Dark Skies and Bloody Stars by Joe Struvallo

Dark Skies and Bloody Stars by Joe Struvallo

Stu knelt beside the first body. The shooter had used a full choke, buckshot striking between the shoulder blades as a single clump. The corpse, hands still bound behind his back, acted as a doorstop, the blood splashed on the trim attesting to the struggle that had taken place in those final moments, the futile attempts to wriggle away from death. Everything reeked of copper and shit.

The man had been young enough to be Stu’s son. Stu looked into his pale, half-lidded eyes, his limpened expression of shock, and silently begged for some sign of life. When there was none, he sighed and stood.

The house was a bland McMansion in a strip of bland McMansions, a foothill of incoherent gray brick and wood paneling whose architect couldn’t decide if he was building a cottage or a castle. The kind of house in the kind of neighborhood whose inhabitants all too often felt themselves immune from horror and bloodshed.

The living room was bizarrely clean. Everything in it was perfectly chic and totally impersonal, from the oversize dusty leather sofa, to the metal-and-glass end tables, to the wall-mounted flatscreen with its protective plastic film still on. The books lining the shelves, their titles illuminated by the evidence team’s flashing cameras, looked brand new. Even the bespoke hardwood floor was hardly scuffed, the dark wood marred only now by bright yellow evidence markers. It felt more like a showroom than somewhere someone had lived.

Stu greeted the team before descending the stairs to the basement, the evidence markers vanishing after the first step. They were clearly taking their time upstairs. He couldn’t blame them – in fact, he envied them. The responding officer had told him what awaited, had jadedly joked about it in a way that’d made Stu glad they were on the phone lest he get written up for another internecine sucker punch.

The basement was a charnel house. Four nude cadavers – two males, two females, none older than thirty – lay prone in a lake of gore, each shot execution-style. Stu produced a pocket flashlight, clenching his jaw as he studied them. None reacted to the bright LED, their dilated pupils never to mind dark or light again.

Grief, old and familiar, sat in his chest like a lead weight. He remembered, as always, his first funeral, a friend of his father’s he’d barely known. At sixteen, he’d cried so hard he’d had to leave.

It was uncertain who’d died first, but the last was all too clear. Stu tiptoed past the other four as if he might wake them and crouched before the shooter’s body. The shotgun beside his limp hand was the one he’d used, an old Remington Model 11 with its bolt locked back – empty and ready for more. He’d pressed the barrel against his temple before pulling the trigger, blowing the top of his skull away in the tremendous sneeze coating the adjacent wall. Drying brains clung to the grimy plaster and stank like cat piss. The impact had popped his eyes from their sockets and they bulged at the rim of his head’s crater, goggling like a cartoon’s.

Stu stared into those dangling eyes, hate blooming like dye in water. He hoped he was suffering. He hoped he was in Hell.

It was going to be one of those cases. Not finding a culprit, just trying to make sense of chaos. The kind of case that ended with – at best – no closure, no justice, nothing but a handful of grieving families soon to be forgotten in the daily stream of random violence.

Something on the workbench caught his attention. It was a sheet of age-yellowed parchment, one long edge ripped where it had clearly been torn from a book. Stu examined it with a latex-gloved hand.

It was a woodcut of a village on a cliffside, though the village was not the main focus: the top two-thirds of the page depicted a jet-black night sky with misshapen diamonds representing stars. At the precise center of the page, ringed by a halo, was something that wasn’t a star, a pea-sized circular light around which the stars were ordered, the concentric rings forming a funnel that seemed to force Stu’s eye to its nexus. A few stray specks of blood had landed on the page but were nearly invisible against that inked darkness which sucked them greedily away.

Nothing about the drawing was too unusual compared to similar illustrations he’d seen, but it exuded an ugliness he couldn’t quite pinpoint, one which made him somehow uneasy. The object at the center approximated an eye, one which gazed not down at the village, but outward. At him. He shivered and shoved it into an evidence bag.

Before he left, he gently closed the eyes of each of the deceased and tried to pretend it helped.

By the time he got back to the station, some details had been confirmed. The perp was the owner of the house, Alexander Cyril, a thoroughly unremarkable real estate agent working for an international luxury firm. No previous criminal record, no restraining orders, nothing at all noteworthy other than a wife who’d blown her own brains out twenty years earlier. In short, the exact sort of impotent psycho who tended to give detectives overtime when they finally snapped.

Cyril had a son in town, so Stu arranged to have him brought in the following morning before retiring, wishing as usual that he worked at Burger King.

Miranda was already asleep when he got home shortly before 3 AM. For a while he watched her, allowing her snores’ rhythm to numb him.

