[INCLUDES SEXUAL VIOLENCE]
“It’s right there detective,” he said pointing to the place where the body laid on the cold forest floor.
“I can see that, officer,” I replied in an irritated voice.
Last night was a long night. I worked until 3 AM and I couldn’t fall asleep when I got home. I had few glasses of whiskey and a sleeping pill. Just when I was about to fall asleep at around 6 AM, I hear my phone ring.
“There’s been a murder,” captain Grey told me over the phone. “You need to come to the Red Pine Forest immediately.”
After he hung up, I swore, got out of my bed and took another glass of whiskey. I needed it to calm me down. I dressed up, put on my equipment and got to the scene of the crime. Few police cars and a few other detectives, including the captain, arrived before me.
“Good morning,” I said when I walked up to where the other detectives were standing.
“It’s definitely not a good one,” Kaley Vale replied.
“Just being polite. My morning also didn’t start so good.”
“Wait till you see the body,” Jonathan Vale told me.
Jonathan and Kaley were twins. Sandy blond hair, light blue eyes and both were about 5’10 tall. However, their personalities were completely different. Jonathan was pretty outgoing and could be a real dickhead. Kaley was very sweet and quiet.
“Where are the others?” I asked.
“Elliot is puking,” Kaley replied. “And the captain is standing next to him and trying to stop him from messing up the evidence nearby.”
“Huh… I’ll go check the body.”
“We have never seen something so gruesome before,” Jonathan said with a spark of disgust in his eyes.
“I assume I’ve seen worse,” I smiled.
“No,” Kaley looked into my eyes. “You haven’t.”
The body wasn’t visible to me since it was leaning on a tree on the side opposite to the one, I was standing on. I slowly creeped walked around the tree and laid my eyes upon the body.
“Ugh… What the fuck?!” I shouted when I saw the full body.
It was a body of a young woman. She was identified to be Summer Brown. A 19-year-old that lived only a few miles away from where she was found. Some kids went into the forest to get away from grown-ups and so that they could drink some alcohol. They started running around for some reason and came across the body. They called the police immediately and didn’t care about what would the police do to them. Whatever they’d do would be million times better than what happened to the Janey.
Before I could start examining her body, I had to take in a deep breath, take out a flask of whiskey I always kept on myself and drink a bit. Janey’s long black hair was covered in clotted blood. At parts it was glued to her skin and the at parts to the tree she was leaning on. Her eyes were missing and the veins and tissue that was connected to them before were now hanging from the dark pits. Her lower jaw was torn of all the way to the part where it connected to her skull. The tongue was still connected and it hung there completely like it was mocking me. She was completely naked and the blood that was pouring from her mouth continued down her chest and almost completely covered both her breasts. In the middle of her chest, there was a large cut. I opened it with my gloves on and saw that her ribs were pulled out. Her lungs and her heart were missing as well. The lower jaw was jammed into her stomach. The teeth from it tore through her flesh as well as the part that were supposed to connect it to the skull. It was pointed upwards and left another trail of blood down her body.
But to me, the most horrific thing was the fact that her vagina and the tissue around it were cut off. It wasn’t places anywhere else like the jaw and no one found anything around the area of the crime. Her legs were spread out to show that it was missing. It looked like the person who did this displayed her for their own savage joy. Her arms were completely covered in blood and they went along the body. Her palms were touching the ground and all of her fingers were broken in such a way that all of them pointed towards her body. They were vertical to both the hand and the body. There also seemed to be some markings on her arms, but we couldn’t see them because of how much blood there was. Her legs were in a much better state than the rest of her body. They were bloody and had bruises, but not much than that. Only bad thing was that her left foot was broken in the middle. The end of the foot pointed towards downwards under the angle of about 80 degrees.
Vales were right. This is the most gruesome thing I have ever seen. Whoever did this was more than just sadistic and insane. They were a total lunatic. I stood up and took a step backwards. I stumbled a bit because of the tiredness, alcohol and shock.
“You okay, detective?” captain asked me while putting his hand on my shoulder.
“Ye… yeah… I guess I am,” I answered. “It’s just… you know…”
“Yes, I know.”
I noticed that he stood with his back turned to the body and looking at me.
“Even I can’t look at it,” he told me. “Seems like you’re the one with the best tolerance out of all of us,” he chuckled. “Elliot barely stopped puking.”
