He couldn’t remember exactly when he’d fallen asleep, but he woke in his bed with a skull-splitting headache. The clock read almost 11 a.m. The memories of the night before rushed back with a jolt —the girl, the crash, her body in the trunk, the drinking.
He scrambled out of bed, half-dizzy, heart pounding with panic. What if Patricia had found the body already? Or worse…
His head throbbed with every step as he stumbled downstairs. Patricia was at the kitchen table, sipping tea and scrolling on her phone while once in a while picking at her breakfast —or maybe dinner. She looked up when she heard him enter and raised a brow.
"You look like shit."
He didn’t need to be told, he felt the part.
"I feel worse," he muttered, rubbing his eyes.
"Up all night drinking?" she asked, mildly amused.
"Yeah," he nodded, reaching for the cold coffee pot. "Didn’t come up with anything better."
She chuckled and went back to her phone.
He poured himself a mug and took a sip, willing the pain behind his eyes to retreat. But it only throbbed harder —along with the rush of dread. It hadn’t been a dream.
Patricia glanced up. "So, what’s your plans for today?"
He hesitated. He hated lying to her —it never came easy. They’d been together long enough that it seemed she could always tell.
"Nothing big," he said with a shrug that felt painfully forced. "Might run to the hardware store, maybe get a workout in. Haven’t figured it out yet, honestly."
She nodded. "Well, try to enjoy it while it lasts."
Something in the way she said it made him flinch. Was that a hint? Did she know?
"What do you mean?" he asked too quickly.
She looked at him over her phone, confused. "Your time off work. Before the routine gulps you back down again."
He exhaled and nodded, trying to cover. "Right, yeah. Sorry. Think the liquor’s still got its claws deep in my head." He gave a sheepish laugh.
Before he could gauge her reaction, Patricia pushed back her chair and stood with her plate. "Anyway, I’ve gotta head out early. Need to pick up my uniform from the dry cleaners —patient puked all over it yesterday." She grimaced. "And the new doc wants to do a full staff briefing this afternoon."
He motioned to her plate. "Go ahead and get ready. I’ll take care of that."
She offered a small, grateful smile, then vanished down the hallway.
Patricia left for work, and he was alone with his grim task.
He waited in the kitchen for a while longer after hearing her car pull out of the driveway. He brewed another cup of coffee —this time fresh and hot, buying himself a few more minutes before facing what waited in the garage.
Then a sharp realization struck him —Sophia’s phone. He hadn’t searched the girl for anything the night before. If she still had her phone on her, and he had unknowingly driven it back to his house, it could be a problem. A serious one.
He rushed to the garage, fumbling to open the trunk. The body was still there. Part of him almost hoped it wouldn’t be —that this had all been a twisted nightmare. But there she was, cold and limp inside the tarp, as he left her the night before.
He dragged her out and unwrapped the tarp with care, trying to make as little mess as possible. She looked the same as last night —pale, stiff, and unmistakably dead.
Grabbing a large black garbage bag from the kitchen, he began undressing her, checking every pocket and fold of clothing. If there was a phone, it wasn't here. Relief washed over him. Maybe it had fallen out when she was hit. At least one less problem he didn’t have to solve.
Her possessions were minimal: a half-used tube of lip gloss that smelled like synthetic bubblegum fruit, a few crumpled bills and loose coins, two stickers with cartoonish anthropomorphic characters he didn’t recognize, a slim vape pen, and two small white pills with ‘404’ stamped on them. He knew exactly what those were. He pocketed the pills for later.
He stuffed all the clothing into the garbage bag —he’d get rid of it later—and stood silently over her now-naked form. The vape pen sat in his hand. Out of idle curiosity —or maybe just a desperate distraction— he brought it to his lips and inhaled.
The black currant flavor hit him with surprising force. He hadn't smoked anything in years, but the familiar rush of nicotine punched through the fog in his head, sharpening his senses. He took another slow draw, watching the thin vapor swirl above the pale, dead frame of girl lying at his feet.
She had a few minor cuts on her arms and legs, but nothing that bled heavily. The side she had lain on in the trunk had turned a deep, ugly purple. He made a note to himself: it would’ve been much easier to undress her last night, before she got stiff like this. These were the kinds of things you never thought about until you had to.
Another pull on the vape. He was surprised how much he liked it. Maybe he’d pick up a few of these pens later on. It was so much better than the cheap menthol cigarettes he used to chain-smoke back in school.
