The Flayed Awakening

Chapter 3: The Old Case

As the Miller family investigation stalled with no substantial leads panning out, Emily became convinced they were dealing with the same depraved killer responsible for another infamous mass slaughter from decades prior. Her growing suspicion manifested into an obsession, spending countless hours digging through boxes of decaying old police files on the savage Peters family massacre from 1983.

Like the Millers, the six members of the Peters clan had been found butchered and mutilated beyond comprehension in their Black Ridge home. Initial newspaper clippings painted a haunting picture of the grisly crime scene discovered by a postal worker one humid summer morning - walls drenched in so much gore that blood had seeped between the floorboards.

Examining the grim black-and-white crime scene photos enabled Emily's imagination to vividly reconstruct that horrific night over 25 years ago. She could almost smell the rank, metallic odors as her eyes took in the severed heads mounted like plaques above the fireplace mantle, their lifeless faces frozen in rictus anguish.

Human bone fragments and shards of broken teeth lay discarded throughout the home, amidst the tattered remains of clothing and hunks of unidentifiable viscera. The savage overkill - inflicted by a blade, hammer, power saw, and who knew what other implements of torture - left little of the victims anatomically intact.

The photos chronicled scenes of true defilement: the crucified upside-down corpse with eyes gouged and blasphemous desecrations carried out upon the mutilated remnants...depictions so disturbing Emily had to pause periodically to maintain her professional detachment from the case's utter barbarity. 

What truly sealed her certainty of facing the same killer, though, were the bizarre and anomalous clues present across both massacres:

Like the strange trifecta of bound footprints found amid the sea of carnage - some abnormally sized and inhuman in their elongated, claw-like impressions. And the precise execution of ritualistic occult symbols literally inscribed into the victims' hollowed flesh with twisting, almost artistic precision.

But most chilling was the strong impression of a deranged INTELLIGENCE behind the bestial savagery. As evidenced by the bizarre crimson riddles sprawled across walls in Elizabeth Peters' own drained lifeblood:

"THE DAWN AWAKES WITH CRIMSON TEARS...DEATH IS THE PROMISE OF SALVATION'S YEAR..."

Lines of dark, twisted poetry that gave malign sentience to the lurking evil behind these mass sacrifices. An ancient, unearthly consciousness that had been roused from its cosmic slumber, hungering to be birthed in a new era of eternal blackness and shadow.

Just reading those haunting proclamations caused an icy chill to run down Emily's spine. She knew then she must confer with the one man uniquely positioned to offer more insight into the unspeakable forces they were dealing with - the former lead detective on the Peters massacre himself...

After months of pleading, the notoriously stubborn retired Detective Frank Mitchell finally agreed to sit down with Emily. Though over two decades removed from his life's darkest case, the horrors of what he witnessed that summer's night in the Peters household were forever etched into his psyche's deepest recesses.

From the moment Mitchell laid eyes on Emily, suspicion fought with the bitterness of a man who'd been haunted for far too long. He warned her in no uncertain terms about peering too greedily into the eternal abyss that dwelled within this case. Darkness, he said, that could consume anyone foolish enough to delve too far beyond the endurable limits of the human soul.

This wasn't just another serial killer they were pursuing, Mitchell gravely intoned over the clinking of ice in his crystal tumbler. No, the Peters massacre had been an ancient rite of resurrection...the spilled blood of innocents used to purge forth an ancient, unspeakable abomination from the bowels of mythic oblivion.

Despite all his years investigating every conceivable leap of sanity, Mitchell admitted being continually stricken by the unshakable dread that "the evil" they had unwittingly stumbled upon was not only malignly sentient - ravenous and immortal beyond reckoning - but fully self-actualized in its mission of extinguishing all light from the earthly plane.

Mitchell's words carried all the pained, wizened wisdom of having bore witness to that eldritch truth...of having survived an encounter with a presence not of this world, but whose very existence served to call into question humanity's tragic delusions of cosmic primacy. 

"If your ritual killer hasn't emerged from hiding yet, you can rest assured his reawakening is now inevitable," Mitchell warned, words as grave as his flinty eyes. His callused knuckles turned bone-white gripping the condensation-glazed rocks glass. "And once his spirits regain their former mantle of flesh... we're all just sacrificial lambs upon the altar."