Ke-style law enforcement officers

Chapter 15 Totem
Milo followed closely, carrying a kerosene lamp in one hand and a short stick in the other, adding an arrow-shaped scratch to the inner wall every so often.

Without knowing how long they had been wading through the water, Milo suddenly saw a faint light shining from the fork in the waterway ahead.

Milo immediately stopped, pressed the kerosene lamp in his hand into the rain, and held his breath.

……

Soon, Milo detected the sound of wading in addition to the sound of flowing water. Clearly, someone was moving in the water at the fork in the road ahead.

Milo stood still for a full minute, too afraid to move.

Only after confirming that no one was approaching the fork in the road ahead did he cautiously continue forward.

This area is where underground waterways converge, but very little rainwater flows down from the point where the waterways branch off.

Milo carefully moved to the fork in the road and peeked inside.

……

someone.

There were living people and dead people.

A relatively spacious area, about five or six square meters, has been carved out in this branch waterway. This area has also been raised slightly. The original location of this waterway seems to have been blocked, so rainwater on the ground has not collected.

This area contains some... well, toys?
Milo saw several dirty dolls, a few wet books, and a girl's clothes piled on the ground. These things seemed out of place in the sewer; they shouldn't have been there at all.

There is a fragmented totem on the wall behind, which was drawn with charcoal. The totem is very intricate and complex, and is drawn with many twisted lines. It looks like only a few lines in the lower left corner have not been drawn yet.

As for the living person, it was the strange man Milo had seen from behind in the law enforcement office. He was tall and was kneeling on the ground, arranging several candles in a strange six-pointed star shape.

Although she was wearing a very clean dress, her body had already begun to rot.

Most importantly, the girl's eye sockets were completely empty; like all the victims in the previous serial murders, her eyes had been gouged out.

The bizarre scene stunned Milo.

……

After arranging all the candles, the man took out a wooden comb and began to comb the dead girl's hair, muttering something under his breath as he did so, as if they were just chatting:
"Don't worry, little one, it'll be quick, very quick, Daddy will finish the ceremony... Once you're better, Daddy will take you out for barbecue, to church for your baptism, and I'll buy you any toy you want..."

In the dimly lit, enclosed space, the man knelt down and gently combed the girl's hair and tidied her clothes.

However, because the body was already decomposing, every time he combed it, the comb would pull large strands of hair from the girl's scalp.

The man acted as if he hadn't seen anything, combing his hair over and over again, pulling out strands of hair from the comb and throwing them into the puddle next to him.

Besides hair, the puddle also contained many rotting human eyeballs; the combination of these two things created a chilling visual effect.

……

If this scene were placed in a normal small room, it would definitely be cozy.

But this is a sewer, the girl is already dead, and the air around her is filled with the stench of decay. The father and daughter are surrounded by candles, making the scene extremely eerie and unsettling.

……

What's even more chilling is what happened next.

The man took out a palm-sized iron box from his pocket. After opening the lid, two bloody human eyes were revealed inside.

When Milo, who was hiding in the shadows around the corner, saw this scene, he immediately clenched his fists.

Fortunately, he managed to suppress the impulse.

Because he knew that the next step was the key to solving the mystery of this series of murders involving gouging out people's eyes, and he couldn't rush out at this time no matter what.

……

Then, the man knelt down and silently recited...
……

The man was reciting something that wasn't the common spoken language used in everyday life, but rather a mixture of archaic grammar, which roughly meant what Milo understood.

This wasn't the first time Milo had heard these words. The last time was at the scene of the carriage murder, when the church members brought by De Lashaw were reciting these words while praying for the two dead law enforcement officers.

It's clear that they have something to do with the Golden Rule Church.

Milo's eyes narrowed.

Could it be that the thief is crying wolf?
The church has consistently claimed that this series of murders involves evil religious rituals, even directly labeling the killer a heretic. However, now that the killer is reciting the Golden Rule prayer, Milo has every reason to believe that the killer is actually a member of the church, a follower of the Golden Rule, and that the church has been cleaning up his messes all along…

What benefit would the church gain from secretly directing and protecting a murderer who clearly appears to be mentally unstable?
What happened next answered Milo's question and made the hairs on his body stand on end...

……

The man kept repeating the prayer, "Blood of the Old Gods."

The eyeballs that had been stuffed into the corpse's eye sockets suddenly began to move on their own, and the positions of the pupils changed from being facing one side to being synchronized.

Then, the girl's rotting corpse began to twitch and writhe.

