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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Saturdead on 2024-10-12 02:40:31+00:00.
I stayed at Nick’s far longer than I ought to. The guy was rarely ever home anyway, spending most of his time either working overtime or helping at his brother’s garage. Nick didn’t talk much about his brother, but he seemed to be a hard-working red-blooded kind of guy. Nick would only talk about him in ways that would start with ‘this one time, Tommy did the craziest shit’.
I crashed on the couch. My place needed some serious renovation, and the only one able to do the work was this carpenter from the Babin apartment complex. I only saw him in passing. He had the look of a hunched-over vulture in human form. Nick advised me not to set foot near my place until the guy was done through and through.
“You don’t wanna meet Roy,” he said. “Guy’s a freak.”
One night as I lay awake on the couch, Nick tip-toed past me to get a midnight beer. I waved an arm at him.
“I ain’t sleeping,” I said. “No need to sneak.”
“I’m just light on my feet,” Nick said, wandering over. “You want one?”
“What the hell.”
He handed me a beer and slumped down on the lazy boy chair next to me. We looked at the TV. It was still on, but there was a countdown warning us about it shutting down in about a minute after prolonged inactivity. Some kind of power saving thing.
“I still can’t believe this shit,” I muttered. “There are, like, actual unreal things out there.”
“Yeah,” Nick sighed. “Takes some time to wrap your head around.”
“How far does it go? Like… demons? Angels? That kinda thing?”
“I dunno. Maybe.”
Nick shrugged the question off, downing two big gulps of beer in one go. He sighed, leaning back in his chair; suddenly looking a lot more tired. He wasn’t gonna make it back to bed.
“I guess it’s just one of those things.”
“Just one of those things, huh?”
He shot me a final tired look, cracking a coffee-stained yellow smile.
“Don’t pretend like you knew how the world worked before you got here, rookie. You had no idea.”
I mean, he wasn’t wrong. Nick was out like a light, leaving his beer dangling from his hand. I plucked it from him, keeping it from spilling all over the carpet.
Looking back at those early days, any normal person would’ve left town long ago. But it wasn’t that easy. I got the impression that making too much noise might get you in trouble. And not just ‘a little note on your personal record’ kind of trouble, but the kind of trouble where you’re pushed into a van and never seen again. Nick was one of the most relaxed people I’d ever met, and even he spoke of the DUC like they were boogeymen. The Department of Unknown Crises. What the hell kind of name is that?
The good thing about being far down the chain of command is that you’re rarely involved in big picture-stuff. The sheriff and his coordinators spent days on their own, leaving ordinary officers like Nick and I to deal with the day-to-day issues. We caught a guy speeding, checked out a couple of broken windows, helped a drunk guy get home… nothing out of the ordinary. And for most of January, and the start of February, that was it.
That is, until we got a call about the Rosemills.
The Rosemills worked at the local middle school. They were a husband and wife of about 50 years old. You could spot them sometimes sitting together at the local café, talking away for hours. It was kinda sweet to see two people so in love, even after more than two decades together, reportedly. I didn’t know them personally, but still, I’d hate for something to happen to them. They seemed like decent people.
We got a call that the Rosemills hadn’t been seen for a while, and we were asked to do a wellness check. Nothing out of the ordinary; we’d done a couple of those at that time. So off we went.
It was the last thing Nick and I were supposed to do that day. It was late afternoon, and the sun was already setting. We rolled up to the Rosemills’ home, parked our car, and stepped out. Having a quick look around, I could tell something was off. Nick stopped when he realized I wasn’t following him.
“No tracks,” I said. “No one’s been around for days.”
I could tell what Nick was thinking pretty well by now. He was thinking that maybe they’d skipped town. Without saying a word, I shook my head and pointed a flashlight to the side of the house. Their car was still parked there, covered in snow.
“Alright,” Nick sighed. “You go out back, I’ll check the shed. Roll back in five.”
There was a broken window out back, and a couple of snowed-over tracks leading down a hill. Signs of a struggle. Possibly a second set of tracks, but it was hard to tell. It kinda looked like someone had either jumped out or been thrown out a window. I called it in to Nick with my radio and followed the tracks.
