The group of friends remained staring for a few seconds more and then, all at once, flinched from the gory sight.
It was Peter who spoke first. He said, almost in a whisper, “Is––is that––is this a real head?”
Alvin cussed loudly. “Jesus Christ! Jesus fucking Christ!”
Tara suddenly broke down in a panic and Dom sprang to give her his shoulder to cry on.
She said, between spasmodic fits of tears, “How can this be? My God—how?”
Jen was shaking from head to toe too, her eyes completely filled with numb terror. She sank down in a couch with the painful awareness that she was going to faint. But somehow, she didn’t.
Conversely, Carol held her head together, a spot of flush on each cheek, her mouth moving imperceptibly, saying, without a breath, “This isn’t happening… This isn’t happening...” She closed her eyes.
Simon and Dom were relatively unmoved, their full attention riveted to their respective girlfriends. Unlike Tara, Charlie didn’t seem in need of comfort and her levelheadedness did actually surprise Simon. Though her revulsion was strong, it seemed she couldn’t help but look on the horror in a daze, and maybe out of some morbid curiosity which was inherently human-bound.
Simon took the initiative to check on her. He said, “Charlie… Are you alright?”
She came out of her prolonged stupor, took a sharp breath and, straightening herself up, closed the cardboard box, thus obscuring the horrendous vision of the beheaded man. Then she staggered back from it all. Simon beckoned her to his chest and, wrapped in his protective arms, she finally uttered with emotion, “God… The poor man. What a horrible end.” She turned her head to meet Simon’s eyes. “You think… You think it was done while he was alive?”
“I don’t know, Charlie,” Simon said. “I don’t know.”
“I can’t believe it was done while he was alive,” Charlie said, shaking her head. “No one is that cruel.”
Simon said, tightening his arms around her, “Obviously someone has a cruel sense of humor, subjecting us to this horror.”
Charlie said nothing. Her thoughts were now haunted by the specter of the unknown man without a body. Unknown…
She quickly asked around, “Does anyone know who that man was?”
No answer came. The shock was still heavy on everyone. Some were shivering a little, though it wasn’t even cold.
“Guys…?” Charlie called to them in a raised voice.
Alvin replied, his hand clutching at his rubber ball, “I’ve never seen that man in my life.”
Simon said in turn, “Neither have I.”
Charlie looked at Dom and he slowly shook his head negatively.
When Tara’s turn came to reply, she looked as if, for a moment, her mind was gone.
“Tara…” Charlie looked searchingly at her eyes. “You know that person?”
Tara became herself again, though her head barely shook in answer. But it was a clear ‘no’. She didn’t know him, Charlie could tell. The reading was in her limp posture.
Dom prodded Tara in the direction of a couch and together they sat down. Carol, who had maintained her wits about herself, told them she didn’t have a clue about the identity of the beheaded. And Jen was in such a lethargic state that it took Carol some effort to tease out a response from her. Like the others, she wasn’t acquainted with the dead man.
“What about you?” Charlie finally moved her eyes to Peter.
With a straight face on, Peter gave the same answer as everybody else. Afterwards, he felt a little bad for lying to his hosts. They’d been so generous in their hospitality, and now he was abusing their trust in this incredible situation. He could’ve told them what he knew, but then… No, it’s just a small lie, he reasoned with himself. And they don’t need to know. They really don’t need to…
The severed head of a complete stranger had somehow ended up in the living room of the apartment… And the eight young people who’d found it didn’t know what to make of it.
II
“This is … this is a nightmare!” Jen suddenly burst out with a weeping impetuosity. Her emotional reaction was coming with a delay, driving her toward the edge of her sanity. Again, she screamed, “This is … oh my God … oh my God!”
Carol said, soothing her with comforting pats on the arm, “It’s okay now, it’s okay. I’m here. Calm down. It’s going to be all right.”
“No!” Jen sprang to her feet, as if in need to exert herself physically. “It’s not okay! There’s somebody’s fucking head in my lounge! How’s that okay, huh?” She then drew herself away to stand by the kitchen doorway. Carol followed her.
Dom said, “How did that get in here anyway? I mean, this is insane!”
Charlie said, addressing Carol, “Where did you say you found it?”
Carol, striving to get Jen to settle down, pointed to where she had found the box. She said distractedly, “I told you: behind that chair, by the window.”
