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  Garret realized that it was a sort of case he has never dealt with before. The decapitation of the Saxon family and the apparently ritualistic layout of the crime scene suggested something sinister at play, beyond the horrible but mundane motivations of the typical psychotic murderer.

  After about ten minutes of incessant babble, essentially composed of questions by Garret, and several different responses that amounted to "I don't know," Garret had enough and said his goodbyes to the Coroner and Detective.

  A few moments later, he had successfully checked into the Motel 6. He only had two choices, the motel, or Ellen's Bed and Breakfast down the street. He didn't think he could deal with the inquisitive nature of an elderly or even middle-aged female owner of a residential property, so he decided on the motel.

  When he had inquired of the motel clerk for a good bar to get a drink, the clerk had just laughed and pointed across the road at the Starlight's End. "That is your one and only choice of bars in this town," the clerk stated. "It is a good thing that it is a decent bar because it is the only one we have."

  Since he was pointed in the right direction, it did not take him long to amble across the pavement and enter the bar's festive door. The sight of one beautiful blonde bartender and four customers who were all sitting at the same table greeted him.

  He ordered a neat Scotch from the girl and turned down her suggestion that he try the private label mead that the bar had available. The four customers indicated by voice and gesture that they wanted him to join them, and so, with Scotch in hand, he did exactly that.

  It turned out that the four men were an interesting bunch. The loudest one was someone named Wilber, who apparently was the host of a local conspiracy radio program. Oscar was a local Biologist, who worked at the local water treatment plant in the lab as both a biologist and a water chemist.

  Jonny was just a car salesman, but he had a sardonic wit and was especially self-deprecating when he mentioned that he sold used cars. The quiet one was named Ian. He didn't really talk that much, but his friends loudly proclaimed that he was the town's resident psychic.

  All four of the men and the bartending woman had traces of that Southern drawl that passes for an accent in East Texas. Ian and the woman had only a hint of the drawl. Oscar and Wilber had shed most of the accent, probably due to educational travels or intentional modifications. Jonny had a thick accent, indicating that he probably had been a resident of this small town continuously since birth.

  When they found out that Garret was an FBI agent, they made the connection with the murders earlier that day, and Wilber seemed to be very conversant with all the details of the case. Apparently, being a radio host included having confidential sources, both on and off the police force.

  "It is almost certainly a ritual murder case," Wilber proclaimed. "The only question is who or what is the ritual supposed to be about, and who the heck did it?"

  "Those are the issues that we are seeking to answer," Garret admitted. "But tonight is just about drinking."

  The conversation went on for a couple of hours before Wilber made his excuses and left the bar to host his nightly talk show. Shortly after that, Garret decided to call it a day.

  He did find out some interesting things. It seemed likely that Garret might find Ian, Oscar, and even Wilber useful in solving the case.

  It turned out that Ian had contributed to police cases in the past, and he thought that he had made contact with the responsible party by psychic means. Oscar was as close to a science geek as this town had, and he might be useful for analysis of substances and materials related to the case. Even Wilber might be a useful source of speculation of the 'thinking outside the box' variety.

  They were a friendly bunch, even Ian in his quiet way. It may not be so bad to be stuck in this little town for a short while, with a few familiar faces to talk to about things.

  After saying his farewells, he made his way to the motel, and in a matter of a few moments, he had settled into the comfortable chair that the motel provided, and was waiting for Wilber to begin his show.

  2 the second case

  April 7, 2019

  “Another one,” said Special Agent Garret when a police officer reported another of the unusual multiple homicides in their little One-Horse Town of Holden, Texas. This small town had no homicides for the last twenty years, until three days ago.

  Now the town had two multiple murders in three days. The strange thing is that both crime scenes shared the same Modus Operandi. They both had the distinct feature of decapitated murder victims.

  According to the Uniform, this death scene featured five victims, all members of the McIntire family. The first crime scene had only three victims, again a family on the other side of town. It was time to make his appearance at the scene.

  Garret drove the short distance to the McIntire home and ducked under the crime scene tape before entering the house. The situation that greeted him strained his usual composed and unemotional demeanor. Seeing the agent on site, one of the Uniforms met with him to fill Garret in on the details of the murders.

  Garret wiped his brow and wished that he could erase his memories of this crime scene as quickly. A family friend had found all five members of the McIntire family in the kitchen of their Ranch House this morning, all of them missing their heads.

  The horror of the missing heads was just a warm-up for the main course of details. Where the heads should be, someone had grafted the bodies of cephalopods, specifically Octopuses in their place. The term 'grafted' was being used to describe the situation because, while the Octopus bodies were initially sewn onto the necks, the two bodies were also growing together in some manner that nobody could explain. It was as if the bodies would become a single body in time.

  Garret had arrived at the scene about an hour ago. Everyone who saw the state of the family felt a mixture of nausea and mystery. The two teenagers with their heads replaced by Cephalopods were bad enough. The three-year-old girl was far worse.