As I peeked over the edge of the hill, my heart dropped.
The lady of the home, Lacey Rosemill, lay dead about 20 feet further down; impaled by what looked like a long steel rod. I yelled at Nick to hurry on over. I was already on my way down the hill, calling it in to dispatch. I spoke out my last name, badge number, address, victim, and reported is as a suspected one-eighty-seven. Seconds later, I heard Nick following me down the hill. As soon as he saw the body, he also called it in.
“Cancel that, dispatch,” he added. “Patrick’s out.”
Lacey Rosemill was dead in the snow. Face down, with a frozen pool of blood spread out underneath. She’d done her best to get away. Signs of struggle on her arms. Buried in her back was what looked like a piece of sharpened rebar; the tail end of it was longer than my arm. I looked at Nick, dumbfounded. He rolled his eyes.
“This happens sometimes,” he said. “Didn’t I mention Patrick?”
“You got a killer on the loose?” I snapped back. “And you’re not doing anything?”
“It’s not like that. Come on.”
He brought me back up to the house. The front door was open, and the hinges were barely holding on to the stale wood. The house was covered in this cheap peeling paint, leaving flakes of green and white across the porch. As we stepped inside the house, flashlights at the ready, Nick explained.
“Patrick isn’t really his name, it’s just what we call him. Patrick. Like Bateman. American Psycho, you know?”
“And you’re not putting him away? Not even after this?”
“There’s no point,” Nick continued. “The guy just kinda comes and goes. I saw him get hit by a truck once, and a couple of days later he walked out of Lake Attabat like nothing’d happened.”
“People don’t work like that, Nick. People don’t come back.”
“Who said he’s people?”
As we moved through the house, I got the impression that Nick was looking for something. He kept checking for trap doors and hidden compartments.
“Thing with Patrick is that he doesn’t just kill anyone, right? He kills just the right kind of people.”
“What’s the right kind of people?”
“The kind of people that’ll end up hurting a whole bunch of other people in the long run.”
I helped Nick flip over a dinner table, checking a storage compartment connected to the kitchen floor. Nothing but old booze and a couple of valuables. Nick didn’t seem interested.
“A couple of years ago, there was a guy who lived out by Saint Gall, right? And he had this, uh… let’s call it unhealthy interest, in some of the locals. Now, the guy hadn’t done anything yet, but we all got the creeps from him, and we didn’t really know what he was up to.”
Nick turned to me, making a finger gun. I could see my reflection in his pink sunglasses.
“Pow. Out comes Patrick, taking the guy out with a piece of rebar fired from a homemade crossbow. Whole thing’s made from an old Volkswagen spring leaf. That thing could behead a goddamn rhinoceros.”
“But the guy hadn’t done anything.”
“True, true,” nodded Nick. “But the sick shit we found in that old-timer’s hippy-hut sure indicated that he was about to. And that’s the thing with Patrick. It’s like he just knows when shit’s about to go down.”
I was starting to get the idea. Nick was looking for whatever had caused Patrick to attack these people. In his mind, there had to be some kind of reason behind the violence. A justification. We searched for about half an hour before we ended up in their bedroom, going through their clothes.
“I don’t even know what we’re looking for,” I admitted. “Like… guns?”
“Sometimes it doesn’t show,” said Nick. “But Patrick never fails. Not once. If you end up killin’ people, indirect or otherwise, he might have something to say about it.”
“Doesn’t that mean that him not killing this Digman guy means… Digman’s off the hook?”
“I said killin’ people, rookie. Digman and his kin ain’t people.”
Finally, something white reflected back at me. A box of something in the back of Lacey Rosemills’ wardrobe. I brought it out for Nick to see.
It wasn’t anything incriminating. It looked like a box of unpainted Halloween masks. Plain white, with black straps. Some of them had an air filter, others had black felt to hide your eyes. They looked pretty expensive, but I’d never seen anything quite like it before. They weren’t factory-made. There were too many imperfections; like the faces had been carved out by hand with a fine tool. There was a shipping stamp on the side of the box, indicating they’d ordered it from somewhere about a week prior.
I picked a mask up, looking it over. It had a strong j…
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