4338.214 · August 2, 2018 AD
Cobwebs and Sirens
Every detective knows how to read a crime scene. The evidence tells a story — footprints, disturbance, displacement, trace. But what do you do when the scene has nothing to say? When the dust on the floor carries no prints except your own, and the cobwebs hang intact, and the man you watched walk through that door minutes ago has left less evidence of his existence than the spider in the rafters? Sirens are climbing the hill. Sarah has no answers for what's coming.
Three metres by three. Corrugated iron walls. A concrete floor covered in a fine, even layer of dust that shows exactly one set of footprints — Sarah's own, made just now. A rake on a nail. A length of twine on a hook. Cobwebs in the rafters, their filaments intact, undisturbed by any movement more recent than the spider that spun them.
No Karl. No Luke. No motorbike. No footprints except hers. No scuff marks, no drag marks, no tyre tracks from the engine she heard screaming less than two minutes ago. The dust lies in the same settled film it would have lain in if nobody had entered this shed for weeks.
She watched him cross the gravel. She saw his hand reach for the latch. She turned away for fifteen minutes — to clear rooms, to hold an old woman's hand, to hear a name that detonated inside her chest — and in those fifteen minutes, the shed swallowed a man and left no evidence he'd ever existed.
The professional part of her mind keeps searching for the rational explanation that has to be there, because sheds don't swallow people. But beneath the professionalism, in the place where instinct lives, something colder is forming — the recognition that what happened here didn't leave traces because it isn't the kind of thing that leaves traces. Sirens climb the hill. The world is coming. Sarah has no answers to give it.
