The Ones Above Us. Chapter 1
Date:- September 30th, 2008, 14 days after initial discovery.
Time:- 18:42 pm
Location:- Ireland Peat Bogs
Flicking a cheap Poundland lighter, sparks spat in the morbid matt of a pure black atmosphere out on location in the back arse of nowhere (somewhere far off Ireland’s version of the M6 he’d been told). Winter winds were of the worst kind: didn’t matter how far inland you made it, or how thick the walls on your house were, they traversed the land with albatross wings wide and undaunted by what they came into contact with, smacking into any surface with no regards to slowing down. They didn’t seem to have any regard for detective Arthur Fleming‘s Marlboro either, a stiff left hand shaking at the switch, and the right vainly trying to create shelter for the cigarette.
“For FUCK sake.” Singed fingertips for his troubles.
“Serves you right. No smoking on the job detective, you know better.”
Head Forensic Pathologist Fatima Alva. A 4’9 willowy thing with a short, plump bob, damn near bobblehead proportions and a tendency to get right under his fucking skin like the irritating shit she was. She’d succeeded young and now all that arrogance she hadn’t quite worked out her system from (what should be mandatory in his opinion) the hard labour of working up the social ladder had only boosted her tendency to tighten her favourite black brogues far too tight, straighten her back like a bloody ballerina and fix that rod she’d shoved up her arse however many years ago a little bit deeper.
“I’m ten yards from the sodding site and wrapped in a white, walkable body bag, I think we can both agree me being over here isn’t going to tamper with shit. And not to challenge your dictatorship, luv, but you’ve got winged lashes big enough to take off under those goggles o’ yours. Now you go back under those useless gazebos, and I’ll happily freeze my arse off out here.” Turning back round to face the empty, Arthur cursed himself for getting a buzz cut rather than a short back and sides a week ago.
Fatima despised this part of the job. Working with middle-aged, greying twats like this one that clearly hated their jobs, but seemed to have this vendetta against the mere mention of career change. Yes, she was aware as you age, getting a new job gets harder. Surprise though, so did being fresh out of uni. Life sends these little tests to fuck us all over, not just you mate. Must be the bitter taste of Thatcher’s rule that’s left him slow to change. Scarred from the days when not having a job meant not eating, full stop. Doesn’t give the trout-mouthed, once-upon-a-time aryan flag pole a reason to snap like a pissed off Chihuahua.
“Why don’t you stop trying to get your next sad excuse for a hit of nicotine, and come over here and do your actual fucking job?”
“No respect.” Muttered Arthur to himself, giving up on his lost cause and unzipping the top half of his polymer suit to shove the cigarette into his oversized shirt pocket.
Finally the standing misery addressed the short woman face to face, a shake clinging to each syllable, “What the hell d’you need me for? It’s obvious this isn’t a normal murder case, IF we’re even calling it a murder case. I mean for god sake, Fatima, the grave is over 50 feet long! Whatever we’re uncovering obviously isn’t a human, it’s a fucking dinosaur! Why am I here in the back-arse of all points nowhere, rather than a load of archaeologists?”
“Because what we’ve found so far isn’t making sense, and last time anyone checked, dinosaurs were fossilised. BONES, detective, not skin. This body is so fresh, there’s absolutely no decay at all! Then there’s the skin, it hasn’t been stained by the acid, nor caked in mud. It’s like the skin is coated in some hydrophobic layer. This body was buried in a shallow grave, no signs of decay. The body hasn’t been dyed by the soil so it’s fresh, both of those signs lead to the possibility of a recent murder. None of this should be possible, but it is.” A sigh slipped the last of Fatima’s adrenaline-fuelled spitting out, she was tired. Tired of him, tired of working, tired of being in the cold. “Look, personally I think this is probably an elaborate hoax some twat on YouTube with a fringe or whatever has decided to plant in a well known historic location for views. The arseholes will probably be waiting for the news report on TV so they can have a laugh at our expense. None of this is natural, and frankly it’s starting to look ridiculous. However, so long as our shitty superiors believe this to be a murder case we stick to finding out how this thing died, understood?”