She bent one arm back to support herself on the ground, sitting up in an extremely contorted, mechanical way.

Because her posture was too stiff when she stood up, one of her eyeballs slipped out of its socket. However, before it hit the ground, the girl caught it with her left hand, put it back into its socket, and straightened it.

After the man saw the girl "move," his tone as he repeated the prayer became increasingly emotional, and tears welled up in his eyes.

The girl who had "come back to life" paid no attention to her father. She slowly stood up, walked expressionlessly to the back wall, bent down to pick up a charcoal pencil from the ground, and began to fill in the lines on the incomplete totem.

The rough charcoal pencil rubbed against the wall, producing an eerie, piercing sound that echoed through the sewers for a long time. ...

In such an environment, Milo's sense of security was eroded to the extreme.

The oldest and strongest human emotion is fear, and the oldest and strongest fear is the fear of the unknown.

What was happening before Milo's eyes was something he couldn't comprehend based on the worldview he had built up over the past ten or twenty years.

For a moment, he felt as if he had not entered an underground drainage system, but had somehow stumbled into another world called hell.

He couldn't understand anything he was seeing.

Why would a dead girl suddenly get up...?

What does that grotesque totem she carved on the wall mean...?

……

The eerie atmosphere in the sewers was taken to the extreme.

The man looked at his daughter's stiff, twisted corpse with eyes full of doting affection, seemingly unaware that his daughter was already a rotting corpse.

He kept repeating the prayer, a smile on his face.

The girl's body was facing away from the man, and she was repeatedly drawing and sketching on the wall.

Only after the grotesque totem was completely finished did the charcoal pencil slip from her hand and fall to the ground, never to rise again.

The man quickly picked up the girl's body, laid it back in the center of the six-pointed star, and then carefully gouged out the eyeballs that did not belong to the girl from her eye sockets, casually throwing them into a puddle nearby.

He gently stroked the girl's forehead, murmuring:

"It's done, it's all done. Baby, wait patiently. Daddy's going to find that gentleman now, and he'll keep his promise."

The man looked up at the ferocious totem on the wall, a glimmer of hope appearing in his eyes.

……

At this point, Milo basically understood why men gouge out their victims' eyeballs every time they commit a crime.

Regardless of who this "sir" he was, the man would place the deceased's eyeballs into the girl's body each time, and then let the girl's body complete the totem on the wall.

As for the exact function of the totem, that's something Milo won't know in a short time.

……

After arranging his daughter's body, the man quickly began packing his things, seemingly eager to see the "gentleman" he had mentioned.

Seeing the man get up and walk towards him, Milo quickly took a few steps forward, bent his knees, and plunged into the rushing rainwater.

The man did not notice anything unusual about his surroundings when he stepped into the fork in the river where the water flowed together.

In the pitch-black sewers, the man skillfully found his way and groped his way forward.

God knows how many times he had navigated this complex sewer system to develop such an accurate sense of direction.

……

Only after confirming that the man had completely left did Milo suddenly lift his head from the rain, panting heavily.

He was soaked to the bone, and the icy rain kept drawing heat from his body, causing Milo's heart to race.

He shivered, tiptoed out of the water, and approached the raised area where the girl's body lay.

The bright candlelight illuminated the girl's corpse, making the totems on the wall behind her appear even clearer and more eerie.

Milo tilted his head and pondered for a while before he could barely make out what the totem looked like.

The pattern formed by the twisted lines on the wall is actually the shape of a golden tree, somewhat similar to the tattoo that members of the Golden Law Church have on the inside of their forearms. However, the pattern on the wall is more complex and intricate, with some strange runes.

And most importantly, the entire golden tree totem is presented upside down, which is why Milo didn't understand it at first.

The vines hanging from the golden tree, after the entire totem was upside down, resembled the tentacles of some kind of creature, spreading upwards...

……

The simple design of the golden tree is recognized by everyone.

In the church's embellishment, the golden tree totem is a symbol of holiness and perfection.

However, the depiction of this totem presents a different, eerie, and distorted style.

Milo didn't know what the totem represented, but he memorized every stroke of it.

Because my subconscious tells me that the totem in front of me is definitely the key to the whole case. If the murder on the ground is related to some special doctrine of the church, then the totem is the key to solving the mystery and also the key clue to chasing down that "gentleman".

……

"Did you kill so many people just to complete this totem?"

Milo stared blankly at the totem on the wall, lost in thought.

But just then, a strange voice came from behind:

"Have you seen enough?"

(End of this chapter)