The slaughter was amazing. That seemed a bathetic descriptor, but amazing it was. The hapless carnage, leaving no escape into ignorance, no matter how willful, buggered the mind. You simply had to stop and take stock and be amazed.
Rubbing his eyes, he turned his back on the scene, closing the door behind him. A few moments later, the door opened again. No, it was still there. There was a flayed torso in the corner: the innards had mostly spilled out onto the floor, but the lungs were still hanging in the broken rib cage. He studied this corpse for a moment. The face had been splayed open as well, so there was little hope he’d recognize whoever it had been. A strange relief, that. As his eyes sifted through the passed over organs, he finally found what was lacking—the heart. Where had the legs gone, then?
Ah, there was a pile of legs in the bedroom. He had come further into this chamber of horrors and could now see past the open door. Doubtless, the legs would be in there somewhere. This thought, too, brought some comfort to his deteriorating grasp of just what had happened.
If you had asked him, as a policeman might have, had there been any, “Eh? What’s all this?” he might possibly have responded. He might say, “Someone has been bisected and flayed. The person or persons responsible seemed to have skinned Courtney.” Courtney was the only member of the household he had made any conclusive recognition of yet as her grinning skull displayed those colorful braces she was always complaining about. They had left her skin next to her, thankfully, and he wished she would put it back on, which only seemed reasonable to him at the moment. “I don’t know” he might have continued, prompted or otherwise, “if that hole means they cut out her heart too, but I don’t see his heart anywhere on the floor, do you?”
He would have said it all with an infuriating impassivety, had he been prompted, as though he were internally engrossed with more pressing concerns; the sort of voice one hears from people who are making quick sums in their heads or else otherwise distracted by compiling a grocery list while you’re talking to them.
As a matter of fact, he was counting, and it didn’t add up. Sure, the bodies had been scattered around, their parts here, there, and everywhere, but there didn’t seem to be enough to make up the whole retinue. A quick counting of heads, supplemented and compared with the quotient of half the number of feet in the bedroom, brought out only five.
There should be two more, he thought, placing his hands on his hips and thinking it all out. This thought, could it be shown as easily as I have written it down, had there been anyone else alive to show it to in that room, might have itself evinced just how badly his mental processes had locked up. Of the seven inmates, he was one. Still, he looked around the rooms for his own corpse and another, another that was not a corpse and not there but was just as mad as he was slowly becoming.
Tale Told 