Scathing way of saying it, But a hoax was something Arthur was desperate to cling to. Of course, this was nothing but staged and faked beyond belief! None of this could be real. Give credit where credit’s due though, the bell-ends that did this were thorough. Tutting, Arthur knew he couldn’t argue his case anymore, and started to strut off on those stilts for legs back to the beams of spotlights, Fatima trotting along after him just to keep up.
“Glad to see you’re helping.”
“Just talk to me about what’s going on so we’ll be able to document this and go back to the hostel.” Spat Arthur in retaliation. He hated this job. These people. But most importantly, that thing.
Entering through the only available entrance, the two nearly ran into another detective. Useless idiot. Despite this temporary flimsy building being the size of a football field, there was barely enough space among the number of personnel of all ranks and professions, technology, storage facilities and dig sights to separate the wood from the leaves. To add to the misery, despite being as frosty inside as it was outside, the scent of dank earth and petrol from the excavation diggers still managed to permeate the trapped air. God it stunk.
Taking on a note of interest as she got into her element, Fatima called out as she moved out the way, “Right, so we are at the feet end, and up there at the other end of the canopy is our head. We’re going there first because that’s what the two witnesses found during their initial dig.”
Taking off briskly, the forensic pathologist seemed unfazed by the sheer size of the foot sticking out like a meteorite fallen to earth just a couple of meters from the entrance, not even gracing the thing a glance. Arthur had no such laissez-faire-attitude, frozen in tunnel vision. This is why he didn’t wanna come back in. The damn toes had the familiar, unique swirling pattern of calloused skin seen on humans, and blotches of brown that must’ve been freckles, as they lacked the blotchy, wet texture of mud. Veins passing like eels under ice became exposed near the epidermis, shining icy blue. On an intellectual level, the aged detective knew a foot his height in length couldn’t possibly exist in the real world. If they did, someone would’ve surely reported such a sighting.
On a primal level, instinct was sending adrenaline shooting to his heart and his lungs could scarcely fill themselves in time to keep up with the demand of oxygenated blood. Those feet looked too alive. The raw power the thing’s hands must’ve possessed, accompanying such ginormous feet! All of this reminded him of his honeymoon with his wife on Safari, watching a pack of saltwater crocodiles descend in a snapping furry upon shared prey, crushing a zebra’s skull in a death roll. Red and bloodied teeth, marred palate facing the animal’s terror-struck gaze whilst it still vainly screamed for its herd to come to its aid. The vocal cords snapped, eventually silencing under the sheer force of those jaws collectively ripping the head off in one piece. Two crocodiles sent the thing flying twelve feet in the air in pure territorial aggression, neither caring that they’d just murdered another being, before the Wiley victor went after the splattering mess to claim its prize. None of the herd even dared approach the brutality. Would his colleagues do the same if he were captured? Would they leave him to the beast?
“Arthur, c’mon.”
Back to reality. “Sorry.”
Just focusing on Fatima’s back seemed to do the trick, heart rate levelling out below 100bpm. Don’t look round and it won’t be there. Arthur didn’t have it in himself to self scold for such a ridiculous reaction; he knew he should’ve stayed outside.
Still set on her headstrong track, Fatima chose to not bother with looking back and risk painfully smacking into some poor soul, so delegated talking to the air in front of herself, hoping he heard her through the ruckus around them. “The head hasn’t decayed, following suit to rest of the currently exposed limbs, though there does appear to be damage. Face appears to be male, middle-aged 35 to 50’s. Noticeable marks being three precise third degree burns across the face resembling a striped pattern. No sign of healing or breakdown within the exposed areas either, which would suggest the burns were created after death.”
“Has anyone tested a sample of skin to see why there’s no breakdown?”
“We tried, but every single time someone has come in with a scalpel to remove a piece, once removed from the body the entire piece seems to crumble instantly to a fine blue dust and disappear.”
“What, Like Indiana Jones style? We found the crusader knight?”
“Please try and take this seriously Arthur, I wouldn’t mention our findings if they were false.” Tutted Fatima.
Arthur knew he was deflecting to shield himself. “I am. Can we at least try collecting the dust?”
“No use, I meant it when I said everything disappears.”
“So anything we test or observe must be on the body at all times or it’s essentially worthless?”