“You have any idea who did this?”
“Not a clue, but evidence hasn’t been sent on inspection.”
“Her heart and lungs are missing.”
“You think it could be organ traders?”
“Maybe there’s one who also happens to be incredibly sadistic.”
“I guess it would be helpful for the job.”
“I believe we can expect more bodies will pop up.”
“I hope you’re wrong, detective,” he replied while pulling his hand away from my shoulder. “Talk to Vales. Maybe they noticed something else.”
“There are marking on her arms. I believe they were cut into her skin, but they aren’t visible due to the blood. We need to wash it down.”
“Not before it is taken for examination.”
“Who else’s blood could this be?” I asked him after looking right into his eyes.
“I don’t know, but it could be someone else’s.”
After saying that, he left to do his work while I stayed standing there. It seemed a bit weird that the captain would send the blood to be checked, but after he was the most experienced out of all of us. I took another look at the body and realized something weird. There were no ants, no maggots, no flies… Nothing was taking the opportunity to feed on the corpse. And this body must have been about a day old. There should have been insects eating it, but there weren’t.
I returned to the other detectives. Elliot was sitting on a chair while Vales were standing next to him. He held an open bottle of water and was looking down towards the floor. His badge was hanging from his neck and he was spitting on the floor trying to get rid of the taste of throw up.
“You okay, buddy?” I asked patting him on his back.
“As you can see, I feel amazing,” he said looking up at me with a smile on his face.
“Did you find anything?” Kaley asked me.
“I noticed some markings on her arm, but the blood needs to be washed off before we could see it.”
“And did you open the cut in the middle of her chest?” Elliot said before spitting on the floor.
“She’s missing lungs, ribs and a heart,” I answered. “There’s also something else…”
Instead of asking me what it was, they just looked at me and waited for an answer.
“There are no insects.”
“What?” confused Johnatan asked.
“There are no insects. This is a forest area where there should be tone of insects and I’m pretty sure none of them would waste an opportunity like this to feast…”
“But there’s no insects…” Kaley finished my sentence.
I looked at her and nodded.
“What could that mean?” she asked.
“Elijah here thinks that there’s something supernatural about the murder,” Johnatan laughed.
“I wouldn’t say so,” I replied. “More like someone used something to keep the insects away. Like pesticides.”
“Though, why would they use it on the body?” Elliot asked.
“Well, that’s on us to find out.”
That day I asked the captain to give me a day off since I was tired like hell and he allowed it. I went home and, on the ride there, I thought that I was going to crash. I barely stayed awake and was still under the influence of alcohol and the sleeping pill. Maybe that’s why I didn’t react to the body as badly as the rest. Maybe I just wasn’t in the proper state of mind. When I got home, I fed my cat Micky, jumped onto my bed and fell asleep immediately.
I had a bad dream that day. It was me standing in an eternal void. It’s all just infinite darkness through which I can walk even beyond the end of time, and so I did. I walked… and walked… and walked… Suddenly, I felt something. During the entire dream, I couldn’t feel anything so when I did feel something, I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if it was pain or joy, sadness or fear. Whatever it was, I felt something behind me. I turned around ready both to embrace or run from whatever was behind me. During the entire dream, there was no sound, but when I turned around and saw it… It looked like a red circle hiding in a mist shining its evil upon the surrounding air. It was closing in and the noise it produced…
It was like a combination of a million different voices humming at the same time. All of them from different people, all of them deep or high, all out of sync. It didn’t sound right; it didn’t sound natural. It was not of this world and its power is beyond what a person could imagine. The humming was also followed by this deep rumbling. Those who have survived an earthquake will know the sound.
I was no longer alone, and now something existed in this void other than my sentience. The ring slowly creeped towards me and the humming voices slowly evolved into screams of agony, pain and terror. When I got close enough, the sounds almost became deafening and I could clearly see what the ring was.
Skinned arms.
The circle was made of skinned arms of various sizes all reaching towards me trying to grab me even from 10 feet away. The terror I felt in my heart was not something I could describe by words, but I could still not act. It was like the ring froze me just by existing. I reached towards it with my right arm and started to fill the arms grab me and pull me closer. They were not able to pull me completely because they were covered in blood and it made my arm slip out of their hands. From the middle of the ring, a figure started to appear. It was just pure darkness and had a humanoid form. It was so dark that even the void behind it seemed like light. It jerked its head and looked at me and, in that moment, I… I heard something say “Pull your arm away. Fight it.”