Looking down at Sophia’s naked, lifeless body, he wished he hadn’t learned her name. It would’ve been easier to disconnect, to view her as just an anonymous problem to be dealt with —a piece of meat, not a person. Instead, his mind kept wandering: Who had she been? What had she liked? What did she dream about?
It would’ve been easier if she was just nobody without a name.
He headed out on foot toward the hardware store. The car was out of commission for now —the front end was too busted to risk driving it around town without attracting attention and questions he couldn’t answer.
The hardware store wasn’t far. Nothing was ever far in a town like this. But he wasn’t used to walking, and by the time he made it there, sweat clung to his shirt, making him feel sticky and uncomfortable.
The place was nearly empty. The man behind the register gave him a nod of recognition as he entered. He knew the guy —not by name, but the way you knew half the people you saw around town your whole life. Someone you exchanged polite greetings with without ever having a real conversation.
He wandered through the aisles, calculating. A PVC pipe saw seemed like his best option for dealing with the bone —and getting a set with interchangeable blades made it look less conspicuous than buying a dedicated thing. Blue garbage bags were on sale —bright blue, not very thick, but would do, he grabbed a pack. Work gloves, too. Not that he particularly needed them, but it seemed like the kind of thing an ordinary customer would pick up. He tossed in a few other random items to fill out the purchase —glue sticks, an aromatherapy candle —clutter that would make the receipt look less… purposeful.
As he approached the register, another customer was already checking out. A tall man, dressed in a scruffy, oddly mismatched outfit that seemed patched together from old work clothes. The man glanced back at him, sizing him up, his expression stretching into a wide grin.
Trying to remain polite, he returned the man’s nod, but the stranger’s gaze lingered longer than it should have. There was something unsettling about him —his beard was long, meticulously trimmed and unnaturally white, coming to a sharp point at his chin. But he didn’t that seem old. One of his eyes was clouded over, milky and pale, while the other burned with a sharp, uncomfortable awareness.
He was certain he’d never seen the man before. In a town like this, faces stuck with you, and this one was too strange, too unsettling, to forget.
After the man left, he leaned in and asked the cashier, “Who’s that?”
The cashier glanced toward the door. “New janitor at Town Hall. Moved here a couple weeks ago.”
He nodded, forcing a casual smile, and left the store.
On the way back home, he stopped by the gas station, grabbed a bag of chips, some beer, and few different vape pens. As if it were just any other day.
Back home, he poured himself a shot to settle his nerves, chasing it with beer. The vape pens delivered quick, dizzying rushes of nicotine that made his head spin. The buzz sharpened him, he tried to tell himself.
He assembled the saw, its new blade clicking into place with unsettling shine of its small teeth. Then, grabbing the tarp with Sophia’s body bundled inside, he dragged her into the bathroom. If there was going to be blood and there it would be easier to contain and clean inside the tub.
He stood over her, unwrapping the tarp, staring at her pale, uncomfortable sprawl in the bathtub. This was the moment. Once he started, there would be no pausing, no second thoughts. Only completion.
He gathered a few extra beers, lined them up nearby. Lit the candle —the one he’d grabbed at the hardware store on impulse. It smelled faintly of lavender, absurdly pleasant considering what he was about to do. Maybe it would help with the smell if began disturbing him.
His eyes drifted toward the small pills he’d found earlier among her belongings. He knew what they were: amphetamines. He hadn’t touched that stuff in years, but today wasn’t like any other day. His hand hovered, then scooped them up. The bitter chalky taste dissolved quickly on his tongue.
He turned the music up —loud enough to hear it from the bathroom, but not so loud as to arouse suspicion from any neighbors. Stripping off his clothes to keep blood off himself, he finally stepped into the tub beside Sophia and got to work.
The saw worked, but cutting through flesh was awkward, messy. He quickly realized why the strange shopping list from the store had included a utility knife. It was far easier to slice through skin and muscle with the knife first, leaving the saw for the bones. The rhythm became mechanical —slice, saw, reposition.
Sophia’s blood spattered everything: the tools, the chips, the beer cans, much of his body, the vape pen that still occasionally perched between his lips to provide another hit. There was no staying clean. No point trying.
He worked with precision, segmenting her arms and legs into smaller, manageable pieces. The dismemberment became strangely procedural, the horror of it slipping into a fog of methodical detachment. When he reached her torso, he paused. It was too large, too unwieldy. He didn’t have the stomach to deal with the organs. Eventually, he decided to leave it whole. It wouldn’t fit into the blue garbage bags, but he still had one of those large heavy-duty black bags they used for raking autumn leaves into. That would do.
