I’m a Detective and I Keep Getting Called to the Same Abandoned House
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My radio squawked at me. The familiar voice of John Parker at dispatch boomed over the airwaves. I left the radio where it was, on the lip of the skyscraper's roof. The city lights glittered like the embers of a massive dying fire as I peered out. A warm breeze stirred my rumpled blue button-up shirt. For the fourth time since I arrived on the roof, I looked over the chest-high lip and then straight down the side of the forty-story building.

And for the fourth time since arriving on the roof, I felt the urge to fling myself over the side. This wasn't the high places phenomenon. That thrilling urge most people feel when they find themselves on a tall building or a bridge or at the edge of a cliff. That was something that normal people felt and it had nothing to do with wanting to die. Quite the opposite in fact. I knew this because I had experienced the high places phenomenon many times before in my life.

back when I still wanted to live. Now, as I looked down the sheer drop, I didn't want to continue existing, but I also didn't have the courage to end my life. That was why I came to this building at night whenever I had a free half hour. I recognized it for what it was, a form of morbid masturbation. I liked to fantasize about killing myself, even if I didn't think I could ever go through with it. Still, I hoped that one day I would find the balls to jump.

But like most cops, I would probably just end up eating my gun. It was easier that way. No less messy, but easier. And I wouldn't risk landing on some poor bastard on the sidewalk below. "Unit 245, come in," Dispatch said again. I turned around and stepped to the picnic table that the building's maintenance guys had put on the roof. The sandwich I'd bought from Sully's Deli lay on top of its fluttering wrapper, two measly bites taken out of it.

I had draped my gray blazer over one side of the table to enjoy the summer wind, trying my best. I picked the sub up and took another bite, but the food tasted like wet cement to me. Still, I forced it down, knowing I had to eat something. My belt was already cinched to its first notch. Dispatch was getting impatient. I swallowed, grabbed the radio, and spoke into it. "245, you've heard the address?" I sighed.

"This isn't something a patrol car can handle?" "You insult me," Parker said. "Of course I tried. Guy said it had to be." "Did he say why?" "Only said it was concerning a case you worked." The warm wind turned freezing, and the three bites of sandwich turned to a black hole in my stomach. I found I couldn't breathe for a moment. "I didn't find anything in the system. You know what this guy is talking about?" "Impossible," I thought, through the choking haze of panic. "It's impossible." "245?" Parker asked.

I cleared my throat with some effort. "Give me the address." "9867 Enigma Lane," Dispatch said, some small amount of relief mixed into my bloodstream upon hearing the address. It wasn't "the" house. It wasn't where I'd met Carver. Maybe it was some sort of coincidence. Or maybe I was about to have a very good reason to kill myself after all. "Thanks," I said over the radio. "I'll see what this is all about."

I pulled the blazer on and tucked the radio into a pocket. After gathering up the sandwich, I moved to the roof access door and down the stairs to the 40th floor. I tossed the sandwich in a trash can and then called the elevator up. The office building was pretty much empty, but a couple of stragglers joined me in the elevator on the way down. My stomach roiled. No one could know about that, I thought repeatedly. No one.

I barely registered the office workers in the elevator with me until the doors opened and everyone filed off, snapping out of it. I moved off after the cubicle zombies, only slowing as I approached the security desk. Despite my worry about the call I'd just gotten, I managed to slip my carefree look into place with relative ease. It was something I'd perfected during my years as a cop. I presented one persona to the general public and a different one to my colleagues.

The carefree one was for friends and family. "How's the sandwich?" I asked the security guard. A retired cop named Teran. My friend's white mustache twitched in remembered delight as he leaned back in his chair and patted his considerable stomach. "Delish," he said. "Thanks again, as always. My pleasure," I said. "Thanks for the view. No better place to eat in the whole city." Teran glanced at his watch.

"Got a call? You usually spend more time up there." "Yeah," I said. "Gotta run. See you next time." As I made my way past the desk and toward the doors, Tehran called out to me. "Make it a French dip next time. You got it." I waved and then stepped out into the night. The hair on my neck stood on end when I saw 9867 Enigma Lane. It was in a rundown neighborhood in a rundown part of town.

