"There's a corpse in the tub, and you're still not convinced that these people are weirdos?" Dion asked.

"No. I'm sure there's some kind of diseased mentality that pervades the household,"

"Then why do we have to check the creepy shed, man?" Dion asked. "Can't we just leave it for the police or something?"

"We need clues, anything, that gives us an idea on Turnus or the circumstance."

"Why? We're just going to finish them off anyways."

"I'd like to avoid killing people. And for that, I need to know more about them." Apollo turned to Dion. "Killing people is wrong, right? And they are people, aren't they?"

"Man, if you'd seen Floyd you wouldn't be saying that."

"Good thing I didn't then, ignorance can make you merciful," Apollo said. "Justice will come to them, don't worry. But we should do it the best way we can and avoid as much murder as we can."

"You know, Old Apollo back in Havenbrook would be slaughtering your way through the mission, no problem."

"Good thing we're not in Havenbrook then, right?" Apollo smiled.

"Then after you," Dion put his hand forward like a butler accepting guests, pointing himself towards the shed out back behind the house among the decrepit trees. Twigs fell, large arms that settled into small nests across the floor. They prodded the floor and stuck out like small stakes, barricades against the invaders who now walked up front to the shed. A chain locked the shed door, it rattled from Apollo's touch.

"They have it locked for a reason." Dion shivered. "Just think about it man, if they have a corpse up there just imagine what's in here-"

Apollo ripped the steel links, they scattered about the floor underneath him.

"Oh man, oh man, oh man." Dion's teeth could not stop clattering, biting his tongue. He lowered his head as he followed Apollo into the shed. It was sizable, a bit smaller than a barn and a bit larger than any normal tool shed. And inside? Well, it was hard to see. Thin lights came out from above in between the cracks of wooden roof-planks. The light shined down onto the floor where tiny footsteps laid fossilized into the soft mud below. It was moist, the floor.

There was a bucket to the rear and a small little lever and faucet next to it that dripped water. It was spilled over, the trail soaked into the floor.

There was hay, too much of it and no animal anywhere around to consume it. It was just there, hay, straw strewn about the room. Apollo revealed a flashlight and pointed it to Dion.

"You've got two hands, spare 'em for me." He said.

"As long as I don't need to touch any gross things." Dion clamped hard on the flashlight, it swerved to the movements of his shaking.

Apollo submerged himself into the shadows, his form reappearing and disappearing between the beams of light that made pockets on the floor below. Then he came to a stop, Dion pointed down the light in the direction Apollo stared.

A skull.

Bones. Femurs. A whole skeleton atop a bed of hay.

"Jesus," Dion said.

"It's not the worst thing we've seen." Apollo knelt down and extended a black-gloved hand (the only hand, of course). He touched the bone. And as if disturbed from sleep, the whole skeleton rattled and rolled in the had bed. Dust flew out. Both of them extended their hands, half-expecting an attack, half-expecting the skeleton to animate. It went still. Apollo focused his hand on the neck of the skeleton, the vertebrae that seemed abnormally large. Almost beast-like in length. A mammoth of a man it must have belonged to.

Apollo reached out for a chain, one attached to the neck bones and tugged on it. This chain was connected to the floor, via a metal stake.

"He must have been a kind of slave for Thomas Wolfe or something," Apollo said. "I really don't know who this person is. I thought only Ritcher and Turnus lived here."

"And the mom!" Dion said.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

"Yeah, and the mom." Apollo focused his eyes on that clattering chain.

"Maybe it was someone Thomas kidnapped, who knows?" Dion asked. "Or someone else, kind of like the Santana guy? Just another victim they had to keep shush?"

"Why chain him then? Why not just kill him?" Apollo rubbed his chin. "We'll need to take him."

"What?" Dion flicked the flashlight. He dropped it, then caught it midair. "Listen, I kill people. I can admit that, but I don't want to collect them when they're dead. That's serial killer stuff."

"There aren't any larva, no residual sacs...nothing," Apollo mumbled. "It's been a long while for this guy. We'll need a skull and pelvis...wrist..."

"You're so weird."

"Dental records too..." Apollo rubbed his gloved hand against the smooth bone. It was brown, craggy as if wrinkled with age.

"You know when people think of souvenirs. They think of postcards and hats and little ceramic mugs." Dion shook his head.

"I need to know when he died. Maybe even how, what type of person was he." Apollo said. "Go get the car.

"This is kind of like...grave robbing, no?"

"Do you see a grave?" Apollo pointed to the dirty floor, the piss and shit smelling hay, the suffocating musk in the air.

