Holes

Holes

Oliver Kane

It began, for him, on the night of July fifth. He had cleaned, of course, but still found bits of paper and plastic wrappers—those ripped from the bodies of small fireworks—on the concrete footing of the back yard, and he still almost caught a whiff of their hot sulfurous odor from within his house and back yard and from those of his neighbors. He knew it wasn’t really there, that it was only a particularly persistent memory, and in truth it was only almost a smell, yet he disliked it. Those wafts of an almost organic odor.

There had never been a woman in his house—not one that stayed and gave it a ‘touch’. His longest relationship (more often than not these things could only be called encounters) had lasted for perhaps two months, and he had only invited her to stay a handful of times; most encounters had been at her place. On the surface, he had not quite driven her away, but of course, he had. To both of them, it seemed more a mutual diversion of desire, both physical and emotional, but of course, it was even more mutual on his end. It could be seen in his house, its decorum and cleanliness, that it did not particularly need a woman’s touch—at least, he did not think so. All things had their place, and all were in them. No pets were allowed in for longer than a few hours. No smoking, of course, save for in the back yard. No children to run and break things, to spill on the carpet, to track in dirt and mud and trouble. Clean, it was; tidy and ordered and right.

But that smell…somehow it was persistent, somehow the zipping and spinning colored firebombs and the crackling faux dynamite and the rocketing tubes of the previous day were still there in that smell. Odd, it was, but not yet alarming.

He had a meal of steak—blue rare—Potatoes Romanoff, asparagus, and a deep crimson pinot noir. He ate in silence save for his chewing, the clink of fork and knife on white china. His thoughts went around and about, though lazily, as sated as his mouth and stomach were. It was not until he was washing up and putting all the dishes he’d used away, that he noticed them. For then, they were naught but seen; in that first moment, they did not itch, nor did they have any texture. It was six orange-red dots on the heel of his right hand that he saw, nestled between the two shallow creases that descended from the middle of his palm and nearly connected where his hand ended and the wrist began. The dots had a pattern that was almost that of a star shape, a pentagram, arranged around one slightly larger one in their center.

He cocked his head, idly wrapping the towel in his other hand about the silver ring it always hung on. Using the index finger of his other hand, he rubbed at the series of dots. They did not smear, as if they were some spattering of juice from his steak or errant red wine, nor did they have any depth or protrusion, as blemishes upon the skin would have had. There was no deep itch of irritation, no localized warmth of inflammation that would have given them their color. They were only a flat, really only vaguely colored pattern on his skin, perhaps a quarter-inch across. He took the area of flesh between his thumb and index and squeezed lightly. No tactility, no pain, no shifting of puss or blood underneath.

Despite having cleaned his hands with soap and hot water already, he put them under again. Pale pink hand soap turned to a slick white froth under his scrutiny, steam rose in light rivulets from the sink, yet even after almost a minute, the spots remained, unaltered. Whatever they were, they were insoluble. Not dirt, not grease, not anything but dots. An allergic reaction, then? Something he had touched in the last hours, some insect that had crawled into his bed and tasted of him? The thought was concerning, more for the concept of an infestation, rather even than the molesting of his person, unseen until now, until these…dots. And what would make such marks, anyway? What pincers or stinger would, with their jabbing, produce such a pattern?

He was saved further thought by a resurgence of that acrid smell, that of spent fireworks. More frustrated now at its phantom persistence, he flicked water from his hands and snatched at the towel, twisting his hands within it and peering around his kitchen with narrowed eyes. Nose forward, the dots briefly forgotten, he sought out the odor. He looked in the trash cans, both interior and exterior, in the shrubbery that bound his back yard, near and under the patio chairs and table, even in the charcoal grill. He did this all with a small flashlight, as the sun had gone again from the world, and he did this with that smell growing somehow stronger with each avenue checked and rechecked.

No charred stub of sparkler or firecracker. Not even an excessive amount of residue where they had set the cardboard tube launchers. Nothing.

