By A Rose

|CHAPTER SIXTEEN🌹|

Stars had made their way into the once blue sky when we got to the alley where we were told Suzy Richards was last seen.

According to our Intel we were in the right place, so we searched around carefully.

Some of the cops found the Volvo, a few inspected it while, Wes and I went deep into the dark in search of the Crucifier. I found red threads on the ground. I called Wes and he picked them up for further observation. They looked very familiar.

"Tina! This is Tina's hair! She must have cut it so we could find her!" I screamed.

"Well she's brave but we might have a problem. Some of the hair strands might have been scattered by the wind or something else. Let's just hope that whatever's been on this street for the past twelve hours was not a fan of clearing out Tina's hair." Wes replied.

It took a while but some of Tina's hair remained intact and just beside a pile of junk we found a yellow ribbon close to what seemed to be a white carpet.

"This looks like what she wore in the security footage. I think I saw this ribbon on her pony tail." I said after keen observation.

"There's got to be something else. This carpet can't be a dead end." Wes mumbled as he walked round the carpet.

He turned to the other officers behind us.

"Guys search round. Some go north, others go to the east and west but no one should go beyond three meters. Let's go!" He ordered. 

In what seemed to be a second he swept his hair and then lifted the white carpet. He threw it to the side to reveal an opening on the ground.

"I knew it! Everyone! There's some sort of secret passage here!" He said. 

The other officers gathered round, while some tried to tactfully open the little wooden door found under the carpet in haste and without a sound.

Wes and I crept into the large hole first after it had been opened. There was a sturdy staircase, which continued in the dark until our feet hit cemented ground. There was some sort of scent. A very familiar scent. Roses.

Soon, we passed a bed of roses. Red roses. They grew around a grave in a room with no door.

In another room, we found humans. Dead humans. Some were hung and others were lain on the floor with roses at the centre of their chest. 

The bodies that were hung, swung from the ceiling by ropes. Their hands were sewn together by long copper wires. The dried blood which once crept down their palms was a horrible sight.

The eyes of some bodies were closed, others open and a few had their eyes gouged out of its socket, leaving dark and hollow circles on their faces from which red liquid once dripped towards the earth. 

The room shone brightly from the rays of a fluorescent bulb. The bodies did have one thing in common. They all wore nylon. Black nylon torn to look like a gown of some sort. It was a horrific sight indeed.

One of the cops threw up, but Wes had another officer escort him back to the surface.

In another little room which had a touch of red and green neon bulb rays, we found another abysmal sight. 

There was a scabby reading table and a wooden chair in the room. There were also boards. Boards which had skulls on them. I knew about wooden boards which had animal heads on them. 

I had seen such headboards in our wooden cabin when I was a kid during my family's vacation in the woods. I knew a lot of the heads were fake, but this time it was real and they were human skulls. I was terrified.