He’d sworn off women after the death of his long-atrophied marriage with Phyllis, only to meet Miranda. Despite the twenty-five year age difference (he was pushing sixty) and the horrible hours he worked as a detective, she’d moved in not long after. Stu had felt impossibly lucky then; time, with its clarity, had added a fair dose of guilt.

He went into the closet, as he did nightly, and checked the shotgun. Loaded, not chambered, never fired: all right in the world. He downed his benzos, threw an arm over Miranda, and let sleep overtake him.

& & &

The first lay spasming in the doorway. Outside the circle, but that wasn’t a problem. The circle was a formality anyway. Blood was blood. He watched the runner die, impressed; he’d been so close to escape, had fought to the last even with his ruined chest cavity spewed across the porch. Misguided as he’d been, he’d earned his respect.

The others in the basement, meanwhile, hadn’t moved. They could’ve, but they hadn’t. They whimpered and moaned and trembled but all were docile as lambs, as all who experience atrocity are – none believing it could actually be the end, but awaiting its arrival just the same.

He took his time. It could have been over in seconds, but there was nothing wrong with savoring it. When the first shot cracked the other three shrieked and writhed, the new corpse jerking as its nervous system fought to preserve the signal. He waited for them to calm and then he shot another. The remaining two jumped and by the time he reached the last she was silent and still. He nudged her with the shotgun and she sobbed. He nodded, pleased, and then he shot her.

He turned to his followers. Their faces were grim but sure, the timeless expression of men new to violence but reveling in its practice. He jerked his head and they silently filtered out, their cassocks smeared with blood. One carried the book.

He surveyed his finished work, an artist before his canvas. The page was on the workbench but he no longer needed the focus; he could sense its prototype, its unmolested song clearer than ever before, a sweet, crushing glissando beneath and within the fear-musk of the slain.

Satisfied, he slumped in the corner, raised the shotgun to his temple, and pulled the trigger.

Stu woke choking on his own spit. He was on his feet before he was awake, his t-shirt clinging to him as a sweat-damp film. Miranda hadn’t budged. He watched her sleep, wondering if his nightmares always made him so fitful. Neither Miranda nor Phyllis had ever mentioned it. Maybe it was a fluke. He could live with that.

Careful not to wake her, he returned to bed, the gentle rise and fall of her breathing lulling him back to sleep.

& & &

Cyril’s son was in the interrogation room when Stu arrived. He looked like his father – lanky, with brown eyes slightly too close together over a Roman nose and under a mop of dry black hair. Stu faked a cough, masking the queasy shudder that ran through him as he recalled precisely how he’d look with half his head shot off.

“Gregory Peters?”

“Yessir.”

Stu sat across from him. “I’m Stuart Young, lead detective on your father’s case. How are you, Mr. Peters?”

He shrugged. “Fine, I guess. Fine as you can be when you wake up and your dad’s suddenly a mass murderer.”

“Yeah…I wanted to ask you a few questions about your dad. Maybe figure out why this happened.”

“Go for it. I’m not going to be much help, but I’ll do what I can.”

“I take it you weren’t close.”

Peters snorted. It was a bitter noise containing a hell of a diatribe. “Nope. Couldn’t stay far enough from that asshole. Would’ve left town if I could afford it. I never even saw that house; he bought it right after I moved out.”

Stu wrote rich kid cut loose? on his pad and instantly discounted it. He lacked the pomposity. “Alright. Tell me about your dad. Anything helps.”

He shrugged. “He raised me, mostly. I was pretty young when my mom died.”

“What was he like?”

“He used to be great. I have a lot of happy memories from when I was little, even after mom died. We were sad, but it was good, you know? Made us close.” His expression hardened. “When I was ten, he went to eastern Europe to help sell some pretty valuable tracts of land. Had old castles or something on them.”

“Eastern Europe? Where?”

“Balkans. Serbia for sure, and I think Bulgaria.” He assumed the thousand-yard stare of painful recollection. “He came back with some pretty strange ideas.”

“What kinds of strange ideas?”

“That’s the thing. I don’t really know for sure; something religious. He was always tight-lipped about it with me. I only overheard bits and pieces.”

“Overheard?”

“Yeah. Our place became a revolving door of freaks. They seemed really serious about whatever they were doing, spending a lot of time in our basement. One time I tried to go down and see. My dad didn’t punish me, or even yell at me – he didn’t give enough of a shit about me by then to bother – but the way he told me to never do it again…I felt scared. Threatened, almost.”

“And you never told anyone about this?”

“And tell everyone my dad was a cult leader? I wasn’t in any danger. There was always food in the fridge, I just had to cook it myself.”

“Do you know the names of any of his associates?”

“No. I know he spent time at the little bookshop on Elm, though. He was always into rare books, even before he went nuts.”

“How do you know he was spending time there?”

“I bumped into him a couple times.”