He locked his doors, turned off his lights, and ascended his stairs to shower and find his bed.

The water fell over him, hot and wonderful, and it drew from his skin dried sweat, dirt, dust, particulate, and dead cells. Oil came off, and sweet-smelling lotion went on, pushing away the other, acrid smells, and he came from the tub a new man, clean and relaxed and flexible, like a freshly steamed felt hat, ready to be reformed perfectly.

That was, save for the star of red-orange dots that had faltered not a whit with his cleansing.

For a long time, he stood in front of the mirror, bathroom door ajar on the dark upstairs hallway, steam and light flooding out, naked as the day he was born, only staring at those dots and prodding at them. Their color had deepened, though of their own accord or only with the ubiquitous subcutaneous flush of his skin, he did not know. And was there something more there now? Was there that itch he had expected? The buzz of one’s body sending a signal of wrongness? He could not tell.

He read for a while by lamp light, sitting in his bed with the pillows propped behind his back, consciously dismissive of the dots on his hand each time he turned a page. In truth, the words on the pages went in the front of his head and exited the back, unchanged, uninterpreted, but he did not draw the pages back and reread; he didn’t even think to.

At some point, he turned out the light, pulled the coverlet up, and rolled onto his side, his left hand rubbing at the palm of his right. There was no light to see the dots, and they grew no texture for his fingers to feel as he fell into the grip of torpor, yet still, he saw them as they had first appeared, that flash of red-orange color against his skin. That image remained even as the world of his mind fell from boiling grey cloud into sparkling, yellow-shot night and then into the ever-present black void of sleep.

He is twelve again. He is small and pale and indrawn, yet he is quick of body and mind. He is about the task never taught him, never shown him, yet that he is so proficient in and that so engrosses him. He has found the wounded albino rat, its two hind legs made limp and useless by a passing car or an angry stamping foot, or perhaps by some degenerative disease, unknown even to rats. It squeaks and wriggles as he grasps it by its hard, whipping tail, as he runs with it to an even more secluded place. Its beady red eyes know not his plans or his own inner workings; they know only that the rat has been harmed and that it will be harmed further. And for all that it is broken and defunct, it fights on.

It fights on as he cleans his work area, as he lays it back and uses the nails to pin its legs, both working and not, to the stump of tree. It fights on, for a time, as he goes to work with the scalpel. Yet, just as all the other subjects he has had, as all else he has tried, its entirety falls as limp and useless as its hind legs; its eyes darken from a bright scarlet, to a crimson like drying blood; its head hangs and blood drips from the incision he made. And he only stares at it, black eyes locked on its red ones, having seen the death and now only looking for the rest, for the after…but of course, there is no after. There hasn’t been thus far, not in any of his subjects. There is only this draining, this egress of a life that he himself does not seem to feel.

He cuts the head from the rat carefully, dismembers it otherwise, and places the head first in a small plastic bag and then into the case with his tools. It is as he clips the black leather case closed, that he sees the dots on his palm. It is then that some part of him knows this to be a dream, a look into a childhood rife with frustrations, confusions, dark urges, and naught else. It is with those dots that his mind comes up and forward, forward through his adolescence and his growth toward the dichotomy, the face man and the inner man. For all that it is a twelve-year-old boy with a rat’s blood staining his fingers that peers at those dots, it is also a man of twice that age looking at slowly dilating black cavities, red around their rims with not his blood, but with some thin alien fluid that freezes and burns in the same moment, that lays into him a black prickling numbness while causing also a bone-deep ache.

The child snatches the scalpel and begins to cut.

