The Outsider 

by Ian Reeve

"Just tell me what happened," I said to the terrified, ten year old boy.

I hate cases like this. Bad things happening to children. And something bad had happened to this kid, that was obvious. He was trembling. His eyes were staring ahead at nothing, and his skin was white as a sheet. The classic 'you look like you seen a ghost' look, except I was pretty sure it wasn't a ghost this kid had seen. I've seen sexual abuse before. Too many times, and seeing what some monster had done to this kid was making my blood rise in the worst way.

"Do you know where your brother is?" I asked, forcing my voice to remain calm. "The other kids said you went to the old haunted house together. I expect they dared you. Is that it? Said you'd be cowards if they didn't? It's okay, you can tell me. You're not in any trouble." There was no response from the kid. He just kept staring at the wall, his eyes unfocused. "You're not in any trouble," I repeated. "I know the house is dangerous, since the fire. There's all the signs saying not to go in. I don't care about that. I just want to know where Gary is. Your brother. I just need to know that he's okay."

"Perhaps get Sally to talk to him," suggested Phil Newcomb, one of my deputies. The others, Andrew Birch and Bob Grey, had already gone to the old Deyfel house, to see if they could find Bobby's twelve year old brother. I wasn't hopeful, though. I suppose there was an outside chance that they might find him trapped under a fallen roof beam or something, but that wouldn't explain Bobby's terrified condition. He hadn't come running back yelling for help. He'd been seen wandering down the middle of the street in an almost catatonic state, as if he'd seen something that his young brain just wasn't capable of handling.

I nodded. Sally, the youth counsellor, might be able to get the kid to talk. She had more chance than the town sheriff, anyway. Especially one who'd only moved to this town a couple of years earlier. People were distrustful of the police there days, because of the things happening in the big cities. "Yeah," I said therefore. "Give her a call, will you?"

Just then, the door burst open and the boy's parents came running in. "Bobby!" cried Kathy, the mother, dropping the her knees before him and grabbing him by the shoulders. "Are you okay? What happened?"

"Where's Gary?" asked Ben, the father, first directing the question at the boy, then repeating it to me. "Where's Gary? What happened to him?"

The man was red-faced and angry. I'd heard some disturbing things about him, and his wife and children sometimes had bruises that didn't look as if they'd happened tripping on the carpet. The boy had a bruise on his arm now, I saw. An old bruise, a couple of days old. I'd talked to the father a couple of times about it, choosing my words carefully because I knew I couldn't prove anything. He'd reacted angrily, of course, but I was hopeful at the time that he'd got the message. It seemed he hadn't. When the kid saw him, though, he jumped out of chair and ran into his arms, sobbing gratefully. Ben wrapped his arms around him and gave him a hug, rocking him back and forth until he calmed down.

"Who did this?" the father asked me, with a dangerous tone to his voice. "Who did this to him? And where's Gary?"

With his parents crooning over him, the boy gradually opened up and began to speak. It turned out I was right. A bunch of other children bad dared them to go to the house that had once belonged to a crazy old man called Armitage Deyfel. It had been shunned by the rest of the town even before it had mysteriously burned down, I knew. The locals, the ones who had lived here their whole lives, didn't like to talk about it, but certain things could be teased out of them if you asked the right way. Start out talking about something else. Get them relaxed and at ease, and then gradually steer the conversation to where you really wanted it to go. That's how I'd learned that a lot of people didn't think the fire had been an accident. People talked about the judgement of God, that Armitage Deyfel had been punished for his sinful ways, but the impression I got was that the judgement had come from a human source. All the careful questioning hadn't told me who the arsonist had been, though, or what Deyfel had done that they thought was so sinful.

Deyfel had died in the fire, and this had, of course, led to the idea that the burned-out shell of the house was haunted. No-one could be bothered to pull down what was left of the building, but it was too dangerous to be just left there, and so a tall fence had been out up around it, with a door fastened with a large padlock.

That had been eleven years before, though, and over time parts of the fence had become overgrown, providing handholds for young, athletic children to climb over. A superstitious fear of the place still kept them away, on the whole, but a dare, with the accompanying challenge to a young boy's courage, could not be refused, and so Gary and Bobby Carter had climbed the fence and gone in.

"There was nothing there at first," said the boy, nestled against his father, who had his arm around him. "Just bare walls and weeds, but then we found a trapdoor. A door down to the basement."

I saw Phil and Ben Carter exchange puzzled looks. "What?" I asked.

"Houses in this town almost never have basements," my deputy explained. "Because of the high water table. Basements tend to flood, or at least that's what the experts say."

"High water table?" I asked. The town stood right beside a lake, it was true, but the land rose quite rapidly away from it. Aldrich was a town of hills and steep, cobbled streets. Surely any water would drain down to the lake. Also, there used to be a mine at the bottom of one of the hills near the town. How could anyone dig a mine if the ground flooded? I smiled at myself. What did I know about such things? Leave them to the experts.