“Do you collect rare books too?”

He smiled sarcastically. “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

& & &

Stu flicked his cigarette onto Cyril’s driveway and watched it smolder.

Peters had solidified some things, but the fact that the supposedly-meek little pissant who’d suddenly killed five people and then himself had actually been into weird shit and was neglecting his son all along wasn’t any bombshell. What Stu sought was the trigger that had sent Cyril on his rampage. Square one, then; Stu didn’t expect to find anything in the house the techs hadn’t, he just wanted to see for himself.

The house had been vacated of the dead, but their spoor littered the place. There was a certain emptiness to everything, like the vacuum after an explosion, a feeling that something tremendous and awful had occurred right where he stood. It would never fully go away, he knew, same as how nothing would ever completely erase the basement’s stains or the smell of rot that would ooze from the woodwork in summer. The dead, long gone, were there to stay.

He descended to the basement abattoir with its absentee sufferers, shuddering as he recalled his dream. The circle, an occult-looking affair about three feet in diameter inscribed on the floor, had been hidden by the cadavers the night before, its border threadbare with the blood that’d pooled there. It, and the curlicue sigils traced neatly around it, were drawn in a thick vaseline-like substance which attracted dust like a magnet, endowing it with a greasy luster that made Stu want a shower. He knelt and dabbed some on his finger. It smelled like rotting meat with an edge of fruity fermentation that made his eyes water. It was like the miasma of an old, ripened corpse.

The sigils were a mystery. Nobody had any clue what they signified or what language they’d come from. Other than giving some kind of meaning to the clusterfuck, Stu didn’t especially care. He’d already decided that whatever Cyril had to say, he was going to do everything in his power to make sure it died with him.

The rest of the house held little. Aside from a study piled high with still-packed moving boxes and ancient, silverfish-chewed books, there was almost nothing at all of decoration past the anomalously pristine living room. No art, no potted plants, nothing at all to suggest a man had lived there for the better part of a decade. By the time he reached the master bedroom upstairs, the only furniture whatsoever was a stiff cot topped with a scratchy old Army blanket, an ascetic arrangement that struck Stu as surreal. Cyril had been making double Stu’s salary, yet the only thing he’d cultivated was the front room. It was like finding a squatter in an IKEA.

A thought, nagging at the back of his mind since his arrival, began to crystallize. Cyril had been thin. His house, for all its strangeness, was devoid of anything he’d have expected to see, given the number of victims; there were no cages, no waste buckets, not even any messes save for the bloodstains. Either Cyril had meticulously scrubbed all such evidence away before offing himself, or the victims hadn’t been there long – a couple hours at most. For a skinny solo actor to abduct and subdue five random people, bring them to one place, and execute them that quickly would be difficult; or, in other words, unlikely.

Stu hadn’t considered accomplices. It hadn’t fit with the already-painted portrait of a random, entitled mass-murder-suicide. He’d thought the case just another without sense or meaning outside of Cyril’s sick mind, but the more he chewed on it, the more his gut sang a different tune. Some dark purpose swirled in the details; an agenda sensed, but looming just out of sight.

He’d always thought that to be killed without meaning was the worst thing there was. He found the alternative disturbed him far more.

Before he left he stood in the entryway, taking in what was another human being’s final view. Across the street, an old lady in khaki everything worked at pulling her plants inside for the winter. The grass was dying, the last patches of green choking in the encroaching cold. The setting sun bathed everything in warm, red-gold light, a brilliant shine that nonetheless made the ugly brown stain between his shoes still darker, still more hideous.

During his drive he saw a dead dog swelling on the side of the road, the tag on its collar flashing in the dying light. Stu thought of the family it’d loved and the dam finally broke. He exploded into tears.

& & &

“Why do you think he did it?”

“What?” He’d been gazing into his chili and watching the meat go cold, the grease congealing like lifeless corneas.

Miranda smiled. “Your killer. Why do you think he killed those people?”

“No idea.”

“None at all? C’mon, you have to have some clue.”

“Not really, no.”

She blew on a spoonful of chili. Stu guessed the question before she asked it. “Are you okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“What I asked. Are you okay?”

He wanted to tell her that no, no of course he wasn’t, but the words just weren’t there. That was a can of worms he hadn’t felt ready to open after thirty years of marriage, worms that’d nonetheless eaten that marriage through. “I’m alright.”

Doubt flashed in her eyes the way it so often did but she mercifully changed the topic to her day at the bank, the litany of harebrained loan requests she’d processed. Stu hardly heard it. He stared at her chili-smeared lips, the way they pulled back from her slightly-crooked teeth. He wondered when she would see him for the crashing train he was, when she would decide the derailing wasn’t worth it and jump. The knowledge that it was his own fault didn’t make it any easier, nor did the fact he couldn’t – wouldn’t – do anything for it; the train might slow, but the cliff it sped toward waited, implacable and inevitable.