  The door of the residence was standing open so that the Forensic team and detectives could come and go freely. Beyond the door, Garret could see shade trees, and hear the birds chirping their greetings to what little sunlight survived the drizzling morning rain.

  An intense atmosphere of despair pervaded this sunny morning. The situation could get anyone down, but this feeling seemed to be a force that was external to the minds of the people present at the residence.

  "Agent Garret," Officer Craton started. "As far as I can tell, the McIntires were all killed as they sat down to breakfast. If I were going to guess, I would say that they were sacrificed in some sort of ritual killing."

  "That is as good a theory as any," Garret returned. "Has anyone formed an opinion about the location of the heads?" That was one of the more troubling pieces of this puzzle. What would anyone use five severed heads for, and who would be sick enough to do any of this? Why replace them with the Octopi bodies?

  All around the house, the interior walls were decorated with a tracery drawn in blood, presumably that of the victims. It was some sort of macabre graffiti, resembling a spider web drawn in blood.

  Garret strolled out of the open door and stood under the eave of the house's roof. He lit a cigarette and stood there smoking, as he tried to decide whether he should go back to the office to update his case files, or not.

  Garret was shocked to have another grisly murder in the peaceful town of Holden, only three days after the first one. In the first killing, the Saxon family had been decapitated, but the heads had not been replaced with Octopods. That seemed to be some sort of progression in cult activity.

  There was a medium-sized crowd of neighbors and local journalists just beyond the tape. Chief of Police Harold Smite arrived at the crime scene as Garret finished his cigarette, and promptly entered the residence to check out the forensic scene. In less than a minute, he returned to the yard with a look of disbelief and urged the neighbors and local journalists to calm down and stay back.

  Garret speculated privately that it was some sort of an insane ritual. Whoever was doing this was following some kind of a cult, and it had only just begun. He reentered the residence and continued his inspection of the home for additional clues and evidence.

  Forensic specialists were busy searching the place for evidence of the blood and fingerprint variety. Garret began an examination of each of the family member's bedrooms in his search for additional clues.

  A police officer who just questioned the neighbors took a moment to give Garret as many details of the family as they had collected. They did not go to the same church, the kids did not go to the same school, and none of the details of their lives seemed to be common to both families, other than the fact that they lived in the same community.

  Garret slowly became convinced that the slain families were not connected. If there were no common trigger details, then the killer was likely not a serial killer of the standard variety. It was further obvious that the killers were targeting random families for murder. This was going to make it much harder to catch the culprit.

  Garret ordered the police officer who had filled him in on the case to search for anyone who dealt in octopuses, a rare commodity in this landlocked town. The Uniform seemed less than enthusiastic about the task, but he dutifully left the room to radio the request for information into dispatch.

  Garret stepped out of the house to catch another cigarette. He was just about to head back to the precinct when a roar of pure anguish came from inside the house. Sprinting that way, the agent saw Officer Craton struggling to restrain a slightly portly man who was doing the screaming, as the man tried to get to the bodies. He had already passed the crime scene tape, and his presence was threatening the sanctity of the forensic analysis.

&nbsp
; Garret tackled the man just as he seemed about to break loose from Officer Craton, and they held him down as the Officer affixed his handcuffs to the man. A couple of uniforms led the man away, as Officer Craton explained the situation.

  "That was Phillip McIntire, the brother of the murdered man." The Officer explained. He has just found out that his brother's whole family was dead, and I guess it was just more than he could handle. He will be taken down to the station, to cool down before he is released."

  "I can't say as I blame him," Garret replied. I doubt I could handle it any better if it were me."

  Garret spent a few more moments at the crime scene, putting the finishing touches on his notes. He pulled away in the Impala that the department gave him to drive, headed for the office. The car had developed a strange rattle in the three days that he had it; a rattle that did not seem to exhibit itself when he took it into the fleet mechanics to get it looked at yesterday.

  Harold was still at the family home as agent Garret pulled out of the driveway. He was wondering if he should do an end-run around the agent, and give the lead on the case to his most experienced detective, Detective Crawford, instead. Harold finally concluded that he should let it ride. Crawford was good, but he had never dealt with cults and symbolic murders.

  He suspected that the department would need to use every resource that they could field to solve this case. Having Special Agent Garret on the case from the FBI was a good start. Crawford had less than ten years on the Force, so collaborating with Garret could well be a learning experience for him.

  3 the group

  April 8, 2019, Monday

  Garret logged off his laptop as he reviewed what he knew about the latest murders. There were the odd but rational facts, and then, there were the bizarre bits, such as the fungus, the weird ritual involvement of the cephalopods, and the even stranger cellular growth of the cephalopod and human bodies in what seemed to be an eventual merger of the two.