Whether it was the drugs, the alcohol, or simply something breaking loose inside him, a strange sensation began to make itself evident —not guilt, not fear —but something like… intimacy. As if by opening her up, by dissecting her, he somehow knew her now. Like the barrier between them had dissolved.
The thought made him giggle unexpectedly, a dry, breathless sound that bounced off the tiled walls.
The fear was gone, so was the panic, replaced with a strange purpose.
He washed everything —the saw, the knife, himself. Even the empty beer cans that had smears of Sophia’s blood. Every trace of it had to be erased.
Still naked, he sat perched on the toilet seat, finishing the bag of chips as he stared at the neat pile of garbage bags stacked on the bathroom floor —bright blue and one heavy black, each swollen with their grotesque contents.
He wished it hadn’t come to this. Wished he could’ve just buried her properly —with a casket, in a grave, something with dignity and respect. Wished she had lived and none of it had ever happened. But strangely, beneath the exhaustion and dread, there was something else: a sharp, cutting appreciation for life itself —for his own continued freedom. He didn’t feel free exactly, but there was a heightened awareness of what it meant to still have his life.
He finished the chips, then carefully repacked Sophia into the trunk of his car. Every step felt clinical now. He cleaned the bathroom again. Making sure there wasn’t a single speck of blood left. He scrutinized every tile, wiped and scrubbed it twice over. When it was done, the bathroom gleamed as if nothing had ever happened here.
Now all that was left was waiting. Waiting for the drugs to wear off, for Patricia to come home, for her to fall asleep, so he could finally dispose of Sophia’s body.
He already knew where he’d take her.
From his childhood, he remembered a place just outside of town —an old, bottomless quagmire. Local kids used to consider it a living, all devouring entity, a monster disguised as a manifestation of mundane. Long ago, someone had driven a whole car into it, and he and his friends watched as it slowly vanished into the mire over several days, sucked down without a trace. There were rumors that beneath the mud, a massive sinkhole gulped down anything unfortunate enough to end up there.
For years, people had dumped everything into that place —tires, fridges, broken furniture, scrap metal —and it consumed it all without a trace. These days, it wasn’t as popular. Dumping there was illegal now, but old habits lingered in towns like this.
If there was ever a place to make Sophia disappear forever, it was there.
He ordered a pizza and kept drinking. Only now did it hit him —he hadn’t really eaten in days. Not properly. Not since the night he hit Sophia. And it struck him strangely, the realization that he couldn’t remember the last time he had felt real hunger —not boredom hunger, not out-of-routine craving, but that deep bodily demand for sustenance. The kind of hunger that came from the core, from a place closer to survival than comfort.
He found the idea fascinating in a detached way, like it was someone else’s revelation. He sat in the half-lit living room, drinking straight from the bottle of rum and trying to suck the last wisps of vapor from an overworked vape pen, nicotine making his mouth harsh and dry.
Or maybe he was just drunk and high.
Eventually, he passed out.
He woke up sometime after midnight, sprawled out on the couch. Patricia was already home and asleep. She hadn’t even tried to wake him —probably for the best. She could always tell when something was off with him.
There were stale slices of pizza still in the box on the coffee table. He devoured two, still hazy from the sleep, lit only by the yellowish streetlights bleeding in through the window.
Upstairs, Patricia was fast asleep. He stood in the bedroom doorway for a moment just to be sure, then quietly showered, changed, and drove out his car from garage in to the night.
He avoided the main roads. It was Friday night —too risky. Someone might be out late, and he couldn’t afford to be seen. It was a long way around, following the old back roads to the far side of town, but it was worth it.
He was halfway there when something jolted him —a sudden lurch in his chest followed by a stomp on the brake. Gravel spat out from under the tires as the car screeched to a halt.
There, just ahead in the headlights —a deer carcass.
He reversed slightly, centering the limp body in his lights. It was a doe. Recently dead. Her fur still rich with color, a bright orange sheen in the undergrowth on the side of the road. She looked more asleep than dead, except for the pecking of the crows —they’d already taken the eyes, leaving black hollow sockets.
Perfect.
Exactly what he needed.