"Alright! Alright, then, I'll bring the car around then." Dion said, and out the door, he went. It gently rolled back and forth in and out of the room, Apollo remained in that little jail. His foot brushed against the shackles. Near him, a strange patch in the dirt lighter shaded than the rest. It was in the shape of a person, a grown man. His eyes, stuck in a daze, locked themselves to that little patch. His vision went sporadic. He stumbled forward, almost striking the bed and the bones into disarray. He held himself from falling with one hand on the floor. Strong grip, tense eyes. His legs could not stop shaking.

And all around him the little demons roamed, materialized from seeming nothing. His eyes flared red and black and red and black, blink after blink. And like a projector starting up, running the stream of film across its light, so it was with each of his blinking eyes. The hallucinations animated, frame by frame.

Were they even hallucinations?

You know they're real.

The little demons and imps pranced around, their forms creating after images-across his view. They danced around the body and danced around the bed and played with the buckets and the silver plates of old slop and the worms and bugs in the corner of the shed. Small grey and red creatures with long ears and single eyes, gnawing on the hay like horses, jackasses.

His head throbbed.

Footsteps, loud plops in the mud.

He turned around.

Bug-eyed he looked at the corner of the shack. A man was there. Standing straight, a stab wound in his neck where blood ran out.

You know it's real, Apollo. Go on, talk to him.

And Apollo shaking his head against the voice mouthing off in his consciousness, thinking and hoping it wasn't real. The lights grew dimmer, the beige and brown and dirty-yellow colors around him bending and reducing to nothing. Black, bleakness.

The wounded figure took a stumbling step forward, blood squirted from his neck. He had a hand extended out. Apollo could not move, not to any meaningful capacity. His knees bent, and he fell to the floor as the demons snickered and laughed around him, hands in lock with each other like ring around the roses. Fauna grew out the walls and floor, and he could only call what he saw "fauna" because he could not understand; eyes and fleshy walls and bloody veins that seemed to protrude from every surface like the intestines and viscera of an animal.

The figure kept stumbling forward. A ghoul looking man with eyes deep in dark caverns in his skull.

This walking corpse, this ghost mouthed off. "D-D-D"

The noise seemed choked, air escaped the hole in the windpipe in the sound of a whistle.

And he kept walking forward, deep step after deep step, churning and shooting wet mud out. It hit Apollo's face, he kicked his foot away from the ghost and struck the wall. From whence the tentacles latched onto his neck, small little hands that caressed him.

The ghost grabbed Apollo by the neck. Apollo flared his red eyes, with his single arm and all possible strength he tried to pry the ghost away. He felt his bones crack and fracture and snap, but the ghost did not let go, perhaps it couldn't.

And it said, black-blood shooting out its mouth. It said, with steam and dark-stained teeth and the shooting the kind of glop and bodily expulsions that cling to your body for days, it said - "No, daddy no. I've been a good boy."

In a voice so eerily innocent, like a child.

And it tightened and dragged Apollo's body up, shaking the cabin.

Apollo's head pounding, his legs kicking away and the grip tightening against his neck; he tried to scream just to keep himself awake. He felt a final wheeze come out of him, he felt the blood vessels in his eyes just about to pop.

"Daddy, I said I'm sorry." The ghost smacked Apollo's body across the walls. The shed shook. The furniture, the hay, all slammed against the fleshy-walls blown away by a seeming pressure releasing from the ghost.

"No, daddy." It shouted. "No! Not today!"

The black blood shot out. Cold. And Apollo saw clearly past fear that compelled him to close his eyes, he took a strong look at the hollow cheeks and the large chin and deformed head of this ghost. A walking abomination, a slack-jawed titan of a man.

"No, daddy, no!" The abominable thing screamed.

A final breath. The ghost whined one final time, blood squirted out its neck. The grip loosened. The creature buckled and fell on its side, on to the haystack below.

Apollo fell, he raised his head away from his body to breath and stare at the light in the cracks. Dion rushed in.

"What was all that?"

Apollo, breathed, he talked in his hastened voice. "The shed. The shaking. It all flew off." He breathed. "A ghost. You didn't see it? The Demons. The walls? Everything."

"What?" Dion asked. "All I've heard was you screaming. You scared the you-know-what out of that poor girl."

Apollo looked down, he touched his neck. Not a single marking. He touched the floor, no more fleshy walls. He looked around nothing out of place. Not even a mess.

He looked down and breathed heavy and let the sweat drop off his face. And he heard that mocking voice again in his head: Astyanax.

How's that for a clue then, detective?