Horror Short Story

Hi, everybody! I'm currently working on this psychological horror/mystery story, and I haven't written a short story in a long time! I would love any and all feedback, because this is kind of unmarked territory for me lol 🫶

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The Man Who Walks at Night

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With a name like Jack Case, it seems he was meant to be a detective.

And if anything was, this was a damned jack case.

It was January, and Seattle was at its dreariest, which, for those who know anything of Seattle weather, is practically the bottom of the barrel. The 24th day on a long string of killings woke up in red. Fitting. Before the clouds covered the dawn, of course. Seattle.

There had been nine reported deaths during the winter months, and this woman was the tenth.

Estimated time of death: 2:40 A.M.

West-side metro area.

Outside a convenience store on W Crockett Street.

Flickering lights.

Lady of roughly forty years.

Married.

Edibles in hand- though sober at time of death, which meant she had likely just bought the THC gummies, and was killed on her way to the lot.

She lay on her stomach, limp in a pool of her own blood. It had been a bludgeoning wound this time around- to the cranium.

Brutal.

Jack Case scribbled all the details on his notepad. It was nearly full, and he had bought this pad in December. Seeing the sheer volume of crime made material- it was sickening. Then again, without crime, he wouldn't have a job. Then again, again, this job was killing him- mind and body alike. Then again, again, again, somebody had to do it, and to Hell if it wasn’t Jack Case.

“It's nothing like the Mullner Case, Jack,” said his partner, Detective Dana McKellerley. “Not like the Airhart-Snell murders either. They’re disconnected killings in a crime surge- likely gang uprising.”

She turned the woman over and visibly winced.

“Jesus Christ.”

Jack spared his notepad from no gory details:

Split skull.

Class 4 wound- clearly dirtied. Likely infected.

A bubbling abscess.

Purpled.

“No,” refuted Detective Case, with a familiar-unfamiliar gravel to his voice. It was the cigs. He'd been smoking through nearly a pack a day since the killings had started.

“No?” Dana's eyebrows knit, looking up at her partner.

“No. These killings are serial.”

“But- you can't be- they have had nothing in common, not even the method of death! Most serial killers at least have some- I don't know- consistency! Take her: middle-aged druggie woman killed by battery, as opposed to the last investigation being on a fourteen-year-old straight-A boy by strangulation! There is no correlation. You know that, Jack.”

The man's jaw clicked a twitch. She had a fair point of course, but he had been hunched over a red-pinned and stringed map of these murders since November's end. You don't question Jack Case.

He began to pace. He thought better when he paced, which was precisely why he never stopped walking.

“It's random, for sure. But not entirely. Every murder- save for one- has been conducted within the 2-3 A.M. range, and the outlier was 3:02. Two minutes isn’t a very large margin, if you ask me. The corpses have all been left at the site. All in dead zones. All in the west Metro through Magnolia and Interbay.

“Plus, homicides are vastly more common in the warmer months. Usually, we see a dip with the temperature. Why would they ‘randomly’ pick up in the dead of winter?” He stilled for just a second. “Dana, we have on our hands an nondiscriminatory serial killer.”

Her lips drew tight as the zipper to a body bag. Detective McKellerley looked far short of infallibly convinced, but she nodded.

Jack continued: “Request a curfew be warranted- and an alert to the afflicted zones.”

“I'll notify the Sergeant.”

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When does an insomniac become a maniac?

Was it when they finally outrun their tiredness? When they fall asleep on their legs? When do they become the walking dead? When?

He hoped it was never, because, as a clinically certified insomniac, Jack Case was teetering that fine line of sanity. The precipice had become thin as a knife’s edge.

Speaking of knives, that next morning, Detectives Case and McKellerley had been called onto another crime site on 5th North, just a block from W Crockett Street. A stabbing. Dead, like the rest.

They were becoming more frequent.

Why, why were they becoming more frequent?

The motive eluded him completely, for though Jack could collect unsullied fingerprints, avoid tampering with even the most fragile of evidence, and track a criminal back to his coffee order, he could not- for the life of him- understand the why.

Maybe he himself would need to be a murderer to walk in their shoes. It takes one to know one, after all.

Detectives were damned to lives of too many questions and not enough answers.

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(Unfinished)