The stench was a physical, choking thing.
It wasn't just a smell; it was an assault. A thick, wet, thermal presence that coated his tongue and sinuses. It was the smell of a slaughterhouse, of hot copper and iron, of opened viscera, and the sharp, acidic tang of voided bowels.
It punched him in the gut, and his body gave up.
Thomas gagged, his stomach lurching in a violent, uncontrollable spasm.
He collapsed fully onto the damp pavement, his body curling as he retched. A thin, burning stream of bitter bile splashed onto the cracked concrete between his hands. He gagged again, a dry, tearing sound, his entire frame shuddering.
His eyes, burning with tears and bile, were squeezed shut.
'Get it out... get it all out...'
He spat, the taste of his own sickness mixing with the all-encompassing smell of death. He was trembling, his muscles weak and useless.
Slowly, painfully, he forced his eyes open.
He was in a small, dark clearing, a place where the carnival's festive facade came to die. The area was choked with refuse—broken wooden crates, discarded, oversized animal props with chipped paint, and piles of black, reeking garbage bags.
The only light was the pulsing, rhythmic throb of the carnival's neon, casting the entire scene in a hellish, strobing wash.
Red...
The light flashed, painting the scene in blood.
Blue...
The light shifted, casting a cold, clinical, morgue-like pallor.
Blackness.
And then the cycle repeated. The world blinked in and out of existence, a two-tone nightmare of red and blue that revealed the horror in agonising, fragmented glimpses.
His gaze, heavy and unwilling, was pulled from the puke on the ground. It was an instinctive, magnetic draw, his eyes lifting to the centre of the clearing.
'No... please, God, no...'
There was a shape. A man. He was lying on a large, dark piece of tarpaulin, as if deliberately presented.
The red light washed over him, revealing a plain, middle-aged man, perhaps in his fifties, with thinning brown hair and a soft, unremarkable face. Or... what had been an unremarkable face.
His mouth was stuffed with a thick, dirty cloth, gagging him. A wide strip of black tape covered his eyes, a blindfold. His simple, button-down shirt was gone, ripped from his body.
Then the blue light bleached the colour, showing the blood. The man's entire torso, from his chest to his waist, was... dark. A wet, glistening, impossible shade of deep crimson.
As the light pulsed again to red, Thomas's mind, slow and thick, finally processed what he was seeing. The man wasn't just covered in blood.
He was open.
He had been cut, like a pig in a slaughterhouse. A single, deep, precise, and horrifyingly wide incision ran from the base of his sternum, down his soft, pale stomach, and ended just above his pelvic bone. His entire abdominal cavity was splayed open to the cold night air.
The blue light returned, and with it, a cold, terrible understanding.
The man was still alive.
Thomas knew he was alive—the gurgling sobs had led him here—but seeing him, seeing him like this and still alive, was a different, deeper horror.
His legs were kicking. A weak, pathetic, drumming motion against the tarp. His head thrashed from side to side, the gag turning his screams into that wet, muffled, gurgling sound.
The red light flashed again, illuminating the hands.
She had tied them. His hands were bound together at the wrists, but there was slack. A foot of rope. A deliberate, calculated, diabolical allowance.
As the blue light pulsed, it cast a sterile, cold glare on what the hands were doing. They were coated in a viscous, dark slop.
They were inside his own body.
In the strobing darkness, Thomas saw it. The scooping. In his blind, gagged, absolute terror, he was trying... to fix it. He was grabbing at the slick, heavy, glistening grey coils of his own intestines, which had spilled out onto his stomach, and he was trying to push them back in.
The red light was merciless.
He watched, his mind numb, as the man feebly lifted a handful of his own organs. His hands were shaking so violently that the wet, heavy mass slipped through his fingers, plopping back onto the tarp with a sound—a wet, thick, slapping sound—that was audible even over his own ragged breathing.
The man shrieked.
It was a sound that shouldn't be possible, a strangled, high-pitched, wet wail that bypassed the gag. He plunged his hands back in, frantic, sobbing, scooping, lifting, and failing. Again. And again. An endless, agonising, private loop of his own disembowelment.
Thomas's brain simply... stopped.
The sight was mind-numbing. It wasn't just a murder. It was a performance. It was a creation of such profound, articulate, and intimate cruelty that his mind had no framework to process it.
This was not the work of a human.
'She's... she's not... she's a... a devil. She's something... worse.'
He thought of her words from the maze…
Even if it was true... even if this man was the monster she claimed... this? This theatrical, personalised hell? This was not justice. This was not retribution. This was... art. Her art.
