The Killer Among Us

Chapter 17

Thirteen days left

Jacob

With the flashlight of my phone, I looked around the grimey apartment. It looked like no one had been there in ages. Dust covered all the surfaces of the one room apartment, soot littered the hardwood floors. There was all sorts of equipment, such as tools, ropes, chemicals, lying around and all of it was rusty and old.

There were no personal belongings to be found anywhere, nothing to find out whose apartment this really was.

"What the actual -" I muttered silently when I finally moved the light to the wall at the end of the room.

It was lined with an endless amount of pictures, pictures of my little sister.

Bile rose in the back of my throat when I took a closer look at them, filling my mouth with a foul taste. Some were fairly innocent, showing her outside, with friends or at work. Some were haunting, depicting her asleep, inside of her own home and even nude.

My vision became tunneled, focusing on the horrible images in front of me. No matter how hard I tried to look away, I couldn't. How long had he been surveilling Aria?

Above me, the faint sound of a somber piano was playing quietly, adding to my already high level of alarm.

In my confusion and rage, I tore the pictures off the wall in a few heavy motions, leaving me out of breath by the time they covered the floor. My body was screaming in exhaustion and the weight of the situation made me weak, tired.

I let my body slump to the floor, causing a loud bang to blow through the room. The pain that initially ran through me only intensified and for the first time in a long while, I wept.

Curled up in a ball on the floor of the apartment of the person who abducted my little sister, I wept like I never wept before.

"I can't -" I cried, "Please."

Slowly but surely, truck loads of pent up emotions fell off me and it felt good - I felt alive.

As I was lying there, throat sore and body aching, I suddenly noticed a sort of curved scratch in the wood, just in front of the wooden wardrobe that stood casually beside me. Immediately, I stopped weeping, my focus now on the ominous scratch on the floor.

"Someone moved this," I voiced my suspicion to myself.

Curious, I forced my body to get up and tried to move the wardrobe. It took significant strength and at first it wouldn't budge but when it eventually did, it caused a screeching sound to ring in my ears.

Behind it was another door and my body froze in panic. Would something even more terrifying be hidden behind that second door?

Slowly I reached out to the copper door knob and twisted it. It was cold to the touch. With a soft creak, the door opened and I shone my flashlight inside. My entire body was shaking in fear, my breathing was hitched. The eerie atmosphere that hung heavy in the apartment pressed down on my soul, making me feel heavy and terrified.

Even with the flashlight, it was hard to see what was in the room and so I hesitantly felt out for a light switch along the dark walls inside. Luckily, I found it without much difficulty.

Fluorescent lights illuminated the tiny room in short, quick pulses. When the light finally steadied and my eyes adjusted to the blinding, unnatural light, I saw something that still haunts my dreams.

In the middle of the room stood a wooden chair, drenched in dry blood. Some of it was splashed in heavy drops on the tiled floor, some of it even reached high up the tiled walls.

"What the hell is this?" I whispered in shock.

Metal shackles were lying on the ground, just next to the chair. They were rusty but, just like the rest of the room, covered in dried blood.

It felt like the longer I looked, the more gruesome details my eyes picked up.

There was no denying that this truly was the snake's pit. But where was the snake?

More importantly, where was Aria?

If that was her blood staining the entire room, she couldn't possibly be alive - that was for sure. The blood was dry and cold, however, giving me hope.

Banishing that horrendous thought from my mind, I took a deep breath and stepped further into the room. My feet stepped into something, but I didn't dare look down, nausea was threatening to put a halt to my investigation if I did.

In the right corner of the surgical room, I suddenly recognized a blood-stained hacksaw, purely because its silver blade reflected in the light. My stomach rumbled, warning me of the vomit that was pushing its way up.

Normally, I wasn't squeamish but the faint rancid smell of decaying flesh stung in my nose.

"This is insane," I mumbled in disbelief.

Once again holding up my phone with a shaky hand, I took some pictures of the room. Part of me wanted to document what I saw, part of me wanted to make sure I wasn't dreaming.

Having had enough of the sight of this, I turned around to leave the room. But before I went to turn off the light, I rotated my body one more time to make sure that I didn't miss anything.

Terror hit me like a bullet when I suddenly saw what looked like a finger lying in the pool of blood next to the wooden chair. I closed my eyes for a second and let out a groan before approaching the pool of blood and kneeling down next to it to get a proper look on the finger.

When I touched it, I realised it was cold, blue and must have been decaying for quite some time now. Picking it up, there was quite a bit of resistance, the dried blood clinging it to the ground.

"This can't be Aria's," I assured myself. But really, I had no way of knowing whose it was.

As I held up the cut-off limb closer to my face, the stench of rotting flesh penetrated my senses. I recoiled in disgust when I suddenly realised that the fingernail of what I presumed to be a pointer finger was painted with a purple nailpolish. The reality of that punched me in the gut. It was the last straw for me, the drop that made the glass overflow, and the shade of purple nailpolish was ingrained in my mind forever.

Immediately, I dropped it, running away from the scene.

My composure finally crumbled. Looking back, I wish I had put everything back in its place but instead I left the doors wide open and sprinted away.

Finally, the cool air of the night soothed my nausea and the running tore at my muscles but anything was better than that smell, that smell of death and decay.

I ran through the neighborhood with all the might I had left - it almost felt like I was flying. The wind carried me, my feet eating up the distance between the apartment and my car.

Once I reached my car, I struggled to hold the keys steady, dropping them to the floor in my panic. When I finally succeeded and opened my car door, I sat inside and locked the car quickly. Then, without warning, my lungs released a scream I wasn't aware I was holding in and for the second time that day, I wept.

Slowly but surely, exhaustion lulled me into a deep sleep and just like that, another day ended.

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A little bonus chapter because you guys were so active lately :) I hope you enjoyed this. When I was writing this chapter back in January, I felt the nausea Jacob was experiencing at the horrid smell myself and I took a few breaks during the writing process. I guess that's the fun of writing a murder mystery, haha. 

Please let me know how you liked this chapter and leave a vote! Also, for any questions or inquiries, please write me a personal message or dm me on instagram. My instagram is meggie.ebel :)

A special thank you goes to @Hopemarie1141 for diligently voting and engaging with this story! I am so, so grateful and I hope you like the rest of the story as well.