“Correct.”
Well that made everything just that little bit harder. JUST! They’d been reduced to the detective abilities of the bloody Edwardian period. No testing beyond what could be extracted from the soil (and judging by the lack of messy bodily fluids, the thing probably didn’t have any), and they had yet to uncover the rest of the body to see if there were any signs of obvious trauma that would account the reason behind the death. This was going to take forever. Every waking moment in this shithole was a second wasted. Whoever made this thing was one sick fuck.
“If I ever find the shitheads responsible for this prank, I’m gonna hand em a fucking life sentence. The law be damned.”
Just missing a collision with another photographer, the head finally came into full view. Even from this vantage point above ground, the thing didn’t seem small in any way. If he’d thought the foot was massive, the head was a new beast entirely upon its own pedestal. Surprisingly peaceful for a dead person, no expressions of pain or strain, just a suspiciously perfect sullen face (aside the burns of course). Knotted, greying-blond hair splayed out in dregs from the skull like old depictions of the sun’s rays, haloing the face and drawing you to the pair of closed lids. He wasn’t pretty by any standard, Arthur vainly self-noted. Weak chin jutting thin lips out from the round face, a high hairline accentuating the large forehead and a heavy brow ridge. If he weren’t the size of a four story building and significantly burnt, he’d have been extraordinary ordinary. Forgettable even. The detective knew he shouldn’t be saying that. It was a ‘victim’ after all.
“If we can’t remove any body parts, can we perhaps open the body up instead and take samples of anything inside the stomach, lungs, chest cavity etcetera?”
A grimace pulled at the woman’s lips, marring her usually stoic face, “Already done it, we had Liam go inside with a contamination dry suit whist you were outside. It’s the kind of stuff sewage divers wear at human waste plants.”
Arthur couldn’t help turning his own nose up at the prospect as well, shuffling unconsciously just a little further away. “And?”
“There were important pieces missing. A full, undisturbed respiratory system: lungs, trachea, the works. Oddly, absolutely no digestive or reproductive organs what so ever. Weirder yet, there were no signs of sabotage or surgical removal, it was like they were never there in the first place. What really caught my eye on the camera feed was that he had, what we think, are a series of air sacks integrated along the connection between the lungs and the diaphragm.”
“Meaning?”
Poor Fatima was looking at Arthur like she was trying to explain how to use the toilet to a three year old, a strong side eye from her place parallel to him
“MEANING this thing had an incredibly resourceful breathing mechanism.”
“So no basic necessary functions like the need to eat and reproduce, but a top quality breathing system. And you wonder why I’m not taking any of this seriously? Why couldn’t we just send a report saying it was a hoax and save time? It technically doesn’t even come under the scientific detention of alive.”
“Well certainly not now it doesn’t.” Arthur gave his own stink eye back.
“… Look, why don’t we try and get the body transferred over to London? Our proper, large-scale testing equipment will be at our fingertips, and we’d be able to at least stick this problem on some stupid lab rats and be done with it, what d’you say?”
Fatima finally stopped half-hearting her disgust to focus on Arthur face to face. “Arthur, where d’you think that kind of space and discreetness would be possible in the middle of London city? This body is over fifty feet all, we wouldn’t even be able to keep it cool enough to stop potential decay-“
Arthur butted in, “- This thing has been out the ground for two weeks, Fatima, and hasn’t so much as lost a hair naturally. We don’t need to worry about decay. Yes, transferring the body would disturb the ‘crime scene’, but if we get this thing sent off as archeological dig remains, the disturbance won’t matter, and we’d be off the case. I don’t wanna be stuck with this shit anymore, do you?” Was he sounding too desperate?
She knew she shouldn’t mention it, not to herself and DEFINITELY not Arthur, but within her selfish consciousness, Fatima couldn’t agree with that. This may be a hoax to Arthur, but all these findings were starting to settle saplings in the garden of her imagination. These Findings weren’t Styrofoam cut outs painted with acrylic, nor were they polymer clay held together over a skeleton. whatever material this was, it was unlike anything she’d seen before. Maybe all this was a hoax, maybe all this was a waste of time.
But secretly, she wished it wasn’t.
“…I’ll see what I can do.”
️.