And the tragedy... the absolute, crushing tragedy of his life was that, unfortunately, this wasn't even the most horrific thing he had seen her do.
'Too much. It's... too much...'
He had to help. He had to stop the man's suffering. He had to... move.
'Get up. Get the fuck up, T-Thomas.'
He tried to push himself to his knees.
His arms trembled, slick with his own bile, and gave way. He collapsed back onto his elbows. His legs felt like they were filled with wet cement. He was frozen. Paralysed. Not by fear, not entirely. By... by sheer, system-shocking horror.
He was just an audience. He was just the critic, frozen in his seat. He was paralysed, just as she'd always found so... fascinating.
'Move. Move. Move!'
He was screaming at himself, inside his own head, but his body would not, could not, obey. He was pathetic.
Click.
It was a sound. Sharp. Clean.
Clack.
It cut through the night. It cut through the wet gurgles of the dying man and the throb of the distant music.
Click. Clack.
Footsteps.
They were slow. Calm. Deliberate. The sound of a woman's boot heel on the pavement, coming towards him.
Thomas didn't have to turn. He knew that sound. He knew that pace.
The real Lilith emerged from the darkness, stepping gracefully into the strobing, two-tone clearing.
Her black dress was immaculate. Her long, dark red hair was perfect. She moved with a slow, reptilian grace, completely unbothered by the nightmare she had authored.
She walked past Thomas. Her grey eyes, unblinking, did flicker to him, just for a moment. It wasn't a glance of dismissal. It was one of acknowledgment. The glance of a performer checking that her sole critic was in his seat and ready for the final act.
He was just part of the set dressing for now. The audience. Her audience of one.
She stopped at the edge of the tarpaulin, standing over the convulsing, dying doctor. She watched him for a long, silent moment, her head tilted with a look of genuine, intellectual curiosity.
She was... studying him.
Her voice, when it came, was calm, light, and laced with that familiar, terrible, cold amusement.
"Hmm. Impressive."
She waited a beat, as the man's hands slipped again, another wet plop echoing in the clearing.
"That he's still alive," she clarified, as if to herself. "The will to live... it's just... fascinating, isn't it?"
Her voice was a soft, clinical hum, utterly detached from the abattoir she had created.
Her fascination was not for Thomas, not yet. Her attention was solely on her work, on the final, twitching brushstrokes of her masterpiece.
Already standing over the dying man, she crouched.
It was a smooth, fluid motion, a picture of impossible elegance amid the gore. Her black dress rustled softly as she settled beside the man's thrashing head. The flashing neon, red then blue, caught the cold, grey sheen of her eyes, making them glitter like wet, polished stone.
Her gloved hand, a precise, black instrument, reached for the tape over his eyes. She didn't rip it. She took a corner between her thumb and forefinger and peeled it back, slowly.
The man's eyelids fluttered, then snapped wide. They were pale blue, bloodshot, and utterly, animalistically terrified. They darted in the flashing light, uncomprehending, seeing only a blur of red and blue and shadow.
Then... they found her.
They focused.
A new sound tore from the doctor's gag. It was not a gurgle. It was not a sob. It was a shriek, a high-pitched, wet, unearthly sound of a soul recognising its devil.
His body convulsed, a violent, spastic arch of his back that lifted him momentarily from the tarp, his bound hands flailing uselessly in his own open cavity.
And Lilith... Lilith smiled.
It wasn't her usual, condescending smirk. It was a genuine, profound, ecstatic smile.
The pure, unadulterated joy of an artist finally seeing their vision understood, their message received. She leaned in, her face close to his, revelling in that final, perfect, absolute horror.
"Beautiful..." she whispered, a sound of pure, sated pleasure.
Then, her smile still fixed in place, she lifted her gloved right hand. She observed the gaping, red-lit cavity... and then she plunged her hand inside.
She drove her arm, wrist-deep, into the hot, wet, organic mess.
The doctor's body went rigid, his back arching off the tarp again, his muffled scream dissolving into a wet, choked, final pop.
A new, brighter gout of blood pulsed over her glove. In the cold night air, a faint, sickly-sweet wisp of steam rose from the obscene violation, curling around her black leather forearm.
She... swam her hand around inside him, her expression one of deep, tactile concentration, as if searching for something she had lost.
Her grey eyes, bright and alive, fixed on his.
"Maybe now," she whispered, her voice a cruel, intimate caress, "you've learned your lesson."