He awoke with a start and with a fear hitherto unbeknownst to him, evident in the sweat that lay in slick sheets on his skin and his quick drawing of breath. Immediately, he was aware of the sharp pain in his right palm, and his other hand flew to it, rustling the coverlet in its haste and bringing a waft of hot fear-smelling air to his nose. What had been sharp pain, however, was now a dull thumping with the same rhythm of his heart, and his prodding was met not with the gashes he had expected, but only what he knew to be those dots, now six hardly distinguishable lumps, like a tiny nest of ready pimples. He tested them with his fingers, emitting a whimper unlike any sound he had ever produced, and then, with a shaking hand, reached for the bedside lamp.

Squinting at the light and sitting up, his eyes were met, after a few blinks, with that same star shape he had seen hours before, though now grown in diameter by perhaps an eighth of an inch, the dots orange-red color now more rosy, more filled with blood. Like acne, the dots had grown heads that stood just underneath his flesh, though where the heads of pimples were almost always white, these were jet black and taught, like minuscule drops of crude oil administered by the head of a pin.

Like a spider’s eyes…

He sat and stared at them for a while, noting the ache of the area, and the itch that was more mental than physical; a need to touch and squeeze them, a need to test them. Finally, he did so, grasping the amalgam between index and thumb and squeezing, lightly at first, but with more vigor when met with little more pain and no visible change. With a grunt, two of the six popped with equal pain and relief. A black ooze pooled around the other four blemishes, and he squeezed harder, his face scrunching. The rest popped, nearly audibly, and that black liquid dripped down into the crease where his wrist met his hand and slicked the squeezing fingers of his left hand, staining everything like ink. He only sat and breathed, lightly flexing the hand with the dots that were now holes. Those holes…they themselves seemed to pulse with the beat of his heart. Not only did he see the flesh around them thumping minutely, from his attack, but the cavities themselves seemed to breathe, to bleed that black ichor. An insect bite, as he suspected…surely. It had crawled in the night before, while he slept, or perhaps even earlier, and with some movement of his, had felt threatened enough to lash out and bite him, loosing some venom or poison that had only now been dealt with.

He was not sickened easily, or often, and only achieved that emotion with threats to his own body’s well-being, or to the order and organization of the things he deemed within his control. He felt it now, however, for this was both.

The oil washed mostly away under a stream of hot water in the bathroom sink, but there continued an oozing of it from the offending cavities, a slow welling in and spilling over from each, and yet more as he squeezed. It did not seem that the flow would stop; it only continued to darken the flowing water. Whatever it was, whatever had worked its way under his skin and had now been expunged, smelled; it stank, in truth, filling his nose, quite volatile despite its lack of volume. It stank like…well, he wasn’t sure just what it was like. It was somewhat like blood, yet somewhat not, somewhat, indeed, like motor oil, yet not really that, either. More than either, it was a burned smell, a used explosives smell.

He stopped what had been monotonous and nearly thoughtless squeezing and cleaning of the holes. It was not easy to stop, but he did, instead planting the heels of both hands to the sides of the sink and forcing his head upward and outward. He closed his eyes and drew in breath ten times. Ten slow breaths that made up perhaps thirty seconds in all. The tension fell from his shoulders and hands and jaw, the sound of the water was now more calming, where before it had been goading, and the smell fell a bit from the air, or at least seemed to. There was still pain in his right hand, an ache truly up into the wrist now, yet he surmised it was mostly from his own constant prodding.

A normally prudent and intelligent man did not allow such fancies as had been running through his mind—the phantom smell, the holes breathing, the holes bleeding something that wasn’t of his body—to dominate his world. A man like that, a man like him, forced such superstitious thoughts and impulses back; they were for the lower beasts, both animal and “human”; they were not for the likes of him, the experimenter, the scientist, the surgeon. He had to think…properly and concisely. He took more deep breaths. Whatever it was, the majority was cleared from his flesh. He would have to apply some ointment, perhaps, and bandage it, but in a few days the punctures would be no more, and that buzzing ache would be no more.

