Soul

SOUL







Officer Harson had known something bad was coming for a while now. Call it intuition if you will. He stared out across the ocean, battered and bruised, his forehead bleeding. But he was standing. After all that had happened in his small town, he was damn lucky. There were many who were standing no longer. Almost without thinking, Harson fell to his knees on the shore, buried his head in his hands. And cried.



“Maybe it was a shark or something?” James Harson asked his father when he heard about the latest disappearance.
“What do you mean?” his father answered, sceptical.
“Well, another girl goes missing from the shore? Maybe it’s a shark or some kind of animal attack?” James prodded.
“Son, we haven’t had a shark here for...well, pretty much never. Plus, there were no body parts or anything found. No. It’s far more likely to be a kidnapping. Which is worse, if you ask me. A shark killing people, it’s understandable, they are predators. But what has the world come down to, when a human kills another human just for the joy? We are asking for another flood, but this time Noah won’t be there with his arc. We’ll all go this time. I guess you never really know anybody,” Officer Harson said, rifling through the files of his desk.
“You always were am optimist,” James Harson said, grinning at his father.
Officer Harson stopped looking in his draws, leaned back in his chair and smiled at James.
“Just be careful. This doesn’t feel right,” he told his son.
“It doesn’t feel right at all,” James agreed.



James was twenty-four years old. He had followed his fathers footsteps, and gone into the force. He was married to Lynn, who was also on the force. She was the greatest person he had ever met in his life.
He had had a long day at work, and the first thing he did was grab the phone, and punch in the number for Lynn.
“Hello?” came from the voice from the phone.
James paused for a while, before finally answering.
“Hey there,” he said quietly.
“James! How are you?” she asked.
“Not great. Had a long day, there was another accident. Another girl has gone missing. Suspected to have been last seen at the sea shore. It’s really starting to get to me this case. It’s the fear of the unknown I guess. If I knew who it was, assuming it’s a person, I wouldn’t feel so helpless,” James said.
“I know what you mean. It’s driving everyone crazy I think. Or it will do soon.”
“What do you mean soon? You think it’s just going to keep happening?” James asked, frowning.
“Well...” she hesitated.
The hesitation unsettled James. She wasn’t telling him something.
“What?” he said fiercely, almost snapping at her.
“Im just on my way out. I’ve been called by the Chief. Screams have been reported from the shore. I’m just on my way down there now.”




As soon as Officer Harson woke, he could feel something was wrong. It just was. He rolled over and looked at the digital alarm clock.
6.57.
He whipped the sheets back, turned the alarm off and jumped out of bed. It would have gone off in only three minutes anyway. He casually grabbed the towel off the chair in the corner of his bedroom. He calmly swung open the door to the bathroom. He also calmly went towards the shower.
But the pretence of a calm man couldn’t dispel the sick feeling in his stomach, and the racing of his heart. He knew something was wrong. But he didn’t quite realise how wrong things were.



When he arrived at the movie theatre, there was crime scene tape blocking the area off almost altogether. Police were crawling all over the place.
“What have we got?” Officer Harson asked as he arrived next to the officer who was keeping people away from the scene.
The man looked a little bit pale, and sick. When he didn’t reply, Officer Harson pushed further.
“You been inside yet?” he asked the man.
“No, sir,” he replied. “But I sure have heard enough.”
Officer Harson stared at him a moment, then lifted the tape, and ducked underneath it. He walked through the double doors of the theatre, and towards the area where all the police were gathered. He stopped alongside Sergeant Porter.
“What the hell happened?” Officer Harson asked.
“Midnight show. Full audience. Some kind of animal’s charged through the doors,” the Sergeant replied.
“Animal?”
“Animal’s. Plural. Killed everyone. It’s blood bath in there, my friend,” he replied.
“Everyone?”
“Everyone,” Porter confirmed. “And to make it worse, your son’s girl and her partner went to check on some reported screaming from the sea shore. They never reported back.”
Officer Harson went in anyway, afraid of what he would find, and afraid for Lynn. He could confirm...everyone was dead.





When he was back in the driver’s seat of his patrol car, Harson got his cell phone out. He dialled the number of his son’s mobile.
“Hello,” came his son’s voice.
There was quite a bit of noise in the background, and the connection sounded kind of fuzzy.
“Hey, James,” Harson replied.
“What’s up?” came the voice.
“Nothing much. Well, that’s a lie. I suppose you heard about the cinema...incident,” Harson said, for want of a better word.
“Yeah. Sounded awful,” came the faint voice once more.
“It was. I nearly threw up,”Harson said.
“And I’m guessing your not ringing to chat about the incident,” James said.
“Well, no. Something else has concerned me now. I think you should know about it,”Harson said, hesitantly.
“I know. Lynn. I’m on my way now.”
“What?” Harson demanded.
“Im going there, to the shore. She’s there. I know she is,” James said.
“Don’t...” Harson started, but the line went dead.



