The curious, almost ritualistic, wounds upon Max Jervis’s corpse perplexed the county coroner: a mangled, right hand missing a thumb and three fingers; a missing tongue uprooted from the throat. The coroner did not linger too long in the consideration of those hurts. However startling those wounds, it was easily apparent that a heart attack delivered death. Regardless, the coroner shivered. He had heard one midnight on the radio a litany of beasts, occults, and serial killers, and the coroner dreaded to consider what monsters might stalk in the night.
So the coroner refrained from finishing the paperwork until the morning. The sense gnawed too disturbingly upon him that a foul magic clung to that night’s desert air, and even a scientific man would do well to write his words after the sun was afforded a little time to dissipate the fear palpable to the skin during the darkest hours of night.
For that coroner could not shake the impression that words themselves carried a power capable of summoning monsters.