He applied the ointment, triple antibiotic, then covered it with gauze and wrapped his hand in flexible water resistant tape. It was much too tight at first and squeezed almost painfully when flexed. He peeled it back one layer and reapplied it. All the while, he tried not to look at the holes he was covering up, tried not to really see them, and as first the gauze and then the tape darkened like tiny growing clouds, he tried not to see that, either. He put the sight of it and the feel of it—still painful, but more than that, prickling, crawling—out of his mind, as far away from him as was possible.

It was still deeply black outside his windows, and with the interior lights off, he was drenched in that blackness. It was still only three thirty-eight AM, as told by his digital bedside clock, and though he laid down and curled in on himself, as was most comfortable, he did not sleep again that morning. He finally gave up on trying to at about four forty-five, rising and flicking on lights as he went down to start coffee. It was programmed to begin its boiling and dripping at five thirty, but he bypassed it and soon, coffee was bubbling and dripping, the only sound to break the silence of the prematurely lit world.

Coffee did not help; nor did the sun. His day was spent in a haze whose like was unknown to him, a haze of childlike thoughts, and indeed thoughts of his childhood: unbidden recountings of experiments and dodged authorities, both of which had the texture of reality more than memory. They were quite nearly physical manifestations of sound and image and thought. Where before he pondered not on clues and evidence left, on other’s routes of investigation and profiling, now he did. While seeking out the stench of spent fireworks, while drawing in yet more of it with each and every breath, and while digging with fingernails at the bandage and his darkening wrist and not alleviating that frantic buzz, that itch that was further beneath his skin than any bone or vein or lymphatic vessel, he sought out the origin of the odor. His actions and his paranoia were fueled equally by the images of old bodies burned in shallow graves, leaving only parts and organs and appendages to the world, and by the cursed stench that filled the air, that filled the world. They knew who he was and what he was. His neighbors with their grins as fake as his own yet out of fear rather than loathing, his coworkers with their laconic, reserved speech only around him, his adversaries the police detectives, his adversaries the incurious and impassive sheep of the world—those who knew not the depth of life, nor had the capacity to take it and revel in its taking—his adversaries the normal; they all knew, for he had left something astray, left something out and open to the scrutinous eye of the world. He had let them in, and they had taken their use of him, had impelled, with their venom-dripping fangs, a curse upon his body and mind. They had all come in and put holes in his story, holes in his order. Holes in his body.

In both the digging into his flesh and the uprooting of his ordered home, he found nothing but a further itch, yet the pain of both mixed with the pleasure of digging, of exploring, of routing out the invaders who had planted evidence of spent powder and decaying flesh. Laughter bubbled and flew from him, his mumbling turned to shouts at phantoms, his breath came hard and ragged and quick, and still, the stench of all his burned experiments was wrung from the air, and still the clattering of their blackened bones berated his mind.

It was with the movement within him that he was brought back to some semblance of reality, with sights and sounds and smells and textures of the present. It was a writhing unmotivated by any impulse of muscle, any jolting of tendon. With breath and heart quickened to the pace of a marathoner, with lungs so choked by that stench as to be asthmatic, he looked down at his hands, one with its nails blackened and sticky with blood, adhesive, and a black jelly, the other half-curled and trembling. The holes had grown to encompass half of his palm, each the diameter of a dime, though cavernous and shiny black rather than flat and silver, and still, they made that pattern on his flesh: a star around a larger central hole. His mouth was as open and as cavernous as each, his tongue a fat, lazy rat between his teeth. He found, for a wonder and for the first time in his life, that there were tears in his eyes, bringing a shimmer to the image. Blinking, he looked on, and as his vision cleared, he saw the culprit of that movement, that writhing.