But the house was not in a livable state. It looked like it was waiting to be knocked down. With a tall chain-link fence surrounding the entire structure, many of the windows had been broken, probably by assholes throwing rocks from outside the fence. It sat in a pool of darkness on a large lot. The neighborhood had once been charming, but had deteriorated over time. The houses on either side weren't doing much better, although they appeared to be lived in.

I stopped my unmarked patrol car across the street and gazed out my window at the house. The whole thing felt like a setup, although I couldn't think for the life of me who could have known about Carver. I'd spent the 30-minute drive over, racking my brain for anything that might have given me away, but I had come up with nothing. I had been careful, extremely careful. For a brief moment, I considered radioing dispatch and asking Parker if he had the address right.

but I didn't want to draw any more attention to this situation than I had to. I looked around the neighborhood, senses on high alert. There was no movement. Everyone was snug in their homes. The abandoned house drew my attention again, and I stared at it, thinking I should just leave. But as soon as I decided to do just that, a ghostly light flashed in an upstairs window. The sight of that had my blood running cold all over again. Someone was up there, and they knew something.

They knew a lot. They knew about Carver. How the fuck is it possible? It only took a couple of moments for the possibilities to run through my head. Either this was some kind of blackmail scheme, or it was a pissed off family member or friend bent on revenge. Either way, I couldn't let it go on. I thought about the urge to jump off that skyscraper, and the taste of my gun in my mouth, my finger on the trigger.

Sure, I wanted to die. So why was I so fucking scared? I wouldn't let this be dragged out. I would end it, one way or the other. I grabbed my mag light and got out of the car, marching over to the fence and pointing the flashlight beam up at the window where I'd seen the light. I put my other hand on my pistol at my right hip. There was no sign of anyone in the house. No sounds of movement. No one came forth.

They wanted me to go inside. Well, fine, goddammit. I marched over to my unmarked and opened the trunk, retrieving a pair of bolt cutters. Back at the fence, I cut through the chain securing the gate and walked in, leaving the cutters on the cracked sidewalk. As I came to the front door, flashlight in my left hand, I pulled my pistol out. "You wanna play games with a cop?" I grumbled.

I kicked the door open and stepped into the entryway. "Police!" I said in my cop voice. "Come on out now!" I waited, listening. No one came out. Nothing moved in the house. Nothing I could hear anyway. Debris littered the entryway floor.

The stairwell to the second story sat side-on about halfway down the hallway ahead of me, which was cluttered with broken wooden chairs and an old side table that had been smashed apart. "This is the police!" I called, louder this time. "Come out now! If I have to come looking, I will not hesitate to use deadly force!"

A raspy laugh emanated from upstairs. "Deadly force, huh? Like you did with Carver?" My shoulders bunched as I trained the flashlight and pistol on the stairs, even though I could only see the very bottom of the staircase. There was something oddly familiar about that old man's voice, and I immediately wrapped my brain for where I'd heard it before. "Who are you?" I asked. "Come down here."

"You know who I am," the voice said. "You come up here." "Don't fuck with me," I said. "I can call back up here in a minute." "Yeah, but you won't. Because if you do, I'll tell them about Carver. And you don't want that, do you? There's worse things than dying." "What the fuck?" I mouthed. "You don't say anything to anyone if I kill you first," I said. His frustratingly familiar laugh came again.

sending a bolt of rage through my brain. I rushed toward the stairs, kicking loose debris out of the way. As I came to the stairway, I pivoted left and pointed both pistol and flashlight up toward the second floor. But as soon as I did, I wanted nothing more than to reverse time to before I stepped inside the house. A pack of three huskies stood on the stairs, their muzzles covered in blood as they munched on a dead woman who lay sprawled halfway up the stairwell.

Her stomach had been ripped open, and the dogs had pulled out much of her insides in their search for the good meat. Their eyes seemed to glow in the flashlight beam as they turned to look at me. Then they began to growl, lips rising to exposed, blood-stained teeth. Somewhere upstairs, the old man laughed again. As one unit, the dogs lurched toward me. Knowing I didn't have it in me to shoot them, I turned and ran, leaping as I bolted for the front door.

