The road to the mortuary wound itself through the outskirts of town like a fatigued artery threading a body long abandoned by vigor, bending languidly through barren fields that had long since relinquished the pretense of harvest, until at last it arrived upon the lonely hill where the citizens of our small dominion had been planted in the soil like seeds awaiting a resurrection none of them would likely recognize.

  The place was less a cemetery than a melancholic estate of the passed over, its grounds divided between the mortuary house: a tall, grey, sepulchral manor whose windows watched the horizon with the patience of an undertaker awaiting business. Then there was the sprawling acreage of graves beyond, which extended outward in ragged rows like the broken teeth of some ancient titan gnawing slowly upon the bones of the earth. We could hardly see it behind the mortuary proper, but I intended on taking a stroll through before the evening was through.

  I guided the car along the harsh gravel drive with deliberate slowness, the engine murmuring beneath the hood like a tired beast resigned to one final pilgrimage. Beside me Gabriel sat stiff and silent, his thin hands folded tightly in his lap as though he feared they might betray some concealed guilt if permitted the freedom of idle movement. Above us the sky had assumed the bruised and purpling complexion of spoiled fruit left too long beneath an indifferent sun, while the wind passed through the dead grass in long whispering currents that sounded uncannily like the murmured cadences of a priest reciting the last rites over a coffin already nailed shut.

  I really love graveyards. They are the one province of the world where men are forced, finally and irrevocably, to tell the truth about themselves. Though the truth, in my brief yet intensely disappointing experience with humanity, is rarely flattering.

  “Hell of a place for an evening stroll,” Gabriel muttered, his eyes wandering uneasily across the leaning headstones that punctuated the hillside like periods in a particularly bleak sentence.

  “Not a stroll,” I replied, steering the car to a stop beside the mortuary steps. “An audit.”

  He frowned. “An audit of what?”

  “The Almighty’s bookkeeping.”

  The mortuary door creaked open with the protracted, arthritic complaint of hinges that had witnessed too many departures and too few returns, revealing the dim interior of the viewing room beyond. Inside, the air carried that peculiar chill unique to places where death is processed with bureaucratic efficiency: an atmosphere heavy with antiseptic vapors, quiet resignation, and the lingering metaphysical embarrassment of bodies that had once contained ambition but now hold only formaldehyde.

  White sheets draped several steel examination tables arranged in careful rows, each bearing the still and solemn silhouette of a woman who had once possessed opinions, grievances, and the tragic inclination to trust a world that never deserved it. I flicked on the overhead light. The bulbs flickered hesitantly with the reluctance of civil servants nearing retirement before finally surrendering to illumination.

  “We only have to look at four,” I said.

  Gabriel shifted awkwardly behind me. “You do this often?”

  “Exhume the truth?” I asked. “Not nearly often enough.”

  I approached the first table and folded back the sheet. Gabriel recoiled in abject horror, quickly turning to face the wall.

  Heather Sorrow, twenty-seven.

  Death had not done her the courtesy of beautification. Her complexion bore the pallid waxen stillness of a candle extinguished halfway through prayer, and her dark hair had been arranged by the mortician with a tenderness that bordered on futile optimism, as though the afterlife were merely a social engagement she had to attend overdressed. I examined the body quietly, my eyes wandering across the still geometry of limbs that had once been animated by breath and stubborn intention.

  Then I saw it.

  There are moments in an investigation when the mind sharpens suddenly into a blade of terrible clarity, when suspicion hardens into certainty with the quiet inevitability of a verdict pronounced long before trial begins. My gaze settled upon her ankle. There, carved carefully into the pale flesh just above the bone, lay a cross. Not a hesitant incision, nor the drunken slash of a panicked liquidator. The lines were narrow, measured, and exacting, etched with the careful cruelty of someone who believed the gesture possessed theological significance beyond mere brutality.

  “Christ,” Gabriel barely breathed out behind me, having seen during a brief glance backwards.

  “Close,” I replied, my voice low with the peculiar high that accompanies vindication. “But I don’t think he did this.” I replaced the sheet and moved to the next table.

  Samantha Patrick, forty years old.

  Life had etched its small humiliations into the architecture of her face: creases of worry, faint ridges of long endurance, the quiet cartography of a woman who had spent many years negotiating with disappointment. I examined the body with a short leash on patience, and sure as the sun will rise there it was. Crucifix ad absurdum, this one carved neatly into the inside of her wrist, its thin red lines intersecting with the same clinical, unsentimental certainty that had marked the first. The kind of consistency that detectives pray for and murderers usually forget to provide. I felt the quiet satisfaction of a man whose suspicions had just been baptized by evidence.

  I moved to the third table. Carmen Sandor, sixty-two.

  Time had vandalized her frame with its usual indifference, yet of them all, death had restored to her features a curious dignity, as though the long and exhausting quarrel between flesh and gravity had finally reached a negotiated peace. I took a while to find this one. Shoulders. Neck. Collarbone. Then I found it. Carved into the shallow hollow beneath the clavicle. Three declarations written in flesh like scripture composed by a prophet who had misplaced both mercy and reason.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Behind my shoulder Gabriel shifted. A subtle, skittish motion betraying the unrest gnawing at his conscience. “You think the preacher did this?”

  “Someone must have,” I answered with no ceremony amidst breath.

  The fourth table waited. I approached it with extreme reluctance. Oh God, I couldn’t.

  Lillian Ashford.

  Twelve years old.

