I chose the array of cabinets on the left. The first two were empty, and my flashlight revealed that the shelves and back walls were upholstered in dark-blue velvet, the better to present select pieces of the finest china—Limoges, Dresden, Minton, Royal Doulton, Pickard—as if they were works of art.
Approaching the third cabinet, I saw that it was likewise darkly lined, but neither empty nor laden with china. I opened a pair of doors and found that the shelves held a series of wide, thick glass jars, almost crocks, with lids that had been fused in place with an annealing torch. The jars were filled with clear liquid, no doubt a preservative. Submerged in each jar waited a severed human head.
The nature of my life is such that I have discovered on several occasions various abominations hidden away by collectors who would not be satisfied with rare coins or postage stamps, or butterflies pinned to boards. They say that familiarity breeds contempt, but familiarity with the death trophies of demented sociopaths breeds not apathy, not an absence of feeling, but instead a composure that is feeling without agitation. To an extent, I could regard these heads as evidence, in the calm way that a police officer can study the most terrible aftermath of violence at a crime scene. I could soberly assess the threat of which these trophies warned me, for anyone who could harvest such a cruel collection would require from me absolute ruthlessness if I were to defeat them and safely shepherd the children out of this place.
I moved to the next breakfront and found more heads, eyes fixed open in every case except for three, where one or both eyes had been gouged out. A few other faces bore the marks of torture, which I will not describe, because the dead deserve their dignity no less than do the living. Most of the specimens bore no wounds except for where the necks had been severed, and if they, too, had been tortured, their suffering had involved violence to the body.
On the forehead of each trophy were hieroglyphics apparently drawn with an indelible felt-tip pen, still black in spite of being submerged in a preservative liquid. The script, written horizontally instead of vertically as the ancients would have done, looked like Egyptian to me but might not have been. Although the language was pictographic, I couldn’t guess what many of the symbols represented, though in each instance they included the stylized silhouette of one animal, most often one kind of bird or another, or groups of birds in strange arrangements, but also cats, rabbits, goats, bulls, snakes, lizards, scarabs, and centipedes. I couldn’t guess the reason for these pictographs, but they seemed to confirm that the murders were ritualistic.
The collection included more women than men, although the male sex was well represented. More of them were white than black, each about in proportion to the percentage in the population, but there were Asians and Hispanics well represented. These collectors—for this could not be the work of one maniac—were equal-opportunity killers. The fat and the thin, the beautiful and the unattractive, twenty-somethings and retirees had met their end on this isolated property and been preserved so that the murderers might stroll this grisly gallery, admiring their acquisitions and waxing nostalgic over glasses of fine Cabernet Sauvignon.
The hair of the dead floated freely in the preservative, and in some cases formed veils across portions of their faces. Sometimes the fright-wide eyes peering through those cloaking tresses seemed to turn to follow me as I moved along, but I knew that I imagined their interest in me, and I could not fear these dead as I feared those who had murdered them.
Suddenly I realized that the most extraordinary thing about the scene was the absence of lingering spirits wanting justice for their murderers. Had I imagined such a place before finding it, I would have expected it to be crowded with ghosts tormented by what had been done to them in the last hours of their lives, haunted and haunting.
With a growing sense of urgency, I toured what remained of the display, and though some faces might have been those of teenagers, none were those of children. I could only assume that this murderous cult, whatever its nature, must be methodical in its depravity, adhering to a policy of progressive outrages, only this night at last arriving at its most extreme transgression to date: the abuse, torture, and murder of the most innocent of victims.
In the last cabinet that contained trophies, the faces were to one degree or another charred, blistered, melted, and I knew beyond doubt that this was the recent work of the rhinestone cowboy. Judging by the size of the skulls, these people had all been adults, but soon he would turn his flamethrower on more diminutive targets.
In the presence of such unspeakable horror, I couldn’t any longer maintain my composure, that “feeling without agitation” that I previously described. Even the most experienced policeman and the battle-hardened soldier, courageously and of necessity repressing their anguish at the human condition, can sometimes repress it no longer, and the emotional pain threatens for a while to break them, before they suppress it once more.