1

Lester sensed the activity around him, that the world hadn’t stopped turning and the chaos that fed through the hazy mesh in his mind came not from inside but from out. There was panic, shouting, questions. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. They were unlikely to see anything like it ever again and as Lester stared, lost inside his own thoughts, he couldn’t help but think that he was to blame.

This was all his fault.

He hadn’t been dumb enough to tell the press about his theory, but it was still his theory, and if not for that then this might not have happened. He didn’t know who gave the information to the press, didn’t know if it was one of the dimwits at Whitegate Police Station or one of his own back home, but it didn’t matter. He had known they would find out, and he had been certain that someone somewhere would leak his theory.

“It’s spectacular, isn’t it?”

Lester angrily turned to face the police officer next to him. He was a local by the name of Tenant, a cocky little prick who Lester had had the displeasure of meeting earlier. He fancied himself, was always checking his hair, grinning into mirrors. The sort of man who hit on every woman he saw and assumed they were lesbians or frigid when they turned him down.

“Spectacular?” Lester spat. “Are you fucking shitting me? Two people are dead, in a church, their bodies strung up like meat in a fucking slaughterhouse. This is not spectacular.”

The officer gave a nonchalant shrug. “To be fair, only one of them is strung up like meat.” He chuckled at that and Lester felt like punching him. If he were a more violent man, a man more like the one who had done this, then he would have caved his smug face into the back of his skull and then stomped on it until the blood stopped pouring and the screams stopped curdling.

“It’s not easy to do that,” Tenant continued.

Lester frowned at him, for a moment wondering if he was talking about the images that had just been going through his head. “Excuse me?”

Tenant nodded toward the mess at the front of the church and Lester followed his gaze and nodded.

The vicar had been skinned, every inch of skin peeled away from his body, leaving nothing but muscle, blood, and bone. The crime had seemingly taken place in the confessional, because its floors were pooled with blood and spotted with chunks of flesh. He had been nailed to a large crucifix that had once belonged to a fiberglass model of Christ. It was positioned so that whoever entered the church, walked down the aisle, or sat in the congregation would face the figure of their lord, and that was what made this human replica so striking and so terrifying. They hadn’t found the flesh yet, but they would, and Lester didn’t really want to be around when they did.

At the vicar’s feet, curled into the fetal position, was a young boy in his teens. He was naked and he looked vulnerable, almost infant-like. He had been positioned that way after death, that much was obvious, but why he had been posed like that wasn’t clear. Lester hadn’t walked down the aisle yet. He had tried, but the further he walked, the more his legs felt like they weren’t going to support him. Walking toward the figure of the skinless vicar held aloft on the cross was one of the most terrifying things he had ever done. It activated a primal fear, a sense of foreboding he had never felt before and knew he would never feel again. This was a set, a piece of theater, one that had been orchestrated by the hand of the devil himself and one that succeeded in its mission to strike fear into the hearts of everyone who looked upon it, giving them a memory that would haunt them until their dying day.

He was stuck in the middle of the aisle, occasionally moving aside to let others through. At least a dozen police officers and forensic officers were in the church, with the majority swarming around the bodies on the altar and the blood in the confessional. At the back of the church, two officers kept guard at the door, keen to keep out the gathering crowd. The bodies had been discovered just a few hours ago by the mother of the boy beneath the cross. He had stayed behind after a family visit to church and when he was late, she got worried and returned. The church was locked and she assumed he had already left, but when she couldn’t find him hours later, she spoke to the caretaker and asked him to open the doors. By then they were already open, the killer already gone, and what they saw was enough to put her in the hospital with shock and to turn the caretaker into a shaking, mumbling wreck.

“Are you not going to get a closer look?” Tenant asked, nudging Lester.

Lester simply glared at him and eventually Tenant left him, his hands stuffed casually in his pockets as he approached the dead bodies. This was no doubt the first time he had seen a corpse in person, but he was trying to play it cool to maintain whatever modicum of respect he thought his colleagues had for him. Lester knew that when Tenant finished work, he would rush home, cry into his pillow, and drown his sorrows in as much alcohol as he could find. Lester didn’t blame him.

