jackntyler
Mr. and Mrs. Carlson had been placed in the center of their dining room, bound to a chair with their heads tilted back and their mouths gaping. There was a pentagram drawn in clumsy, charcoal marks beneath their feet, which had near crumpled into ashes. They had been burned alive and salt poured down their throats. Someone, apparently, had watched a little too much of that show with the brothers who spouted pop cultural references and drove in that old car, a few too many horror films.
He'd thought that he could purge whatever evil he perceived dwelled inside the couple by salting and burning them while they writhed and screamed. Their bodies became one with the wood. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all of that.
Roderick wanted a cigarette, but he'd quit because it was 'bad for you.' He'd watched that show about the chemistry teacher who made drugs and after seeing the way he hacked and stuttered and stumbled his way through life with lung cancer, he decided he might not want to risk it. Even so, his fingers sometimes twitched, wanting to reach into an inner pocket to pluck a cigarette from a box that wasn't there. He missed it.
He glanced back at the door he had entered through, frowned at the dangling strips of bright yellow caution tape that hung around the edges of the door like limp, stained fangs- the crack in the door a lazy, yawning maw. He ran his fingers through his curly hair and sighed heavily.
Behind him, Mrs. Carlson's left ear spontaneously crumbled and fell as dust onto her blackened, crispy shoulder. There was the quiet sound of a fridge opening and the soft, familiar metallic clink of a bottle-cap being popped off the head of a beer bottle. Roderick frowned and looked in the direction of the kitchen. After a pause to make sure that he really was hearing the sounds of unhurried life in the other room, he walked into the kitchen and tilted his head.
“Uh... excuse me, this is a crime scene. Didn't you see the...,” He gestured toward the doorway with the plastic tape teeth. “You can't be here...”