He stepped out, took off his shirt to avoid getting blood on it, and tossed it back into the car. Then he grabbed the doe by its hind legs and dragged it toward the front of his vehicle. It wasn’t large —not too heavy —and the sight of it gave him an idea.
This would be his story for the busted grill and the dented hood Sophia left. He hit a deer while driving around at night.
He lined up and swung the carcass into the bumper. Once, twice and again. The doe’s skull cracked audibly. Blood spattered across the chrome. Still not enough.
He repositioned, gripping her by the front legs now for better leverage. Her rear end had more weight, and the impact hit harder.
Blood and tufts of fur stuck in the car’s cracks. Thick, dark blood trickled down the hood in lazy rivulets. He stopped only when his arms burned with effort.
Exhausted, he heaved the doe onto the hood and grabbed his phone from the trunk. The photos looked convincing —maybe too convincing. A gory tableau of smashed bone, smeared fur, and metallic dents.
Finally, he hurled the doe at the windshield —not hard enough to crack it, but enough to coat it in blood and viscera.
He stood in the darkness, chest rising and falling, heart pounding as he admired the sick realism of the scene.
Now it looked right.
Now it looked like an accident.
With the glee of a madman convinced he’d devised the perfect cover story, he slumped back into the driver’s seat and tugged on his shirt. The vape pen dangled between his fingers as he drew in a few greedy drags, flooding the car’s interior with the sticky-sweet fog of artificial strawberry and banana.
He turned onto the smaller road leading out to the pit. As the headlights swung around a bend, a deer materialized in their glow —paralyzed, caught dumb in the blinding light. Its eyes shone with that hollow, alien shimmer, like distant moons reflecting something dead and cold.
He shook his head. No wonder these creatures got hit so often, if that’s how they greeted imminent death —standing stupid in its path. He was about to honk when the deer bolted in one sudden, elegant leap, vanishing into the bush.
The road ended at a clearing choked with overgrowth. He parked near the edge of the pit and killed the engine.
Silence.
A single owl called somewhere in the dark, its cry distant but sharp. With the headlights off, the night was pitch black. Only the faint glimmer of the pit’s surface betrayed its presence, an inky shimmer reflecting nothing back. Rotting scraps of old wooden debris lay scattered nearby, soaked in decades of rain and time.
The smell —wet, moldy stench that clawed up from the pit. Exactly as he remembered it. The scent of slow putrid decay.
He moved fast. Adrenaline and nicotine surged through him, enhancing resolved for the purpose. One by one, he hauled the bags from the trunk —arms, legs into the pit they go, and finally, the torso, heavier and more awkward than the rest. He tossed each into the dark without ceremony, hearing them slap wetly in to the pit.
Then he waited.
The final bag still floated. So did the others.
“Fuck,” he hissed through his teeth, pulling long grad from the vape as the glowing light pulsed in response. The bags bobbed gently, refusing to sink. Too light to sink in to bottomless void of the pit.
He flicked the headlights on again, squinting through the haze. He scoured the edge of the clearing for something long and sturdy. Eventually he found an old branch, waterlogged and warped, but solid enough.
Grunting, sweating, he jabbed at the bags, one by one, pushing them down, working them beneath the surface of the black mire. The pit resisted at first, thick like oil —but it gave in eventually, just as he remembered from when they were kids, throwing in tires and fridges and other junk.
The last bag slipped under with a faint, gurgling sound. And then — nothing.
She was gone.
Buried in silence. Claimed by a place that didn’t give anything back.
On the way back home, he torched her clothes. The fire fueled by gasoline took them quickly —bright synthetic fabrics curling and blackening into grotesque shapes, the smoke with the smell staining the night air. There was nothing left now. Nothing but the image of her stitched into the fabric of his memory. He wasn't sure that would ever leave him and, he didn’t know if he even wanted it to.
He cruised the backroads for a while after, not with purpose —maybe to calm himself, maybe just to feel something ordinary. The stillness of the world around him was tranquil, the kind of silence only rural nights can conjure. Few times, he pulled over and stepped out, standing beside his car to stare into the thick dark of the woods, or across the open fields that vanished into the horizon. There was something sacred in that emptiness. The air, cool and wet, carried no judgment.
He felt like part of it now —the night, the land, the quiet. Like they shared a secret no one else would ever understand.
It was past three in the morning when he finally turned back. The sky was shifting subtly, the blackness softening into pre-dawn gray. The town lay in silence, streets empty, homes asleep.
But then he saw someone.