The Masquerade, whatever he was and whatever he would become, finally got the recognition that Lester always knew he had wanted. Whitegate would once again be filled with macabre tourists and terrified locals. For the next few weeks at least, Herman and the town of Whitegate would become the center of the universe, but there was something else, another reason. It felt like more than a stunt, more than an orchestrated nightmare, and the more Lester stared at the human destruction in front of him, the more he felt he wasn’t seeing the whole picture.

There was something there. The way it was arranged made Lester confident Herman was trying to tell him something. This was grand and showy, and he had done that for effect, there was no doubt about it. Herman loved to make a scene; he loved to strike fear in the hearts of the people and to give them a memory that they would never forget, but this, this …

“I feel like I’m missing something,” Lester said, half to himself.

“Me too,” Matthews said. He face was pale and his lips were blue. He looked like he was about to projectile vomit a sugary breakfast all over the already desecrated ground.

“There’s a message here.”

“Yes. That this guy is fucking nuts.”

Lester shook his head slowly.

“For He so loved his pathetic little world, that He gave his only begotten son.”

Lester’s face creased as he looked up to see a woman approach, decked out in the white uniform of the forensic team.

“Excuse me?”

“Your message,” she said, holding up a bible. “That’s it.” Her finger was pointing to a passage, parts of which had been crossed out and rewritten.

He reached for the book but she pulled it away. “Evidence, I’m afraid. If you want to touch it, you’ll have to dress up.”

“What else does it say?” Lester asked.

“That’s it,” she told him. “It was open at that page when we found it. Oh, and there is this.” She showed him again. He could just make out a faint word that had been scribbled onto the end of the edited line.

“And Devil?” he asked, a little concerned at the reference.

“Look again,” she said.

He edged closer, close enough to get a whiff of the scent of old leather and ancient parchment. This book had probably been in the church’s possession for more than a hundred years and yet in one instant it had been defaced.

“‘And Daughter?’” He looked up into the eyes of the forensic officer and she nodded.

“We have no idea what it means,” she confirmed.

Lester ran the phrase through his head a number of times and then spoke it out loud; it was nothing more than a mumble, but it was enough to drive the meaning home. “For He so loved his pathetic little world, that He gave his only begotten son and daughter.” Lester felt every muscle in his body tense. He felt his heart stop and his lungs empty as the life in him froze.

“That can’t be,” he said softly, his voice breaking, grating out of his chest, barely making it past his lips, which had turned dry. Sticky. “He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.”

The forensic officer gave him a concerned glance. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

When he raised his eyes to meet her, she became frightened. He had changed from disconsolate to terrified in an instant.

“I—I—” He shook his head and then pulled out his phone. They asked him questions, their voices growing louder and more concerned with each word, but he ignored them. He dialed the number he knew by heart, as if in that split second he didn’t trust the validity of speed dial.

He waited, breathing heavily, beads of sweat popping on his forehead.

The phone rang once, twice, three times. There was no answer, and with every chime he felt his heart sink lower. Felt the life drain out of him.

How did he know?

By the fourth and fifth ring, his surprise and his fear began to evolve into anger—anger at himself and anger at the man who had caused those emotions to stir inside him.

By the seventh ring, he was prepared to hang up, but the sound of the voicemail message stopped him.

“I’m sorry, but no one is home right now.”

It was a standard message, but it wasn’t spoken by anyone who lived in the house. It wasn’t his mother, his son, or his daughter. It was a man, a man whose voice he had never heard, but a man whose featureless face had haunted his nightmares many times.

“But if you would like to pay us a visit, then who knows, you might just get to see us. We haven’t been feeling very well of late, so to avoid doing us any harm, please come alone.” The voice changed at that point. Lester could almost picture the sadistic serial killer sneering as he finished. “I’ll look forward to it.”