Chapter 7
"Leave my house, or I will loose my dogs on you."
"It's just a glass of water, friend," I smiled at the hostile man.
"You can get a lemonade from over there," the skinny man pointed across the street to where a child had set up a stall reading 'lemonade' in bold, bright letters.
"Ah, yes," I said, but at least see how the address is, I added in my mind, planning to come back and visit the man anytime, with the police on my shoulders, of course. Just as I was stepping beside the dogs, the man called out to me.
"Come back."
"Yes, friend?" I turned around and plastered a fake smile on my face.
"I feel bad for you. I don't think you might make it across the street. Come inside. I've got some cold water in the fridge. Or would you like some beer instead?"
"Anything would be fine, friend," I replied as I climbed up the porch steps again.
The inside of the house was rather deplorable. There was very sparse furniture in the living room, save for the threadbare and worn-out couch, and one armchair that looked like it had seen better days.
The coffee table that sat in the middle and the fireplace were so worn out and old that they were simply brown. I grimaced as he took a seat on the couch where I thought was the cleanest spot.
"Just a moment," the man said as he retreated into the kitchen.
There were no pictures on the walls, no trinkets. There was nothing else that would tie a living human being to the house, I concluded as I looked around.
"What do you want?" the man suddenly asked.
"Where is my water?" I asked back at the man, who was glaring at me with so much hate in his eyes it could have melted something.
Instead of a glass of water, the man held a gun pointed at me, with the barrel facing me.
"I simply want a glass of cold water. You could have even offered me beer," I pointed at the man.
"If you don't tell me who you are now, I'm going to fill your head with a bullet. Are you with the police?"
"I'm not a police officer. If anything, I hate that bunch. I simply want a cold drink."
" If you are lying to me, I will kill you this instant."
"I'm not lying to you. I'm not a police officer, neither am I looking for anything but hospitality, and if this is how you treat your guests…"
"Stand up and lean against the wall. Take off your shirt. Quickly!" the man yelled when I made no movement.
I stood up, feeling threatened, and moved to the wall just as the man said. I removed my shirt and threw it back towards the man, suddenly remembering that the portrait was in the shirt pocket.
While it might have been slightly smudged by sweat, it would be very easy to recognize that the man was looking at himself.
"Don't move!" the man ordered at him.
But I moved slightly so I could see what the man was doing. Suddenly, there was a gunshot, and the bullet made contact with the wall beside my cheek, sending splinters of wood all over my face.
"That's why I told you not to move. If you move again, the bullet would hit the back of your head, you hear me!?"
"I hear you," I said, hoping to ease the man.
"Why is there a portrait of me in your pocket? Who are you? What are—"
"Since you found that one, I might as well tell you who I am," I turned around and looked at the man.
"Don't move!" The man had a nervous look on his face as opposed to the slide confidence he had earlier.
"Well, we had a bit of information. You simply matched the description of someone, and I was here to check it out. There's no need to be so hostile. You haven't committed any crime yet." The man didn't look convinced.
"You wouldn't want to kill a senior police officer now, would you? That would definitely put a target on your back. You'll be hunted down forever as a cop killer."
"Move," the man suddenly said as he cocked his gun towards me and nodded me in the direction of the kitchen.
"Now, friend, let's be reasonable."
"Move, I say, or I will shoot you," the man insisted.
I didn't understand why the man was leading me through the kitchen. All I could do was blindly be led. The man pushed me until he reached a door at the back of the kitchen that, once it was open, had a staircase leading downwards towards a basement.
"Don't stop," the man said as he continued to push me down the stairs. "When you get there, there is a cellar," the man directed.
I reached the bottom of the staircase, but it was so dark I had to pull out the lighter from my pocket. I moved until I reached what was the cellar. Now, with a bit of light, I was able to see my surroundings. It looked like a typical cellar with typical things lined up on the walls.
There was nothing special about this one, I thought to myself. What was the next step? Why did the individual lead me, unforced, down there? I had too many questions, but I doubted the man at the top of the stairs could answer.
I moved deeper into the cellar with one thing on my mind: I needed to stay alive and find a way to get this strange information to Jack. I had one day left, after all, before Jack would make a move to arrest an innocent man.
But why did the man tell him to come down only to leave him there? I asked himself for the umpteenth time.
I continued to walk into the cellar until I suddenly stopped and started to look for preventive measures. I began to search the boxes and found what was a dumbbell and a number of other knickknacks that proved to be heavy.
