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“Creatures of the Night”

A Jake Ivers Mystery

By John W. WhiteheadPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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“Creatures of the Night”
Photo by Tanya Trofymchuk on Unsplash

Usually it starts with a late-night phone call.

In my business, we call it the 2 a.m. alert.

At that hour, callers run the gamut from the drunk to the troubled cop to the screamer.

This time, it was a weeper.

“Jake Ivers, PI,” I mumbled, squinting bleary-eyed at the clock on the nightstand.

“Please, you’ve got to help me,” she sobbed.

“You gotta name?”

“I’m sorry,” she faltered. “It’s Sherry. Sherry Black. Please, Mr. Ivers, my husband is missing.”

“You only noticed this now?”

“It’s been two weeks.” A siren sounded in the distance. “I’ve tried everything. I called the police. I’ve talked to his friends, his co-workers. He just vanished without a trace.”

I shifted deeper into the pillow. “Alright. Meet me at my office at 10. 714 Reed Street.”

_____

Sherry Black looked just she like sounded over the phone: young, pretty, elegant.

In my dingy office, surrounded by piles of old newspapers, discarded coffee cups, and an overflowing wastepaper basket, she might have been the youngest thing in the room.

“So tell me about this missing husband,” I said, after she’d refused my offer of day-old coffee and a stale bagel.

She slid a photo across the desk, a shot of a beaming couple on their wedding day. “His name is Derek. He’s 34 years old. And the last time I saw him was two weeks ago, when he left for work.” Her eyes glistened with new tears.

“Is Derek from Florida, too, or did you move down here to be with him?” I sipped at the sludgy brew, waiting for the jolt to my system.

“How did you know—?”

“It’s the accent. One of the first things you learn as a private investigator.”

She offered up a ghost of a smile.

“What does Derek do for a living?” The bagel was rock-hard, but I gnawed on it anyhow.

“He’s a geneticist with the Bernays Institute.”

“Smart guy.” I leaned back, propped my feet up on the desk. “He like it there?”

“It’s been his dream job. Until lately, that is.”

Mouth full, I gestured for her to go on.

“He’s not allowed to talk a lot about what he’s working on, but generally, it has to do with how genetic shifts across the species impact the environment. And whether in the future it might be possible to achieve a kind of singularity between species.”

“Singularity? Like merging everyone into one being?” We were about to reach the limits of what I knew about genetic tinkering and technology.

“I don’t think it is anything like that,” she said, a slight frown marring the smooth slope of her forehead. “From the little Derek said, it had more to do with symbiosis, each species sharing the best of traits with each other.”

“And you think Derek going missing has something to do with his work?” I watched her out of the corner of my eye, looking for any signs that she knew more than she was telling.

“I’m sure of it.”

I dusted bagel crumbs off my lap and pulled out my little black notebook. “And what did the folks at the Bernays Institute have to say about Derek going missing?”

“I talked to his boss, Dr. Amin. He claims Derek’s on an extended assignment, somewhere where he can’t be reached.”

“And you don’t believe it?”

“Derek didn’t say a word to me about any travel assignments, or being gone for any amount of time. He didn’t even pack a bag. Anyway, he’s not that kind of researcher. He’s a lab guy, not a field researcher.”

“So what did the cops have to say? You went to the cops, right?”

“They sent me to you. Said I couldn’t file a missing person’s report since his boss says he’s not missing, so you’d be my best choice.”

“Was he working on a specific project?”

She hesitated. “His latest project involved reptiles.”

“Lizards, snakes, that kind of thing?”

“Just the genes. Not the actual creatures. Derek’s focus has been on the class of alligators found in the Everglades.” She bit her lip, leaned forward, started to speak, then stopped again.

I waited.

“The thing is, Derek had been acting strange ever since we got back from our honeymoon. He’s normally very calm, very reasonable, very systematic in all he does. But he started getting irritable, agitated, aggressive. Even his appetite had changed. And no, it wasn’t drugs.”

“Maybe the guy was having a tough time at work, bringing his stress home. It happens.”

“Not Derek.” She clasped her hands tightly in her lap, and started fingering her wedding ring. “He was different. Even in our most private moments, he was different.”

What she wasn’t saying was a lot.

“OK, Mrs. Black, give me a few days to do a little digging, and I’ll be in touch.”

_____

I tried to dig up some intel on the Bernays Institute, but there wasn’t a lot to find on official channels. Still, I had my own methods of getting at what I needed.

There’d been murmurings for years now on the underground networks about black-ops research into cross-species hybridization. Mainly in China, where they’d been working to fuse humans with rabbits and pigs. But was it happening here, too? Of course it was.

I was just starting to delve deeper into a few possible leads when Sherry called to say she’d come across something that might be relevant. We agreed to meet in a dark corner of a little dive where no one wants to know your name.

I was nursing a dirty martini—heavy on the dirty part—when she arrived, more flustered than the last time I’d seen her. “These are our latest bank statements,” she said, pulling a small sheaf of papers out of her purse and passing it to me. “There’s a recent deposit in there for $20,000 from Bernays Institute. It was transmitted the day after he went missing.”

