THE RED WAKE

Chapter 27 (Pt...2)

     “HOLY MOTHER of God,” Stanford breathed. 

    Alan reeled away from the light and the horror it revealed. From somewhere in a corner of the room, Stanford heard him retching. But even in his horror, Stanford could not stop the physician in his head from analyzing the bodies. The faces had been removed with surgical precision. There was no sign of trauma to the surrounding skin. The wounds on each victim were clean, with no ragged edges to suggest the hacking and slashing one would expect to find in such butchery.Stanford swung the flashlight around the room. In the steady beam he saw that the walls had been painted with blood.  Odd writings of some sort were painted across the walls and ceiling. In the flickering beam of their flashlights, Stanford and Alan could see that the writings had been painted  in the victims’ blood. 

                                                     *

   “They were some kind of runes, pictograms that showed…crazy things…I couldn’t…” Alan said. He paused, looking once more over to Stanford.

And now the physician smoothly picked up the narrative. He had a wealth of horrors of his own to relate.  

     “They were similar to cave drawings,” he said. “At least that’s what I felt at the time. But the details were amazing. The whole room, from floor to ceiling had been covered in…in these drawings. I studied them for as long as my stomach let me...” 

                                                       *

     In the gloom of Apartment Seven, Stanford’s flashlight had revealed a depth and complexity in the drawings that boggled the mind. That such stunning detail and obvious skill should accompany such unspeakable depravity was unimaginable. Crimson adorned the walls with extravagant care. There were other colors; yellows, purple blending into black; grays and browns stolen from the tormented and ruptured bodies nearby; a canvas realized from the torture of innocents, the desecration of living bone and sinew. In the pictograms he could make out representations of planets, suns, whole galaxies. Stanford even recognized the Milky Way. But there were other objects, things that Stanford didn’t recognize, something he took to represent a black hole... He couldn’t be sure.

     Another wall depicted a calamitous war, a conflict that seemed to span the stars. The mosaic covered the entirety of one wall and part of the ceiling in its sanguinary intricacy. While still another wall displayed the journey of a group of beings, somewhat streamlined in shape, their long tentacles trailing from the depths of the seas to the edges of space. 

     Each drawing had been executed in the finest detail. And each detail told an intricate story of its own. Looking closely, Stanford could see no evidence of a brush, no sign of actual brushstrokes which would have revealed the hand of the artist. 

     In one particularly arresting image, a being that resembled a massive, anthropomorphic cobra stretched forth a clawed hand. The image showed the giant being’s hand closing around a solar system, the sun at its center.

     The third planet from this sun was undeniably the Earth. 

     “Alan, look at this,” Stanford hissed. 

     But Alan was gone. Stanford looked around as he heard Alan’s footsteps pounding up the stairs toward Jillian’s apartment. Panic, held back for so long by his macabre interest in the abomination before which he stood, exploded now at the thought of being left behind. Turning, he fled that place of torment and death as if Satan himself were on his heels.