Jaw-snapping barks sounded from close behind me. I sprinted through the entryway, pulling the front door shut behind me. Only when I got through the gate and shoved it closed did I look back and see that the dogs hadn't followed me. The front door stood open, apparently having bounced off the jam because I had destroyed its ability to latch on my way inside earlier. There were no dogs in the entryway. There was no barking or growling, but I could still hear the faint, raspy sound of the old man laughing.

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B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash D-N-S. Rules and restrictions may apply. I had seen many messed up things during my years on the force, and most of them had been while I was a patrol officer. As a detective who mostly worked robbery cases, I wasn't often around to see the worst of things. The first responders, guys and gals in uniform, often got to see the worst of the worst.

them and homicide detectives. I had worked homicide for two years when I first became a detective, but pretty soon I asked for a transfer to robbery, mostly because of something I had seen and something I had done only two months into my career as a detective. It was a coincidence when you get right down to it, a strange coincidence.

My partner, Julie Begley, was at the hospital getting her appendix removed when I stopped at a house to question a possible witness in a recent gang shooting. No one answered the door, and the phone number I had just kept ringing and ringing. So I decided to sit on the house for a couple of hours to see if the witness would show up. I had no other leads and was still learning the ropes of being a homicide detective.

So I parked my unmarked car down the block, killed the engine, and sat back to watch the house. This was mid-spring, and it soon got hot in the car, so I rolled down the windows. That was when I smelled it. It wasn't the stench of a dead body, not quite, but it was a smell I would never be able to forget either. Some years before, while answering a call about an abandoned vehicle, I came across a U-Haul truck with the back locked.

Once my patrol partner and I heard a faint cry for help from the back of the truck, we broke the lock and opened the roll-up door to find a woman tied up in the back. She'd been in there for days, apparently put there by her ex-boyfriend. She had soiled herself several times. That, mixed with the stench of her body odor, left a serious impression on me.

So when I caught a whiff of something similar as a newly appointed homicide detective, it immediately raised my senses. I forgot all about the potential witness at the house down the street and started looking around for the source of the stench. For a moment, I lost the smell. It wasn't overwhelming, and the wind had been just right to bring it to me that first time. But soon, I followed it to a small one-story house across the street from where I was parked.

I knocked on the door but got no answer. The smell was reasonable suspicion enough, so I went around the house and looked through the windows. A back window was just barely cracked, and when I put my nose to it, the piss, shit, sweat smell hit me like an uppercut. But I couldn't see through the window because there were heavy blinds inside. It didn't matter. I went to the back door and broke a small square window pane over the knob, letting myself into the house.

I announced myself, but heard no reply. So I proceeded, moving with caution, my pistol out. The stench was coming from a back bedroom. A young man in his early 20s had been gagged and strapped to a bed. He was frighteningly skinny, and his chest didn't move. I felt for a pulse, but there was no need. The temperature of his skin told me enough. He was dead, but he hadn't been gone long enough to produce the smell of a rotting corpse.

I cleared the rest of the house, finding that I was the only living soul in the place. Then I went back to the bedroom and stood in the doorway, staring down at the dead man. He'd been tortured and starved and left to wallow in his own waste. A strange, calming rage settled on me then. It was a different kind of rage than I was used to. Previously, my anger had thrashed and screamed inside, urging me to lash out at the world.

Now, I only clenched my jaw and thought about what I would do to the person responsible for this inhumane cruelty. The inside of my skull crackled with staticky anger as I stared at the dead man, cruel fantasies parading across my mind. My radio was clipped to my belt under my suit jacket, and I reached for it, bringing it to my mouth. But I stopped, playing it out, thinking about what would happen.

If I called this in, the place would soon be crawling with cops. The street would be blocked up with official vehicles. Whenever the guy came back, he would see the activity and turn right around. Maybe he wouldn't get away for long. Then again, maybe he would. I knew that not calling this in would mean I was breaking the law, but that low, staticky rage didn't care.

