GUILLOTINE

Chapter 2: Home Sweet Home

Finally I arrived. RedCliff is just as grey as I remember. It seemed like everyone was hiding at their houses trying to stay away from all the police stuff. The lights were off on most homes and cars were covered in deep, white snow. Although this, fireplaces were all working, and you could think that the huge smoke cloud that was coming out of the chimneys was hiding the blue sky that never existed.

Everything looked white, really pure and deep, but with nothing inside. A hollow white. A white that represented the space that everything you cared for occupied, but was now gone, and the only thing left was the space by itself... it felt just like me.

I couldn't help but remembering how I used to walk in this same street with mom and my little sis. I kept remembering... Mom brought us to play one winter day when snow wasn't as harsh as it usually was. I was fifteen, or fourteen, I'm not really sure, and I played snowball fight with Diana right there on the park next to our house. She was pretty little, one or two years old I guess. She would laugh and giggle when the snowballs I had thrown landed on her face and then would try to catch snowflakes with her tongue. I glanced at the playground equipment on the park and sighed. They were all covered in snow too, and kind of now looked rusty. I shook my head to take away those thoughts and kept walking.

Then I saw it, my home. It seem to be just as it always was, a small house with a red, pointy roof and blue walls, with lots of windows but just one door. I was looking at it when I perceived someone standing behind me. I turned around and I saw a police man wearing a black jacket. Actually, all his clothes were black. He wasn't taller than me, looked kind of old, and had no hair, making the falling snow create a small mountain over his head.

It made him look quite stupid, like a gnome.

"Good morning, sir." I shook hands with him. "I'm Alan Pitch. It's a pleasure to meet you."

I lied on that last part. "What happened." I said with no emotion at all, not even with a question tone.

Even if I was hurt because of mom and Diana being dead, that man wasn't going to see me cry just like that, I wasn't a crybaby after all. Little dwarf seemed a bit surprised because of my reaction, but I wasn't apologizing. After all, they did not save my family, I had nothing to be grateful for with these incompetent people. They were lucky that my actual target here was not them.

Tiny leprechaun turned around and led me all the way to the backyard without actually getting inside the house. Our backyard wasn't really a backyard, it was more like a really narrow space where my mother used to plant flowers while I chased insects. I just couldn't help but to imagine my mother there, taking care of the flowers that no longer exist. I thought about Diana too, she used to play there with me, and we would both examine the whole garden trying to find ladybugs. She really liked them, and thought they were lucky. I sighed.

There were two big things covered by heavy, wrinkled and dark trash bags. I immediately understood what they were. I felt really sick, and chills crawled down my back. I wasn't ready to see my mother and sister dead right there in the darn cold floor, but I wasn't retracting either. I took a deep breath.

"There is no damage in either of the two bodies." Explained midget man. " There is no sign of violence or abuse, it seems death was painless."

"Then what the hell did they die of?" I was starting to lose patience.

Lucky Charms guy breathed deeply. "Decapitation." He said after a short silence.

The word "decapitation" resonated on my head. I could have never expected that one to be the cause. I thought about gun shots, hanging, stabbing, slashing, drowning, perhaps even poisoning, but... decapitation? It just seemed way too dark and sadistic. A million questions came to my head, but I kept them to myself. Those were answers that I was going to find by myself.