By Kaitlin Ragosta Hughes
So he led an unusual life. Doesn’t mean there was anything unusual about his death. As he so often did, George kept this thought to himself. When a man like Albert Hensley died, it didn’t matter if suspicion was warranted or not. The press was going to dissect the situation–poke and prod it from every angle, blow every minute detail out of proportion–and as a matter of liability, the department needed to make sure every “t” was crossed and every “i” dotted.
Personally, George had never been a fan of Hensley’s work. The writing probably was skillful if you cared about that sort of thing, but it was all just a little too…odd for his taste. One of his daughters liked Hensley in her teenage years. She also liked combat boots and black eye makeup. George had a hard time understanding why a pretty young girl would want to get involved with crap like that, and while he kept those thoughts to himself too, his wife had less restraint. They didn’t see that daughter much anymore.
My opinion be damned, I guess, George thought as he pulled up to the estate. Sometimes it does pay to be odd. The old, stone manor sat well back from the street, encased in a matching stone wall and surrounded by manicured grounds. When Hensley bought it, something like 30 years ago, it had been sitting abandoned and dilapidated for as long as anyone could remember. Local lore even said it was haunted. For this particular buyer, that was probably a selling point. Hensley did repair the old eyesore, and George was grateful for that, but the place still seemed off somehow. Not “off” as in haunted or any of that nonsense. It was just out of place in a way George found distasteful; the town had clearly spread outward since its construction, and he cringed at the bizarre sight of a castle-like stone house situated at the edge of an otherwise normal suburban neighborhood as he made his way to the front door.
Personal feelings aside, George had a job to do, and he would really like to be done before the news broke and the street outside was full of Hensleyheads hanging fishnet stockings on the gate in tribute, or whatever those sorts of people do. Ducking carefully under the caution tape across the front door, he pulled on a pair of too-small latex gloves that stretched taut across his fleshy fingers, with the exception of the small divot where his wedding band squeezed slightly. He ought to have the ring resized. Really, he ought to have had it resized years ago. He just could never quite bring himself to do it. Once a year or so, he teetered on the brink of the prerequisite realization that he was no longer the same George who purchased the ring all those years ago, but he invariably shied away, decided the fit wasn’t all that bad, really, and promptly shoved the whole ordeal out of his mind.
One of the newer kids on the force, Rollins or Richards or something, showed George through the home’s labyrinthine hallways with a thinly veiled excitement that George found exhausting until they reached a tall and winding spiral staircase. Albert Hensley would be found dead in his observatory, George thought darkly as he found himself quickly short of breath. His doctor was right; he really ought to do more cardio. He shoved that thought away too.
When he finally reached the room, he adeptly hid both his labored breathing and a disgruntled harumph. The observatory could’ve passed for a wizard’s tower in a storybook: luxe velvet furnishing, a free-standing globe inlaid with some sort of expensive-looking stone, and a large, antique telescope pointed up at the domed glass ceiling. Splayed across the plush Persian rug was the corpse of Albert Hensley. It looked out of place due more to its attire–loose basketball shorts and an old t-shirt–than anything else. Otherwise, a dead body actually fit quite well with the decor.
There was only one door into the observatory, which Hensley had apparently used as an office, and his maid insisted he always kept it locked while writing inside. “Mr. Hensley is–or um, was” she corrected herself, beginning to sniffle, “very private about his writing process. No one was to read his drafts before he was satisfied with them, and–” Here her sniffling grew into full blown tears, but she continued. “And the door remained locked while he worked lest someone mistakenly enter and catch a glimpse of any unfinished work.” Most likely, she was repeating verbatim a speech she’d been given; normal, non-Hensley people don’t say “lest”.
Her tears turned to heaving sobs, and George shuffled uncomfortably. Decades of policework, and he still never quite knew what to do with himself when women cried. His wife rarely cried; that was one of the things he liked about her. She yelled sometimes, but yelling was fine. Anger he could take. Tears were a different story entirely. The handbook instructed him to offer comfort, whatever that meant. He decided to silently offer her a tissue and let Roberts or whatever his name was usher her back downstairs.
Hysterics aside, her story checked out. She’d called 911 this morning when Hensley didn’t answer to a knock on the door. First responders broke it down when they arrived. By that time, several firefighters and medics were on scene, and none of them saw anyone in the room other than Hensley.
Sweeping the room with practiced eyes, George saw no signs of a struggle. No objects overturned, no defensive wounds or injuries of any kind on the body. A half-drunk cup of coffee sat abandoned on the desk, but Hensley had one of those single-cup coffee machines–the kind that used expensive pods and made a noise like nails on a chalkboard and still didn’t taste half as good as regular old drip coffee, so poisoning was unlikely. Nothing at all suggested that Albert Hensley had been the victim of anything other than his own failing body. The man was in his mid 70s, after all, and his dripping nose suggested he hadn’t been in the best health. Maybe it could’ve been a suicide, but the circumstances didn’t seem right for a man with such an infamous flair for the dramatic. Could George believe that Albert Hensley flung himself from the observatory? Possibly. Slit his own throat under the light of a full moon in some bizarre ritual? Certainly. But quietly overdose, without so much as a note? His gut said no.
Just in case, George did another sweep of the room and crouched down to check that nothing on the body had been missed. As he turned the head slightly, more liquid came flooding out of the nose and, this time, the ears. When the smell hit him, George’s stomach turned. This wasn’t a runny nose. He’d smelled decay often enough to know that his shoes were now covered in liquefied brain matter. Before he could even wonder how the liquefaction occurred, George was interrupted by the sound of the kid–Rogers, maybe?–screaming like he was being skinned alive. George turned sharply to find him frozen in place, staring directly upward at the glass dome above.
He didn’t know what he expected to see when he turned his service weapon upward, but he expected something. An intruder, the rapture, Bigfoot, something. All he saw was a pane of glass that looked a bit wobbly. No, wobbly wasn’t quite right. It rippled, almost as if the glass had become molten again. A drop of something seeped through its surface, and when he went to touch the carpet below, his fingers came away dry but shiny. Not a watery sort of shine; his hand now shone the way a backlit prism shines, radiating a kaleidoscope of colors across the room. Some kind of oil? George wondered, but he knew that wasn’t quite right either. Some of these colors he had never seen before. When the effect spread to the surrounding panes, the ripples took on a kaleidoscopic tiling quality, as if the glass was floating in tiny, fractured pieces on the surface of a pearlescent liquid.
The ceiling didn’t so much collapse as open in a direction that didn’t previously exist. While George failed to comprehend what he was seeing, something slithered outward from the new opening. Monster, was the first word that came to mind, but that wasn’t right. To call it a monster would be like calling a tornado a bully–somehow both an understatement and a mischaracterization. Monstrosity requires malice. Malice, however, is a quality unique to human beings, and George wasn’t looking at a being–human or otherwise.
George didn’t bother searching for a better description; he simply opened fire and thought, “How the hell am I going to explain this in the report?”
* * *
Kaitlin Ragosta Hughes, a Ph.D. student at Brandeis University, combines her life-long love of the supernatural with her formal training in the often counterintuitive world of pure mathematics to create fiction with an out-of-the-box twist. The Unusual Death of Albert Hensley is her literary debut. Originally from Tulsa, OK, Kaitlin now divides her time between Boston, MA and Bonn, Germany. When she is not reading, she can often be found watching horror movies with her husband or working on an ever-changing assortment of crafts.