Chapter 1: The Abattoir Next Door

The screaming had stopped an hour ago, but Elias Shearer's hands still trembled as he gripped his worn Bible. The leather binding, cracked from years of devoted study, felt slick beneath his sweating palms. Through the thin walls of the Shearer cottage, he could hear his sister Samantha moving about in her room—or perhaps it was his father tending to her again. These days, it was impossible to tell the difference between her lucid moments and her episodes.

Lord, grant me strength, he prayed silently, though the words felt hollow in the suffocating silence that had descended over their small coastal town. The McGovern house next door stood eerily quiet now, its windows dark despite the afternoon sun.

Elias set his Bible aside and rose from his wooden chair, his tall frame unfolding like a pale specter in the dim light filtering through their cottage's small windows. His dark hair, perpetually unkempt despite his mother's long-ago teachings about proper appearance, fell across his brow as he peered through the gap in their curtains.

Nothing. No movement from the McGovern place. No sign of Mrs. McGovern tending her small garden, or Mr. McGovern returning from his work at the docks.

The screaming had been... wrong. Not the cry of someone in pain, but something deeper, more primal. It had cut through the afternoon air like a blade, causing every dog in the vicinity to fall silent and sending the gulls wheeling away from the shore in a cacophony of alarmed cries.

"Elias." His father's voice, strained and weary, called from the back room. "Come here, boy."

Gideon Shearer's tone carried that familiar weight of unspoken burdens, the same heaviness that had settled over their household like morning fog after Mother's death three years prior. Elias had learned to read the subtle gradations in his father's voice—this was urgent, but controlled. Worried, but not panicked.

"Father?" Elias made his way down the narrow hallway, past the family portraits that seemed to watch him with knowing eyes. The faces of generations of Shearers stared down from their frames, all sharing the same pale complexion, the same dark hair, the same haunted look around the eyes that Elias saw in his own reflection each morning.

He found his father standing in Samantha's doorway, his weathered face grave with concern. At fifty-five, Gideon Shearer bore the marks of a man who had carried heavy secrets his entire life. His beard, once dark like Elias's hair, had gone completely gray in the years since their mother's passing.

"She's gone again," Gideon said quietly, stepping aside to reveal Samantha's empty bed, the covers thrown back as if she had left in haste. The simple room, with its cross on the wall and her collection of pressed flowers on the windowsill, looked strangely violated by her absence.

Elias felt his chest tighten. "When?"

"Just before the..." Gideon paused, his jaw working silently for a moment. "Just before we heard the disturbance."

The screaming. Neither of them would name it directly, as if speaking the word might summon it back.

"I'll find her," Elias said, already turning toward the door. His sister's episodes had grown more frequent and more severe over the past months. Sometimes she would be found wandering the rocky shoreline, speaking to herself in languages that sounded almost familiar but remained incomprehensible. Other times, like today, she would simply vanish.

"Elias." His father's hand fell heavily on his shoulder. "Be careful. Something feels... different today."

The words sent a chill down Elias's spine, but he nodded and made his way to the front door. The afternoon air was thick with the salt tang of the sea and something else—something metallic and unpleasant that made his stomach turn.

The McGovern house sat just fifty yards away, separated from the Shearer cottage by a small patch of scrub grass and a stone wall that Mr. McGovern had built the previous summer. It was a modest dwelling, much like their own, with whitewashed walls and a slate roof that gleamed dully in the overcast light.

Elias approached slowly, his scholar's mind cataloging details with the same methodical precision he applied to his biblical studies. The front door stood slightly ajar. Mrs. McGovern's prized roses, planted along the front of the house, looked somehow wilted despite the recent rain. A strange, sweet smell hung in the air—not entirely unpleasant, but wrong somehow, like flowers left too long in stagnant water.

"Mrs. McGovern?" he called softly, not wanting to startle anyone who might be inside. "Are you well?"

No answer.

The metallic scent grew stronger as he approached the door. His hand, pale and ink-stained from his morning studies, pushed gently against the weathered wood. The door swung open with a prolonged creak that seemed to echo in the stillness.