He reached across the table and squeezed her hand. She looked surprised and that hurt. She smiled and squeezed back.

& & &

When he woke that night, all that initially seemed odd was, simply, how sudden it was; there was none of the typical disorientation, nor layers of semi-awareness. He was just asleep, and then he wasn’t. He squinted at the clock as Miranda snored away. It wasn’t long before he had to be up anyway.

He grumbled and flopped over, shutting his eyes, and that was when he heard the hallway light switch on and the creak of the bedroom door opening. Adrenaline flooded his system as he felt a presence make its entry. The hallway light kissed his eyelids and he thought of the shotgun in the closet but didn’t dare move.

He opened his eyes.

The man stood naked and half-silhouetted in the doorway, his skin stretched taut and shiny over the absurdly bulging mound of his belly. Then there was his face, or what was left of it: his bulging eyes hung beneath the ruins of a half-removed skull, a cracked-eggshell line of bone and tattered flesh. He stood motionless for what felt like an eternity, the silence broken only by his rattling breaths.

And then Alexander Cyril grinned.

There was no more restraining the scream. It ripped itself from Stu’s throat, a crazed bellow that jolted Miranda straight upright.

“Whazzat?” she slurred.

Stu babbled and wheezed, thrusting a finger at the doorway he saw then to be unoccupied, the hallway light revealing nothing but the opposite wall.

Miranda looked back and forth in sleep’s confusion. Stu put on the calmest voice he could manage. “Go back to sleep, baby. Just a bad dream.”

She gratefully obeyed, mumbling indistinctly as she settled. He ran his hand through her tangled hair, the thick auburn mane he refused to let her cut no matter how much she bitched about brushing. He petted her until his hand stopped quaking, and by then the sun was rising, the world outside his window bathed in muted pre-dawn light.

The floor was icy against his bare feet as he rose and flicked off the hallway light.

& & &

It was starting to feel rather like the breaking point had come. If it had, it’d sure taken its time; he’d spent 35 years handling shit he’d known from the start he couldn’t handle, motivated first by stubbornness, then by the threat of that forbidden guilt of harm by absentia. If it’d come, if his detective days were over, it would be a long-overdue mercy for everyone involved – everyone, that was, except for Stu.

The bookshop was a musty hole-in-the-wall with water stains and a mold problem, the interminable stacks illuminated by flickering, jaundice-yellow fluorescents. The counter was half-buried in a tidal wave of ratty old books. A pink notecard taped to the glass top told him to ask the currently-missing proprietor to see the rare ones. Stu tapped his foot, the stale air and poor heating sapping his patience. He pulled out the page he’d collected from the evidence locker and removed it from its bag.

Instantly, his eyes locked on the thing dwelling at the page’s center, gripped by a strange gravitas as the room around him grayed out, the books and miscellanea dissolving into static. The tunnel of space leading to the spot – the eye – seemed to swirl in reverse, the stars unmoving whilst black infinity spun and folded on itself around them. His eyes itched but he couldn’t find the nerve to blink, the woodcut whispering somehow more frightfully in the light than in the corpse-abundant dark. The abyss leaked from its parchment bounds, a shimmering emptiness he knew but couldn’t name, shadowy tendrils prodding and testing his supple flesh, his spongy mind, village consumed and forgotten, the parchment too soft to cut like paper could but its touch slicing him apart all the same…

“May I help you?”

Stu jumped. The proprietor had materialized behind the counter, two thin paperbacks pinched between his sausage-like fingers. If he’d noticed the shock, it didn’t show; his expression was effortlessly measured, a knowing smile barely revealing nicotine-yellowed teeth. He was some flavor of North African and dressed the part with a brown djellaba draped over his sizable paunch.

Stu tapped the page. “Know anything about this?”

The bookseller examined it. “Might I inquire where you found this?”

Stu flashed his badge. “I’m Detective Stuart Young. This was found at the scene of a multiple homicide. Mean anything to you?”

“Where is the rest of the book?”

He was rapidly tiring of the answering-questions-with-questions schtick. “Haven’t seen it. Do you know Alexander Cyril?”

“He is a…frequent customer of my rare books. He and his son Mr. Peters both, though Mr. Peters’ interests are more…conventional.”

“So, what, Cyril was into devil-worship shit?”

The owner smiled. “Oh, no, sir. That’s much more Mr. Peters’ purview. Mr. Cyril’s tastes are more unique…and more expensive, indeed.”

“He had this when he died. What is it?”

“He’s dead?” Something like concern appeared. “Unfortunate…tell me, what do you plan for his collection? He owned a good many valuable -”

“Answer the question, please.”