Rising slowly from within those pulsing holes in his palm, beginning only as dots of grey-white, were thick worm-like things with bulbous, slightly conical heads, like gargantuan spermatozoa. They were smooth and pallid, almost fleshless, marred not with veins, tubes, mouths, or eyes, and they danced in their homes in his flesh, swirling and knocking at the sides of the holes, swaying like snakes or indeed like worms testing the air for moisture. The one in the center, just as its hole, was larger by a noticeable degree, though it was no different otherwise. They rose and grew until they filled the holes, plugging them with their tear-drop heads and only continuing to writhe. Christ, he could feel it, could feel them, from the surface of his flesh, down into his wrist and perhaps further. It seemed, with any minute movement of his fingers and the subsequent movement of the tendons and ligaments within his forearm, that the area was fuller than it should have been, as if packed with almost twice its intended volume of meat and blood.

There was a sound coming from him, a low whimpering groan that began deep in his lungs and rose out, turning quickly to a hoarse shout. For another moment, he only stared, another shout brewing and boiling in him, and as it came forth, he grasped with a shaking hand, the center worm by its head. It was as unyielding as a hard rubber tube, and tried to dart back at his touch, though with a frantic pinching, he was able to keep it in tow. With short, staccato screams now, high-pitched calls like a wounded dog’s yipping, he yanked at the worm. It wouldn’t come; the shape of its head wedged it in the rim of the cavity. He yanked harder, and with a slight tearing of flesh and a flash of white hot pain, it came out enough that he could get his fingers around the stem-like body of it. The others slunk backward, seeming to coil up an inch within, bulging his wrist as if it were horribly inflamed. Pulling now as if cinching a knot, the muscles of his left arm bulging and shivering, he felt something deep in his right forearm pop and let go. In the same moment, the worm came free and began immediately to wither and grow limp, drying up and curling as if left out beneath a desert sun to bake. He dropped it on the floor and, still screaming—though now with a glee in violence like some ancient hominid, almost a hooting—he stamped on it over and over. It was like stepping on a thick rope, and it rolled under his foot, emitting the dry crackling of a snake’s shed skin.

He had to get at the others, had to pull them all out by their alien roots and see them wither and die. That, and that alone, would relieve him of this horror. Yet they knew, and they had hidden themselves in his flesh. For all that they had no eyes or mouths or noses or ears, somehow—by some telepathy, perhaps—they knew their host to be an ungenerous one and had retreated. They still writhed in there, however; worms wriggling, snakes slithering.

He started for the kitchen, stepping over the upturned chairs and table in his dining room, over two plants knocked free of their pots and uprooted from their soil, over all his ordered things turned out of their rightful places in cabinets and drawers and shelves, turned out and strewn about the floor. What he sought had been in a drawer across from the range, tucked away along with digital thermometers and other such kitchen implements. Clenching and unclenching his fists, hatefully aware of the burning itch beneath those holes, his heaving breath coming through clenched teeth, he searched and kicked through the mess. Finally, he found it and bent to swipe it from the floor.

A butane kitchen torch, for searing crème brulée or charring vegetables…or popping the heads of rancid alien invaders. With his left hand, he held it, turning the little knob on the back and pushing it in to light it with his right. The gas hissed out, flashed blue and went out once, twice, thrice, and then shot into life on the fourth click. He gazed at it for a moment, feeling a smile crawl up his face at that blazing blue cone, tipped with a sputtering orange-white ring at its front. Then he began to breathe quickly through his mouth, shaped as if to whistle. He had to do it, and before he lost his nerve.

He felt the glow of heat much before that white tip of fire touched his flesh, yet he pressed on. There was a small sound coming from the holes in his flesh, like the churning of some thick fluid, like the bubbling of a cheese-sauce. They had to come out. The temperature just under his skin, where they held themselves, must have been in the hundreds now, for his wrist was bubbling and blackening. The pain was horrid, unimaginable, and exquisite, yet he pressed on. His left eye twitched uncontrollably, his teeth were bared to the gums, and he could feel something in his right hand—the nerves in there, he was sure—crying out but also dying, popping in the heat like kernels of corn.

