Breadcrumbs

The corpse stank of shit. As hard as it had been to track down the building where he’d stashed it, finding the body had been easy - just follow the stench. The man had been bound to some sort of ‘reverse chair’ - the kind of faintly sinister-looking furniture you might find in a massage parlour.

Blood had pooled under the tension of the ropes, leaving purple-black flesh bulging and drooping like a macabre muffin top. It set my stomach churning, and I turned away to stifle an acidic belch. I scratched the back of my neck and wondered what I had been eating.

My initial impression was that the victim had been killed by the…delivery of a hot, sharp rod into his rectum. It certainly explained the smell. I found the rod lying by one wall, wiped clean, thankfully. If he was lucky, he would have passed out instantly from the shock before the internal haemorrhaging had started. If he was unlucky… A wave of nausea hit me at the thought, and I almost became the second person in the room to empty the contents of my stomach.

Bodies had been the currency of our relationship. It had started with a body, and I had no doubt it would end with one, one way or another. I thought of that first corpse, stretched out on my back lawn like a rabbit on a barbecue, dew clinging to every hair. I had just stared, trying to blink away the shock. Then I had found the note, which explained the situation in painfully simple terms. He would leave bodies.

I hitched up my shirt to cover my mouth, but it did nothing to block out the smell. Two weeks ago it had been a woman. He had injected her with a series of insect venoms, until one, pumped into the back of her neck, had sent her into anaphylactic shock and she had suffocated. I had no idea how he had got hold of such an impressive array of toxins, but he had taken extensive notes on their effects, which he had been kind enough to leave with the body.

That one had been the hardest to find. The only clue I’d had was a single dead bee, run through with a continental pin and set on a chip of wood. It had taken some effort to identify that particular species without being too conspicuous in my inquiries, since I fully expected to find a dead body at the end of that trail. The corpse was irregularly swollen, so much so that the skin had split in several places, letting the black flesh beneath spill out.

He would leave bodies; I would find the bodies.

This new body was naked except for the remnants of the top of his shirt, a horrible plaid thing which clashed gloriously with the blood soaked into it. It hung, tattered, collar and all, around his shoulders. It looked like the rest had been torn or cut away. A weird choice, to leave the collar on the body after stripping the rest. Maybe it was a critique of his fashion sense. I had never been able to grasp the ‘why’, but I assumed - hoped - that there was some point to all this; that he was building to some bloody, inevitable conclusion.

It hadn’t always been so sickeningly brutal. As far as murders go, that is. Early on, it had been quite…’vanilla’. Knife wounds. Asphyxiation with a plastic bag. Severed arteries. Classic staples; the greatest hits of homicide. The first body I found he had just hit hard in the head with a brick. That seemed almost funny now. Not belly-laugh funny, but the kind of sick laugh you make when someone tells a filthy joke. It had just been lying cooking in the morning sun, no drag marks or blood trails, like it had always been there. I had already dialled the first two nines before I found the note. The note made everything quite clear to me.

He would leave bodies; I would find the bodies before the police could, and deal with them.

The one before King Edward here had reminded me of that first time. The same sort of blunt trauma, oddly…pure. A single hammer blow to the back of the neck. Though not before he had used it to shatter the victim’s teeth. The bastard had even slipped a handful of the shards into my jacket pocket.

I found myself staring at the tattered remains of the collar. He’d focussed on the back of the neck for the last two victims - why not here? I always grasped for some sort of pattern, some deeper meaning in his brutality that might, just might make some sense of all this, a hint that it was something more than random acts of depravity.

I find the bodies before the police do, and dispose of them, else I pay my life for his crimes. I’m blacked out while he works, so I have no idea what he’s been up to besides whatever little hints he deigns to leave me. It doesn’t work both ways - sometimes, I can feel him peeking, checking in on me. It’s subtle, but I notice it now. The odd spider-scuttle across my skin. 

I ran my fingers around the edge of the collar, trying to ignore the dampness. No harm in looking before I torch the place. There was a craft knife in my pocket, blade caked in blood. I used it to cut away the last of the fabric. The skin on the back of his neck was pale and slightly mottled, but otherwise unmarked. 

I shook my head. I’d had this feeling that there would be a connection here, especially since he had left the collar. But there was nothing.

I was a little disappointed. I straightened, scratching the back of my own neck, and froze. My neck had itched a little, but I hadn’t thought anything of it before now. I traced circles with my finger, testing the skin.

One of the walls had a bent-in bit of sheet metal hanging off it, a distorted reflection I barely recognised looking out at me. I pulled aside my jacket collar and contorted myself until I could see, bending the sheet to get a view. There were a series of slits in the skin, hard to make out in my impromptu mirror - shallow, bloodless ridges of flesh. I ran my finger over them, pressing until redness welled up and I could read the words they formed.

‘NOW YOU’