Nano excerpt: Temple

You enter the room again, despite the horrors you know it contains, ignoring the warning being screamed in your head. Heart racing and feet slowing, your own body rebelling against a decision already taken. Ignore the creak of the floorboards under your feet, ignore the stench of death, ignore the feeling of a single great eye bearing witness to your actions, and definitely ignore the hot breath on the back of your neck. Focus on the doorway, that gaping void into the waiting unknown, the dark abyss pregnant with dread, closing your mind to the possibility of anything else. Hesitate at the entrance, one last hopeless chance at a respite from these events, but an unneccesary one as your legs move of their own accord, breaking the threshold and throwing you into madness. One final rule flits across your thoughts, above all, Don't Scream.

She screamed.

"It's the same nightmare every time, doc. Recounting the events of that day over and over until they're burned into my mind like a cowboy branding a steer. I've been drinking twelve cups of coffee a day, downing energy drinks like someone who hasn't seen water in a week, taking pills to keep me awake because I can't face it anymore, I can't face entering that room again, seeing those things again. I can't. I WON'T!" Amy buried her face in her hands, long ginger hair falling around her face and down her shoulders. She was somewhere in her late twenties, plain but not wholly unattractive face currently transfixed in a mixture of fear and pain, leading her to look aged beyond her years at this point. She sobbed gently, tall, lean body shivering from the sleep deprivation and nerves. Tears streaming down her face in rivulets, coursing down her palms but stopped at the wrist by the gentle touch of the psychiatrist whose office she was currently in. "My dear, what you've been through is tough, but this isn't the way to deal with it. You're going to have to confront these fears, and accept that they're a part of your life. Until you do that you'll never escape these night terrors. Now, come, tell me what happened to you to make this happen, how did that day go?" Vygotsky radiated warmth and comfort through every pore. Everything about him seemed designed to reassure his patients; from his small, spectacled eyes, through his wiry, greying hair and to the soft decisive voice. It felt, to Amy, that he was reminiscent of Morgan Freeman declaring that hope was a shield that would protect you from the world.
"I can't, I don't want to think about it."
"You must, Amy. Without this there can be no healing, no nights filled with sleep again. I need to know what you went through before I can get it out of your mind. Start with something small, normal, and work your way up to the events. Tell me what your job is like."
"Okay, okay. I can handle that. Sure. So, it's never been easy being a homicide cop in London. The urban sprawl here brings an awful lot of crazy with it. Eveyrthing from tourists too proud or stupid to hand over their wallets at the first flash of a gun; abusive husbands pushing just a step too far and discovering the emotional stress inherent in having a kitchen knife shoved hard into their gut; smalltime drug dealers thinking they've got the stones or the cash or the guns to take some of Kwik's corners and then quickly finding that they didn't have nearly enough blood in their bodies any more. All that kind of crap comes across my desk regularly, and I deal with it."
"That's good, notice how you stopped crying when you were talking? You can do this. Cast your mind back to that day and tell me what happened."
"My two til ten shift was passing easy on that day, one of those hot, lazy summer days that makes people think twice about killing other people. Nobody's got much energy for murder although the heat raised tempers and number of assualts rose with them, surprisingly few ended up with dead bodies. I hadn't been doing anything but finishing bits and pieces of paperwork, maybe phoning up the vice guys to see if they'd turned anything new up, but nothing. Then the phone rang. Patrol had found a man screaming on the corner of Granby and Chilton, gibbering insanely about a body, they'd checked it out and apparently a mean piece of work had been done. Definite homicide case and could I come over? Sure.

