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Ella had scoured the police database for any previous murders in this town and came up short. A few people had referenced some kind of decades-old strange crime but no one seemed to have any further details.
“Oh, weird. I checked the records for any old murders around here and I couldn’t find a single thing.”
Tyler laughed. “That’s because it wasn’t a murder. This family on Coalville Street was convinced they were haunted. Weird stuff kept happening in their house. TVs kept turning on, music played from nowhere, their stuff was going missing. That type of thing.”
“Haunted, eh?” Ella guessed this was just some kind of urban legend. Chuck Pierce probably just made everything up to impress Tyler.
“Yeah. Then they kept hearing knocking on the walls. Sometimes they’d find messages written in shaving foam. One day they found a bunch of knives stuck in the sofa.”
Ella listened a little more closely. The story was probably fabricated but she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t curious how this fairy tale ended. “Right. What happened?”
“One night it got so bad they called a cop out. They scoured the house top to bottom and found nothing, but then they heard a noise in the vents. The cop went up there, reached in the vent and found another arm reaching out to him.”
“Woah,” Ella said. “Someone was in there?”
“Yeah. The cop pulled him out and it was this creepy dude living in their walls. They found he’d been living in there for years. No one had any idea who he was. No one had ever seen him before. No one ever found out his name or where he was from. He was just this… unknown guy. Black hair, dead eyes, shabby clothes.”
Quite the story, Ella thought. Obviously just a load of nonsense. You could always identify a fake story through two things: the lack of sources and the lack of real names.
“Well that’s a folklore story to keep the kids away from the vents, right? I’m guessing no one ever found out who the guy was.”
Tyler flicked his cigarette to the wind and breathed out his last plume of smoke. “Nah. A complete John Doe. Because they found him creeping through the vents, folks just started calling him the Crawler.”
Ella caught her reflection in a car window and it resembled nothing like the girl she thought she was. She was hunched, rigid, her expression one of sheer bewilderment. In her head, pounding drums and high-pitched vocals drowned out the sound of the night.
Doors are locked and bolted now.
As the thing crawls into town.
Night Crawler, beware the beast in black.
“Wait, what did you say?” she asked.
“For real,” Tyler said. “Pretty messed up, huh?”
She took a moment to reply because the sudden exhilaration rendered her mute. “Oh my God,” she finally said.
She grabbed Tyler, hugged him then turned back towards the door. Tyler looked a little uncomfortable, like he’d never been touched by anyone else in his life.
“Everything okay?” Tyler shouted.
“You’ve just helped me more than you could ever know.”
Ella was back in the precinct, on her way toward the office. Now it all made sense. Absolutely nothing in this whole case had been a coincidence. Everything had been meticulously planned to the highest degree, and everything had pointed towards one man, one place, one unsolved murder.
Their killer was an old, mysterious perpetrator known as the Crawler, and she knew exactly what he wanted.
He wasn’t just referencing zero victims, Ella realized. This killer was begging them, pleading with them to solve his own case.
The killer wanted Ella to find his own zero victim.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Ella hurried back to an empty office and grabbed her laptop. She furiously typed away, researching everything she could find about this mysterious incident from decades previous. She uncurled the piece of paper in her pocket – the one she’d taken from Chuck Pierce’s house – and used it to narrow down her search results.
For whatever reason, Chuck Pierce had written about this strange Crawler person in his notes recently, perhaps as part of his ‘research.’ According to his notes the Crawler was:
A local.