He lifted the page with a gentleness surprising for his thick hands. “This comes from one in a set of books known as the Wilkerson Texts. I recently sold a copy to Mr. Cyril. The original title, if there was one, is lost to us, as the set was a favorite target of early Church burnings; the Texts’ origins, however, are quite well-documented.”

“I didn’t ask for a history lesson. Is this relevant?”

“I am sharing with you what I know, sir. You may listen, or you may not.”

Stu glanced at his watch, trying to ignore his quickening pulse. “Alright. Truncated version, please.”

“Certainly.” He laid the page back down. “The originals were written around the year 1000 by a coterie of Byzantine soldiers under Basil II Bulgaroktonos. While the Emperor methodically destroyed the Bulgars, these soldiers went native, becoming monks styled after the Christian tradition of their homeland, but devoted to certain strange, violent sects of backwater Bulgar paganism…depraved sects recorded nowhere else than the Texts, indeed. Alas, their cenobium was discovered by their countrymen-cum-conquerors. The Emperor himself oversaw their executions.”

Stu felt oddly relieved. “So this page is over a thousand years old?”

“Hardly. Mr. Cyril’s copy of the eighth volume was printed in 1551. For all their efforts, the Church had a very hard time extinguishing this particular little flame.” He sighed. “Still, most were eradicated. Of the twenty volumes, only nine have ever been discovered in their rare various vintages – all in Old Church Slavonic and, interestingly, scribed in the Glagolitic alphabet.”

Stu studied the bookseller. He’d never met a finer bullshitter in his life, but couldn’t see why he’d lie. “One last thing. This book…is there anything in it that would encourage murder? Anything at all?”

His belly quaked as he laughed. “Oh, friend, yes. These Texts concern communion with gods and spirits…effected by sacrifice and ritual, naturally.”

Stu’s mouth filled with saliva. “Thank you. That’s all for now.” He re-bagged the page. “Keep your ear to the ground. You see any sign of that book, you let me know.”

“Certainly. I will watch the auctions. Such things have a habit of…resurfacing.”

As he left, he pulled Google up on his phone. He was unsurprised but no less dismayed when he saw that Glagolitic’s eerie, looping alphabet matched the sigils from Cyril’s basement.

& & &

Miranda was cross-legged on the couch when he returned, two glasses of wine pre-poured from a half-empty bottle on the coffee table. Her hazel eyes glistened in the glow of the end-table lamp. She extended a glass and he sipped, the dry warmth exacerbating the nauseous anxiety already twisting in his belly.

“We need to talk.”

He rested a hand on her knee. A litmus test; she didn’t take it. “What about?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing’s going on with me.”

She got the annoyed crease between her eyebrows. “Something is going on with you. Please. Talk to me.”

Every other time she’d made that request he’d towed the line, insisting he was fine and just exhausted from work, a comfortable half-lie to satisfy them both for a while. He’d opened his mouth to repeat it, to keep up the front, when the knot congealed in his throat. He tried to force it down but by then the tears were already spilling, a phlegmy sob racking hischest.

He could feel Miranda’s shock. She had never seen him cry, had never seen anything but his gruff denial. After a moment he regained his composure enough to speak, each word pounding like a headache.

“This case…all those people, Miranda, he killed them like dogs. Fucking dogs. Kids, their whole lives ahead of them. And Cy – the guy who did it, he has – had – this book…this weird old fucked-up book. Or a page from it, I don’t know.” He fixed his eyes on hers, wiping snot away with the back of his hand. “And I’ve been having these dreams. Or visions. Seeing shit. I keep waking up at night, thinking he’s here, somehow…I don’t fucking know…”

When she laid her hand on his shoulder he flinched.

“After this,” she said gently, “I want you to take a long vacation. You need rest.”

For a moment he was silent. “I can’t.”

“Please, Stu. You have to. For me?”

“I can’t,” he repeated.

Miranda just stared.

“Momentum is all I have,” he mumbled. “I can’t stop. This shit is driving me crazy, but not as much as quiet will.”

She said nothing. She just wrapped her arms around him and squeezed. Stu was intensely aware of the day’s stink on him but he clung to her, his tears flowing afresh.

& & &

He awakened that night standing in the living room with no memory of having fallen asleep. His sagging gut hung over the waistband of the boxers that were his only clothing.

Alexander Cyril sat on the couch precisely where Miranda had, his posture almost regal. Decay had commenced, the flesh just above his groin blotched blue-green. Putrescence hung thick in the air. His shattered skull was no longer empty; something segmented writhed within, beneath a translucent membrane stretched across its rim like wet cheesecloth over a bowl.

“Hi, Stuart.” He grinned with bloodless lips. His voice resonated within his own head, the words flowing together in a hollow timbre, his sinuses rent by buckshot.

