“That the kid? Scrawny one with the shaggy hair, looks like he just came outside for the first time in weeks?”
“Yeah, I think so. Pretty sure that’s her brother. Mr. Grimsby?”
The young man looked up from his feet, dark blue eyes behind glasses first landing on the detective’s badge and then his face. He had the look of a cop; deep-set wrinkles around his forehead and mouth, rough hands, tired look in his slightly bloodshot eyes. His voice had the same authortative raspiness to it as the one he spoke to on the phone; he was the one who called him down to the station.
“Yes.”
“Detective Fresk,” he extended his hand as he spoke. Bartholomew, Bart for short, awkwardly stretched his hand out and shook the detective’s. The man had a strong grip, much stronger than Bart’s meek response.
“If you don’t mind, could you come into the next room and answer some questions?”
“Of course,” Bart rose to his feet, almost a full head shorter than the detective, who had to be somewhere over six feet.
He followed Detective Fresk into the next room, which turned out to be an interrogation room with a metal table, two chairs, and a two-way mirror so he would be on display like an animal in a zoo. He seated himself opposite the detective at the table.
“Alright. You’re Bartholomew Grimsby, age twenty-three?”
“Yes.”
“You and your sister, Alice Grimsby, moved here about a year ago?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Mr. Grimsby. Sorry for pulling you in here. It’s really the only privacy you get in a station. I’ve got a couple more questions for you.”
He nodded to show he was listening, his eyes staring down at the table.
“Where did you and your sister move here from?”
“The next state over. She moved here with me after I got accepted into a Masters program here in the city.”
“Did she have any enemies back where you’re from or here, anyone that had a grudge against her? Did she hang out with any seedy people that you know about?”
“No, uh, no one I know about…”
Lying…
Bart flinched in his seat as if someone had swung at him. It was slinking around in the shadows again.
“Are you okay, Mr. Grimsby?”
“Yes, I’m… yes.”
“Alright. Do you and Alice have any other family?”
“No. Our parents died when we were young, so our grandparents on our mother’s side took us in, but they passed shortly before we moved here.”
“I see. Thank you, Mr. Grimsby. You need to know that the window to find a missing person closes pretty quickly, but we’re interviewing anyone she had contact with that we know of in the city. We’ll do what we can to find her -”
Lying…
“If you think of anything else we should know, contact me. Here’s my information.”
He slipped a card across the table with his name and number to Bart. He pockted the card without looking at the detective.
“You sure you’re alright?”
“I’m fine. Thank you. Am I free to go now?”
“Yeah. We just needed some background on your sister to help us fill in some blanks. Take care, Mr. Grimsby.”
“Thank you.”
He stood and passed back into the main part of the station and then out onto the street. It followed him. He could see it out of the corner of his eyes, slinking around in the shadows like a cat but not quite. He kept his head down and quickened his pace away from the police station. Alice had gone missing two days after he heard her yelling at someone on her phone in the other room of their apartment. He didn’t know who it was, and her phone had gone missing along with her. Who had she been talking to?
It was probably just a work friend, they just had a fight.
Lying…
Its silky voice pervaded his thoughts, mocking him. It followed him everywhere, just beyond his field of vision at times, but at others it slink just in front of him like a black cat crossing his path, and like a black cat it had just brought misfortune to his life. He bumped into someone on a street corner and stumbled.
“Watch where you’re going.”
“Sorry…”
Lying…
Again the thing’s voice invaded his mind. He did what he could to ignore and keep from looking at it as he finally reached his apartment. He raced upstairs and locked his door behind him, deadbolt and several chains for good measure. He slipped into his bedroom and sat down. The desk he sat at was covered in old weathered tomes with old cryptic languages spreading across the pages, looking more like gibberish and scribbles than actual languages. Their meanings were clear as day to his well-trained eyes though. He ignored the books and their texts, his head thumping onto the nearest of them. His eyes shut, and he felt a wave of exhaustion hit him from nowhere, dragging him into a fitful sleep filled with images of that… thing.