But maybe he wouldn't be coming back. Maybe he was gone, on to the next town, or the next house, or the next victim. Maybe. I started looking around for any sign of who the house belonged to, and for any sign that he was planning on coming back. Maybe he didn't know that the guy in the bedroom was dead yet. Maybe he had plans for a little more torture, a little more sicko fun. There was nothing to identify the owner, no mail or ID lying around.

but there was a half-smoked pack of cigarettes and a fridge with fresh-smelling takeout leftovers. Then I opened up the freezer, and what I saw in there made my decision for me. There was a forearm in the freezer, severed at the elbow. I could tell from the slender fingers and painted fingernails that it had once belonged to a woman. I decided I would wait in the house for the man to return.

and I told myself I would arrest him. I told myself that I would arrest him and get him to tell me where the other victims were buried, so we could give their family some closure. But that low, powerful rage told me different. I was sitting in the dark kitchen when the man returned. A key slid into the front door lock, the sound prompting me to stand from the kitchen table, pistol in hand. I stood next to the kitchen doorway, against the wall, ready.

A light came on in the other room, a widening rectangle of illumination pouring through the doorway. That rectangle was soon occupied by the shadow of a man as he approached. "Don't shoot him!" I thought. Part of me was already making plans so I could get away with murder. Leaving a slug behind wasn't part of the plan.

The man stepped into the kitchen carrying cloth reusable bags filled with unseen items. He wore a blue fleece pullover with a quarter zipper, blue jeans and running shoes. I shoved the gun into his face, surprised at how short he was. I'd been a cop long enough to know that you could pass a mass murderer on the street and not know it. But this man's face struck me as painfully average, causing me to delay my next action for a brief moment.

He seemed unsurprised to see me. Maybe he'd been expecting to be found out. And he acted quickly, whipping one loaded bag into my ribs. He was strong, that much was clear as the air rushed out of my lungs. But I had longer arms and was nearly a foot taller. As he turned to run, I reached wildly out and hit him in the head with the butt of my pistol. He didn't go down, but he stumbled, dropping his bags as he bolted for the front door.

Still unable to breathe, I lurched over the dropped bags and grabbed him from behind. We smashed into a side table, which crunched under our weight. Then we were on the floor, and he was struggling mightily until I hit him a second time with the pistol, harder, and he went still. When he came to several minutes later, I had trussed him up in the bathtub. I'd taken the gag from the dead man's mouth and put it into his, and he seemed to realize this as consciousness came back to him.

Since he couldn't see the gag, I had to assume it was the taste that led him to the conclusion. He started squirming and grunting. I had donned latex gloves and found a sharp knife in the kitchen. I put the tip of the blade next to his left eye and said, "He stilled and stopped grunting against the gag." "I'm going to remove your gag," I said. "But if you make a noise louder than a whisper fit for a church, I'll plunge this knife into your eye, but not far enough to kill you. Do you understand?"

The man nodded slightly. "Good. You will answer my questions honestly, or the same thing will happen. Knife. Eye. Pain. Got it?" He nodded again. I removed the gag and allowed the man to turn and spit. Then I replaced the knife next to his eye. "Is there anyone else coming here? Do you have a partner?" "No," the man said. A faint smile came across his face. I didn't like that smile. Not a bit.

"How many people have you killed?" "Three." "Where are the other two buried?" "They aren't. I burned what I didn't eat." I had to take a moment, gathering myself as that rage told me to plunge the knife into his skull. "What's your name?" I asked. I hadn't found any sort of identification on him, only a bunch of cash and a prepaid debit card. He didn't even have a driver's license. "I'm the Carver," he said, his smile widening. "What's your real name?"

His smile grew until dimples formed in his cheeks. "The Carver. I carved them up. Don't you think it's a good name? I just came up with it on my way back from the store." I sighed, knowing that no matter how much the rage wanted it, I wouldn't be able to stab this man through the eye. I stood up from the bathtub, deciding I would call in a random tip.

I knew that if I called it in myself, the fact that I had bound him up and threatened him with a knife would be grounds for a mistrial at worst, and a big embarrassment for the department at best. As I glanced at him one last time, I realized I needed to put the gag back before I headed out to clean up the place so none of my DNA would be found. Only after I cleaned everything up would I leave and drop a tip to the police. I knelt back down, keeping the knife in my right hand as I grabbed one side of the gag.

