For just a moment, he’d been struck by the uneasy feeling that he was being watched.
His attention turned to the thick row hedges that lined the path from the front door to the drive, and the manner in which the pines in the back yard crept across the rear of the property. Both areas would provide fine places for concealment for anyone trying to approach the house undetected, and he made a mental note to have the boys check them for any sign that the killer had indeed been there.
Deciding he couldn’t postpone the inevitable any longer, Damon resigned himself to what lay ahead and walked to the front door.
Inside was chaos.
The living room was in shambles. A recliner had been overturned, its leather upholstery slashed. Cushions from the sofa and loveseat were strewn about the room, ripped as well, their white foam interiors spilling out around the jagged tears. It looked as if someone had taken the same knife to the heavy drapes too as they now hung in ragged strips. The floor was littered with chunks of ceramic and glass; all that remained of what Damon guessed had once been a pair of table lamps.
Two technicians were moving about the room, pausing now and again to scoop some object into one of the many clear plastic envelopes that jutted from their pockets.
One of them looked up and waved a hand in the direction the hallway was leading, and Damon followed it to a stairway that led to the second floor.
At the top, Deputy Frank Castiglioni stepped out of the shadows to greet him. Frank was a ten-year veteran of the force, and one of Damon’s most hardened and experienced officers.
'Sheriff,' he said in greeting.
'How’s it going, Frank?' Damon noticed his fellow officer was pale, his voice slightly off key. Behind the man’s back, where he obviously hoped Damon wouldn’t be able to see it, Castiglioni’s right hand was shaking violently.
'Is it bad?' he asked.
The other man swallowed once, hard, and then nodded. He tried a weak smile but failed to bring it off.
Damon laid a comforting hand on Frank’s shoulder, and then moved past him. He stopped at the entrance of the room just beyond, his bulk framed in the narrow doorway.
What he saw in front of him made the bile rush to the top of his throat, and for a moment he thought he might be sick at a scene for the first time in many years, but after a moment or two the sensation passed.
'Holy Mother of God.'
What he saw here was far, far worse than what he’d expected.
The room was a slaughterhouse.
Blood was splattered everywhere; on the floor, on the ceiling, on the walls. It was as if someone had taken buckets of the stuff and merrily splashed it around.
Pieces of bloody human flesh were likewise cast about, scattered across the floor and atop various pieces of furniture.
A hand, with only three fingers intact, dangled from an open dresser drawer, the missing digits ripped off at the first knuckle.
A foot, still clad in a blood-stained slipper lay in the middle of the floor, the shinbone was shining whitely through the torn and bloody flesh.
Many of the other pieces were unrecognizable as to what part of the body they had originated from, a fact which Damon found increasingly disturbing as his gaze kept returning to them repeatedly, his mind trying to discern what they once might have been, so as to give order to the chaos.
What he took to be glistening lengths of rope dangled about the curtains that concealed the surface of the king-size bed, reminding him of the tinsel he used to decorate his Christmas tree every year.
Curious, he stepped closer, only to realize with rapidly escalating horror that they were actually human entrails.
In the back of his mind an evil little voice began singing, 'A Slinky, a Slinky, a wonderful, wonderful toy, a Slinky, a Slinky, they’re fun for a girl and a boy.'
Vomit surged back up into his throat, and this time he barely managed to choke it back down, leaving a foul taste in his mouth that matched nicely with the reek of death that hung in his nostrils.
In all his years of police work, he had never seen anything so vile.
So twisted.
So undeniably evil.
Conflicting emotions ran through him as he stared down at the carnage before him, the sickness he felt warring with his need to study the scene and understand just what had happened.
Anger reared its ugly head, and he let it come, knowing it would help calm nerves that were dangerously close to the breaking point. Anger would get him past his revulsion, would allow him to look at the situation objectively. He clung to it, wrapping it around him the same way a child might envelope itself in a comforting blanket on a cold winter’s night.
I’ll make the bastard who did this pay, he vowed to himself, and felt a little better for the thought.
For the first time Damon noticed a police photographer was in the room with him, had indeed been clicking away the whole time Damon had been standing there, ignoring his presence, wanting to finish up and get the hell out of there.
Damon didn’t blame him.
'There’s more, boss,' a voice said from behind him. 'The rest is worse, if that’s possible to imagine.'
Damon didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just turned to look at Frank. The rest of it? Worse? What the hell could be worse than this?
Castiglioni motioned the Sheriff towards the bed and Damon followed, his feet as heavy as cement blocks. He didn’t want to get any closer, didn’t want to see what his fellow officer had to show him, but duty compelled him to follow. Frank ducked under a low hanging piece of intestine, and drew back the hanging curtains, exposing the bed itself and what lay atop it.
Damon felt the breath sucked from his lungs at the sight.
A human corpse was on the bed, and from its musculature Damon could tell it had been a male. From its chest gaped a savage wound, and it was from here that the internal organs had been pulled and stretched forth to the canopy around them. If that wasn’t enough, the body had also been dismembered.
And beheaded.
The sheer brutality of the act was sickening. Damon hoped to God that the victim, whoever he had been, had been dead long before the killer had performed his grotesque artistry. To even contemplate what the man might have endured had he been alive was unthinkable; his mind balked at the very concept.
When he had recovered sufficient breath to speak, Damon asked, 'Where’s his head?' He noticed his voice trembled when he spoke, and wondered if Frank had noticed it, too.
Frank laughed, a strange eerie chuckle. Wilson instantly recognized it for what it was; the type of laugh you make to chase away the willies when you’re alone in an empty house in the dead of night. It was the sound of a man doing his best to reassure himself.
And miserably failing.
It was anything but comforting.
'In the bathroom,' Frank replied. He hesitated, clearly considering how much to say, and then decided against saying anything at all, for he merely indicated once again that Damon should follow. The two of them crossed the room, to where a door stood next to the bureau.
It was not the extravagant master bath Damon had expected. An oval-shaped mirror hung over a marble sink. A toilet stood to his left, a claw-foot tub to his right.
Frank nodded at the open toilet.
Damon stepped over and looked down, peripherally aware that Frank had moved back out of the room.
The man’s missing head was stuffed in the toilet bowl, the once blue-tinged water a sickly purple hue from the blood that had been spilled into it from the leaking head.
The man’s white hair writhed about his head like living seaweed. His ghastly dead face was frozen in an expression of horror; his mouth open wide in a silent scream of pain, his empty eye sockets still leaking blood.
For just a split second, Damon’s mind told him it wasn’t real.