More suddenly than he would have thought possible, the small desperate writhing that was each of those worms shying away from the heat ceased. He threw the torch—still it—into the sink. He could deal with it in a few minutes, and it would not hurt the steel too badly. He had done it! The palm of his right hand was a black ruin, charred and bubbling and already curling in on itself like a dead spider. Those holes curled outward, mushroomed like the exit holes of large caliber bullets…but he had done it. Those things were dead in his flesh now, likely drying up as the first one had done. He could pluck them out and bandage himself. He had beaten them.

There was a sort of sucking, a vacuous inward movement as fast as an opening airlock. Five nearly distinct lengths of something, like flexible rods, shot down his wrist as he looked on and shouted in surprise. He felt them burrowing and wriggling up his arm, marked at each further inch by a ring-like engorging of flesh and a growing flare of agony. His torso and shoulders tensed instinctively and immediately, yet the rest of him went limp for a second, and he fell onto the edge of the sink, grunting and gritting his teeth against the pain. Further and further they burrowed, up into his elbow now, following no easy path; they were ripping through muscle and fat and sinew, one curling around and between the heads of his bicep. The pain was utterly wild, unlike anything he had ever experienced. Alternately babbling to himself and screaming at the invaders within him, he moved left and snatched a long knife from its nestled place amid others in a wooden block. It was for the carving of meat, thin enough to be dexterous and sharp enough to move like liquid around fat and sinew and silver skin. It was hand forged and polished to a near mirror shine. It was perfect for the job.

They were nearly up to his shoulder now, spread almost equally around the circumference of his arm. With a cry, he slashed with the blade at the lump on his anterior deltoid. It dug in almost half an inch and would have hit bone if not for sticking halfway into the hard rubber-like body of the alien worm. As it was, he had to tug it free of his flesh. He had hit it, but the thing still writhed onward, faster now. He cursed it and slashed again, harder and with better aim. Twin rivers of crimson began to flow and drip from his raised arm, but that lump had stopped. He could feel and see it begin to shrivel up under his skin, but he wasted no time in revelry. There were still four in him, two almost to his back, one with its head just past the upper connection of the medial deltoid. And one currently in his armpit. He chose to strike at the last, for he surmised it meant to dig into his abdomen, perhaps the chest cavity or the lungs. In truth, they all were on that path, but that one was the furthest along. He swiped twice, knowing he had to aim by feel, and with each, shouted in mingled pain and ecstasy. They wouldn’t get into him, not deeper. That one took three slashes to wither and die, and he wasn’t sure if he had hit the head; it could have been into his lung already for the hot breadth of pain on his right side. He went for the uppermost worm next, and despite turning the top of his shoulder into a field of ragged, red furrows, that one and the two on his back evaded him fully. They had made their trek and had sunk themselves deep again, like diving leviathans.

They were in him. Moving in him.

Screaming, he attempted to tear his shirt open. With only one working hand, and that one holding a blood-dripping knife, it took four tries before the buttons popped and his flesh was revealed. He could no longer see them, yet his eyes followed their paths all the same. One punctured his right lung from behind, and he could only tear impotently at the air. He began to cough, wet with blood that splattered from his mouth, as another of the worms found its way into some part of his lower abdomen, perhaps the intestine. The last, as he choked on blood and pounded his chest with his ruination of a hand, wormed its way closer to his heart, perhaps knowing its importance and perhaps not, for he felt it there, a physical thing curled against his hammering heart, yet it did not burrow in and end him immediately.

He would die; he knew it for a certainty. Already, pints of his blood had made a thick puddle on the floor. He had not taken a breath in seconds, and he would take no more unless he was able to plug up the lung. And that worm beside his heart would at some point grow bored, more likely curious, and bore through it, using the blood-slick arteries like a series of subway trains to the rest of his body. And would they mate? Would they spawn asexually an army of themselves to, at some point, grow from red-orange dots to cavities and then to grey-white worms whose rubbery skin could secrete an acid that dissolved flesh, like “piranha solution”? Were there already a few million eggs throughout his body, only waiting? Yes, he was sure of it all.