I pulled my arm away and the screams started again. I was so mesmerized by the ring that I did not even realize that the screams stopped. However, this time, it was accompanied by a roar. It sounded like a combination of a chalk scraping against a blackboard, elk sounds and that earthquake-like rumbling. It started quickly pulling itself away as it screaming into endless nothing before it suddenly disappeared.
I woke up sweating and sitting on my bed. I was taking deep breaths and needed a few seconds to come to my senses. When I calmed down, I noticed that I woke up Micky who was tiredly sitting next to my legs and looking me right into my eyes.
“Sorry, little guy,” I told him. “I just got scared.”
I leaned back and laid back down on my bed. I pulled my arms from under the covers, put them on my head and sighed. Suddenly, I felt something wet on the right side of my face. I immediately pulled my right arm away from my face and turned on a lamp on my night stand. My entire right arm was… it was covered in blood. I always tried to be that cool stoic guy who feels no fear and is never scared no matter what situation he is in. I always managed to be like that, but not this times. This time… whatever it was… wasn’t done by a human and was most definitely not done by my cat Mickey. As soon as I saw the blood, I scream and jumped to the side falling from my bed and falling onto the floor and hitting my back at the night stand. I squealed in pain and started crawling backwards to a corner of my room.
I leaned onto the wall in the corner. I was just breathing heavily and looking at my right completely covered in blood. It was slowly dripping onto the floor and all over my legs. After about 5 minutes of uncontrollable terror and crying, I calmed down. I was still terrified and didn’t know what the hell happened out of shock. The best thing I could do was to take a shower and clean my room so that I could focus on something else for a bit. I stripped down, turned on the cold water in the shower and stepped in. At first it was uncomfortable when the water hit my body, but I got used to it. The entire floor of the shower was colored red as the blood flowed towards the drain. While trying to wipe the blood off with my left hand, I felt like I touched a scar. I took a look at it and the terror returned. I didn’t scream or jump out of the shower, but I was still terrified.
The scar looked like a circle with small lines protruding out of it. In the middle of the circle there was a stick figure, however, it had a third but much longer leg and two smaller straight lines coming out of the figure’s head. The scar looked like it was carved into my arm with a knife and like it healed. The problem was that I never had that scar. This was the first time I saw it. I also didn’t feel like the scar was there. I didn’t feel pain coming from it nor did I feel like it was there. I could see the scar too well from that position so I took a look at it when I stepped out of the shower. It looked like the cuts that made the scar were deep and carefully carved into my flesh. The circle looked like a perfect circle and it only made it more disturbing.
I took all the supplies I needed to clean my room and jumped to work. Micky returned to the room and I found him licking a puddle of blood. I took him out of the room and closed the doors to it so that he wouldn’t come back in. It took me a bit longer to clean everything up. It was blood after all. After I was finished, I took a look at my phone. It was 5 AM which meant that I had a bit over an hour and a half before I had to leave for my job. I decided to come in early because I couldn’t just sit there waiting and doing nothing. I was too bored. Then I remembered that the captain ordered the forensics to examine the body overnight. I made myself some coffee and turned on the TV to past some time.
When I arrived to the station, I immediately went to the forensics. Two of them were working that night and the person examining Summer Brown was Elena Matthews. She had short brown hair, blue eyes and was about 40 years old. She looked at me and usually she’d smile at everyone, but she didn’t smile this time.
“Good morning, Elijah,” she told me.
“Good morning,” I replied without emotion.
I saw that the way I replied confused her. I was usually very ecstatic and full of energy in the morning.
“How’s the progress on the body?” I asked.
“I believe I’ve found everything,” she answered taking a look at the covered body.
“I need to see it and I want you to explain everything.”
When I walked up to the body, she lifted the blanket and even though I already saw it once, it made me sick.
“I took out the lower jaw jammed into her stomach. I found nothing there. She has cut all over her breasts and her right arms is flayed from the elbow down. And…” she stopped.
“What and?”
“There’s a marking on her right arm. It looks like a sun drawn by a child with a weird stick figure in the middle.”