Stu wanted to scream but restrained it, some carnal instinct telling him that would be a grave mistake.

“What are you?” he whispered. “What have you done?”

“Nothing so special. Not to those out there. Once you start asking questions, Stuart, you’ll find such answers. You won’t like what they tell you. But respect them, and oh, how they’ll love you…”

“You killed all those people.”

“Small fry. Bullshit.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Listen close. I don’t have a lot of time.

“Terror isn’t an emotion, man. It’s not something inside. It’s a thing – in energy, not essence, a consciousness drifting out in the void, farther than any star, singing to us. We just have to learn to listen.” A front tooth crumbled, antennae flexing in the gap. “Humanity’s not much without its fear, you’d agree. But that’s just it – the fear of death is farcical. Meat couldn’t think to react otherwise. What substance has for us – that song – is much worse.

“But let me tell you: with the right blessings and the right prices paid, you can consecrate yourself to terror. Become it.” He shot himself with a finger pistol. “Then you can kill it. And when you kill your fear in just the right way…”

The things in Cyril’s braincase squirmed yet more fiercely. Stu’s bowels lurched.

“Well. You’ll see. We’ll meet again soon.”

“Please…please, just leave us alone.”

“No can do. You’re perfect. Terror wants you to hear – really hear – its song. Get ready, Stuart, because you will. Things are going to be changing around here. You and I? We’re the novitiate of a new dawn, brother.”

Cyril laughed, a viscous cackle that yet echoed in Stu’s ears when he awoke face-down on the carpet.

The late-autumn air chilled his sallow flesh, a rivulet of drool running over his cheek into the carpet. It wasn’t until he heard Miranda stirring that he summoned the willpower to move. He dressed quickly and quietly as he could before he could be seen.

He had two hours before he had to be at work. He had time to make a stop.

& & &

With its sterile lighting and ammonia-acrid linoleum, its pungency of death and loss, the coroner’s office was one of Stu’s most-hated places.

Dr. Rodgers, unlike most coroners, was an actual physician, with the early-onset baldness to prove it. When Stu entered his office, he eyed over his reading glasses with an expression that reminded him of a tortoise.

“You look tired.”

Stu glanced in a wall mirror. His face was ruddy, his eyes bloodshot, his cheeks carpet-imprinted. “Morning to you, too.”

“What can I do for you?”

“You got a body recently. Alexander Cyril. Murder-suicide.” He swallowed. “Half his head missing. Was there an autopsy?”

“Didn’t see much point. Shotgun suicides aren’t hard to diagnose. Why?”

“I…need to see him.”

Five minutes later, Stu wasn’t entirely sure what he’d expected. Cyril’s body lay on its stainless steel tray, mist from the open locker licking his grayed flesh. He peered into what remained of the cranium and found it blessedly empty.

The problem came with the turquoise stain over Cyril’s appendix. Stu was afraid to ask, but he asked anyway.

Dr. Rodgers frowned. “Yeah, that. Thought it might be an issue with the refrigeration, but everything’s running fine.” He touched the discoloration as if checking its temperature. “Not sure how he could be decomposing. All I can say is you’d better figure out what to do with him before he stinks the place up.”

Dread curdled in Stu’s stomach. “I want you to do an autopsy. ASAP.”

“I can make time tomorrow morning. Booked solid today.”

“That’s fine. Thanks, Mike.”

“No problem.”

Stu waited for him to turn before pinching Cyril’s upper lip – pensively, as if he might bite – and pulling.

A spot of darkness in a field of white.

A missing tooth.

& & &

That night Stu laid awake in bed, his guts churning. He’d spent the day following up and poking around and had to admit he was out of leads, with no sure evidence of accomplices, nor even the Wilkerson Text. His bank account showed little other than bills and cash withdrawals. His neighbors and coworkers didn’t know shit and seemed perfectly comfortable remembering Cyril as a decent-but-reserved guy turned morbid curiosity, something to tell their friends and families about with barely-concealed fascination.

He’d explained his accomplice theory and that had bought him some time, but that wouldn’t last long if he couldn’t find them. The writing was on the wall – they would let him stare at the case for a few weeks, maybe a month, and then they would tell him to close it as just another psychotic rampage, and within the year it would be forgotten to everyone at the station except Stu. The dead would be reduced to nothing but byproducts of Cyril’s rage, their loves and worries and laughs lost to all but those who were forced to pick up what scraps they’d been allowed to keep. Nobody would remember the shredded young bodies or their mothers’ shrieks. Cyril, for his efforts, would earn local news attention, maybe a Wikipedia article.

Or maybe he’d earned far more.

Of course, Stu hadn’t told Chief Barnes about the dreams whose unreality he was rapidly losing faith in, the underlying monstrosity he sensed. How could he? He’d be removed from the case and put on leave before he could blink.

