Rakshasa(?)

It's been a while, so I thought I would post something up here to show that I'm not lazing about.

This is the start of something new. It's the basis of a lot of stories I'm going to be working on moving forward, involving a new character I've been building up. It's going to be dark and weird and bloody, but it's going to be exciting-- maybe. Read on...

“This makes no sense,” said Detective Chief Inspector John Coolage. It was two hours after the call had been made to the police. They’d mobilised fast, the best officers were on the scene, but even getting there so fast, even having half the department in one room working the scene, it didn’t mean that the crime made any more sense. “The victim….”

Todd Matthews had been a Scene of the Crime Officer for ten years last February, and as much of a cliché as it was, this was beyond anything he’d ever experienced before. This case was going to be a rough one, and it wasn’t just the pints of blood covering the ceiling, walls or floor that clued them into that. It wasn’t just the fact that this woman was mutilated while her roommate slept soundly beside her. It wasn’t just because this massacre took place in the bright light of day. There was something more.

Their suspicions had been aroused when the coroner went to take the victim’s liver temperature. It was an impossible action, considering that there was no liver present in Caroline’s body. The liver wasn’t the only internal organ missing. The young woman had been disembowelled, a clean, twelve inch gash from bosom to groin opening her up for the world to see. Two slabs of skin and meat were peeled back, and inside her body was nothing but dried blood and bone. No lungs, no kidneys, no liver, no nothing.

The coroner, Lana Silke, was still in the room, stood in the corner, grasping her chest as she breathed in and out slowly. “Skin and bones,” she said. “She’s all skin and bones.”

“So we’re looking for someone with a surgically precise knowledge of anatomy?”

“Maybe,” said Detective Sergeant Richard Laddy. “Look here,” he loomed over the corpse, and pointed to the upper most point of the bodily incision. “There. See that?” There was a nick on Caroline’s flesh, trapped by rigor. “That looks like someone pressed their finger nail in. A hesitation mark, or maybe a statement of intent. ‘This is what I’m going to do to you, so don’t you dare look away’. If I wasn’t a sane man, I’d suggest that this was done by someone’s bare hands.”

“What?” said Coolage.

Silke approached the body once more. “Where her… where either side of her was pulled open, can you see the bruising here?” She pointed with a pencil to the space beneath Caroline’s breasts. “That’s pre-mortem. That was done while her heart was still beating. It’s not the kind of bruising you’d get from a clamp, it’s what you get when you do this:” She held her hands out in front of her, and then drew them to the equivalent position on her own body as the bruises on Caroline’s. She clenched her fists, and with imagined effort, wrenched them out to either side of herself. “Someone opened her up. By hand.”