Sheriff Jasik kicked open the bedroom door with brute force, the wood splintering on impact. The door slammed against the wall, a harsh punctuation mark to the night's unspeakable events. He entered with his pistol trained on Faith, her and Madison’s silhouettes stark against the harsh light blasting through the window behind them.
Behind him followed Deputies Douglas and Jankowski—Douglas, a mountain of a man whose teddy bear demeanor belied the tension in his trigger finger, and Jankowski, whose muscular frame seemed almost artificially grafted onto her small-boned body. Both had their pistols aimed at Faith.
Faith clutched Madison to her chest, one arm protectively encircling her daughter while the other hand sprinkled holy water onto the girl's back. The droplets caught the beam of sunlight on her back, momentarily glinting like falling stars.
Jasik's voice cut through the room's heavy atmosphere. "Put your hands where I can see ‘em."
"Drop whatever's in your hand and release the girl! Now!" Deputy Jankowski's command vibrated with urgency.
Faith's fingers loosened their grip, letting the bottle of holy water fall. It landed on the mattress with a soft thud, its label facing upward like an accusation. Sheriff Jasik's eyes darted to the bottle, his expression cycling through confusion to something darker—something like doubt.
"I count three victims on the floor!" Douglas announced, his voice cracking.
The scene unfolded with nightmarish clarity. Deputy Jankowski rushed to Grace's side while two medics lingered in the doorway like uncertain specters. Deputy Douglas knelt beside Hope before beckoning the medics forward with a quick, desperate gesture.
"Y'all just keep still now," Sheriff Jasik said, his Southern drawl drawn out thin by tension.
Faith held Madison against her with the fierce protectiveness of a mother wolf. "You're okay," she whispered into her daughter's hair. "We're okay." The words hung in the air, fragile as spun glass—a desperate affirmation against overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Deputy Jankowski stood up from Grace's body, her head shaking in that universal gesture that needs no translation. "She's gone."
“Gone”—the single syllable hit Faith like a physical blow. She felt something break inside her chest, a dam of emotion threatening to burst. But she couldn't fall apart. Not now. Not with Madison trembling against her, the girl's breath coming in shuddering gasps against Faith's side.
Madison’s brow furrowed. “She’s what? You mean… dead? W-what’s going on? What happened?
"Detain these two," Jasik ordered.
Deputy Jankowski approached, hands outstretched to separate Madison from Faith. Faith's muscles tensed, instinctively pulling her daughter closer. Madison cried out, the sound piercing the room's tension: "Mom!"
Douglas lunged for Madison, but she fought back with the wild desperation of someone clinging to their last shred of safety.
The metallic click of Sheriff Jasik cocking his pistol silenced the struggle. The sound carried a finality that froze everyone in place.
The living room of the house looked like it had been visited by a particularly vindictive tornado. Furniture upended, possessions scattered, secrets laid bare in the chaos.
Detective Woods stood in the center of this devastation, his barrel chest heaving slightly with each breath. He was early fifties, but his eyes belonged to someone much older—someone who had seen too much and processed too little, letting it calcify into a hardened cynicism that passed for investigative intuition.
From the couch, Faith watched him, her hands bound by handcuffs that bit into her wrists. She sat with an unnatural stillness, like a cornered animal calculating the precise moment to strike. Madison huddled beside her, wincing occasionally as a medic finished bandaging her bruised wrist.
Deputy Douglas stood nearby, his attention divided between his notes and the scene unfolding before him.
"This ruckus could make a preacher cuss," Detective Woods finally said, gesturing at the disarray. "Now... from what I've seen, we got us, uh, one deceased female with a knife, who is—"
"Actually, Sir..." Douglas ventured.
Woods continued as if he hadn't heard. "—twisted up like—"
"Actually, Sir..." Douglas tried again.
"—a pretzel, and—"
"Sir..."
Detective Woods turned his irritation on Douglas like a weapon. "I say, do you mind?"
Douglas cleared his throat. "The deceased, with the knife, it's a male... The teen obviously identifies as a—"
Woods cut him off, sharp and cold. "Did I ask for a lesson in political correctness!?" Woods's face flushed red. "You don't know what that person identifies with, other than the dead. Now, do you mind?"
Douglas retreated back to his notes, lips pressed into a thin line of disapproval.
Woods redirected his attention to Faith and Madison, the veins in his neck pulsing with barely contained frustration. "I have a deceased male, God only knows what happened to him, along with one female victim... Female, am I correct?” He shot a pointed look at Douglas.
"Yup," Douglas confirmed without looking up.
