8: WHY DID YOU DO THAT?
Jones hears back from a detective in Carson City, with photos of his sire’s house. Including a greasy dark mark of decay on the floor - like a body was left there to decay for months.
--
Another detective, watching the house where the woman disappeared, reports nothing in the nights since.
--
Dr. Barrow picks up a stick and starts to carve out a face on a chunk of the fatberg, as he talks into a Dictaphone.
“Rate of decomposition accelerated... like the time of death of one of us. But in the living... burning through them at an accelerated rate.”
He catches a rat and bites into it.
“And who keeps taking the blood bags?”
He spits out a chunk of skin.
“Blood health requires bone marrow. Culture bone marrow to separate human and our blood? What is the transferable element?”
He pauses, looks at the face he carved. Smears it off with his hand.
“Now why did you that?” a voice behind him asks.
--
Arthur keeps an eye on the alleys as he hunts. He stops at the particular bar as he senses someone there, and sees Elena Davison sitting with someone. She excuses herself and comes over to talk with him.
“Keeping busy?”
“We’re, ah, pursuing some angles.”
“Good. I’m sure we’ll hear all about it on Saturday.”
He leaves, hails a cab, heads away from the Rack to try somewhere else.
--
Barrow turns, steeling himself for what he might see.
“I’m amazed by what you can hide down here...” he says quietly.
A female figure, lowering the hood of a raincoat to show a bald head, red raw and skinless.
“Good evening, Dr. Barrow.”
“Ahh... you would be Sal’s ‘mother’?”
“And the mother of her kind. Miss Gibson is the most gregarious of my brood. I believe that your sire was a cousin to me. We share an interest in the sicknesses of our people.”
“Yes... have you seen something like I described?”
“No. But then, I am only a hundred and fifty years old. Give or take.”
She steps back into a shadow, and is gone.
When he plays back the recording, he can only hear his own voice.
--
Jones looks up from his computer.
“One of our ghouls made it out.”
“Who?” Henry asks.
“Charlotte Donnelly. Did you know her?”
“No.”
“Maybe Arthur did. She was one of his circle’s...”
--
“Charlotte. Yeah. She was... the elder thought she might be a medium.”
“Was she?”
“You never know. I didn’t really test her on it myself... Where is she?”
“Reno... in a rehab clinic.”
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