Prologue — The oddity was the blood.
There was so much of it, pooled in minor depressions all along the flooring, the wood absorbing it, pregnant and swelling. The blood wasn’t everywhere and the walls were barely touched, but it was unrelenting on the room’s floor and it smelled in an unfamiliar way, like iron and rotting fish. In the room, the blood had settled half an inch at its deepest, toppling over and creating tributaries running throughout the small room. At its thinnest, it was dry and flaky and a fingernail could chip away at it. In other spots, it had coagulated, a sticky mix of platelets and protein that made the blood stretch like reanimated gum on a hot sidewalk.
In the room, there weren’t a lot of places for the blood to go because there wasn’t much room for anything at all. There was nothing on the walls. They were off-white with mild scuff, no furniture, no beds, windowless. The one light in the room could be turned on, and if you plugged in a television, it would turn on. No obvious fingerprints or drag marks or footsteps. The doors had been locked and there were no cars in the driveway, no oil on the ground, no tire tracks coming or going. Even though it was fall, it was still hot and if you wandered past the home — also unlikely for there weren’t any others particularly close — you would probably smell what the heat dredged up.
The blood had slowly arrived at one of two doors to the room, the entrance. At the other door, the one to the backyard, the blood had pooled; like a slug that left a dark red, dried trail in its wake, it found low points across the floor and at its deepest, it wasn’t yet dry. It was like this all over the floor. It looked like pudding, like any step would be into wet sand. One would gag on their tongue, try to press it through their palate to stop the smell in their sinuses. Pristine blood where wet, glistening and motionless like an open can of paint, foreboding where dry — how long does it take for blood to dry?
There was so much blood, it would almost be easy to overlook the most puzzling fact of all, the one that would most confound those who were there: There were no bodies.