MISPER (short horror story)

[Zaune]

(Hammered this together in a few hours, after being inspired by something I saw in a Markiplier video of all things.)

It was half-past ten on a Monday morning, and Detective Constable Mark Peters was already more than ready for the week to be over and done with. This morning's briefing had included the news that the particularly unpleasant local loan shark that Mark and his team had been building a case against for the last six weeks had done about 80% of the median lethal dose of cocaine, attempted to drive who-knew-where under its influence without the benefit of a seatbelt and ploughed his car through somebody's garden wall at almost a hundred and fifty miles an hour. The last thing to go through his mind, the Collision Investigation Unit believed, had been the steering wheel. While Mark couldn't say he was particularly sorry to see the man in question depart this mortal coil in a spectacular and ignominious fashion, it did bother him on some level that a great deal of hard work and patience on CID's part had been rendered utterly pointless.

Especially because he still had to finish the damn paperwork on it. With a sigh he got up from his desk and made his way to the coffee machine at the back of the office, quietly longing for the days when they were allowed to smoke in here.

And as if his day wasn't already off to a flying start, some bellend had put a wet spoon back in the sugar bowl again. "Fucksake," Mark muttered to himself, searching unsuccessfully for a clean replacement. "Who even does that?"

Eventually, and feeling slightly better for having acquired a fresh cup of coffee, Mark returned to his desk just in time for the phone to go off. "CID office, DC Peters speaking."

"Morning Mark. You busy at the moment?" The voice on the other end of the line belonged to Detective Sergeant Lucy Whittaker, his immediate superior and semi-official mentor within the team.
"When aren't we busy round here? But I'm not doing anything time-sensitive. What's up, sarge?"
"MISPER case just came in, and it's a bit of an odd one. 25 year-old female named Kimberly Hicks, last seen going home from drinks with friends on Friday night, hasn't answered her phone or checked Facebook all weekend and then didn't show up for work this morning."
"Okay," Mark said thoughtfully. "Sounds potentially nasty. What's odd about it?"
"She was last seen getting dropped off by the designated driver and entering her flat, so whatever happened to her took place after she got home."
"Yeah, that is weird. So what do you need me to do?"
"I'm about to talk to the friend who last saw her, but I've got to be in court this afternoon. Can you go to the address and check it out? Uniform are already there, they're trying to gain access."
"Sure. Hold on, let me grab a pen..."

The address proved to be a four-storey block of redbrick flats in a residential neighbourhood just off the ring road, not the poshest part of town but not particularly dodgy either. The building was a lot bigger than average for the area, being mostly surrounded by old terraced houses from around the turn of the last century, and Mark fancied it might have once been a factory or mill. A panda car was parked outside, and a female constable was standing by the main door talking to a woman in a cleaner's tabard. As Mark parked his own car and applied the handbrake the cleaner walked off, looking quite put out.

"DC Peters, CID." Mark presented his warrant card to the other officer, who he didn't recognise. "Who was that?"
"Cleans for our missing person," she replied. "Couldn't tell us anything very helpful, but turns out she gets the spare key from the man in the flat next door. My colleague's talking to him now, I'll get him to buzz us in."
"Thank you. Oh, sorry, you are-?"
"Helen. PC Helen Matthews."

Mark and PC Matthews climbed the three flights of stairs to where Ms Hicks lived. Helen's partner was waiting for them with a middle-aged, slightly scruffy-looking man who Mark presumed to be the neighbour with the keys. He was proven correct when Helen made a quick round of introductions. "Kim definitely came home," explained the neighbour, whose name turned out to be Jack. "I heard the door swing shut, then about an hour later I heard water running -her bathroom and mine are pretty much back to back and it's not a very thick wall- so she probably took a shower and went to bed."
"And you didn't see or hear her at all since?" Mark asked.
"No. That doesn't mean much, I've been on the back shift so we haven't seen much of each other the last couple of weeks, but I did text her yesterday because I was going to the shops and wanted to know if she needed anything. Never got a reply, but I didn't think anything much of that at the time, she mentioned she'd ordered a new phone because her old one was acting up. First I knew that anything was wrong was when Chloe -that's the cleaner- rung me to say the police were here."
Mark nodded. "Alright, thank you. May I have the keys?"
"Sure." Jack handed them over, looking stricken. "Do you think someone has done her harm, Detective?"
"At the moment I don't know," Mark replied gently. "Can you think of anyone who might have a grudge against her, like an ex-partner or a neighbour she'd had a falling out with?"
"Not that she's mentioned to me, no. I know she had a bit of a row with a bloke she was seeing a few weeks ago but it can't have been him, he's been away at sea for the last month."
"Alright, thank you." Mark turned to Helen. "Would you mind getting a statement from him while I check the flat?"
She nodded. "Sure. Once I've done that we'll check with the rest of the neighbours. They were probably all in bed long before half-past eleven but you never know."
"Thanks. Ask them if they saw any unfamiliar faces hanging around too, I know the witness claimed Kim Hicks walked through the main door but you never know." With that, Mark took some rubber gloves out of his pocket and prepared to do some detective work.