He’d tried to convince himself it was in his head, all coincidence and exhaustion and ever-present pressure. It hadn’t worked. His thoughts drifted continuously back to Cyril, his malevolent smile and the crimson pit of his head with its horrible insectile additions. He could feel him swimming at his mind’s periphery, his laugh half-replacing his tinnitus, and he had no choice but to admit that he didn’t have a clue where reality’s edges were anymore. Lunatics were firm believers in their own reality; otherwise, there’d be no lunatics.

Stu turned and stared at Miranda’s back, bare and strong and smooth in the moonlight. He wanted to shake her awake and spill everything he’d kept her from – the guilt and grief that strangled him with each new corpse, the heart he’d never quite managed to turn to stone. But he’d already slipped once. The train was derailing. He couldn’t bear to see her leap.

His phone commenced vibrating on his nightstand, shockingly loud in the still dark. He spun and grabbed it, too slow – Miranda was awake, rolling over to squint at him.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Stuart.”

Stu’s heart skipped a beat as he checked the number.

Cyril’s.

“You know where to find me. It’ll be easier for you, you know. I had to start from the beginning…but you…”

The line went dead. Stu looked to Miranda, found the worry glinting in her eyes.

“Who was that?”

Stu didn’t reply. He knew what he should do – lie down and shut his eyes, or else hole up with the shotgun – but he also knew what he was going to do. Knees shaking, he got up and dressed. Miranda watched silently until he was already opening the bedroom door to leave.

“Where are you going? What’s going on?”

Stu swallowed. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be back soon.”

“Please, Stu. Please just tell me where you’re going.”

“I said don’t fucking worry about it!”

The way she cowered sent his heart plummeting to his ankles and he wanted nothing but to grab her and tell her he was sorry and believe her promises that everything would be fine, but he knew that if he went to her he wouldn’t ever leave. So he gritted his teeth, repeated that he’d return soon, and left.

He had to see. He had to see because to see was to understand, and to understand was to destroy.

& & &

From the outside, Cyril’s house looked as it always had. The gray stone was highlighted by the orange-hued lamps lining the sidewalk and garden, all pointed up to give the house a veneer of warmth. No car sat in the driveway and no lights were on. A momentary prayer to be insane after all dissipated when he made the mistake of trying the front door, finding it unlocked.

He took his time shuffling to the basement, clinging to every empty moment before he had to descend. Menace wormed its way into every pore. He wanted desperately to turn back, to run home to Miranda, but the illusion of choice had breathed its last. There was nowhere to go but down.

Four stood beneath the hanging light. Two men not being treated well by middle age idled to the left, nervously wringing their fingers. A woman of maybe 25 knelt in the middle, renewing the circle and its letters, a jar of the yellow goop in her off hand. All three wore baggy gray cassocks.

Cyril waited in the corner he’d died in beside the morsels of his own brains which had caked to the wall. His fingers had split and short spikes erupted from within, the broken digits dangling like talismans. On these claws was perched a squat tome with tattered leather binding. Cyril studied it intensely. Something squirmed beneath his black cassock.

The woman saw Stu first as he reached the concrete floor and though alarm was plain on her face, he saw nothing of surprise. She pointed and suddenly all eyes were on him, though he regarded only the drying sacs that were Cyril’s. His ears rang.

“You’ve made it. Just in time, too.” Cyril shut the book. Even in his grotesquerie his expression approached somberness, even sympathy.

Stu responded by raising his Glock and pointing it squarely at what remained of Cyril’s head, the sights quaking as the chitinous appendages in his cranium slithered through the membrane and swayed like branches in an unseen wind.

The acolytes looked uncertain. Cyril waved a hand. “Please, Stuart. It’s too late to play hard-boiled.”

“I’m going to kill you. I swear to God, I’m going to kill you.”

“Kill what, exactly?” Cyril sighed. “Pity. I’d hoped you’d understand by now. It would’ve made this next part much easier.”

One of Cyril’s eyeballs detached and fell stickily away, followed by its twin. His sockets, Stu saw, were filled not with muscle and nerve but shone instead with blackest starlight, and all at once Stu was drowning, awe mingling with a disgust older than death, a nightmare screeching from the strands of a universe horrified by what it had borne.

And then Cyril peeled everything else away, his transcended humanity laying in a seeping pile at his “feet”.

The acolytes screamed their vocal cords to shreds. One tried to run.

Stu was vaguely aware of his pistol firing, the bullet spinning into nothingness. He dropped it. He saw the game for what it was.

The basement, the circle, split to the foundations – deeper, past the forgotten husks of worlds blasted cold and dead, titanic necropolises scorched to psychic ash.

