grabbing his ankle, soon leaping up, hoisting herself over, and landing on the other side with a grunt, only steps away. A barbecue grill tumbled onto the ground between them, shoved by the man in black, and a dog barked aggressively behind another side of the fences.

The chase continued, with only the man in black in sight.

“Stop!” Parker shouted. She no longer ran but jogged and drew her gun to aim.

The man in black raised his hands and slowed down.

Beware—

Glass shattered. Out of nowhere, two slender hands had seized Parker by the shoulders. She stumbled and saw stars. Her face and forehead burned brightly, registering a heavy blow with delay. The woman in brown had reached through the window and smashed Parker’s skull into solid wood.

The dog behind the fence barked even louder. The man in black was already scrambling to scale the next fence at the far end of the backyard, having rounded a wide blue swimming pool.

Wells no longer shouted, but his footsteps neared, slapping against pavement. Parker staggered about till she regained her bearings. The woman in brown had vanished into the darkness of the home and Parker dithered on who of the two to chase.

The man in black struck her as… kind of an idiot. He slipped and fell over the next fence, and the dog’s barking turning into angry animal growls. The man in black stammered out swear words between what sounded like someone pleading with a “good doggie”.

Parker relied on Wells to catch up to the man in black and chose to chase the faster suspect: she jumped through the window. She had misjudged the distance and tripped over the back of a wide sofa, tumbling over cushions, and crashing sideways into a low glass coffee table.

Sharp pain flared up across her lower back.

A sneaker nearly stomped on her face, which Parker narrowly dodged by rolling away. Glass crunched, fabric swished, Parker took a kick to the side which knocked the wind out of her lungs. Another kick sent her service pistol flying from her hand, skidding into shadows underneath another sofa partition.

She caught the woman’s leg before a third kick could connect and tugged with all her might. More glass shattered as her assailant took a fall to join her on the floor, where they grappled amidst a sea of broken shards. They gripped and slapped and punched and rolled over each other in a growing, violent struggle.

Warm and sticky fluid blinded Parker on one eye, and she caught the woman in brown in a reverse chokehold.

A swift elbow to the gut broke the headlock. The woman wriggled out of her grasp and elbowed her again to the tune of a pained gasp. They both slipped twice as they struggled to get back up on their feet, evading each other’s ensuing series of lunging punches.

Door.

Long, straight, raven-black hair, now frazzled, framed the symmetrical face of the woman in the brown tracksuit. Murder glinted in her steely blue eyes, studying Parker’s movements closely as they circled around each other for painfully long seconds. Long enough for every sharp sensation of pain to catch up and cloud the FBI agent’s senses. Countless tiny cuts and bruises already littered her body.

Beware. Door.

Blinking. A blink was all it took. She took Parker by surprise—suddenly jumping into the next room. Parker lunged to chase after her. Then saw another explosion of stars.

Someone had struck her on the back of her neck, sending her face first into the door’s frame.

Somehow, the woman in brown had reappeared behind her. Out of thin air.

Fingers curled into Parker’s short hair, yanked back. Sent her crashing against the edge of the dining room table. She kicked the woman in the stomach, not mustering enough strength to keep her at bay. They immediately wrestled again—the woman granted Parker another explosion of stars by headbutting her. Where they crashed, she sat on top of Parker with her full weight, pinning her down.

The woman in brown showed a set of perfect white teeth as she grinned, but something insidious and malevolent flashed in her eyes.

Parker reacted just in time. Gripped the woman’s wrists before she could sink her thumbs into Parker’s eyeballs. Her grip trembled under the strain, vying for the upper hand, and failing—sharp thumbnails hovering dangerously close, a hair’s breadth away from scraping her eyes.

The FBI agent thrashed once, then twice, then a final time with previously untapped reserves of force, landing a knee in her opponent’s groin. Those thumbs missed eyes, leaving a burning sensation where one nail scratched her cheek. A dining table chair clattered and flew away from their continued wrestling. The women flipped over one another, and the woman in the tracksuit hit her head against the doorframe, rolling right back into the living room to kip up.

They both frantically got back up, but the woman in the tracksuit dove through the next doorframe.

Door. Left.

A knee connected to Parker’s belly, throwing her into a violent coughing fit as she reeled, failing to grab hold of the nearby table, and collapsing onto her knees. Good bad luck. A chair exploded into cheap plywood and a shower of splinters where a sneaker crashed down, narrowly missing her head.

Door.

The woman in the track suit kept appearing elsewhere. In the wrong places.

Whenever Parker blinked—she had changed positions. Defying physics.

Door!

More stars—a vase shattered over the back of Parker’s head.

Doorways. Windows.

It finally clicked. Parker blindly smashed thin air behind her with her elbow—thin air it was not, and her elbow connected. The woman’s nose cracked behind her, provoking choking and gasping as she stumbled away from Parker through another doorway.

Parker dove backwards into the dining room table, awkwardly sliding over its top to gain distance, and tearing down the tablecloth with her where she landed on the other side.

It had finally clicked.

Doors—whenever you aren’t looking. Whenever you blink.