A lone figure walking the sidewalk with a steady, deliberate pace —too slow to be in a hurry, too composed to be a drunk.
Odd.
As he drew closer, the figure turned and casually waved, like they'd known each other for years.
It was the janitor from the hardware store.
That strange man with the dead eye and unnervingly white beard. What the hell was he doing out this late? No bars open, nothing else to draw someone into the night. In this town, once midnight passed, it was all ghosts and locked doors.
The man didn’t break stride, and the moment passed as if it were nothing. Still, the encounter clung to him, faintly sour like a memory you don’t trust.
But he shook it off. Who really cared? He was back home now. And as far as he was concerned, he was in the clear.
He pulled the car into the garage, stepping out to look at it one last time. Dust-caked, mud-splattered, the bumper splattered in dry, flaking deer blood. Perfect.
Exhaustion hit like a wave. He could barely keep his eyes open, his limbs heavy and dumb. He shuffled into the kitchen, leaving a trail of dirt from his shoes, too tired to care. He reached for a glass but couldn't even remember what he was reaching for. Water? Whiskey?
Whatever it was, it didn’t matter.
He poured himself a shot.
“I guess that’s what a few nights of drinking will get you,” he muttered, voice slurred by fatigue, and tipped it back.
A strange chanting resonating through his skull —rhythmic and strange. He was floating in that liminal space between waking and sleeping, too heavy to move, but alarmed into consciousness.
He remembered slipping into bed beside Patricia, careful not to wake her. The exhaustion had hollowed him out, left him nothing but limbs and fog. But now the chanting was too loud, growing more insistent with every iteration.
He was on the ground.
Slumped on the cold floor, limbs numb and disobedient, as if shot full of anesthetic. His vision was blurred, and everything throbbed with a pulsing dullness. The first thing he could make out was a figure — tall, looming, just standing there.
A man, it was evident by his eager and impeding presence.
Too close, invasive and persistent.
Around him, more figures became visible —hooded, cloaked in white robes that looked almost iridescent in the dim light. They stood in a semicircle, masks fashioned from deer skulls with towering antlers. They chanted in unison, the cadence rising and falling in waves, a language that clawed at the edges of comprehension.
Every cell in his body screamed to reject absurdity of their presence, to wake up, to tear the dream apart.
But the dream wouldn't release him.
The man stepped closer, his face now clear in the haze. The janitor. That same strange man from the hardware store, his white beard seemed to glow in semidarkness and his one good eye burned with ripe with insanity.
“I am Agnos,” the man delivered. “You, my son, receive my baptism and be initiated among your brethren.”
He wanted to scream —Fuck No— but he wasn’t even sure if his lips moved. Baptism from the town hall janitor? This was lunacy, madness with chanting and stupid masks.
He clawed at the ground, and this time his hand responded.
The chanting faltered, grew faint. His mind cleared just enough to seize it —he was awake. Or at least more than he was before.
—What the fuck is this?
He didn’t look up. Didn’t give them the satisfaction. But he recognized the floor beneath him now —the old, warped boards of the backyard shed. The bastards had cornered him in his own home.
The rage came fast and hot, flooding through the remnants of fear. He surged toward the bench to his left, fingers finding the familiar grip of the electric hedge trimmer. Its motor buzzed to life with a shrill electric hum, the teeth of its long blade potent with capability for a good damage.
—It’s baptism you want?
Then one of the robed figures stepped forward and removed their mask.
He froze. It was Patricia.
"It's alright," she said softly. “You’re one of us. You always were.”
His breath caught. “Patricia?” he asked, needing to say her name aloud —to hear it, to believe it. “What the hell is going on?”
She stepped closer, gentle and calm, as if soothing a scared animal. “It’s going to be okay. This… this was foretold.”
Before he could respond, the white-bearded man spoke again, his tone calm and sermon-like. “Like your father before you, and his father before him.”
He pointed the hedge trimmer at the older man, its gleaming teeth alive in buzzing of the electric tool. “I’ve had enough of your crazy shit.”
Patricia didn’t flinch. Her voice was unwavering. “You put this into motion. You can’t back out now.”
His hands trembled, not from fear but confusion, rage. “What are you even talking about?”
“The girl,” she said, still stepping forward.
“The sacrifice,” the white-bearded man added, as if finishing a sacred verse. “The one you were meant to claim.”
“Sophia?” He shook his head. “No. That was an accident. I didn’t… I never meant—”
But Patricia only nodded, with a disturbingly serene expression. “It was never about meaning to. It was about fulfilling your place.”
