2.
We drove in silence for what seemed like hours, but in reality, took only five minutes. As we rounded a bend on Jackson Street, I saw a police car with its lights flashing a few hundred yards further up, parked in front of what appeared to be an abandoned storefront. The building was sitting on the front section of an empty paddock with houses scattered every couple of hundred yards at this end of town. The nearest building to this one was on the opposite side of the road and well over a hundred yards away.
Steph parked her car nose to nose with the police cruiser, as if blocking any would-be escapee. The building stood alone, deserted and almost silent as we exited the car, the windows dirty and dusty, grimy streaks running this way and that. There was a faded sign propped up in the window, but the lettering had faded to such an extent, that reading it proved near impossible. There were high weeds growing on either side of the door, the garden if you could call it that, sat maybe 10 to 12 feet deep from the footpath to the front of the house, although only a small dirt track, devoid of greenery.
There were two officers on the scene, one standing by the open door looking ghostly pale. His partner was off to one side, bent over and feeding his lunch to the weeds that grew there, a dry retching sound the only one breaking the eerie silence. There were no birds singing, no sounds of distant livestock, almost as if mother nature had flicked a switch, recognizing the horror we were about to find. As we approached the building, Officer 1 looked up, waved, made a heaving sound, then rushed to the other side of the door, also letting go of whatever he had paid good money for. My arms turned to gooseflesh as I heard the pair of them struggling with whatever had greeted them inside. Steph looked at me nervously, then led us in through the faded green paint-flecked door. The hinges groaned in agony as she pushed it open enough to allow us passage and an all too familiar smell snarled through my nostrils.
3.
If I had any preconceived ideas about what I might see this time around, they were eliminated from my mind in an instant. Steph actually shrieked as she saw the girl for the first time. She was walking a little ahead of me, the hallway not wide enough for us to walk side-by-side. She turned into a doorway a little ahead of me and the terror on her face, the anguish in her eyes, clearly visible as she raised one hand to her face. For a moment I thought that she too, would allow her stomach to get the better of her, but she was a tough girl. She closed her eyes for a moment, swallowed with a hand to her mouth, then opened them again and walked into the room.
4.
It was a lady that looked as though she may have been in her late twenties. I say ‘may have looked’ as half of her face had been torn away. She had an eerie expression, her teeth exposed along the left side of her jaw in an eternal grin, her left cheek, upper and lower lips and most of her nose chewed off. There were bits of skin and sinew dangling from the bones that were visible beneath the flesh. There was a fly sitting on the one finger that remained forced into the eyeball, the other just a hollow socket, a stringy nerve jutting from the darkness, the second finger lying on the floor. Again, all the clothing had been removed and it appeared as if the killer had taken great care to try and invoke as much horror as he possibly could. The flesh from one upper arm was completely gone from shoulder to elbow, the other arm missing its entire lower arm, the elbow jutting out from the meaty gristle, a single tendon left dangling. One breast was gone, the other was missing its nipple, teeth marks visibly surrounding the wound. One thigh had been chewed on, then ripped off the bone, its remains hanging down almost far enough to rest on the calf beneath it. The blood that had flooded the room had dried to a brown crust, the black and white linoleum floor that had once served this bathroom, almost entirely hidden.
It wasn’t blood that was now filling its stench throughout the house. It was the onset of decay. At a guess, I would say that this girl probably died before the victim from the previous morning, and with the cold days and near freezing nights, the speed of the decay had been slowed considerably, although I was no expert in such matters. Yet the smell of rot was so pronounced that it was thick enough to taste, giving me the indication that she may have been hanging here for longer than a few days.
“Any idea who she is?” I asked Steph.
“Pretty sure her name is Rita Hayworth or Hayman or something. Works at the laundry mill by the hospital in Daylesford.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Picked her up a couple of times. She hitched rides to work sometimes.”
Steph knelt down and looked at the stumpy finger as it lay caked in blood, a tiny insect crawling across it as I felt an all too familiar feeling returning into the pit of my stomach. It was the feeling of recognition.
5.
The other two officers came back into the house, still as white as a freshly laundered bedsheet. I could see them trying to avoid looking at the girl, instead staring at the floor, pretending to search for evidence.
“It’s OK, guys,” I said to them, “we have this.”
“You sure?” the younger of the two asked and my nodding was all the encouragement they needed, both almost running back down