She had been trapped between a corner of two open doorways, connecting the living room, dining room, and a hallway. The woman in the brown tracksuit kept disappearing through one and reappearing behind the other.

But the architecture made no sense. Too many walls to separate them. Too much space.

Through the door, the woman in brown flashed Parker another crazed, sadistic smile. She picked up a leg from the broken chair, weighing it like a club and splaying her fingers around it before tightening her grip.

“I guess you have some trick of your own up your sleeve?” said the woman in brown. Her voice was melodical.

Evil.

Sticky warmth trickled down Parker’s nape, which she absently wiped.

“No matter. I’m Karma, and this is your lucky day. I’m supposed to take you alive.”

“Freeze!”

A silhouette had entered the opposite end of the living room. Wells stood there, aiming down his gun’s sights at Karma. He gritted his teeth, visibly unwilling to pull the trigger as Parker stood nearby. Too risky to take a shot.

Karma hissed at him like a snake. Then ran right through the nearest doorframe.

Door.

Wells was standing next to another one in the den, adjacent to the hall.

“Door!”

Parker’s cry had warned him too late.

The confusion on his face soon gave way to explosive pain—Karma had crossed the distance of twenty steps in a split second, popping in one passageway and hurtling out of the nearest doorway at Wells, kicking him sideways in his ribs. He tripped over the broken coffee table and crashed into the couch.

Parker flipped the dinner table to quickly gain ground, took a running start, slid across the floor, then extended an arm. She reached underneath the other sofa partition to retrieve her gun, accidentally pushing it farther away.

Deafening thunderclaps resounded from two shots. Wells had fired at Karma, though every bullet missed. Gone through the doorway. Instead, Karma’s hands reached through the broken window behind Wells, yanking him backwards, and wrestling with him to pull him into the knife-like shards of glass still jutting out of the window frame.

Doors.

He wheezed, “What the—”

“Nobody needs you, though,” Karma hissed at Wells.

Wells started screaming once glass broke skin and his blood painted a shard crimson. Karma tried to saw his flesh against the jagged edge.

He fired shots blindly behind him, missing twice. Parker finally seized her own gun. She whipped it up. Steadied her own aim.

Breathe. Focus. Release.

Training kicked in. Parker shot at Karma, but the woman ducked behind the window in time, releasing Wells. He flopped away from the frame, gripping his bleeding neck.

Door. Left.

Parker shot blindly to her left without thinking.

Karma screamed in pain. The shot hadn’t hit, but tiny splinters of wood from the nearby doorframe were sticking out of her face.

“Fuck! How—fuck you!”

Door!

Parker swiveled—a split second too late—Karma had disappeared and grabbed her from behind again, locking her gun arm and neck in a merciless chokehold.

Dragging her. Away from Wells, who clutched his neck, stumbling forward while he haphazardly aimed at them one-handed, unable to take a clean shot without risking Parker’s life.

Doors…

A blink.

Just in a blink.

The world had changed dramatically around Parker. The trashed living space of the expensive home had been replaced by the abandoned expensive home of the Colliers across the street. Karma dragged Parker underneath yellow police tape, closing in on two sets of white tape outlines on the floor, near dried blood splatters, while Parker started thrashing to break free—

Through clenched teeth, Karma sneered at her, whispered in her ear, “You’re going wherever I wa—”

Parker kicked down and up with greater force—managing to slip her arm free from the iron vice of Karma’s grasp. The pistol’s muzzle slammed down into sneakered toes, eliciting a shout. Parker snapped the trigger.

Her ears were ringing after the bright flash, allowing only the faintest echoes of Karma’s shuddering gasp to pierce her deafened hearing.

Finally, Karma let go, stumbling through the next doorway. She limped. Parker dropped backwards. In an upside-down world, she aimed the gun at Karma and discharged it multiple times, losing count in the panic, but the woman in the brown tracksuit had already limped out of sight, bullets merely shredding wood.

A groan. Pained. Shuffling footsteps, one of them dragging behind the other.

Door. Right.

Parker didn’t even bother looking where she shot—right—instead pulling the trigger blindly.

Karma shrieked, dropping to one knee after being shot in her leg.

“How the fuck—you bitch!” She stumbled backwards through another doorway and disappeared.

Parker could not have explained even if she tried. The whispers. Acting on raw instinct.

You… listen…

Breathing. Karma was still there. Somewhere. Lurking. Just beyond the doorways. Somewhere else in the Colliers house.

Wells? Probably still in the home across the street. Maybe he had heard her shots.

Parker scrambled to her feet, crouching, and hectically pointing her gun, swiveling, and pivoting to cycle her aim between different doorways and windows. Heart pounding with terror, threatening to beat its way out of her chest.

Now doubly aware of every corner.

Eyes burning as she strained not to blink.

Shuffling, limping. Karma was somewhere in the house. Still there.

Plotting her next move.

Through the doorways, Karma spoke. Her voice came from different locations simultaneously. All the sadistic melody in her voice had died.

All replaced by malice. Seething rage. “You could stop resisting. Make things easy on yourself—just come with me.”

Parker steadied her breathing. Ready to fire blindly in any direction she wasn’t looking.

Listening for a warning.