"One female victim, asphyxiated, another, who was stabbed in the back, multiple times, with pens." Woods stalked closer to Faith. "They were found in this house, in a room where you were discovered, and the place is an absolute shambles! Now, I might be willing to show some leniency if you tell me what really happened here."
Faith met his gaze, unflinching. "I already told you everyth—"
Woods talked over her. "You're lyin' like a no-legged dog. You got a lil' girl here to look afta, you may wanna—"
"I'm not a little girl," Madison interrupted, her voice small but sharp, slicing through his words like glass.
Faith shot Madison a concerned look—a silent plea to stop antagonizing the man who held their immediate fate in his calloused hands.
Woods leaned in closer to Madison, his smile thin and patronizing. "Coulda fooled me."
He turned back to Faith, invading her personal space until she could smell the coffee and cigarettes on his breath. "You can save yourselves a lotta aggravation, and me a lotta work, by just tellin' me, in God's name, exactly what the Hell went on here."
The moment was interrupted as two medics wheeled a gurney out of the hallway and through the room, the quiet squeak of the wheels cutting through the heavy silence. Hope lay motionless atop it, her respiratory mask lightly fogged—the only indication that she was still clinging to life.
"Hope!" Madison's voice cracked with emotion.
Faith placed a steadying hand on her daughter's shoulder. "Hell is exactly what went on here." Her voice had dropped an octave, taking on a resonance that hadn't been there before. She turned to Madison. "And we only have God to thank that we're alive..." Then back to Detective Woods. "The easiest way to say it is... Satan stopped by for a visit, and he wasn't welcome."
Woods took a step back, as if Faith's words carried a contagion. "You're tellin' me, some murderous person, up and stormed through here, like the Devil himself?"
Faith's eyes didn't waver. "What I am saying is, the actual Devil stormed through here!"
"My goodness..." Woods's voice dripped with contempt. "You're crazy."
"SHE'S NOT CRAZY!" Madison shouted, her protective instinct for her mother flaring up like a struck match.
Woods scowled at Faith, shaking his head with theatrical weariness.
Deputy Douglas's eyes widened with disbelief. "What's our next move, sir?"
"This story doesn't amount to a hill of beans..." Woods muttered. "Screw it. Take 'em both to the station and we'll proceed from there."
Like a choreographed dance of bureaucratic cruelty, Deputy Jankowski grabbed Faith, pulling her away from Madison while Deputy Douglas restrained Madison. Faith struggled against Jankowski's grip as Madison cried out, her voice raw with fear.
"Keep 'em apart," Woods commanded. "The young girl in your car, the mother in mine. Don't need 'em collaborating stories."
A mortician exited the hallway, wheeling a body bag on a stretcher. The shape inside was undeniably human, yet distorted—a warped sculpture beneath black plastic. The sight created a momentary shock, a collective intake of breath that provided just enough distraction for the deputies to begin forcibly separating mother and daughter.
"Mom!" Madison's voice tore through the room as she drove her elbow into Deputy Douglas's ribs and broke free, rushing to Faith's side and clinging to her with desperate strength.
"I've already fought for my daughter once, tonight," Faith said, her voice vibrating with a quiet ferocity that made even Woods pause.
"Sir! Sir, hold up!" Deputy Jankowski called from across the room.
Deputy Jankowski rushed up to Detective Woods, thrusting a cell phone in front of him. "Sir. I think you're gonna wanna see this. Knew I recognized the girl.” He pressed play on the cell phone's screen, and suddenly the atmosphere in the room changed.
The video yanked its viewers back into the room, the moment alive and writhing - the walls shifting as insects swarmed the frame, a churning, living mass weaving through the air. Madison knelt on the mattress, her body twisting, hands raking at her own skin. Thick, grey ooze slid from her mouth, too dense, too wrong to be saliva. Her eyes are latched onto Faith, who’s standing rigid at the foot of the bed, unblinking, unnervingly steady. An open Bible trembled in her white-knuckled grip.
As the video played, the sounds emanating from the small device seemed to fill the entire room—inhuman screams, moans, the buzzing of insects, and the violent banging of something assaulting the walls.
Madison's self-mutilation grew more frenzied. The mattress beneath her began to smolder and singe as Faith approached the bed, her voice clear despite the chaos: "You're not going to take my baby!"
Woods stared at the screen, the color draining from his face as his worldview twisted and buckled under the weight of what he was seeing. For the first time since stepping into the house, he looked at Faith not with suspicion, but with a raw, unwilling understanding. And beneath that, dark and curling at the edges—fear.