The flat's front door had two locks, a Yale and a mortice. Only the Yale proved to be locked when Mark tried them, and he made a mental note to ask Jack about that later: Maybe she only bothered with the second lock when she was going away overnight, or maybe she usually only locked it when she was about to turn in for the night but had forgotten... or been prevented from doing so.
The front door opened into a rather cramped hallway, furnished only with a small table and a coat rack. The coat rack held a fancy-looking rust coloured leather jacket and a more pedestrian green and purple raincoat, and a couple of pairs of shoes were placed neatly underneath it: Some black court heels, ballet flats and a pair of trainers. The hall table had a small glass bowl on it that contained a set of keys, a handful of loose change and a balled-up recipt that proved to be for topping up an electric meter the previous Tuesday. Next to it sat a small red leather handbag, one that to Mark's unpracticed eye looked quite expensive. It was zipped closed, and when he opened it he found a purse and a phone in a leather case, both of which matched the bag. "Miss Hicks likes to colour coordinate, it seems," Mark mused to himself.

The purse held six neatly-folded £20 notes, a single £10 and slightly less than £5 in various coins, along with two bank cards and her driver's license. The phone turned out to be the latest model from Samsung, its screen lacking a single scratch or blemish. Experimentally he tried the power button but got nothing, unsurprising if the thing had been sitting unattended for 48 hours. Mark dutifully placed it in an evidence bag for the forensics team to examine later, then carefully counted and noted down the total amount of money in the purse before placing it in its own bag.
The picture on the driver's license caught his eye as he put it in the bag with the purse. A young woman a couple of younger than himself, short blonde hair with a vivid magenta streak through it, smiling brightly. She looked happy, carefree, friendly.
"Wherever you are, lady, I'll do what I can for you," Mark said quietly, and headed into the rest of the flat.

It was more spacious than he'd expected, with a large kitchen and living room and another door leading to what was probably the bedroom. Most of the living room was taken up by an enormous, battered but comfy-looking sofa with a vividly tie-dyed throw over it, with a small TV and a sound bar perched on a tall mahogany display cabinet full of ornaments: Several colourful china vases, a glass bottle with layers of multi-coloured sand, some rock crystals and for some reason a complete set of Gravity Falls Funko Pops. A poster for some Korean or Japanese pop group Mark had never heard of dominated the wall behind the settee.
But there was nothing damaged or knocked over, and no apparent gaps where some item of value might have been carried off. The place was meticulously tidy, in fact. Mark entered the kitchen and found it much the same. The countertops were cluttered with jars of dried herbs and spices and a wooden block holding some kitchen knives (none of which were missing, he noted) but everything was neatly arranged, and the sink and drying rack were empty. There was a tiny kitchen table in one corner of the room, with an old Macbook and a single mug on a coaster. "Have a cup of Positivi-Tea", the mug read, in a jaunty font and colourful letters.
"That's probably a Class C drug these days," Mark said to himself, tapping the space bar of the laptop on the off-chance it was still logged in. It took him straight to a password prompt, so he decided to leave that to the experts and wondered if he had an evidence bag big enough to hold it. Probably not: The Scenes of Crime Officers would have to deal with it. The mug he did bag up, noticing absently that there was the residue of what seemed to be hot chocolate at the bottom of it. "A quick shower, a night-time cup of cocoa and then... what? Tried to get into bed, accidentally noclipped into the Backrooms? Turns out your mum struck a bargain with the Fair Folk and she's in arrears? 'A bit odd' wasn't saying that half of it-"