She leaned in, her perfect face just inches from his, her voice dropping so only he—and Thomas, in his paralysed state—could hear. "To keep... your hands... where they... belong."
She pulled her hand free with a thick, wet, sucking sound. Gore and bile and dark, stringy bits of tissue dripped from her fingertips.
"You'll have to practice that lesson in your next life."
Lilith stood, a smooth, fluid motion. She held her hand out, her expression shifting to one of mild, feminine disgust at the mess clinging to her glove.
She flicked her wrist, sending a dark spray of blood and viscera pattering onto the pavement near Thomas's feet.
Her gaze, cold and analytical, finally settled on him.
She watched him, still on his hands and knees, trembling, his body locked in that pathetic, frozen state. The artist's pleasure on her face vanished, replaced by a sudden, cold, critical fascination.
"This," she said, her voice sharp. "This... is what I don't understand."
She took a slow, deliberate step toward him, her boot heels clicking, until she loomed over him, a tall, black shadow against the flashing neon.
"This is what I find so... confusing about you, Thomas," she said, her voice laced with genuine frustration. "The chase... the puzzle... you're magnificent. You see the pieces. You find me. You're the only one who ever could. You are... fascinating."
She crouched, lowering herself to his level. Her cold, grey eyes stared directly into his. "But then... here. At the end. At the moment of truth... you just... freeze. Every. Single. Time. You become a... a spectator. Why? I... I don't... understand it. An artist... a critic... shouldn't just watch. He should... participate."
Her words were scalpels. They cut deeper than any knife, sliding past his horror and striking right at the core of his shame. She was right. He was a fraud. A coward.
'No.'
The thought was a raw, primal scream inside his skull.
'Not again. Not this time. Move. Fucking... MOVE.'
He channelled all of it—the horror, the rage, the shame of her words—into a single, burning point of will. He had to act. He had to end this. He had to stop her.
His body finally obeyed.
His right hand, trembling so violently it was almost useless, began to creep across his chest. It moved with agonising slowness, a pale spider crawling toward the opening of his dark jacket.
'Just... a few... more... inches. Get it. Get it. Get it...'
"This?"
His head snapped up.
Lilith was standing over him, no longer crouched. She had moved with a speed that defied physics, a black blur. Her bloody, gloved hand had shot out, plunging inside his jacket for him.
She pulled his own handgun free.
She held it, not by the grip, but pinched between her thumb and forefinger, the barrel dangling toward the ground. She held it as though it were a diseased, filthy thing. A piece of trash.
She swung it gently, a pendulum, in front of his frozen, horrified face. The strobing red light glinted off the wet metal, which was now smeared with the doctor's blood from her glove.
"This... was the plan?" she asked. Her voice was laced with a new, different kind of amusement. It was pure, unadulterated pity. "Oh, Thomas. They let their special consultant carry a weapon?"
She tilted her head, a gesture of mocking curiosity.
"But you're not a killer, are you? You're a finder. You just... sniff... sniff... sniff..." she whispered, a cruel pantomime. "You find the monsters for them. But you don't... stop them."
She leaned in, her voice dropping to that conspiratorial, intimate hiss he hated more than anything. "But think about it deeply, Thomas... what does it take? To really find a monster... if not another?"
A distant, thin wail cut through the night.
Sirens.
Lilith's head tilted. The smile vanished. A flicker of genuine... wariness... crossed her features.
The game was being interrupted by the rabble. She looked back down at him, her expression hardening, all business.
"The rest of the audience arrives," she said, her voice flat with annoyance. Her private performance for him was being interrupted. "How... utterly... boring."
She didn't hand him the gun. She didn't drop it. She threw it, a gesture of final, utter contempt, onto the pavement at his feet.
"Goodbye, Thomas," she said. "Next time... try to be more fun."
The sight of the gun, his gun, right there... it broke his paralysis.
A raw, animal sound tore from his throat—"NO!"—and he lunged. He didn't crawl, he dove, his fingers splayed, his entire being focused on that single, metallic object.
He never saw the kick.
He only registered a black, lightning-fast blur at the edge of his vision.
Then, an explosive, white-hot, deafening impact on the right side of his head, just above the temple. His jaw snapped shut, his teeth clacking together with enough force to send a shockwave through his skull.
The world... tilted.
The strobing red and blue lights dissolved into a single, grey smear. The ground rushed up to meet him, and his vision, his hearing, his very consciousness, faded, mercifully, into black.