"You want to know who my first victim was?" Carver asked. Before I could answer, he said, "A little girl. You might remember. Her name was Tessa Johnson. That was me. The Carver's first victim." I froze, looking into his eyes. Every cop on the force knew about Tessa Johnson, but I knew better than most. I had been part of the second unit to arrive at the dumpster where her body had been found. I had seen firsthand what the monster had done to her.

Without a moment's hesitation, I plunged the knife into the left side of Carver's neck. When I pulled it back out, a torrent of arterial blood flowed out, sliding down the off-white porcelain tub toward the drain. The man tried to scream, but I slapped a gloved hand over his mouth and watched him squirm as he bled out. It didn't take long. Only after hours of cleanup in the house did I fully realize what I'd done.

In those first weeks after the murder, I felt justified in my actions. At least, that's what I told myself. Sleep was hard to come by, and I kept having dreams of killing Carver over and over again. Five days after the deed, one of the neighbors called in because of the awful smell coming from the place. Of course, a couple of homicide cops were assigned to the case, but I had it on good authority that they weren't looking too hard.

Carver's DNA was all over the place, and they found a stash of journals where he detailed his murders, along with pictures with his victims, including Tessa Johnson. Strangely, they never figured out what his real name was. His fingerprints were not in the system, and the photos the media put out didn't garner any results. Soon, everyone forgot about it. Everyone but me. As time passed, I grew to hate myself for what I'd done.

I grew to believe I should be punished for taking the law into my own hands. About a year after I killed Carver, the thoughts of suicide started and they hadn't stopped since. Now, someone was fucking with me, using Carver's name to get my attention and bring me to 9867 Enigma Lane. But why? So he could sic dogs on me? So he could taunt me with a dead woman on the stairs?

I stood outside the abandoned house, looking for the dogs, waiting for them to come bounding out. They didn't. I knew I had to go back in. There was a dead woman in there. I should call animal control, I thought. I should call backup. I should, but I won't. I eased my way through the gate again, heading up the stairs with my gun still drawn and flashlight still held up. No dogs came out when I reached the top of the porch. No dogs came out when I stepped into the entryway.

And when I reached the stairs, the dead woman was gone. Nothing but an empty staircase stood before me. It wasn't possible. I had only been outside for five minutes. There had been blood and guts all over the steps, but now they were clean. How? I moved up the stairs and found that all the second floor rooms were empty. I cleared the first floor and the basement. I also searched the backyard. There was no sign any dogs had been around.

and the backyard was fenced with the same tall chain link that encompassed the front. There were no holes in the fence, no gates, no way out through the back. I hurried back out to my car and sat inside it for 15 minutes, staring out at the house. Finally, I pulled away and headed home for another night of restless sleep. This wasn't John Parker's voice. It had been a month since Parker had contacted me about the mysterious call from the old man with the raspy voice.

Parker, who had been injured then, was back in a patrol car, no longer helping out with Dispatch. I sat in the office of Tony's Bar and Grill, talking with the owner and the general manager about a burglary that had taken place overnight. As with every other time Dispatch had contacted me since that night a month ago, I grew sick to my stomach. Instead of putting it off, I stood up from my chair in the cramped office and said, "I'll be right back." The two guys looked upset.

but I barely registered it as I stepped out of the office with my radio and contacted dispatch. "I've got a strange call for you," Durand said in her gruff voice. "Wouldn't give me much information. Just said." "Let me guess. He said it was Carver." Durand said. "Is he related to you?" "What gave you that idea?" I said. "Uncomfortable with these questions," Durand said. "Did he give you an address?" "I got it from here," I said. "Thanks." There was a pause.

"You don't sound too good. Want me to send a unit to that address?" "No." I said a little too quickly. "I'm fine. I got it. It's nothing I can't handle." I finished up at the bar and headed to Enigma Lane, arriving just as the sun was setting. Someone had replaced the lock on the front gate, so I had to use the bolt cutters again. This time, I didn't dawdle.

With my flashlight and my pistol, I rushed into the house. Wondering why it hadn't been torn down yet, I found no one on the first floor. I heard nothing. I yelled out for the old man, but I got no answer. "If there's dogs in here, I'm gonna shoot them!" I shouted up the stairs. When I heard only silence, I rushed up to the second floor.