Mark suddenly froze in place. Had he just heard a noise? No, not a noise. More like a different kind of silence, the kind where nothing you could consciously hear had changed, but on some subtle frequency that humans only heard at a subconscious level there was something there. Or nothing, and Mark had read enough spooky stories to know that Nothing could be every bit as bad as any number of Somethings...
Just as he was starting to reach for his CS spray, his phone went off, the ringtone seeming definitely loud by contrast. Mark exhaled sharply and leaned against the wall, taking a moment to get his breathing under control before answering it. "DC Peters."
"Mark, it's Lucy. Just got done talking to the witness who last saw our MISPER, but she couldn't tell me much that she hadn't already said to the 999 call-taker. How's it going on your end?"
"Not great," Mark replied, and briefly recounted what he'd found out from the neighbour. "I'm still going through the place but so far I'm drawing a blank," he admitted. "Do we have a description of what Kim Hicks was wearing on Friday night?"
[/i]"Black minidress and tights, ballet flats, red leather jacket with a matching handbag."[/i]
"Well, I can confirm she made it back into the flat then. Found the jacket, the handbag and probably the shoes in the hall. And there was over a hundred and thirty quid in cash and a phone that probably cost another three hundred in the bag, so whatever happened to her it wasn't a robbery. I haven't checked the bedroom or bathroom yet but so far I'm seeing absolutely no sign of forced entry or any sort of disturbance: Wish I had the spoons to keep my place this tidy, in fact. Oh, and do we know anything about this ex-boyfriend her neighbour mentioned?"
"Enough to establish his alibi. Carl Henderson, age 26, currently working as a steward on a P&O cruise ship that left Southampton three weeks ago. And sent about fifty quid's worth of flowers and an apparently very heartfelt letter of apology for losing his temper just before departure, or so our witness informs me. Not sure how we're going to handle him yet, maybe we can get the company to put him on a flight home."
"Sounds a bit risky, but if he does a runner before boarding then we'll know we're on the right track, I suppose. Anyway, I'm going to finish checking this place over but I think we'll have to get SOCO out here. If Kim was attacked then it must have been someone she knew well enough to let in."
"Or someone she trusted with a spare key, maybe? When you're done with the flat I suggest you have another, longer talk with that neighbour. In the meantime, SOCO are more likely to show up before the next shift if the request comes from a DS than a DC so I'll get on to them. Call me back if you turn up anything useful."
"Will do. Bye." Mark pocketed his phone, pondering the possibility that Jack might have had something to do with it. He hadn't really given off a stalker vibe at the time, but if you could tell that sort of thing just by looking then he'd have a lot less work to do, wouldn't he? Although when asked about anyone who might have a grudge, he'd brought up the query-former boyfriend Kim had a falling-out with and then explicitly stated that the guy had an alibi, odd behaviour for someone who was trying to deflect suspicion away from himself...

Well, one problem at a time. Check the rest of the flat first, then start questioning persons of interest in a crime that he couldn't yet prove had even taken place at all.

On impulse, Mark went back to the hallway and opened the bathroom door first. There was nothing especially remarkable within: A shower cubicle, a sink, a toilet and a heated towel rail. The bath mat was a vivid shade of pink that Mark would definitely not have wanted to be confronted with first thing in the morning himself, and the mirrored cabinet screwed to the wall over the sink had been decorated with rainbow-hued stickers. "I've seen romcoms with girls like you in them," Mark quipped, with a bleak little laugh. He opened the cabinet to check for any prescription medication that might indicate some sort of mental health episode: You would think that would have been mentioned with the concerned friends by now, but if she was doing well enough to hold down a job as long as she didn't forget her hallucinate-that-you're-totally-sane juice two days in a row then maybe they didn't know themselves...

But there were no medicines in the cabinet besides birth control pills, some paracetamol and a nearly empty and long-expired foil packet of something called Omeprazole, which a quick search with his phone revealed to be an anti-inflammatory used for treating conditions like heartburn or acid reflux. No antidepressants, no antipsychotics, not even any antibiotics...
That was a thought, wasn't it? Mark replaced everything in the medicine cabinet and started typing on his phone, intending to look up some specific medical information. Schizophrenic symptoms usually came on in the first half of your twenties, he recalled from somewhere, so she'd be just within the right age range. Or it could be something like what had happened to a woman he'd run across while on foot patrol a year out of his probation, stammering and confused and trying to speak to people only she could see: Urinary tract infection, the paramedics had said it was. Better take that up with DS Whittaker when she got here-

And then it came again, that sound that wasn't a sound. This time the change was abrupt enough to send Mark spinning on his heel with his CS spray out and at the ready, convinced he'd seen a flash of something in the mirror... But there was nothing there except the empty hallway. "Bloody hell," Mark hissed through his teeth, lowering the spray-can and forcing himself to breathe slowly. "What is it with this place?" He peered suspiciously at the raincoat that was hanging up there, wondering if it had moved slightly in some draught he hadn't noticed until now. Must have been something like that, he decided. And old buildings like this made weird noises all the time...
As if on cue, there came a loud sound of rushing water as a toilet flushed, probably the one on the other side of the bathroom wall. Jack clearly hadn't been exaggerating about how thin it was, which suggested that he hadn't needed to deliberately listen out for the sound of Kim taking a shower. Another small point in favour of him being on the up and up, perhaps.
"Right, then," Mark said to himself. "One more room left to check. And I think I'm laying off the horror podcasts for a bit after today."