  There exists obscenity in the death of a child that no amount of detachment could ever rid me of. Shaking, I did what had to be done. Her small form lay motionless upon the steel table.

  I examined the arms. Nothing. The legs. Nothing. Then I turned the body gently. I stifled a tear, sucked it back in the way it came. There’s no time for emotion, you old son of a bitch, wake up! I think Gabriel heard my thoughts, as he gave a small pat. It was there as I already knew, carved across the pale skin between her shoulder blades.

  I studied it for a long moment, not because I doubted what I was seeing, but because sometimes verity arrives like thunder rolling across the firmament of one's mind, and even the most seasoned man requires a moment to orient himself beneath the sound.

  Four bodies, four crosses, and I felt quite sure that if Ms. Cobb had visage remaining, we would find a fifth. Four distinct locations upon the body, as though the killer were composing some grotesque anatomical liturgy. The pattern was no longer speculation, but proclamation.

  I turned slow as a snail pushing another snail on a rock toward Gabriel.

  “Why did you bring me here sir?” He rubbed his body’s temple nervously. “I told you what I heard.”

  “No,” I offered my reply with little patience left in my bones. “You told me what you were comfortable saying.”

  His jaw tightened. “You’re imagining things.”

  “Am I?” I gestured toward the bodies lying beneath their thin shrouds. “Four women carved as biblical footnotes and you think I’m imagining things.”

  His voice rose, defensive. “I don’t know what you want from me, I never got his name, he was dressed in black with the fuckin’ white thing around his neck-.”

  “It’s a Clerical Collar dingbat. You say he put a gun to your head, made you hold onto some things for me. Then how come you didn’t just show me when I got there? Doesn’t add up,” Gabriel hesitated, and I loved it. Hesitation spoke volumes in between the subtle space of lies. “Alright, if a gun to the head is what it takes to persuade you.” I pulled quick as middle aged dexterity allowed. Barrel to head. I wasn’t gonna shoot him, but he didn’t need to be privy to such information.

  “Fuck man, okay, okay! Men who believe God makes mistakes tend to develop some fucked up ideas about correcting them!” His Adam's apple rose and fell with a swallow that carried more fear than spit. “You don’t understand!”

  “You’ve got about ten seconds to educate me.”

  “Jesus, fine! Just, p-put the gun away, please!” I wanted to laugh, maybe something is wrong with me.

  I stared at him for a long minute before slowly lowering my device of evidence-seeking. “Well, gun’s gone, get to talking.”

  The lamps in the mortuary burned low, the sort of sickly illumination that seemed less like light and more like a reluctant concession to darkness. Gabriel stood beside the steel examination table, his fingers resting upon its edge as though he required the cold iron to steady himself. I watched him, ready to pull again at any moment, but I could see that the man had not yet recovered from what we’d found carved into those bodies. Come to think of it, I hadn’t either, and I’m not sure I ever would.

  “There was a preacher here once,” his throat slickly eeked out. “Years back. Judah Isiel, he believed the world was… miswritten.”

  “That so.”

  “He preached things like creation had gone wrong,” Gabriel continued. “That God had begun something perfect, but somewhere along the line man had… corrupted the design. Bones placed wrong. Souls misplaced. Flesh out of order. Everyone in town got real uncomfortable with him, how he would always say things like if man is made for this plain then why is he so simple to dismantle, and well, everyone kind of pushed him out. No one wanted him around teaching their kids this crazy shit so he left. Hadn’t seen him in what feels like forever, I was just a kid then. So when he walks into the shop, its just this crazy blast from the past, crazy being the operative fucking word. He’s pacing, never in one spot for more than a couple seconds, and then I notice he’s got blood all on his hands, and he reeked of gas-”

  “Judah… would you say, I don’t know, his bones aren’t on right?”

  “What the fuck does that even mean? Look, I’m sorry for not telling you all this but the man is insane! He’s got my wife back home and said if I don’t- oh christ, Cheryl!” His eyes shot open wide, like a rabbit pinned in the tiger’s cage. In this moment, dialogue turned to psychic phenomena; through a primordial set of eye movements, we communicated the plan. Go.

  Evening had deepened in dramatic fashion while we were inside, and the graveyard now lay beneath a dim violet firmament where the first stars had begun their distant and apathetic vigil over the failures of mankind. It moved through the rows of headstones with the low mournful cadence of a funeral hymn sung by an inattentive choir. Then something caught my eye. At first it appeared insignificant; a subtle discord in the geometry of the cemetery. Graveyards are normally paragons of quiet order. Rows. Lines. Symmetry. Yet something about the hillside looked… disturbed.

  The earth before the nearest headstone had been recently turned.

  The coffin lid lay beside the grave in splintered ruin like the shattered ribcage of a creature that had died attempting to escape its own burial. Empty. We moved to the next grave. Same story, broken coffin, vacant interior. The next, and the next.

  Gabriel’s voice trembled. “Julius…” But by then I had already seen the rest.

  Across the hillside the graves had been opened in grotesque succession, their coffins shattered, their occupants removed, as though some nocturnal grave robbing archaeologist had arrived with an interest not in artifacts, but in the dead themselves. The earth itself appeared wounded, as though the dirt had attempted to keep its promises and failed.

  “Tell me something, Gabriel.” He looked at me nervously. I gestured toward the violated graveyard stretching across the hill like a battlefield after the looters have passed through.

  “In your professional opinion as a man of medicine…” My voice hardened into something colder than the night air creeping over those stones.

  “What exactly does a preacher intend to accomplish with a clique of corpses?”