“A bonus, maybe?”

“I don’t think so. He didn’t make that kind of money. And he never said anything to me about expecting more money for any reason.” Glancing around uncertainly, she shifted her chair closer to mine. “Jake, there’s something else… It’s going to sound crazy, but those last few weeks, before Derek went missing, he was different in other ways, too.”

“Different how?”

“He walked differently sometimes. He’s always had a lean build. Carried himself well. It was one of the things that first attracted me to him. But he started hunching over when he walked, just a little, and his body was changing, getting bulkier in places, more muscular. His skin felt a little more leathery, too. And he even smelled different…almost fishy, like fish that had been left out too long.”

Something was starting to smell fishy, alright.

Everything pointed to Bernays. Inner alarm bells were going off right and left.

“Bernays has a marine laboratory research park not far from here.” I pulled out my phone and started checking the coordinates. “I’m going to do a little after-hours prowling and see what’s what.”

“I’m coming with you.” Sherry scooted her chair back and stood up. She’d clearly dressed to go incognito, her hair pulled back, her clothes nondescript, her jewelry minimal.

“I work alone.”

“I’ve been to that research park with Derek. I know the general layout,” she said, her eyes awash with grief. “Please. I need to help.”

_____

We parked a block away from the research park and walked along a street dappled in shadows. This part of town, deserted even at the busiest of times, didn’t bother with too many street lights. A small, inconspicuous sign directed visitors to a door around the left of the low-slung, one-story building. Tubes and antennae arrowed out from the roofline.

Sherry led us around to the right of the building, past a dimly lit employee entrance. Behind the building, the research park stretched back about as far as a football field. A metal fence surrounded the rear of the property, which was dotted with large, rectangular vats and cages.

Sherry motioned me over to a line of shrubs that ran along the perimeter of the fence. “Derek needed to grab something one time after hours when we’d been out together and didn’t have his security badge with him. There’s a small gap beneath the fence, just big enough to shimmy under.”

We slipped behind the shrubs. Tracing the line of the fence until we found the place where the ground dipped down, creating a small hollow, we burrowed under the fence. Sticking close to the shadows, we wandered among the large containers. Occasionally we’d hear something splash in one of the oversized vats.

We kept moving, not sure what we were looking for, but drawn to the shadowy figures moving inside the cages, which lined the back wall. And then we saw it. A solitary figure, seated on a log inside one of the cages. A small bulb illuminated the cage. The creature inside had the body of a man, but its skin was leathery and covered in scales. Its hands were tipped with claws and its head…

It was neither man nor beast, but something in between. An alligator-human hybrid.

Sherry gasped and clutched at my arm. The alligator man sprang to his feet, fluidly graceful, though bulky with muscles.

Turning his head, he stared through the darkness straight at us.

Lunging forward and grabbing the metal cage, he growled a warning at us in a guttural voice but unmistakably that of a man. Or one who had once been a man. “Get out! Get away from here.”

“Derek!” Sherry moved towards the cage, horrified eyes scanning the form of the man she loved. “What have they done to you?”

Derek stepped back, out of reach, dark eyes glinting in a face elongated and scaled but still recognizable. “Go away, Sherry. Forget you saw me.

“No, I can’t leave you like this.”

“It was my fault. I reached too far. We were testing a new serum. We were so close. It was supposed to be—.” Derek broke off suddenly. “Someone’s coming. You’ve got to get out of here.”

It was too late.

A beam of light broke through the darkness, pinning us to the spot.

“You should not have come here tonight, Mrs. Black.” Dr. Amin was flanked by two armed guards. All three wore headlamps, leaving their hands free. “But since you’re here and since you brought a friend, you can either leave in a body bag or in a cage. Then again, in the interest of science, why don’t I make that choice for you.” Amin signaled to the guards to restrain us. “I was just about to administer another dose of serum to Derek. Can’t have him reverting, can we? We’ll just split the dose three ways.”

Derek rattled the bars of the cage. “I won’t let you do it, Amin. Let her go.”

In the dim light, the needle of the syringe glinted wickedly as Amin approached Sherry. “Ladies first,” he muttered as he jabbed her with the needle.

Derek went wild, throwing himself bodily against cage. With a sudden spurt of superhuman strength, he tore the cage door open. Amin and the two guards barely had a moment to register what had happened before they were falling to the ground, throats sliced by Derek’s clawed hands.

Eyes glinting, chest heaving, he turned towards me.

“Derek,” Sherry whispered, the syringe sticking out of her arm, the full dose having been injected into her system. Derek gathered her into his arms and disappeared into the darkness.

_____

That was the last I saw of them, but every so often, I’ll hear whispers about strange creatures of the night that walk upright. I listen, I make note of what I hear in my little black notebook, but I say nothing.

Still, I know what I saw, and I know what I know.

Copyright 2021 Glass Onion Productions

fiction
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About the Creator

John W. Whitehead

Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law, human rights and popular culture. Whitehead is president of The Rutherford Institute.

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