The first bedroom was empty, but when I shoved the door to the second one open, I was met with a horrendous sight. A man lay in the middle of the room, his skin flayed from his chest and stretched out, then stapled to the floor. His face had also been skinned, but the removed flesh was nowhere to be seen. His exposed rib cage didn't move at all, and the stench of putrefaction left no doubt in my mind that he was dead.

Watch the backswing! He said. But his voice was the old man's. He didn't sound anything like the real Carver.

The words meant nothing to me, but I was already raising the gun and choosing my own words. "Drop the knife and put your hands up!" The man darted toward me. I pulled the trigger three times, shooting the man in the chest. I blinked reflexively on the last shot, and when my eyelids opened again, the man was gone. I looked around the hall. Then I looked back into the bedroom. There was no dead man. No evidence there had ever been one there.

I rushed out of the house and got into my car. Sure, a neighbor would call the police because of the gunshots. As I raced down Enigma Lane, I started a new mantra, repeating one question over and again in my mind. "What the hell is wrong with me?" I banged on the door with the side of my fist. "Leonard Varney, this is the police. We have a warrant for your arrest." It didn't take me long to find the man who burgled Tony's Bar and Grill.

mostly because the guy was an idiot and left his fingerprints all over the place. He'd recently been fired from the bar for stealing from his register, not the strongest spirit in the liquor cabinet this one. When I didn't receive an answer from inside, I stepped away from the door and gestured at the uniformed officer with the battering ram in his hands. Several other officers stood nearby, ready to storm into the house. But before the guy could break the door down, our radios crackled to life.

I immediately darted away from the front door and ran around the small one-story house, coming into the backyard in time to see Leonard Frederick Varney take a wild swing at a police officer with his golf club. The officer ducked back, and the club whizzed through the air. I slowed, approaching the man from behind, hoping he wouldn't see me.

He was barefoot and shirtless, dressed only in floppy pajama pants. He yelled incoherently as he held off the officers who'd been tasked with watching the back of the house. As another officer darted toward his front, I moved in to tackle him from the back.

Varney swung at the officer in front of him, but he was quick on the backswing, and I was slow in getting to him. The club came around, and I had no time to dodge it before it smacked me directly in the throat. I stumbled back, and Varney turned around, surprised, to see what he'd hit. An officer tackled him from behind and sent him to the ground. A moment later, I lost my footing and fell hard onto my ass, eyes wide as I struggled to pull in oxygen.

Some was getting through, but not nearly enough. I dropped my pistol and gripped my throat, vaguely aware that one of the uniforms was calling for an ambulance. The world narrowed to a pinpoint as panic closed in. I was sure I would suffocate. Despite the noisy, painful breaths, I managed to pull through my damaged trachea. I grew lightheaded from the small breaths, but through the panic and pain and fear, the mysterious old man's words echoed in my head.

They were the only words he'd spoken to me on my last visit to the house. "Watch the backswing! Your vocal cords are damaged and they need time to heal," the doctor explained to me after the surgery. "If you can help it, don't talk at all for the next seven days. But if you absolutely have to talk, do so in a whisper. And certainly don't raise your voice. If you shout or otherwise stress your vocal cords during this critical healing period, you could damage them permanently."

I nodded from my hospital bed, my mind still on 9867 Enigma Lane and the strange things that had happened there. But mostly, I was thinking about how the old man could have known about something that hadn't even happened yet when he'd said those three words. "Mind the backswing. I'm scheduling a follow-up for a week from today. We'll decide then if you can start using your voice normally, okay?" I nodded again, staring blankly past his shoulder.

He left the room and soon after, I was discharged from the hospital. I had to resist the urge to finger the bandage on my throat. The doc had given me instructions on when to change the bandage. He said the stitches from the surgery would need to come out in a couple of weeks. Watch the backswing. How could he have known? Everything else I could have chalked up to an overactive imagination. But not that. That was the equivalent of seeing the future.

Was it possible that I had just imagined the whole thing and had a premonition that I would get hit in the throat? It was a ridiculous notion. I drove home, determined not to think about it. I spent two hours pacing in my living room, trying to talk myself out of going back to Enigma Lane. The sunlight outside my closed blinds dimmed and then faded altogether as night fell.