"It took about thirty minutes to get into Bethnal Green through the traffic but I was still there before Forensics. Patrol evidently hadn't gotten anywhere with their man, he was still sat on the curb, despite the protestations from both two policemen and an ambulance crew. All I saw was a man in obvious shock, but I feel like I should've been able to read his face better, to discern that something else was wholly wrong behind his eyes. He had the same look that I see when I look in the mirror nowadays. Stewart from Patrol directed me into the dilapidated block of flats that stood behind him, guiding me down the dark hallway, past the elevator with an Out of Order sign pasted firmly to its door. We walked up the four flights of stairs and he pointed down the hallway at room 513, its door half off its hinges. Stewart went back downstairs to await Forensics while I made my way down the hallway filled with foreboding. Except there wasn't any foreboding at the time, it was more of the same for me, just another crime scene to look at, log and then investigate myself or hand over to someone else on the team. Now, after five years on Homicide you get used to seeing dead bodies. Your mind becomes completely calloused to all the blood and shit that covers crime scenes, I barey even smelled it any more. I've seen sawn off body parts being fished out of a bin, I've seen the body of a man killed by strangulation, his genitals cut off and placed in his own mouth. Basically, I've seen a lot of shit, and I thought I was ready for whatever shit the city had thrown at me that day. I wasn't, not even close. The first thing my eyes were immediately drawn to was the pentagram drawn on the panelled, wooden floor, obviously in blood. I should have closed my eyes then. Shut them tight and walked away and called Daniels and let him and his people deal with it, but I still didn't know what I was dealing with. The victims torso was left at the centre of the pentagram, while his arms and legs were left splayed out to match the star shape. The head was missing, or, at least, not attached to the body any more. The uppermost point of the star didn't end on the floor though it was elongated, and carried on up the wall. As my eyes reached the zenith I saw the head, nailed to the wall. Eyes bulging, tongue lolling and half obscured by blood matted hair, it filled me with revulsion that someone could have done this. Some sick fuck, probably overdosing on some PHP, thinking he was the Devil himself. I'm sorry." Amy paused, visibly shaken again, her whole body rocking back and forth in the leather armchair. "I can't do it, can't do it. Not what you're asking of me. It's too much, I can't handle it. I wasn't built to deal with this."
"Come on Amy, you've brought yourself to this point, you can do it, you can tell me what happened in that room and we can begin the healing process. Please, break this last barrier down and tell me. We've come further today than we have in the past three weeks. I'm right here with you, you're safe in this room." By now, Vygotsky's arm was around her shoulders, holding her steady, trying to relax the tension evident in her body posture, his voice encouraging but firm, like he would no longer take no for an answer. "This is it, this is the crux of the whole matter. What was it about the head that caused this, how was this any different from the crime scenes you dealt with for five years? Tell me, Amy, confide in me."
"It.. the head.. it spoke."
"It spoke? How could a head seperated from its body speak? It's got no lungs to push air through what vocal chords were still attached"
"I don't know, but it spoke to me. Jesus Christ, it knew my fucking name!"
Vygotsky reeled back in shock, both at what she said and the force with which she'd said it. The words came out like a physical blow knocking him back into his seat. It was a full minute before he regained enough composure to ask "You told Daniels all of this?"
"Yeah, every last word of it. He told me to take two weeks vacation, go somewhere, forget about this. Smug bastard. How do you forget about something like this? No matter what I do, it's still there." Amy replied, through gritted teeth and with fists clenched tight.
"Did the victim, the head, did it say anything else to you?"
"It did. It said 'Amy Temple? I've got a message for you. From your father.' Hear that? My dead father, sending a message through a disembodied head nailed to a wall. I threw up when it spoke, heaved everything I'd eaten that day into a corner of the blood-stained room. Shit, the head, whatever it was, called me disgusting. Me! A fucking talking head calling me disgusting." Her composure was returning and with it a sense of control, although not of proportion, perhaps.
"The message, what was it?" Vygotsky had lost all pretensions of psychiatry, merely hooked on the story unfolding before him. Amy, the formerly hesistant narrator, playing to this audience of one.
"It said," she paused once more, collecting herself before finishing, partly due to the association of terror that was still present, but partly due to the drama that seemed to have infested the room, prescient and commanding, forcing these two people to submit to its driving will. "It said that this was from the mouth of James Mason, my father. That I wasn't safe any more, that I couldn't keep my head buried in the sand much longer. That things were beyond my control. That the raven's wolves would hound me and tear me to pieces. He said to find my mother again, that she held the answers."
"Could this message really be from your father somehow? Could he have left it with someone?"
"My father's been dead for seven years."