Five years on the job and nothing looked so sick to me as the sight before me.

I needed to bolt out of the room with my hand over my mouth, hunched over and getting as close to the overgrown grass and frigid clean air from the woods. I spewed chunks of leftover chili from my dinner an hour ago. I needed the cold to fill my lungs and cool my acid laced throat. I needed to be numb before I could go back inside. I needed a scent in my nostrils that wasn’t a foul mixture of rotten flesh and bile. A scent that would be able to send me to a place outside from where I was.

I needed to pretend this wasn’t happening. I needed to pretend that I hadn’t seen what I had so that my stomach would settle and my mind would clear. The image that would sear into the minds of those who would come later needed to become a shadow of a nightmare. I couldn’t let it get to me

What had I seen?

I couldn’t even describe it; it was so vile that I doubt an expert would be able to describe it. The sick fuck who did it all was probably one of those psychotic pricks who wore the skin from their victims at home, and attended school board meetings for their kids. One of those secret killers. Those people who pretend to be the good guys, but behind that, they pick up kids and took pleasure from their pleas for mercy. That’s what the fucker who did this had to be like.

 We had searched out the usual suspects, the people who you would think were capable of these things. We hadn’t found the bastard in the eight months of his torment on our town. We asked the parents, the lovers, the enemies, the friends, the drunks, the new couple in town, the teachers, the principles, the distant family members, the neighbors, the club members. We asked anyone and everyone in town. But we ended up finding no one with a motive, and no one suspicious.

 And now that his fun house was found, he’d either set himself loose on the town and paint it red with blood, or he’d move on before we could catch his ass. Isn’t that how it went? Out with a bang, or fade to black.

He had to have known we were coming, it wasn’t like any one didn’t know what was going on after the links had been made. Kids from the ages of ten to nineteen had been going missing. Nothing linked them, we hadn’t known of the problem until one of our own went missing.

 It started two hundred miles outside of town, then the kidnappings started to get closer, and closer, and then it was our turn. It was like he was making his way to us. Circling the area like a vulture circling its prey. Each place had lost about three kids in a month, but not us. All of our kids started dying out in droves. The only ones safe were locked up in their homes with their families. No chances were being taken. Not after my own daughter had been taken on her way home from school.

The FBI came. Took over. Did what they did. Who was it that found the fucker’s hiding spot? I did. And how I wish I hadn’t. Those kids strung up like ornaments on a Christmas tree, their guts hanging out like Christmas lights on the ceiling, and their blood smeared on the walls like it was paint that a kid had dipped their fingers in. The wall their canvas. With how many kids were missing, you’d think there would be more bodies. But there weren’t. At least not that I saw, and I knew I had to go back and look.

 I had to go back and look at his masterpiece.

After taking slow breaths of the cold night air, wiping my mouth with the back of my trembling hand, I went from small toad to tall statue. I reach for my radio on my chest, ready to call it in, when I think about how I got there.

How would I explain how I found this place and why I was there? If I called it in I was sure that they would think I was the killer. But I wasn’t, I’m not. I’m not some fucking psycho who chops up little kids! I’m not! I have a daughter of my own, a wife, a dog. I’m not some sick piece of shit hiding behind a facade.

“I need to burn it down,” I whisper to myself, my hand falling from my radio and clenching at my side. It has to be done. I could have left my hand prints on the door, on the light switch, on the bodies. It needs to be burned down before someone comes.

Of course, it will be awhile before anyone comes down here. No one knows what that sick bastard did, they don’t know where he went. But there are ways of finding this place. Just like how I found it. All they’ll have to do is look into her bank accounts. See something that doesn’t make sense. Check every scrap of hay for that one damned needle.

That’s what I did. That’s how I found out it was him. She knew that if she cheated on me, left me, I’d kill her. I told her, and she still did it. And then he came. As soon as I realized what she had done, he took them.

I followed. I couldn’t not follow. That was my wife and daughter in the same car that he was in. I had to be there. I had to calm them down and tell them that everything would be okay. They needed to know that it wasn’t me, it was him. But they kept saying it was me, they didn’t understand.

Taking the gasoline out of my trunk, I splashed the inside of the hut with the noxious liquid, deciding soon that the outside of the hut needed a good coat as well.

It all has to come down.

I took my lighter from my coat pocket and flicked it on. I took one last look at the hut, I could see my wife’s maggot eaten head mounted on the wall, like a trophy deer’s head that any hunter would proudly display. I tossed the lighter into the hut, watching the fire bloom and consume.

I’m not a killer. I saw him in the hut, and he wasn’t me. I’m not some sick fuck. I didn’t do this. It was someone else.

 I could hear sirens behind me like ghosts of the dead calling for justice. He came again, pulling me to the car parked outside the cabin. He took control, driving us out of that nightmare and into another.