  The Uniform that Garret had charged with the task of finding any potential dealers in octopi had reported that there were no dealers in that particular commodity found locally. It was not that far to the Texas or the Louisiana coasts. Theoretically, someone in the town could have acquired the cephalopods in a recent fishing expedition.

  Of course, the question of why the octopi were associated with the ritual killings was a far larger issue than the origin of the cuttlefish. Garret could easily chalk it down to the crazy idea of an insane mind, but even insanity usually carried its own brand of logic.

  Garret was leaning toward the hypothesis that the perpetrators of the crimes were from the outside, but they had to have some local help. The killer or killers were using someone’s information to slay his or their victims at the right time and the right place.

  There were too many common elements in both murder scenes for the killers not to be the same killers or at least members of the same group. The second killing could not have been a copycat killing, because the killer would have had to have information not released to the public, even by leaks, at any time up to the current date.

  A suspicion of police involvement with the murders was slowly growing in Garret's mind. If the second murder were indeed a copycat crime, the information source that would inform them of the necessary information would have to be a police source. That information had not been released to non-departmental persons so it could not be a public information source.

  There had been no real discovery on the part of the press of details, as they would have indeed published any articles with such juicy info if they had the facts. Even though there had been a momentary invasion of the press into the second crime scene, it apparently had not resulted in any case-damaging material.

  The behavior of the murderers in the face of police investigations screamed that they had a police channel of information. There was no information regarding the nature of the killings or details released by the police to the local public. No human being would be so cool in the circumstances without knowing the thoughts of their opponents.

  In the four days that Garret had been in town, the townsmen had changed. The whole feel of the place was darker, and it felt far more dangerous to be here than it did just three days ago.

  There was a sense of mass hysteria in Holden now. Panic seemed to fill the streets of this small burg to overflowing.

  Many, if not most, of the people in town, were changing on some fundamental level. They were not acting like themselves.

  The town librarian had beaten one of her customers unconscious with a shelving strut just yesterday, and she probably would have killed him, if the other people present had not taken action. The fact that they beat her unconscious in the process appeared to be par for the course now.

  Everyone in town awoke every morning with the same dream in their minds. Everyone dreamed about the corridor, the hooded worshippers, and the tendrils of darkness.

  Garret was no exception. He had awoken this morning with adrenalin pumping through his body, and scenes from the dream creating a sense of dread in him that caused him to wake in sweat every morning.

  He had listened to Wilber on the radio last night. Wilber had a show called 'Night Shadows' that aired Monday through Friday from midnight to 2 AM. He talked with guests about things like UFOs, Bigfoot, and other strange subjects.

  This show was obviously about the two murder cases in town, but it was not explained that way, and the public would not be able to connect the dots, never being privy to the case details. Garret had a talk with Wilber, and Wilber said that he would keep critical secrets from his audience. Wilber might be crazy, but at least his word was good.

  The show last night was all about the Cthulhu Mythos, which was supposedly created by H.P. Lovecraft. There were discussions by a Dr. Langstrom about the possibility that Lovecraft really just tapped into a genetic memory about a gigantic and very alien type of creatures that once was the dominant species on Earth, long before the dinosaurs, maybe even before the trilobites.

  In the discussion, it was reported that the only thing that was known to repel or in any way vanquish these 'Old Ones' was a strange sigil called the Elder Sign. Dr. Langstrom suggested that this was one of the few original inventions of Lovecraft, created to make the defeat of his version of the Old Ones possible.

  One of the things that made Garret sit up and take notice was the description of Cthulhu himself as having, among other deformations, tentacles protruding from his face, similar to the effect of the octopus grafts on the headless victims.

  Garret spent the majority of the two-hour show listening while he did Google searches for information about the Mythos that needed some explaining. By the time he was ready to sleep, he had accumulated far more information about Cthulhu than he ever wanted to know.

  After he had woken this morning, Garret spent most of the day at the motel, doing research online to try to crack this case, with only a brief outing to the precinct to pick up a file, and a few short telephone calls to keep up to date, and to coordinate the investigation. He made a personal note to look into telecommuting every day. It was a whole lot more relaxing.

  Even though the parallels with what was happening in the murders to the Cthulhu Mythos was stunning, Garret knew that it was all supernatural crap and that it was not real, no matter how strongly people believed in it.

  He could not explain the strange fungus or the dream that everyone in the town had nightly, but he knew that there would be a rational explanation for everything. He was sure that the shrinks would spout some psychological bullshit about the power of suggestion, or some such ridiculous process. Assuming you thought the Psychologists made more sense than the Supernaturalists, they would find a way to explain everything. That was the only tolerable trait that the shrinks had, in Garret's opinion.

  Assuming that one accepted the Mythos thought-process for a moment, the murders would be ritualistic attempts to summon one or the other of the Old Ones. No matter how silly the rituals were, the deranged mental states of the practitioners made them extremely dangerous.