"Did Gary go down through the trapdoor?" Phil asked him. There was a look on his face that sent a chill up my spine. Please say no, that look said. Please say he didn't.

Bobby nodded, though. "We both did," he said with a tremble in his voice. He was beginning to shake again. His father held him tighter. I waited for the boy to speak again, but he was silent, and neither of his parents seemed to want to ask him any more questions. There was a blank look on their faces, at if they'd already been told that their other son was dead. The look of people trying to hold in a terrible grief.

"We'll take our son home now," said Ben, taking hold of Bobby's hand. "Thank you for what you've done."

"Don't you want to wait and see if my other deputies find anything?" I asked, feeling confused.

"You know where to find us," Ben told me. "Bobby needs familiar surroundings to recover. He'll be better off at home."

"I feel as though I'm missing something," I said, looking back and forth between him and Phil. "Someone want to explain it to me?"

"This... happens sometimes," said Phil, looking embarrassed. "People go missing, especially if they go underground. If Gary Carter went down into the basement..."

"If he went into the basement, what?" I demanded. I pointed at Bobby. "They both went down into the basement. That's what you said, right, Bobby?" The boy nodded silently.

"What happened in the basement?" I asked him. "Did something happen to Gary?"

"Leave him alone," cried Kathy, moving quickly to put herself between me and her son. "He can't tell you anything."

"How do you know? We haven't asked him yet." I moved to face the boy again. "What happened in the basement, Bobby? Can you tell me?"

The boy remained silent, though, staring down at the floor and pressing himself up against his father. The father that I was pretty sure beat him on a fairly regular basis. What had scared the boy more than an abusive father?

"Leave him alone," Ben Carter told me firmly. "Wnatever he saw down there, don't make him remember it."

"A boy is missing," I reminded him. "Your son. We have to find him. If Bobby can tell us anything..."

"Maybe give him time to rest for a bit," said Phil gently.

"Gary may not have the time."

The parents were taking the boy out of the room, though, and I let them go. Maybe Phil was right. Maybe give the kid a little time. There was a look of despair on their faces, though, as if they'd given up all hope of seeing their other son again. It was a defeated look, and as they left the building I realised that I'd seen that look before. It was the same look I'd seen on the faces of some of the Native Americans when my wife and I had been on holiday in Arizona. It was a defeated look, as if they, as a civilisation, had come across something they simply couldn't handle, that their brains simply couldn't process. Which, of course, they had, in the form of the European settlers. It had made me sad, I remembered. The Germans and the Japanese had been beaten in the second world war, but they had recovered within a single generation to become world powers again. The Native Americans, though, had been beaten forever.

Many people in this town had the same 'beaten forever' look, I now realised, as if the town had a secret that was too much for them to bear. I turned angrily to my deputy. "You've lived here all your life, right?" I asked. "You and your family." He nodded. "So whatever's going on here, you know what it is."

"No-one knows," he replied. "Only that it happens when people go underground. You remember the mine?"

"There was a cave-in," I said. "People died."

"It wasn't a cave-in," he told me. "Or, at least, that's what I heard. Something happened to the miners, and the mine-owners covered it up. They say there's something under this town, and sometimes it takes people."

I stared at him. "Are you serious? People go missing, children go missing, and no-one bothers to investigate?"

"You don't understand," he said defensively, almost pleadingly. "You haven't lived here long enough. You're an Outsider. You haven't heard the stories. Not all of them..."

"I don't care about stories," I told him. "A child is missing and I intend to find him..."

At that moment my phone rang. I answered it, and heard the voice of Andrew, one of the deputies I'd sent to the Deyfel house. "We've had a look around," he said.

I put the phone on speaker, so Phil could hear as well. "Did you find anything?" I asked. "Did you find Gary Carter?"

"No," Andrew replied. "We found a trap door." There was a note to his voice that suggested that nothing more needed to be said.

More did need to be said, though. "And?" I asked. "What did you find under it?"

There was silence for a moment. "Is Phil there?" the other deputy said at last.

"Forget Phil. You're talking to me. What did you find under the trap door?"

"Nothing," said the other man. "There was nothing under it."

"You didn't look, did you? Go and look now, and I don't want to hear any superstitious fairy stories."

"No way. If you want to know what's down there, you're going to have to go look for yourself." Then he hung up."

I stated at my phone in astonishment for a moment, then put it down. "Right," I said. "That's exactly what I'm going to do."

"No, Geoff!" said Phil in alarm. "You mustn't."

"Tell me why not. What's down there?"

"I honestly don't know. No-one does, except maybe Bobby Carter. He may be the only person who ever saw it and lived to tell, and you saw what it did to him."

"I saw what it did to a ten year-old child," I told him. "I'm a grown adult, with a gun. You want to come with me?" He shook his head in wide-eyed, silent dread.

"Then I'll go on my own."

I stormed out of the Sheriff's office, went to the car and got in. It was a small town. Nothing more than a ten minute drive to the Deyfel house. Then I would see. Whatever was down there, under the trap door, I would see it for myself.