Last Days by Brian Evenson;Peter Straub

armless and legless torso. He got down on his knees and looked more closely at the chalk figure. It must have been drawn wrong, for the head didn't fit snugly into the pool of dried blood that had sprent out of it. He got up, brushed off his knees, went over to look at the nearest wall. Blood was fanned all along it but in no regular pattern, as if spattered from eight or ten different blows. No blood on the other walls. It was as if the killer had struck the limbless torso once and then had hauled it a few feet away to strike it again, and so on. A legless, armless man wouldn't be able to cover much ground while being stabbed, would he?
    He had stared at the wall for quite some time before it struck him that something else was wrong. He didn't have to bend over to see the spatter. He knelt down again beside the chalk torso and measured it roughly with his arm. It was slightly shorter than the arm itself. The spatter should be quite a bit lower on the wall.
    Maybe, he thought, Aline had been in a chair. But the only chair in the room had no bloodstains on it. Maybe, he thought, whoever killed Aline had done so while holding him in their arms, perhaps dancing or spinning as he stabbed. He could imagine the limbless torso stiff, rigid, struggling.
    But that didn't strike him as quite right either. True, he had been trained to infiltrate; true, his experience with crime scenes was far less than most of his former colleagues. Perhaps the killer had struck upward each time, as if carrying a golf swing through? Perhaps that would account for the odd spatter and the decreased amount of blood on the lower part of the wall?
    But why? he wondered. Why strike that way at all?
    And what was the instrument? From the way the spatter was slung he would have guessed a knife, some kind of blade. Without seeing a photograph of the body it was difficult to be sure. It hardly seemed likely that the killer would attempt to use a knife as if it were a golf club. Something was wrong.
    He regarded the chalk torso, the way the blood had pooled unconvincingly out of the chalk head. It had been drawn wrong somehow. He reached out to touch the surface of the pool of dried blood. It looked almost lacquered. It was slick in some places, cracking on the surface in others, darker and thicker in the center. The light from the ceiling shined off it in a kind of busted nimbus, the shape not unlike that of a broken jaw.
    What could blood tell? he wondered. Where blood was could tell a lot. Could blood itself tell nothing?
    He got out his keys and dug at the blood in the center of the stain. The top quarter-inch layer cracked away in bits, but underneath it merely separated. Right near the floor the blood was almost moist, like a dough.
    How long had it been? he wondered. They had started calling him several weeks ago. At least that; it could have been longer: he had been confused enough not to know exactly how much time had gone by. Aline, then, must have been dead for at least three weeks, perhaps more than a month. There was no way blood would stay moist for that long. It would either dry out completely or it would begin to rot and stink. And why were there no flies?
    He went out into the hall. The guard was waiting, standing as stiffly as he had been when Kline had gone into the room.
    "Nobody was killed in that room," said Kline
    "I don't know what you're talking about," said the guard.
    "Whose room is it?"
    The guard just looked at him.
    "I need to see Borchert," said Kline. "Right now."

    "The room, Mr. Kline?" said Borchert absently. "What room is that exactly?" He held his mutilated finger between them and scrutinized it, his eyes flashing back and forth between it and Kline. "Nice work, don't you think, Mr. Kline?"
    The fingertip was pale and puffy, streaked dark at the end, a sort of red collar just below the cut.
    "It's infected," said Kline.
    "Nonsense," said Borchert. "What you see is simply the body sealing itself off."
    "About the room--"
    "I can