I paced and ruminated, and always in the back of my mind was the thought of suicide. "You can just make this all go away," a slithery voice in my mind said. "All it would take is a pull of the trigger." Convinced I was going insane, I didn't think it was such a bad idea. I wasn't cut out to be a murderer. Carver had been haunting me ever since I plunged that knife into him. That thought had me pausing in my living room. Maybe it really was Carver's ghost haunting me.

Maybe he was trying to drive me to suicide. If so, it was working. After all, who else would know what I'd done in that crummy little house over two years ago? Who else but Carver and me? I decided I would go to the house one last time, if for no other reason than to satiate my curiosity. After all, it was as good a place as any to eat a bullet. Maybe I could join that prick as a ghost and haunt him for a change.

I arrived at 9867 Enigma Lane just after 9 that night. The lock was still broken for my last visit, so all I had to do was slip through the gate. I paused at the still open front door, listening for any sign of activity. The place was as silent as I had been since my surgery. My throat was still painful and swallowing hurt. This meant I couldn't call out my presence. Not that I would have even if I could.

I stepped over the threshold and into the house, my pistol still snugly in its holster. This time, I had left my flashlight in the car. I let my eyes adjust before moving farther into the house. The door slammed shut behind me. I spun around to see a pile of severed body parts against the door. There were three legs, four arms, and two heads. One set belonged to a man, the other to a woman. They were so real, just like all the other visions had been.

But I hadn't touched any of them, and they hadn't touched me. Maybe they couldn't. Maybe Carver couldn't actually hurt me, so he was just trying to drive me crazy. I turned around and looked down the hall toward the stairs, determined to confront the sicko. But I couldn't speak, not without damaging my vocal cords. I marched to the stairs and looked up. The dead woman was there, and the three huskies.

The dogs all looked at me, quickly falling into a frenzy of growls and savage barks. I stepped onto the stairs and the dogs pounced. I recoiled. Sure, I was about to be torn apart, but they passed right through me and the illusion disappeared. The stairs were clear.

Smiling grimly, I moved to the second floor and went to the bedroom where I'd seen the flayed man. He was there again, just as he had been before. I kept walking, heading toward the master bedroom, looking for Carver. I felt as if his power over me was waning. Then I stepped into the master bedroom and saw the pair of little bodies on the floor. They were just kids, and they couldn't have been more than ten years old.

I shut my eyes and turned my head away from the gruesome sight, suddenly reminded of all the evil in the world, evil I had contributed to by killing Carver. When I opened my eyes again, the kids were still there, but there was another body in the corner of the room, a familiar body. My blood froze as I stepped closer. He was in a recliner, the top of his skull gone and his brains splattered all over the wall behind him. He was older and a little gray, and his belly was bigger.

but there was no mistaking him for anyone else. I had seen him in the mirror every day of my life. He was me, 10 or 15 years older, but still me. I stepped closer and leaned down, looking at the gun still clutched in his right hand. It was the same gun I now had in my holster. Then my gaze traveled up and saw the faint scar on his neck. Absently, I reached up and fingered the bandage there. "No," I thought, "it's not real."

I reached out, expecting to break the illusion with my touch. But instead, I felt a solid arm under my fingers. As I flinched away, the man in the recliner opened his eyes and shot a hand out, grabbing me by the neck. I shouted in pain and surprise. The act of vocalization only caused more pain as the shout ripped from my throat. The man drove me back with one hand. He was impossibly strong, and he directed me into the bathroom.

Then the backs of my knees met something hard and I fell into a bathtub. He shoved me so I was lying lengthwise in the tub and brought his right hand up, but he no longer held a gun. It was a knife. A knife identical to the one I had used to kill Carver. He pressed the tip of the blade next to my eye and said,

His face was no longer an aged version of mine. It was Carver's. Yet, when he spoke, he did so in that same raspy voice. "I'm going to ask you a simple question. If you lie to me, I'll plunge this knife into your eye, but not far enough to kill you. Do you understand?"

I nodded slightly, the pain and terror now all-encompassing. He could hurt me. He could kill me. I was wrong, and I was about to pay for my sins with my life.

