The canopy of trees gave shade even in this dark hour of night. Branches rustling, the crackling of wood, sweet smell of flowers and cool breeze — this place was a haven right at the mouth of hell.
Smith's knuckles brushed the dew on the leaves. It seemed to seep into his calluses. The cold wind, under the nurse of flame, welcomed him like an old friend.
Smith saw the scene as he was meant to see it. The one who left it had made that clear — this was art.
His art. His requiem.
A living one, made with patience and care. Every detail brought to perfection. Every step deliberate.
There stood the brush strokes.
Five of them.
Arranged in a circle — equidistant, deliberate.
Their hands were not braced. Raised. Elbows bent, wrists loose.
The particular angle of hands lifted in rhythm. In an offering. In the middle of something that had its own music.
Their heads were tilted.
Not wrenched. Tilted. The way a man tilts his head when he closes his eyes and lets something move through him. When he welcomes it.
The bodies were white. Not the white of skin — the white of skin evacuated. Every shade of living drained downward and out, leaving the surface pale and strange, turned inside out and sewn back with a precision that had no business being here.
The stitching ran in long curved lines. Careful. Patient. The work of someone who had taken their time because the time was part of it.
Smith made himself look at the rest.
From the chin upward the skin had been separated and folded back. Folded. Peeled with the same patience as everything else, drawn up and back over the crown of the skull like the brim of a hat turned inside out — pooling there in folds of dried red, darker at the edges, vivid at the center, the only color in the scene that still remembered what color was.
Heads were not stitched. Molded. Gilded. Crowned, maybe.
Five crowns of red. Five white bodies. Five pairs of hands mid-movement.
Smith's mind did what it always did. Started moving.
Circle. Equidistant. Premeditated spacing — measured, not estimated.No signs of struggle at point of death.Victim positioning inconsistent with coercion.Stitching uniform across all five — single craftsman or rehearsed method. Not the first kills?Facial tissue preserved. All according to structure.
The inventory ran.
Underneath it something else ran too, quieter, in a register he didn't have a name for. Not revulsion. Not fear. Something that sat behind both of those things and watched them happen.
His eyes went back to the hands.
Mid-movement. Mid-offering. Fingers loose, wrists dropped. He had seen hands braced. Hands clawed. Hands that had fought and hands that had been folded after. These were none of those things. These were hands in the middle of giving something away.
He didn't know what that meant yet.
The stitching bothered him more than it should have. Not because it was there — he had seen worse — but because of how even it was. No variation in tension. No hesitation marks. The work of someone who had done this enough times that the doing of it had become ordinary. Had become, maybe, peaceful.
That was the part the unnamed thing in him kept returning to.
The care.
He heard the rustle of boots on wet grass. The BSU consultant was moving toward him. He still looked at the picture drawn in front of him.
"Officer." She stopped at his side, hands folded, "What do you think?"
"He is a good painter."
"Yes, he is."
"Is it a traditional dance that they are doing?"
"Sufi dance, also known as 'Sama', It's a type of meditation for inner peace." She moved into the circle and stopped at the fire. "Dancer spins and leaves his world, abandons it for divine union with God."
She crouched at the fire's edge. Not examining but just feeling the warmth of it.
"The spinning shows that all creation revolves around God and the interconnectedness of all existence."
Smith looked up toward the sky. The crescent moon shone in dull, sad eyes. He hadn't shaved in days — hadn't noticed until now, the cold finding the new growth. Then he spoke as if necessity of existence was keeping its pace with him, "Does he think he is God?"
"No but he believes in him. So much so, he made others rejoice for his melancholy."
That landed somewhere. Smith didn't show it.
"Is God so bored he needs sacrifices for his amusement?"
She was quiet for a moment. When she answered it was careful "Sacrifices are necessary but innocence sacrificed represents not God but his creation."
Suffering built by man for fellow man. Smith looked down at the fire. It was still burning.
Then he looked towards her, short black hair, big round glasses a mole on her chin. It only did what it does — found its place and made that place beautiful.
She answered his gaze with her own. "Amanda Steel." Her hand came out.
He took it. Firm. Brief. "Daniel Smith."
"I know." She said it without weight, without performance. Just a fact she had arrived with.
Smith withdrew his hand. "You think it's his first rodeo?" He looked back at the five bodies — white as pristine, red caps on their heads.
