The Trinity Killer smiled at his reflection in the glass.
“Positively angelic,” he said, and opened the door. “Like taking candy from a baby.”
The foyer was a long, thin, high-ceilinged tunnel tiled with chipped alabaster and bordered on one side by a thick mahogany stained balustrade that twisted around to crown the first flight. A strip of worn carpeting ran a line of emerald through the centre of the tunnel, edged on both sides by strips of polished green linoleum.
“Yes, yes,” he said, rounding the first flight of stairs and starting up the second, talking to the feeling inside him, the hunger. The second riser groaned under his weight. Up, up, and up again. The door to apartment 5a was the first of three on the landing. Behind him, the floor danced with a brittle glass-frost.
Something red ran and washed into his eye, staining the world the colour of blood. He touched his forehead, felt the weeping wounds left by the crown of glass thorns. Strands of glittering light wove a hypnotic ballet around his ankles, twisting to the rhythm of silent belly dancers. He felt the touch of glass against his skin, burrowing a bloody passage into his ankle, grating against the calcine bone and cutting upwards, slicing through ligaments like some sort of coiled worm crawling through the dead skin of a roadkill, moving up, towards his gut. His skin rippled, the only outward sign of the glass’ advance.
Another shard of blood red glass hooked into the cut in his torn jeans, coiled around his leg, freezing like a second skin of ice around the tense muscle, feeding a bloody red malevolence into his dead body.
Lamenzo threw back his head and tasted the air in back of his mouth, brimstone eyes wide with fire. Sand trails of sweat trickled down the crystalline sheen of his spine.
Downstairs, a door closed.