"I don't know, would be a good weapon," I thought to myself as I lifted it out from the box and gave it a swing. In the proper cover of darkness, if I swung it at someone's head, it would guarantee a concussion, leading to my escape.
I looked up till I saw a small light bulb on the ceiling and smashed it. While the action made a sound, I didn't want to chance that the strange man would see me and then shoot.
Darkness meant blindness for him, I thought to myself. I moved the boxes until I had made something that seemed like a mini-fort. I set myself behind it and waited for the strange man to come down into the cellar so I could launch an offense.
I waited for 10 minutes and heard no movement. Bored, I began to look around the now dark space. Something caught my eyes. It was a small strip of light peeking through the wooden boards that served as the wall of the cellar.
Feeling hopeful and curious, I began to trace the light until I found some slightly larger spots. Some areas were larger than the others, some were large enough for me to fit my finger through, while others were simply just a small slit of light.
Still, I was hopeful that I would escape from this strange ordeal. I continued to fiddle around with the cracks and light until my hand suddenly reached a protrusion. I pushed it, and suddenly I had a Eureka moment.
It was a secret door! I almost announced out loud.
Why would there be a secret door in a cellar? I thought to myself, but I didn't have time to respond.
I began to finagle around with other protrusions, turning and twisting them, and for a moment that seemed like nothing, I could do to open the door, I didn't stop playing around with it desperately.
Finally, I twisted it and pushed it in a rapid motion, and then the cellar was filled with a clack sound as though a door had been unlocked. And with a puff of steam, a huge section of the cellar lifted off from the wall and light flooded into the room, momentarily blinding me.
After I had gotten my vision back, I pulled open the door and was greeted with cold.
It's a freezer, I thought to myself. Who needs a freezer this big?
Suddenly, at the back of I mind, I began to feel an affording sensation.
Why would anyone have a freezer hidden in a cellar in his house? I didn't want to think of the possibilities, but the brightness of the room was enough for me to tell.
Instead of a conventional freezer, it looked as though it was a studio albeit several degrees below freezing point. On the walls were many diagrams relating to the human body.
Shelves were also positioned periodically here and there that had jars filled with human parts such as heads, hands, and even hearts.
Aside from the room being strange in itself, why would anyone have a morgue and a miniature forensics lab hidden underneath his house?
Upon further inspection into the room, which seemed larger than what I had initially thought, hidden behind the cabinets was what was a glass wall with compartments.
The compartments looked as though they were my height and a bit taller in some areas. I worked deeper into the freezer room just as the cold was getting more intense.
My teeth began to clack furiously, and my fingers were already getting numb by the second. I moved closer to the compartments.
Using the handle, I pulled the compartment door open, and what I saw left me utterly shocked. Inside the compartment was a body standing upright with its eyes closed.
With wide eyes, I looked around at the several other compartments that lined the walls of the entire freezer, with my teeth making a more furious sound. I counted nothing less than 20 of those compartments.
"20 compartments," I said with icy puffs coming out of my mouth. By this time, I was already feeling as though my beard was freezing.
"20 bodies," I said to myself, unable to bear the cold. I began to walk towards the door of the freezer, back into the heat of the cellar.
I stood there until I began to feel the blood rushing back into my fingers as I tried to absorb the overload of information my eyes just took in. Why would anyone be keeping bodies like that?
I asked myself, but just as I was about to think of an answer, I began to hear clacking sounds from inside the freezer. The sound of something dragging. A chair, perhaps, I remembered. For there was nothing else inside the freezer except for dead bodies, I suddenly realized.
I stood there for a moment, processing the chilling realization of what I had just discovered. My mind raced with questions, each more disturbing than the last.
Who was the person responsible for these bodies? What was their motive? And why were they hidden away in a secret freezer?
I sat out in the cellar until my fingers began to feel warm with the blood within. Granted, the chill from the freezer was flowing out into the cellar, it was still much warmer.
More questions began to form in my mind. Who killed them? Was this part of some exper–
Crash! I turned my head in the direction of the freezer where the sound came from. The crash was followed by another screeching sound as though nails were scratching a chalk board causing me to wince.
Wait! I screamed in my mind. I closed the canister. No one was in there except dead people. So what was that? I slowly stood up and walked back into the frosty room with my heart thundering in my ears.
Sitting on the chair at the table, was the dead man I saw in the canister!