The smell hit him like a physical blow.

Blood. The air was thick with it, so heavy he could taste it on his tongue. Elias stumbled backward, his hand flying to cover his mouth and nose, but the damage was done. His stomach lurched, threatening to empty itself onto the McGoverns' front step.

Steady, he told himself, drawing on the inner strength that had carried him through his theological studies and his mother's long illness. Steady. Someone may need help.

He forced himself forward, into the dim interior of the McGovern house. The layout was familiar—he had visited many times over the years, sharing meals and conversation with the elderly couple who had been friends to his family since before his birth.

The sitting room appeared normal at first glance. Mrs. McGovern's knitting sat abandoned in her chair, needles still holding the partially completed scarf she had been working on for her nephew in Boston. Mr. McGovern's pipe rested on the small table beside his favorite chair, a thin wisp of smoke still curling from its bowl.

But the smell...

Elias followed his nose toward the kitchen, each step feeling like a betrayal of his rational mind. Part of him wanted to flee, to run back to his father and report that the McGoverns were simply not at home. But a larger part, the part shaped by years of studying scripture and wrestling with questions of duty and moral obligation, compelled him forward.

The kitchen door stood open.

What Elias saw beyond that threshold would haunt him for the rest of his days, short though they would prove to be. Mrs. McGovern lay sprawled across the kitchen floor, her body positioned at an impossible angle, arms flung wide as if she had been dancing. But it was what wasn't there that made Elias's mind reel and his knees buckle.

Her head was gone.

Not cut away cleanly, but torn off, leaving a ragged stump of neck that had painted the kitchen walls with arterial spray. The white kitchen curtains, so carefully maintained by the fastidious Mrs. McGovern, hung in scarlet tatters.

And there, in the corner by the cold stove, sat Samantha.

His sixteen-year-old sister, dressed in her simple blue dress, held Mrs. McGovern's severed head in her lap like a beloved doll. Her vacant eyes stared at nothing, her delicate fingers stroking the dead woman's gray hair with a tenderness that made Elias's soul recoil.

"Samantha?" The word came out as barely a whisper.

She didn't respond. Didn't even seem to hear him. Her lips moved silently, forming words in that strange, lilting cadence that had become so familiar during her episodes. But now, seeing her cradling the evidence of unspeakable violence, those foreign syllables took on a sinister significance.

Blood covered her dress, her hands, even her face. It was still fresh, still glistening in the pale light filtering through the kitchen window. She must have been here when it happened. She must have...

No. Elias's mind recoiled from the thought. Not Samantha. Not my gentle sister who feeds stray cats and presses flowers in her Bible. There has to be an explanation.

But as he stood there, watching her continue her grotesque ministry to the severed head, another thought crept into his consciousness—a memory of his father's words just moments before: Something feels different today.

Had Gideon known? Had he suspected what Elias would find?

"Samantha," Elias said again, louder this time, his voice cracking with emotion. "What happened here? Where is Mr. McGovern?"

At the sound of her name, his sister finally looked up. Her eyes, usually the same dark brown as his own, seemed somehow different. Deeper. As if something vast and hungry was looking out through them.

She smiled—a serene, beautiful smile that belonged on an angel's face, not on someone sitting in a charnel house.

"The roses are blooming, Elias," she said in her own voice, sweet and clear as a church bell. "Can you smell them? They're so very hungry."

Then she returned her attention to her ghastly charge, humming a lullaby their mother used to sing, while Mrs. McGovern's lifeless eyes stared accusingly at the young man who had stumbled into a nightmare he could never have imagined.

Elias stood frozen, his world tilting on its axis. Everything he thought he knew about his sister, his family, his faith—it all crumbled in that blood-soaked kitchen, leaving only questions that threatened to drive him as mad as Samantha appeared to be.

The afternoon sun slanted lower through the window, casting long shadows across the scene of horror, and somewhere in the distance, Elias could swear he heard the sound of something blooming.