The huge wall ran along the shore for about a mile. But there weren’t often holes in the bottom of the wall, leading downwards, almost like a tunnel. When James saw this tunnel, he stopped at the foot of it.
He hadn’t known exactly what he could do about Lynn disappearing. Walking along the shore hadn’t seemed like a great way to find her. But it had felt right to James, somehow. It was better than doing nothing. The tunnel looked dark, so James walked back to the road where he had left his cruiser, and grabbed his torch.
Nothing had changed by the time he had gotten back. Not that he expected it to. But for some reason he had felt the irrational fear that maybe the tunnel would have closed by the time he got back. Concealing Lynn forever. But it hadn’t.
James hesitated before stepping into the darkness. But the thought of Lynn drove him on, and he plunged into the dark, trying to be optimistic, but without hope.
After about three minutes of walking downwards, the tunnel became wider, opening up into some kind of circular clearing. Forcing himself to keep going, James kept walking forward slowly, shining the torch all around the walls. The smell was bad, and getting worse every step he took. It smelled like...things rotting James guessed. But he kept going. Then he saw that the tunnel continued in a different direction out of this room. The little openeing was even smaller, a tiny door, to his right.
He continued along this path for a few minutes. The smell got stronger and stronger. There was no denying it now. The smell was of something dead.





James came to yet another circular opening. At least he guessed it was circular. The torch beam didn’t quite reach the far sides of the room, but he thought it was safe to assume it was circular.
He slowly moved forward. One cautious step at a time. The smell was stronger and more pungent than ever now. It was almost making him feel sick. He desperately wanted to go back out into the sunlight on the beach. However, the thought of Lynn kept pushing him forwards. He wasn’t exactly scared, but very nervous. Not nervous for his own safety, nervous of what he might find ahead, in the dark. It seemed to James that the only time humans can really put someone else before themselves, is when one of their loved one’s are in danger.
He stopped when something nearly made him fall. After a moment, he got the light of the torch to the area where his foot had slipped. He saw a holes in the ground. Or rather, he had stood on the lining of a hole. The ground was declining. And about a foot away from James there was a real hole, about 3 foot deep, and 3 foot wide. He shone the torch all around the hole. It seemed completely empty. He shone the light further ahead of him.
This time, there was something in the hole. Some shape, lying down. He couldn’t tell, but he felt it must be lying on it’s back.
He carefully, silently, walked around the side of the nearest hole. He shone the light still further ahead, and saw a third hole. Again, this one had a dark shape in it. He realised as he heard movement from one of the holes, that these must be the things that had caused the massacre at the cinema.
As the noise of something moving continued, James moved his hand to his holster and drew the gun. He shone the light on the nearest hole just as the creature was rising, seemingly on two feet. Like a human in appearance, but not at all like one in the sense that James could feel, he simply knew, that this creature had no soul.
He pointed the gun, and shot the creature in the head. He heard a grunt from the other hole. He swung the light towards that creature, and likewise, shot it in the head. The creature managed a short scream, which stopped immediately as the bullet connected with it’s head. The body flew backwards. And stayed down.
James quickly, but carefully, moved forward. Shining the torch on the ground, looking for any more holes. When he found a fourth, he wished he hadn’t. What he saw made him sick. In the forth hole, lay the bloodied body of Lynn Hopperfield.
Then he heard the noise behind him.



Officer Harson arrived at the entrance to the opening just as he heard the second shot. He was out of breath from running. Officer Harson watched his son walk forward. He slowly crept further into the room. He quietly moved towards his son before drawing the revolver.
He pointed it directly at James as James spun around. He looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car. Fear seemed to be seeping out of him.
“Look what you’ve done,” muttered Officer Harson.
“Dad, I got them,” came the voice of his son, weak and fragile.
Then, Officer David Harson shot his son three times.
He walked over to the fallen body and shot him once more.






Head buried in hands, Officer Harson cried.
How had it gone so wrong? James was never supposed to get involved. He was never supposed to find out. But now he had ruined everything. He had only wanted a few nights of complete murder on this small town. A few nights of vengeance. But he hadn’t even gotten that.
He continued to cry. His life was such a mess now.
As he sat there, crying by the sea, the third shape, that belonged in the third hole sat next to him, in the broad daylight. The strange fur of the creature pricked the back of Harson’s neck as it put it’s huge paw around his shoulder.
To Harson, this strange creature knew emotion as well as any man. It was simply a misunderstood creature. It did not kill for fun like humans. It killed because it was a predator, This was it’s nature.
“We’ll be okay,” Officer Harson said through tears.
He leaned over, and he hugged this creature which had no soul. But it felt to Harson like any other human being.
“We aren’t so different,” he muttered.