The bedroom was pretty small, and a bit on the crowded side. An enormous oak wardrobe with a slightly Gothic design and a vaguely threatening aura took up most of one corner: If he'd been playing a videogame, Mark reflected, he'd expect that thing to either have some really good loot or be the source of an incredibly cheap jumpscare. Most of the remaining floor space was taken up by a double bed covered with -he was starting to sense a theme here- a vividly coloured tie-dye blanket and more multicoloured pillows than could possibly be necessary. A radio and a small lamp with a bright pink shade stood on a small bedside table, and it took Mark a second to notice that the radio was still on, the volume just barely above muted. Did Kim Hicks just have sensitive hearing and prefer to keep the volume this low when using the radio as a sleep aid, he wondered, or had she reached out and turned it down because she thought she'd heard something in the night?
The bedroom window was slightly open. Being careful not to touch it anywhere someone trying to push it from the outside might put their hands, Mark pulled it inwards as far as it would go. It stopped after perhaps ten centimetres, arrested by some mechanism in the frame. Nobody could have got in or out that way, not without causing obvious damage to the window itself. And he'd like to see anyone try forcing it open one-handed while clinging to a drainpipe and not break their fool neck in the attempt, let alone somehow not make so much noise that the occupant of the room would wake up and either scream the place down or club the intruder upside the head with something...

"I wonder," Mark said to himself. He glanced at the drawer in the nightstand, but decided the sort of thing a woman might keep in there was unlikely to be germane to the investigation or anything she'd thank him for fiddling with and instead knelt down to look under the bed. Two objects down there immediately struck him as very suspicious. The first was an empty glass lying on its side as if it had been knocked off the nightstand and simply left there, which was thoroughly out of character given how neatly-kept the rest of the property was. The second, much more alarming object was a very large utility knife pulled part of the way out of its sheath. From the angle at which it was lying and the dstance relative to the bed, Mark could see no way it had landed where it was unless someone had dropped it while they were standing up in the middle of the room.
"She heard something," he said aloud, taking another evidence bag out of his pocket for the knife. "She heard something in the night, and she grabbed the knife and got up and..." He trailed off. And then what? And then somehow someone instantly and completely subdued Kim Hicks before she could even fully pull it out, then carried her off into the night without anyone seeing or hearing a single thing? It didn't seem possible-

And there it came again. The shift in the silence, the feeling that there was something there, listening for you the way you were desperately listening for it... And this time it was accompanied by a faint but very real and identifiable sound. The faint squeaking of the hinges as the door betwwen the hallway and the living room swung open.

Something in Mark snapped, and he yanked his telescoping baton out of its belt pouch. Whatever the hell was going on here, he decided, had been going on for more than long enough. He kicked open the bedroom door and snapped open the baton, bringing it up ready to strike. "Police!" he yelled. "Stay where you are and-!"

And then DC Mark Peters learned exactly what had happened to Kimberly Hicks. The hard way.

"I've tried three times," PC Matthews told DS Whittaker. "No answer from the intercom or his radio. Anything from his phone?"
"Nothing," Lucy replied. "Something's wrong. Get someone to buzz us in, and if nobody answers we're breaking it down." She keyed her own radio set. "November Oscar, DS Whittaker. Urgent assistance to my location, officer believed in danger!"

By the time they got the door open, three patrol cars had reached the address. One of them was carrying an Enforcer ram, better known to its users as "the big red key". It broke down the flat's internal door without difficulty and the officers poured in. They found the property completely deserted, with no sign of a struggle or any other forced entry beside their own. The Scenes Of Crime Officers meticulously searched for any fingerprints or DNA traces and found only those that which belonged to Kimberly Hicks. Her phone and laptop were minutely examined, along with her social media accounts and internet history, and so far as can be determined she had last used her laptop shortly before midnight on the night she was last seen. Nothing about the message traffic or other activity indicated that anything was out of the ordinary.

The last movements of Detective Constable Mark Peters before his disappearance are even less clear. His phone and police radio were never found, and so far as can be determined they were both abruptly and simultaneously powered off less than fifteen minutes after his last contact with DS Whittaker and have never been reactivated. The last verifiable activity on his phone was a pair of internet searches, one for "Omeprazole" (likely identifying some leftover medication that was prescribed to Ms Hicks some eighteen months earlier) and another for "medical conditions likely to cause delerium". No attempts have been made to access his bank account, email or social media since his disappearance.

Other than various items he had placed in evidence bags during his search of the property (none of which ended up providing any insights into the case), the only item DC Peters left behind was his telescoping baton. It was found lying on the living room floor, extended and ready for use. It yielded no fingerprints save its owner's, and no blood or skin cell residue: So far as could be determined, it was never used.

Both missing persons cases remain unsolved.