Everything was overwhelmed. Only fear remained.

& & &

Resisting calling every hospital in the county was wearing Miranda’s nerves thin.

Anxiety gurgled in her belly as she gazed out the window. A cold rain was just beginning to fall and she knew full well the panic was going to break free sooner rather than later. Her mind refused to leave the phone call, what Stu might be caught up in. Gambling? Drugs? Certainly not another woman – she’d had her cheaters before, knew the type. Whatever it was, once he came home, she didn’t know whether she’d kiss or kill him.

The cracks had always been there, she knew that. She’d never told him about her phone calls with Phyllis, the stories she’d been told by the woman who’d shared his bed for thirty years. She’d never told him that Phyllis had cried, called him heartless and aloof, that she’d warned Miranda away in no uncertain terms.

It’d been far too late. By then she’d already seen Stu for what he was; seen his torturous, delicate love despite his conviction that he was a sealed vessel. That he would die for her – for anyone. It’d just taken her a while, even with Phyllis’ testimony, to see that he was dying already.

Miranda could feel something coming, like a seismograph before the quake. She could hear it in Stu’s cracking voice, see it in the darkening circles under his eyes. She knew she had to do something and knew also that the more she pressed, the more he’d pull away. He’d shown her ten minutes of vulnerability, and then he’d retreated, a snail into its shell, when she’d tried, oh-so-delicately, to address it.

Of one thing she was sure: she was done with delicacy, and he was done being a detective. She refused to watch him waste away and she prayed only that she’d have the strength to follow her ultimatum through.

Relief washed over her as her phone began clattering on the coffee table, then dissipated as she saw it wasn’t Stu calling, but Chief Barnes.

“Hello?” She hated the sound of weakness and worry in her voice.

“Miranda? Hey, have you -”

“Is everything okay? What’s going on?”

Barnes sounded taken aback. “Uh…well, can I talk to Stu? I can’t get a hold of him.”

“Is he in trouble?”

“No, no. I’ve got Mike Rodgers, the county coroner, here with me. Believe it or not, it seems we’ve managed to lose a body – one from a case Stu’s been working on. We need to loop him in here, so -”

A ball of sick crawled up her throat. “He’s not here. Did he not show up today?”

“Miranda, he called in this morning. He said he was going to spend time with you.”

A dense silence settled, Miranda trying and failing to come up with an explanation. She wanted to cry, to beg Barnes to tell her what was happening, but she could feel he was just as confused.

And then, as if on cue, a key twisted in the lock. Miranda’s breath hitched as she saw Stu in the doorway, and she was leaping to embrace him when something stopped her. She stared at him, searching, crossing her arms over her abdomen as she shrank back.

Something was off.

Barnes was asking something.

“He just got here. Hang on.”

She put her phone down. Barnes’ voice became a tinny indistinction.

For a moment, all was still, and then Stu’s head swiveled as if he’d just noticed her. His smile was distorted in a way that made her want to puke. There was some disconnect – a shift so essential she hardly recognized him but couldn’t say what, exactly, was wrong.

“What the fuck, Stu?” The words tasted of bile. “What the fuck?”

Stu just stared. He didn’t look high – his balance was too sure, too much comprehension on his face.

Miranda’s spine tingled. Something told her to make herself slight but she steeled herself, stood up straighter. It was then or never. “I want you to quit.”

He simply stared.

“This needs to stop. Fucking…look at you, Stu. You’re killing yourself and you won’t listen to me, or anyone else, and I’m sick of it!”

Nothing. His grin became mocking. Anger and fear flared inside her, a searing nuclear heat that flew as dragon’s fire before she could help it.

“Phyllis saw it too! She did! You’re too weak for this job, too fucking WEAK, and you always were, and it ruins fucking everything! It’s ruining ME!”

She knew immediately that she’d crossed a line. Frustration at her inability to turn back time metamorphosed into guilt, her sudden tears hotter than they’d been in ages.

Expressionless, he trudged toward the bedroom.

“Wait…Stu, wait, I’m sorry…”

She followed. Barnes had hung up. A trail of blood droplets traced Stu’s path, and as she followed the breadcrumbs home the woods felt dark and deep indeed.

The bedroom door was locked. She heard Stu muttering, dragging something heavy across the floor. She knocked, and for some reason regretted it.

“Stu? Stu, are you okay?”

The shotgun’s action answered.

“Stu! What are you doing? Please answer me, I’m sorry…”

Stu giggled from within, high and childlike. The safety’s click was deafening. Desperation constricted her chest and she pounded on the door with balled fists.

“Wait, Stu, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I said that, I didn’t mean it, please come talk to me! I’m sorry! I’M SORRY!”

He started to say something. Whatever it was going to be was erased when he pulled the trigger.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Joe Struvallo 2024