"Not his first kill. But this —" her eyes moved across the circle, "— this is his first masterpiece. "She continued, "We've collected blood samples and prints. Maybe we can find the painter."
"Every painter leaves a mark on his painting. Maybe he left one too."
"It's not a maybe. It's a certainty. We just have to find it."
She looked at him the way she had looked at the scene. Reading. Then she looked away, back at the bodies, and said nothing.
As if the looking was enough to make it true.
Smith looked at the sky again. The moon also looked lonely while surrounded by countless stars.
***
The room was warm.
That was the first thing Carol had noted. A warm that didn't cause irritation even when being surrounded by earthen walls. But not the kind that came from a heater doing its job — the kind that had been decided.
Curated. The throw on the couch was the right weight. The lamp in the corner was the right light. It all felt home to her. A palace of dirt made specifically for her.
Someone had thought about this room before she arrived in it.
That was the thing about people who wanted something from you. They always made the room warm first.
She lay on the comfortable bed as she thought about the day they brought her here. It was chaos. Before she even knew what had happened, she lost her vision. And then, here she was.
She knew something was wrong. The people here had a way of looking at her, not unkind, just attentive in the wrong direction. Most of them were just like that. Smiling in the dark, waiting for something to happen.
What cultish…
It is a cult.
But the unknown was exactly that. Unknown. She couldn't push against something she couldn't name, couldn't map, couldn't see the edges of.
So she wouldn't. Not yet. Full assimilation wasn't the word she'd use. Pretending was closer. And pretending didn't hurt, especially when Sam and Emanuel were here too. That changed things. It made the warmth almost bearable.
A gentle smile settled on her lips as she looked toward her only treasure.
Her son.
Sam sat on the floor with the small wooden blocks they had given him. Stacking. Unstacking.
He hadn't asked where they were. Hadn't asked why. Three years old and already the most unbothered person she had ever known — which was either her greatest achievement as a mother, or evidence that God had handed her something she didn't fully understand yet.
Probably both.
She watched him stack a tower taller than it had any right to be. It stood.
Of course it stood. My boy is genius.
The door opened with a soft knock that came after, not before. A knock that was courtesy dressed as habit.
A woman entered. Warm smile. Neat clothes. The particular stillness of someone who had found their purpose and settled into it like a house settles into its foundation. Carol watched her and felt something close to envy, then caught herself feeling it.
Would that happen to her too, one day?
"How are you feeling? Did you eat?"
"We ate." Carol's voice was even. "Thank you."
The woman's smile held. "Emanuel asks about you. He'll visit soon. We wanted to give you time to settle first."
That was a thing here. Men and women were kept apart — not forbidden from each other, just rationed. The reasoning, as it had been explained to her with great sincerity, was that separation made the time together feel more precious. That longing was a kind of love language. That distance sharpened desire into something holier.
What bullshit.
Emanuel. Carol kept her face open. Grateful. The face she had learned to wear in rooms like this — not cold, not suspicious, just receiving.
Inside she was filing.
They had brought her mother too. An old woman, ill, not built for disruptions like this. She was in the medical ward now. Stable. Carol had been told this twice, as though repetition made it a kindness. It did not. If her mother had been anything other than stable, this conversation would have looked very different.
Sam had taken the woman's hand at the door without hesitation.
That had decided it more than anything they said. She had to play this game.
"You're safe here." The woman said it the way people said grace — like the repetition was the point. "Both of you."
"I know." Carol smiled. Meant thirty percent of it.
"Tomorrow there's a gathering." The woman folded her hands. She had delivered this kind of good news before. It showed. "We hold one every month. Everyone comes. It's —" she paused, searching for the right word, or performing the search, "— joyful. You'll see."
"Everyone."
"Everyone." She smiled. "And there's a feast. Prepared specially for the occasion. You'll want to eat — people always say it's the best meal they've had here."
Carol kept her face where it was. Open. Receiving.
'I'm sure they do.'
"Sam is welcome too, of course."
Carol looked at her son. Sam stood holding the woman's hand with the ease of a child who had never learned to be suspicious of strangers — or had never needed to be.
"We'll be there." Carol said it the way the woman had said 'you're safe here'. Like the repetition was the point.
Sam looked up at the ceiling. Then at the woman. Then at Carol.
"Mama."
"Hm."
"This place is old."
The woman laughed, delighted the way adults perform delight at children. "Very observant."
Carol watched her son go back to his blocks.
This place is old.
She felt that too.