The Face of Death

wetter things. Guts, they have an aroma all their own. I can hear something now. A faint sound. I cock my head and strain my ears.

Sarah is singing.

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. My stomach does a single loop-de-loop as the adrenaline overwhelms the endorphins and fills me with the clangy-jitters.

Because this is not a happy sound. It's a horror sound. It's the kind of song you'd expect to hear coming out of the earth in a graveyard, at night, or maybe from the shadowy corner of a cell in a mental institution. It's a single word and a single note, sung in a monotone.

'Laaaa. Laaaa. Laaaa. Laaaa.'

Over and over, that single word, that single note, in a voice just above a whisper.

I start to worry in a way I hadn't before, because this is the sound of insanity.

I move up the last flight of stairs in quick strides, passing all those smiling faces in the photographs. Their teeth seem to glitter in the light.

Look at that, I think when I reach the top, more beige carpet. I'm standing in a short hallway. A bathroom is at the end of the hall. Its lights are on, its door flung wide. I can see (surprise!) a beige tile floor, more evidence of the uninspired tastefulness I've come to expect from this home.

The hallway turns to the right at the bathroom, and I surmise that a bedroom door is just beyond that turn.

More beige, I'll bet.

My heartbeat hammers, and God am I sweating. To my immediate right is a set of white double doors. The entrance, I'm sure, to someplace terrible. The smells have all become stronger. Sarah's horrible singing tickles my skin. I reach out a hand to open the right door. It pauses just above the brass handle and trembles.

Girl with a gun on the other side of that. Girl with a gun, covered in blood, in a house that smells like death, singing like a crazy person. Go on, I think. The worst thing she can do is shoot me. No, moron. The worst thing she can do is look right at me and then blow her brains out or smile and blow her brains out or--

Enough, I command.

Silence inside. My soul goes quiet.

My hand stops trembling.

A new voice comes, one familiar to soldiers and cops and victims. It doesn't offer comfort. It offers certainty. It speaks the hardest words and it never, ever lies. The patron saint of impossible choices. Save her if you can. But kill her if you must.

My hand drops and I open the door.

9

THE ROOM IS DECORATED IN DEATH.

It's an extra-large master bedroom. The king-sized bed has a large wooden hutch and a mirror behind it, and still takes up less than a third of the floor space. There is a plasma TV mounted on the wall. A ceiling fan hangs, turned off, its silence anointing all the other stillness in this room. The beige carpet is present, almost comforting under the circumstances. Because blood is everywhere. Splashed on the ceiling, smeared on the off-yellow walls, beaded on the ceiling fan. The smell is overpowering; my mouth fills with still more pennies and I swallow my own saliva.

I count three bodies. A man, a woman, and what looks like a teenage boy. I recognize them all from the photographs on the stairway walls. They are all naked, all lying on their backs in the bed. The bed itself has been stripped bare. The blankets and sheets lie on the floor, wadded and blood-soaked.

The man and woman are on either side, with the boy in the middle. The two adults have been disemboweled, in the worst sense of the word. Someone cut them from throat to crotch and then reached into them and pulled. They have been turned inside out. The throats of all three have been slit like hogs, sopping grins from ear to ear.

'Laaaa. Laaaa. Laaaa. Laaaa.'

My eyes go to the girl. She's sitting on the windowsill, looking out into the night and what I can only guess is the backyard. I can see the dim silhouettes of other rooftops in the distance. It's a twilight world, caught between the dying sun and the awakening streetlamps. Apropos.

The girl has a gun in her hand, and she's pressing the barrel against her right temple. She hadn't turned around at the sound of the door opening.

I can't blame her. I wouldn't want to turn around either. Even as my heart hammers, the clinical part of me takes notes. The blood on the walls was put there by the killer. I know this because I can see patterns. Slashes, swirls, and curlicues. He played here. Used their blood like finger paint to make patterns. To say something. I look over at Sarah. She continues to gaze out the window, unaware of me. She's not the perpetrator. Not enough blood on her, and the corpses are all too big. She'd never have gotten any of them up the stairs by herself.

I move forward into the room, trying not to step on evidence. I give up; I'd have to levitate.

Too much blood, but none of it in the right places. Where's the murder scene?

Every bit of blood evidence I could see was purposeful. None of this was the result of a throat being slit.

Focus.

The investigator in me is a detached creature. It can view the worst of the worst with dispassion. But detachment isn't what I need right now. I need empathy. I force myself to stop examining the scene, to stop calculating, and focus all of my attention on the girl.

'Sarah?' I keep my voice soft, unthreatening.

No response. She continues to sing in that awful monotone whisper.

'Sarah.' A little louder now.

Still no reaction. The gun stays at her temple. She keeps on singing.

'Sarah! It's Smoky. Smoky Barrett!' My voice booms, louder than I'd intended. I startle myself.

Startle her too. The singing stops.

Quieter: 'You asked for me, honey. I'm here. Look at me.'

This sudden silence is as bad in its own way as the singing had been. She's still looking out the window. The gun hasn't moved from her temple.

Sarah begins turning toward me. It's a montage of slow, jerky motions, an old door opening on rusted hinges. The first thing I notice is her beauty, because of its contrast with the horror around her. She is ethereal, something from another world. She has dark, shimmering hair, the impossible hair you see on models in shampoo commercials. She's Caucasian, with an exoticness about her that speaks of European roots. French, perhaps. Her features have that ideal symmetry that most women dream of having, and too many living in Los Angeles go under the knife to get.

Her face is the mirror opposite of mine, a counterpoint of perfection to my flaws. She has blood splattered on her arms and face, and soaked into the short-sleeved long white nightgown she's wearing. She has full, cupid-lips, and while I'm sure they're normally a beautiful pink, right now they are the pale white of a fish belly.

I wonder about that nightgown. Why had she been wearing it in the afternoon?

Her eyes are a rich blue, heart-stopping. The look of defeat I find in them is so profound, it makes me queasy.

Pressed to all that beauty, the barrel of what I can now tell is a nine-mm Browning. This is no weak twenty- two. If she pulls the trigger, she'll die.

'Sarah? Can you hear me now?'

She continues to look at me with those defeated, blue-flame eyes.

'Honey, it's me. Smoky Barrett. They said you asked for me, and I got here as fast as I could. Can you talk to me?'

She sighs. It's a full-body sigh, straight from the pit of her stomach. A sigh that says, I want to lie down now, I want to lie down and die. No other reply, but at least she keeps looking at me. I want this. I don't want those eyes to start roaming, to remember the bodies on the bed.

'Sarah? I have an idea. Why don't we walk out into the hallway?

We don't have to go anywhere else--we can sit at the top of the stairs, if you want. You can keep that gun