He backed away. His heart hammered. The betrayal cut deep — Patricia, of all people. How long had she been a part of this?
“Don’t come any closer,” he said, voice low and shaking, hedge trimmer raised.
And then something shifted in her face. That same woman he had loved for years disappeared behind a mask of manic devotion. Her eyes widened with a kind of holy joy, feverish and terrifying.
“You’ll see,” she whispered. “It will all be so clear soon.”
But the old man —Agnos, the self-proclaimed priest— didn’t see it coming.
The hedge trimmer growled as it bit into his throat. The blades tore through flesh with a sickening ease. When he felt it struck the bone, he pulled back —not clean, but more then enough.
Agnos didn’t scream, or maybe couldn’t. Instead his face contorted into strange silent grimace, like he was grasping for air but forgot how. Blood fountained from his neck as his hands tried to clutch the wound closed, but there was nothing left to hold.
Without hesitation, he turned the blade toward Patricia.
She barely had time to react before it slashed across her shoulder, ripping through cloth and skin. Her expression was not pain —not at first —but of disbelief. That was what hurt him the most. That she could still look at him like he was the one who had betrayed her.
He drove the blade into her stomach. Her scream pierced the air — hardly human, raw and primal. It made his heart race with alarm of adrenaline.
He didn’t stop, he drove it dipper, until it was lodged stuck in her entrails. The electric tool almost sawed through her, but he couldn’t get it out.
He shoved her back, with hedge trimmer still stuck in her abdomen, and hurled her into the shed wall. Her body crumpled to the floor, still gasping, still gripping the blade like it anchored her soul to the world.
She wasn’t screaming anymore. Only breathing —fast and deep— more blood pouring out with every expanse of her chest. Her eyes wide with confusion and some final flickering thoughts.
One of the other robed figures turned and fled.
No, he couldn’t let that happen.
He chased after them into the night, blood pulsing hot through his veins. But the figure was too fast —impossibly fast, and just as it reached the clearing, it shed its robe in one smooth motion.
And what emerged from the fabric wasn’t a person.
It was a deer.
Tall, lithe, and silent. It leapt into the brush with a grace that made the world feel like it wasn’t quite real anymore.
He stopped, rooted to the spot, breath ragged.
The robe lay empty at his feet.
And the woods swallowed the creature whole.
He stood there for a long while, naked under the trees, until the night breeze pressed cool fingers to his damp skin and snapped him out of whatever fugue he’d drifted into. His breath, shallow and unsteady, hung in the air like something ghostly.
The robe at his feet fluttered lightly in the wind.
He turned and walked back to the barn, slow at first, then quicker. Nothing made any sense any more, he felt like once solid reality suddenly turned into something more malleable, inconstant, maybe even something with its own will, and he felt like he wasn't even its observer, more like its toy.
As he stepped into the barn’s half-lit interior, what he found made the world sink further into that sickening place where logic started to rot.
The white-bearded man, the janitor priest, lay in a growing lake of dark crimson blood. Mouth slack open, eyes still and dead. That much remained true.
Patricia however, was no longer Patricia.
In her place lay a deer.
Its body slumped awkwardly, front legs twitching weakly as though trying to rise itself. Its eyes —her eyes?— were wide, dark, and very much alive. The hedge trimmer still jutted from the gaping wound torn into its stomach, a grotesque mechanical limb fused with flesh.
He staggered backward.
He wanted to believe it was a trick of his imagination, vision of madness. That maybe he hadn’t seen what he’d seen. But no —no, this was it. The same thing he’d just attacked —talked to— once kissed, years ago married —and it was not human.
Whatever they were, she had never been real. Not in the way he thought.
Something inside him gave, snapped maybe. It didn’t matter anymore.
He stepped to the wall and grabbed the shovel leaning there.
The deer —the thing— looked up at him, blinking slowly, twitching again like it might try to rise.
He didn’t let it.
He raised the shovel and brought it down hard on its neck, until the vertebrae cracked and the head slumped. He kept going, slicing through muscle and tendon, tearing away until the head came free from the body entirely.
He let the shovel fall from his hand.
The barn was quiet again.
He stood over the severed head, chest heaving, the world spinning around him in silence.
This wasn’t just murder anymore.
This was something else. Something old. Something masked behind the faces you thought you knew.
And somehow —whether he’d chosen it or not— he was part of it now.
