GOD IS DEAD

the killer was not in the building, he was here in the shadows

The town had long forgotten the shape of true horror. But horror did not require memory to persist.

A moonless night had swallowed the land. The sky, an unbroken void, gave no light to the earth, no reprieve to the things moving within it. The town lay still, blind in its sleep, unaware that something was stirring in the dark—a thing neither beast nor man, but something in between, something that carried the weight of both hunger and ritual.

In a nameless house at the edge of the world, a man had been remade in suffering.

His body lay in a ruin of flesh and bone, the torso flayed open in a wet and glistening lattice, the ribs spread like the fractured cage of some broken-winged bird. His hands had been undone at the knuckles, fingers scattered across the blood-drowned floor like discarded dice. The face was gone, peeled away with a care that belied the violence of the act, leaving only raw muscle and the gleam of exposed teeth grinning against the ruin.

A knife lay beside him, its blade chipped, the steel dark with what it had carved. And above the ruin of his body, nailed into the wall, was a single rose, its petals so deep in color they drank the candlelight like an open wound.

I stood at the threshold, my breath even, my pulse unhurried. The air hung heavy, thick with the stink of opened bodies, of iron and bile and voided bowels. The house had swallowed the sound of his dying. No neighbors had come. No prayers had been whispered. There was only the work left behind, and the silence of something finished.

This was the third.

The first had been a girl, left in her own bed with her stomach opened wide, her insides unspooled in a gleaming pile at her side. The second, a man of means, found draped over his desk with the back of his skull split, his thoughts dripping down the grain of the wood like a butcher’s leavings. And now this. Another taken. Another shaped into something final.

A lesson, if one knew how to read it.

Outside, the wind had stilled. The town held its breath. I could hear the distant wail of sirens, crawling toward the corpse like carrion birds sensing a meal. The detective would come soon. He had begun to see the lines in the blood, to recognize the rhythm in the ruin. He had started to look past the slaughter and into the symmetry beneath it.

Good.

From the shadowed street, I watched as the constables arrived, their boots splashing through the pooled remnants of a man who had once walked among them. The detective came last. He was taller than the rest, lean and sharp-edged, carved from something older than the uniform he wore. He stepped into the house without hesitation, and when he emerged minutes later, he looked out into the dark. As if he could feel me watching.

Our eyes met, across the dead man’s threshold, across the blood and the silence and the knowing.

I did not flinch. I did not turn away.

I smiled.

The detective had a name. Elias Wakefield. The kind of name that did not belong in a place like this. He had come from somewhere else, sent down into this nameless town with orders to make sense of the senseless. I had watched him since the first body fell. He carried himself with a patience most lacked, moved as though he belonged to the stillness itself. But more than that, he looked. He did not merely see. He looked.

And I wanted him to.