The Face of Death by Cody McFadyen Page B

the kind of song you’d expect to hear coming out of the earth in a graveyard, at night, or maybe from the shadowy corner of a cell in a mental institution. It’s a single word and a single note, sung in a monotone.
    “Laaaa. Laaaa. Laaaa. Laaaa.”
    Over and over, that single word, that single note, in a voice just above a whisper.
    I start to worry in a way I hadn’t before, because this is the sound of insanity.
    I move up the last flight of stairs in quick strides, passing all those smiling faces in the photographs. Their teeth seem to glitter in the light.
    Look at that, I think when I reach the top, more beige carpet.
    I’m standing in a short hallway. A bathroom is at the end of the hall. Its lights are on, its door flung wide. I can see
(surprise!)
a beige tile floor, more evidence of the uninspired tastefulness I’ve come to expect from this home.
    The hallway turns to the right at the bathroom, and I surmise that a bedroom door is just beyond that turn.
    More beige, I’ll bet.
    My heartbeat hammers, and
God
am I sweating.
    To my immediate right is a set of white double doors. The entrance, I’m sure, to someplace terrible. The smells have all become stronger. Sarah’s horrible singing tickles my skin.
    I reach out a hand to open the right door. It pauses just above the brass handle and trembles.
    Girl with a gun on the other side of that. Girl with a gun, covered in blood, in a house that smells like death, singing like a crazy person.
    Go on, I think. The worst thing she can do is shoot me.
    No, moron. The worst thing she can do is look right at me and then blow her brains out or smile and blow her brains out or—
    Enough, I command.
    Silence inside. My soul goes quiet.
    My hand stops trembling.
    A new voice comes, one familiar to soldiers and cops and victims. It doesn’t offer comfort. It offers certainty. It speaks the hardest words and it never, ever lies. The patron saint of impossible choices.
    Save her if you can. But kill her if you must.
    My hand drops and I open the door.

9
    THE ROOM IS DECORATED IN DEATH.
    It’s an extra-large master bedroom. The king-sized bed has a large wooden hutch and a mirror behind it, and still takes up less than a third of the floor space. There is a plasma TV mounted on the wall. A ceiling fan hangs, turned off, its silence anointing all the other stillness in this room. The beige carpet is present, almost comforting under the circumstances.
    Because blood is
everywhere
. Splashed on the ceiling, smeared on the off-yellow walls, beaded on the ceiling fan. The smell is overpowering; my mouth fills with still more pennies and I swallow my own saliva.
    I count three bodies. A man, a woman, and what looks like a teenage boy. I recognize them all from the photographs on the stairway walls. They are all naked, all lying on their backs in the bed.
    The bed itself has been stripped bare. The blankets and sheets lie on the floor, wadded and blood-soaked.
    The man and woman are on either side, with the boy in the middle. The two adults have been disemboweled, in the worst sense of the word. Someone cut them from throat to crotch and then reached into them and
pulled.
They have been turned inside out. The throats of all three have been slit like hogs, sopping grins from ear to ear.
    “Laaaa. Laaaa. Laaaa. Laaaa.”
    My eyes go to the girl. She’s sitting on the windowsill, looking out into the night and what I can only guess is the backyard. I can see the dim silhouettes of other rooftops in the distance. It’s a twilight world, caught between the dying sun and the awakening streetlamps. Apropos.
    The girl has a gun in her hand, and she’s pressing the barrel against her right temple. She hadn’t turned around at the sound of the door opening.
    I can’t blame her. I wouldn’t want to turn around either.
    Even as my heart hammers, the clinical part of me takes notes.
    The blood on the walls was put there by the killer. I know this because I can see patterns. Slashes,