He held the knife in front of him, the quivering tip pointed toward his chest. He would die. Yet was it better to choke on his own blood or to be disemboweled by them or to have his heart popped…or to put the knife through the worm and through his aorta? Was this to be the last experiment, the ultimate one? Was he to find the after in his own heart? There was only one way to find out.

He took one more moment to aim, then plunged the knife.

From the journal of Corporal Lee Warner, Markov County Police:

I wanted to be a writer, you know. I never was much good at it, and it never really took root, but it was fun. A lot more fun than this bullshit, I’ll say that. I guess that’s why I journal rather than go down to Monty’s and get sloppy six days a week like all the other ‘Leos’. No Monty’s for me. Too expensive. And I’m like George Thorogood, anyway; I drink alone. Right here at home. Better that way. Better than being pulled over hours past midnight.

‘You been drinking tonight sir?’

‘Hey, that’s my line!’

Yep, never really took root.

Long day today. I think when most people think about police detectives, they see some motherfucker in a trench coat, his glowing cigarette shielded from the downpour by his fedora, on the trail of some crazy bastard killer. And, of course, that motherfucker is the best detective out there. He does things his own damn way, and the brass hates his methods, but by Christ does he get shit done. He’s almost as crazy as the killer he’s chasing, but he’s got a weird sort of charisma and, of course, he gets the girl… Fake shit. Storybook shit. (‘Ooh, aren’t we bitter tonight?’ ‘Fuck off and die.’) The job’s boring most of the time, in reality. Reports, reports, reports. File the evidence. Take the call. Drink the coffee. Eat the doughnut. Beat the wife, hardy-har-har.

Today, though. Today sucked the big one. Another thing they don’t really tell you about crime scene investigation; it fucking smells, man. Today it was…let’s see: piss, shit, burned hair, burned cloth, burned flesh, and blood. So much god damn blood. I can still smell it over my own breath, and you could light a fire on the latter. The fire department called us after the neighbors called them, having seen smoke coming from the place. I guess I can be thankful for that. Otherwise we’d have been called after the fucker plumped up with gas and then popped, stinking up the entire fucking neighborhood. Silver lining’s, Lee. Always the silver linings.

Suicide, undoubtedly. A pretty gruesome one, but I’ve seen worse. This guy, a surgeon (blind man could see the irony there) first burned the absolute shit out of his hand, then went about cutting his god damn arm off, fucking shanked himself, and then died falling into the sink where he had tossed the still lit torch, turning himself into something of a pyre. Kind of funny if you don’t have to deal with it. The house was torn up, but there was no sign of a break-in, and all his wounds seem to be self inflicted, though we’ll have a better picture after the autopsy comes back in a few days. There were two odd things, however: almost perfectly round puncture wounds on the burned hand, and a grey-white powder in the air. Everywhere, like concrete dust almost. There was a pile of it on the floor, and there were more than just traces in the guy’s body. The lab might come back with something on it, but who knows. Doubt it matters, anyway; it wasn’t coke or anything.

Can’t say why he did it, not really, but it’s a good thing he did. Sounds bad, I know, but its the God’s honest. We were looking upstairs, and there was this custom cabinet sort of built in to the back of his closet. Cracked the lock and found some pictures. Drum roll please…kiddie porn and dead, partially dissected bodies, some adult, some the same kids he made pose. The two-for-one deal. The meal deal. Found the Polaroid the pictures were taken with, a small scalpel that one of our guys says is at least a decade old, and a dried rat’s head. We’ll probably find some body parts in his back yard or in some storage container. Fucking Hell, what a job.

Well, I’m gonna go kiss the bottle and then kiss Sally, try to forget a little.

Ah, for the life of a writer!

p.s. I saw something after dinner. There’s a little pattern of red-orange dots on my skin, right above my left clavicle. They don’t itch, but they won’t wash off, either. Odd.