"Do you want to die?" he asked. I nodded just enough so I wouldn't skewer my eye. "Goddamn you!" he screamed in my face. "Stop this self-pitying bullshit. All those people saw you when you came in here. All those people would be dead if it weren't for you. The woman on the stairs? Her name is Angela Palacio, and she has three huskies that would have gotten hungry enough to eat her corpse if you hadn't saved her life."

He took a breath, still pressing the knife to my cheek.

But there's one more life you can still save. So tell me again, do you want to die? Through the pain and fear, the puzzle pieces were falling into place. They were impossible pieces, but I could fit them together nonetheless.

Amazement started to take hold inside. Sheer, incomprehensible amazement. "Answer me!" he said, digging the tip of the blade into my skin just enough to draw blood. "Use your voice. Do you want to die or not?" "No," I whispered, wincing at the pain. My voice sounded strange to my own ears. "I can't hear you," Carver screamed. "Do you want to die?"

The puzzle pieces clicked, revealing the full image. An image as real as the pain in my throat and under my eye. No! I screamed, realizing only then that I was speaking the truth. The scream felt like sandpaper scraping along my vocal cords, but I continued anyway. I don't want to die! My eyes widened at those words. My voice had changed, thanks to the injury. Now, I sounded exactly like the man holding the knife to my eye. My new voice was...

"Is?" I looked into his eyes, watching in shock as they changed back from Carver's into mine. His face soon morphed back and it was like looking into a mirror that aged me 15 years. He smiled and removed the knife. "Now you get it, don't you? I think so." It was as if his voice was coming out of my head, but it was my voice now. It had always been.

That amazement was still blossoming, still filling me with a great sense of possibilities to come. "How?" I asked in my new voice. My future self stood up from next to the bathtub and looked around. "Next year, they'll tear this place down and build a series of townhomes here. Ten years after that, you'll move into one of those townhomes. About three years later, you'll sit down in a recliner in your living room and put a bullet through the roof of your mouth."

He turned and looked at me. At least, that's what I did. But you won't do that, will you? Because you weren't lying just now, were you? You do want to live. I do, I said. I want to live, but I still don't understand. You're the ghost of my future self? How is that possible? The other me shrugged.

They say ghosts only remain because they have unfinished business. Well, turns out if you only exist as a spirit, time is... less than linear. At least, time within the span of my life. Our life, I guess. I can't go back and haunt Hitler is what I'm saying. I tried. "But why this place?" I asked, standing up in the bathtub. "Why this house?" I told you. This is where I killed myself.

Only it's not an abandoned house when I do it. It's a series of townhomes. I'm tethered here, I guess. That's how you knew about the backswing. Because it happened to you. The other me nodded. That's right. I stepped out of the bathtub, noticing that the other me was looking a little less solid, like he was fading away. What do I do now?

"Go forth knowing you did the right thing. Maybe not right in the eyes of the law, but right in the grand scheme of things. Don't lose any more sleep over Carver, okay? And for fuck's sake, don't kill yourself. That would be a waste of a great homicide detective." "I'm not a homicide detective," I said. "I work robbery. Do you?" The other me asked, smiling. The final pieces of the puzzle clicked into place, and I found myself smiling too.

I was never called to 9867 Enigma Lane again. Granted, it has only been a few years since I walked out of that abandoned house for the last time, but I have had no contact from the ghost of my future self since then. I hope that's because his job here is done, and he's moved on to the next plane, whatever that may be. I drove by the old place one day and saw the house had been torn down, and construction was beginning on what I assume will be townhomes.

I'm now back in Homicide, and I sleep pretty well at night. As well as any homicide detective can sleep, I guess. But there's still one thing that still bothers me about the encounter. And that's my voice. The doctor says it will be raspy like this for the rest of my life. That's not such a big deal. But my voice, and the voice of my future self were the same.

Since I damaged my vocal cords while I was in the bathtub with the ghost of my future self holding a knife to my eye, wouldn't that mean that the same thing happened to my future self? And if so, wouldn't that mean that nothing ever really changed at all? It's all so confusing. I don't know how time travel works, and I certainly don't know how ghosts work, but I do know one thing, and it brings me great solace. Suicide is a choice, and it always will be.

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