a new kind of darkness

who: december
where: morgue
when: early morning

She almost got through her shift.

Almost. There were the two bodies that came in earlier, and she nearly got to go home. She'd got through the autopsies, which were fairly straight forward if a little morbid. But it wasn't anything she'd never seen before. Gun shot wounds, something that really messed up their insides, and that was that. She'd sent their stomach contents to be tested, to see what was used in there, what sort of poison or whatnot, but she'd seen things similar before. If she had to lay down a guess, she was thinking someone wanted information, and when they got it, they executed the source.

But then there was the third body of the night. That was the kicker. That was what had her staying over. This guy was where things went from zero to 'what the screaming fuck?' in .2 seconds. She'd seen people who had burns but she hadn't seen anyone set on fire. Not while they were alive. Trying to ash evidence? Sure. But there was a difference between torching a corpse and setting fire to some guy who was still breathing.

There was also a difference between what she'd seen earlier and what had happened to this poor asshole. His abdomen was sliced open, and stitched back up. Because really, setting a dude on fire wasn't nearly enough you needed to go and gut him like a fish first. And the crowning achievement in the Psychopath Sweepstakes was inside the guys guts. And not swallowed. Nope. Shoved in there. Unwrapping what she found, she was blinking at a poem. Like the guy was a giant, underdone fortune cookie.

There was something fascinating about it all, in the darkest way possible. She'd never seen anything like it, never witnessed anything this extensive. Who did that? Who went through all of this trouble? Clearly they were sending a message. As she read the poem, of course a few things stood out. But one passage in particular.

In what distant deeps or skies,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

What hand indeed. Of course, sitting there reading a poem she dug out of a guy's innards was kind of taking the cake on dark moments in December's life. She'd always been drawn to darkness in and of itself, but there was a level of blackness to this that she'd never quite seen before. If the guy was alive when he was set on fire, he was alive when he had the fortune shoved inside. And from the blood loss she could assess, he'd lost a lot of it, so she had to wonder just how long he'd been allowed to bleed. Nothing vital had been nicked, whoever had done it had been pretty damn careful for someone with the intention of setting him on fire later. There'd been very little chance he'd bleed out, even if he'd lost a lot. And so far as she could tell, whoever had done it hadn't sliced into the intestines either. They were intact.

Setting the poem down on the worktop next to Poe, she exhaled, looking back at the corpse on her slab. She wasn't going to be getting home for a long while, sorting through the shadows on this one. December felt a whole hell of a lot like she'd be navigating this abyss without a flashlight.