Listening for a whisper.

The shuffling stopped.

The fresh, bloody shoe print—the foot of Karma’s she had shot—it had left the same print as the ones disappearing through the laundry room door.

This… this was her.

Karma. Mister X. The killer.

Doors. Left.

Parker gasped, swiveled, aiming through every nearby frame.

Right.

“I’m tempted to take you up on your offer,” Parker hissed through clenched teeth. Listening intently for a response.

Careful.

Heavy breathing. Her own. Only her own.

Karma had gone silent.

Parker added, “If it means you stop doing whatever you’re doing, I’ll come with you.”

No! Don’t.

Parker twitched, aiming through another doorway. No sight of Karma.

Karma whispered through the doorways. “Oh, really? I was hoping you’d say no. 'Cause I really, really, really just wanna hurt you now,” whispered Karma. “You only need to be alive and able to talk. Not sure the Way King needs you with legs.”

The earth quaked. Rumbled. Windowpanes rattled in their frames.

Parker inched back against a wall, gaze darting back and forth between three doorways. The nearest window.

“Eye for an eye, leg for a leg. Actually, let’s start with your toes and work our way up. I’m thinking… acid. Something to just eat up all the flesh and bone.”

Don’t blink.

Furious whispers everywhere, all of them insidious.

Her attacks could come from anywhere.

Don't… blink…

But Parker had to blink. Her eyes burned. She blinked.

Left.

Parker ducked. Wood clattered and exploded—a chair shattered against the nearby dresser instead of smashing into Parker’s head. She fired blind shots to her left mid-spin, splitting more wood from a doorframe.

“Fucking—how do you keep doing that? Are you psychic?”

“You first,” Parker breathed between labored breaths. “I love learning new things.”

Behind you.

Parker swiveled again and shot Karma in the belly before she could lance a long metal rod—what looked like it had come from a broken standing lamp—right through Parker’s chest.

Instead, the metal rod clattered uselessly on the floor. Karma pawed at the injury, staring at her own blood on her fingers in disbelief. The gunshot wound wept blood in gushing bursts.

“F-fuck this,” Karma stammered, clenching her jaw, and sneering at Parker. “You absolute bitch, I love this suit.”

She shambled backwards through the doorway and disappeared after another blink of Parker’s eyes.

Every time Parker pulled the trigger, the weapon clicked without effect. The cacophony of previous shots was still ringing in her ears. She cringed from the afterimages of every blinding flash, blinking the stars and searing sensations away.

Between the rushing of her blood, the ringing, and her heavy breathing, Parker may as well have turned deaf to the world around her.

Gone…

Still, Parker swiveled, crouching, just moments shy of giving up and curling up into a fetal position on the floor. She kept shifting her aim to keep pointing the gun at different doorways.

Despite the slide of her semi-automatic pistol having long locked into a stopped position. Its magazine empty.

Breathing.

Gone.

Breathe. Focus. Release.

Her training. Internal voices melting into one.

Where did instinct end? Where did the whispers begin?

“Woah! Easy! It’s me,” Wells exclaimed, hands raised, his service pistol held sideways.

He was missing his jacket. The right sleeve of his shirt had been torn off, haphazardly wrapped around his neck. Dark red soaked the blue fabric on one side.

Parker lifted her empty gun, making sure not to point it at Wells while he ripped away the yellow police tape to barge back inside the Colliers home.

He switched into a ready stance with his firearm, then proceeded to scout the environs, back turned to Parker.

“She’s gone,” she breathed. She slumped against the wall, sliding into a sitting position.

Everything hurt. Her lower back, shoulders, neck. Her vision blurred after every blink.

“Did she—did she just teleport? Can that lady just teleport?” Wells asked. Much like his sanity, his voice cracked midway. “Is this just the new normal now?”

“What about the other suspect? The guy in the jeans-shorts?” Parker asked.

Wells shook his head.

Her hands trembled while she reloaded her pistol with a spare magazine. The slide clicked back into place. “Crap.”

“Sorry. Had to make a judgment call. I am deathly afraid of dogs.”

“No, no need to apologize. We just—our only two leads just got away,” Parker said, exhaling sharply.

Gone.

Wells emitted a clipped laugh.

“Well, not exactly. Before you hightailed it out of this house, I used the redial on that fancy new phone in the Nazi’s hobby room.” The smirk on his face faded, making space for a grimmer expression. “You’re not going to like what it connected to.”

Parker’s brow furrowed.

“What?”

Wells rolled his jaw. Set it. He winced as he absently touched the makeshift bandage around his neck. Finally, he holstered his gun after more seconds of quiet between them.

Police sirens howled in the distance.

“I mean, shit. I’m not even sure this is a lead. It’s more like… this—this is bad, Quinn.”

Parker stood up straight.

“Parker, still,” she breathed.

He scoffed past a semblance of a smile.

“The re-dial connected to our FBI headquarters in Richmond.”

The blood drained from her face. She had suspected it. The reality of it hit far worse than Karma’s multiple blows to her head.

“We’re on our own,” Wells grumbled. “We need to get outta here, pronto.”

Listen…

Emergency sirens.

Steadily nearing.

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