Private Detectives

You ever played games with your friends as a child? I know that I did, me and my friend, who shall remained unmentioned for the sake of this story, used to play games like hide and seek and cops and robbers and also, we used to pretend to be private detectives, we would go around town, sneaking into people’s front and backyards and just look at what they had in their bins, it was funny, only that my mother used to always shout at me for the trouble I got into. But one day, when me and my friend were playing private detectives. (Keep in mind I was seven at the time.)

We stumbled upon something terrifying, I still remember it, we was walking up and down the street, constantly looking in bins and gardens, we were very weird kids, but it was fun and something to do, after all, we didn’t have important things to do, except school of course.

Okay, so we finished checking one of the neighbor's bins and I wrote down on the notepad what we had, things like crisp packets and chocolate wrappers, and then I said to my friend, “Hey, do you know what we should do? We should check out your mother’s bins, it would be fun.” He said that it would be fun; only that he would prefer if we didn’t because his mother says to stay away from their shed.

Well, I was a kid, and I was curious, so I immediately opened his back door gate, went into his back garden, open the bins, note what was in them, and wrote down what we thought of his cats and his dog, and then we saw the shed.

A typical, normal shed, and I was so curious to find the key to the padlock, I asked if his mother was in and he said that she wasn’t. I remembered that my parents had a spare key to the house, for emergencies, and I also remembered where they hid it and I knew the fact that they did not keep it on their key rings, so I found it and took it and opened his mother’s back door, we walked in, and searched far and wide for the key, and my friend suggested that we leave. And in hindsight, I should have taken that advice. But I decided to check the bedroom first, and lo and behold, I managed to find the key in one of the drawers next to what I thought was a toy finger, but now that I think about it, it could have been a human’s finger.

So, I unlocked the padlock, and opened the door, and in the shed, was nothing, nothing out of the ordinary, just an old washing machine, a few cobwebs and spiders around, nothing I was too scared of, and there was also this neat basket in the corner, but it was a big basket, too big in fact. My friend looked worried, and I decided to ask him why, and what he said next upset me. He explained that one time when he tried to get into the shed, his mother hit him. He was crying after he told me that, and I had a feeling that we should leave, but, I decided to instead move things around, move the clothes, the bikes, and the basket.

Underneath the basket, was a trapdoor, which I just had to open, see what was down there, as I opened it, a bright light peaked out from it, it nearly blinded me, but after I regained my vision I noticed a ladder from the top going down, I decided to go first, as I went down I could smell something horrible and I could hear footsteps, I was very scared as to what was down here, why my friend’s mother told him to stay away, and why there was a trapdoor hidden under a basket.

When I got to the bottom, all I saw was blood, blood everywhere, the smell was wretched, and I threw up at the bottom and when I looked back up, there were corpses scattered around, some burned, mutilated, dismembered. I then heard the footsteps for the second time, and they were approaching me and my friend. I hid underneath one of the tables and pulled the cloth on it over me.

But I could see the shadow of my friend just still standing there, and I saw another figure walk up to him. I heard voiced and I recognised them. “Honey, what are you doing down here?” Said his mother. “Uh... nothing”

He replied back, I could hear the fear in his voice, for Christ sake, we were only seven years old! “You shouldn’t have come down here, you know” His mother said, but when she said that, I heard insanity in her voice, and I noticed she had something in her hand, and I was in fear as I realised, it was a chainsaw. I heard her starting it while cackling wildly, and all of a sudden all I could hear was screaming and the sound of a chainsaw running, “I’m sorry son, but I killed my friend’s father, and I need to keep it a secret!”

I couldn’t take this anymore, I saw that next to me, was a knife as if God had answered my call, I grabbed it snuck behind her and stabbed her in the back, instantly killing her, she fell to the floor, I knelt down, and started crying, I had killed my friends mother, I vomited on the floor, and then I looked at my friend, he was bleeding to death, his arm had been cut off and his neck sliced, yet his head had not come off, he was still breathing, though only slightly.

He looked at me with all his strength and said three words which I could not believe I heard coming from him. “Please…kill me”. I couldn’t believe it, I broke down, bawling, it was the worst day of my life, if only had listened to him to get out of the shed, to leave the garden alone, everything would have worked out, I had to listen to him, I grabbed the knife, and stabbed him in the heart, I watched him die, we were both crying, but he stopped eventually, because he was dead.

I left the room, I left and locked the shed, locked the back door to his house and went home, I had blood on me, and I didn’t know how I was going to explain it, but I looked at the notepad and found something on it that was in my friends’ bins. He had clothes in the bin, I had to see if they were still there, and lucky for me, they were, so I took my blood-stained clothes off and put these smelly old ones on, they would be easier to explain.

And that’s where the story ends, and I am now thirty-four, I bought the house that it all happened in, to stop people going into the shed and examining what was down there in the cellar, but you may be wondering, how did no one know that my friend and his mother had died? Well, people did know, they had a funeral, but the bodies were never found, since I shifted the washing machine that was in the shed on top of the trapdoor, no one moved that luckily for me. I am recalling this story while I am in the cellar right now, my daughter and her friend playing out, I don’t know where my daughter’s mother is, she left us at an early age, I don’t really care though, hang on, I’ll be one minute, someone just entered the shed, I’ll grab my chainsaw and be back... “Sweetie, what are you doing down here?"