Charlie broke away from Simon’s protecting arms and started toward the designated spot. Simon swiftly caught her hand. “What are you doing?”
“I just want to take a look.”
Her answer stumped him. His brow furrowed in disapprobation. Before he could voice it, Carol said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?” Alvin asked, swallowing. His throat moved tensely as he did. At the moment, wild thoughts were swirling in his mind, so fast he couldn’t access the analytical part of his brain. That’s why he repeated, “Why it is not a good idea?”
Carol said, pulling a chair for Jen to sit, “She’s going to compromise the integrity of the crime scene.”
“Crime scene?” Dom said, in a tone of bewilderment. If it weren’t for the horrific nature of this whole affair, he would’ve openly laughed out at the notion of the apartment becoming a crime scene.
But Carol wasn’t talking lightly. She said again, “Yeah a crime scene, you know. The police are going to come in and everything must be left untouched until they arrive.” She paused and looked around the living room. “This place is a mess already, trampled over on its entire surface. If there’s any evidence in here, then it’s probably contaminated already, so let’s not touch anything until they arrive, alright?”
Peter said, “How will they get in? There’s a problem with the door, remember.”
Carol located her cell phone and said, “Oh for this, they’ll figure a way in.”
Disregarding Carol’s recommendations, Charlie walked over to the discovery spot and began poking around the chair behind which the cardboard box had lain.
Carol narrowed her eyes.
“Charlie…” Her voice was hard, compelling Charlie to lay off.
Charlie said, in her defense, “Just a minute; I won’t touch anything.”
Carol shook her head disapprovingly. Charlie was as strong-headed as she herself was. And even though they’d become intimate friends through Jen’s intervention, Carol had always had the impression that their temperament was naturally irreconcilable. Looking at her cell phone cradled in her hand, a tight look came on her face.
“Goddamn it,” she said to herself, suddenly remembering that her phone’s battery had run out of juice the night before. “My battery’s dead,” she announced to the group.
Alvin said after a moment, “Okay, I’ll make the call.”
He was feeling able and willing to get a grip of himself along with the situation.
He was about to use his own cell phone when Dom muttered hesitantly, “Gee… I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
Alvin looked at Dom, making an effort to understand him. Dom took back his arm from around Tara’s shoulder and frowned.
He said, “This whole thing is––something’s not right about this.”
“What do you expect?” Alvin said. “We just found someone’s fucking lopped-off head in a godda
mned box.”
Dom said, his eyes flashing with a sudden intelligence, “My point exactly. How is it that we wake up to find the head of a perfect stranger right in the middle of the apartment, huh? I mean, think about it. Doesn’t it strike you as odd? It certainly does to me. I mean what if it’s some kind of setup?”
“A what?” Tara managed to say while the assumption got everyone else quietly pondering about it, except Carol, who was flatly dismissive of the theory.
She said, in a jerk reaction, “That’s idiotic. You should listen to what you’re saying.”
Tara quickly agreed. “Yes, yes. That’s carrying things a bit too far.”
But Dom persisted in his reasoning with the readiness of an underdog fighter.
He said, “What if we hadn’t found it when we did? Or were we even supposed to find it?”
Tara said with a faint sob:
“What does it even matter now? What are we even talking about here?”
Dom said nothing; Tara was still very much in shock. No point in upsetting her further. He waited a second or so and simply added, “I just think it’s too weird; that’s all I’m saying…”
There was silence. Alvin proceeded to dial the police number but stopped again. Charlie, who’d been keeping to herself in her poking around, had ferreted out something noteworthy on a table lamp. She called it out. “Guys… You should come see this.”
In a few strides, they all regrouped around her and she pointed at a section of the lamp shade. On it was a dried blood smudge of a meandering shape.
III
They stood staring at the blood on the lamp, some bemused, and some stupidly awe-stricken. But surely, even if none of them demonstrated as much, they were feeling increasingly insecure with each passing second. The bewilderment of this new find gone, they began to look at each other.
Tara said, in a hoarse whisper, “I think we should just get out of here! ”
The feeling was almost unanimous with one reluctant voice from Dom, who said, “Shouldn’t we find out first if there’re any more surprises like this? I mean this is getting weirder and weirder.”
“You don’t say,” Charlie said, mentally making inventory of her facts.
The trash bag containing the man’s head was bloodstained on the inside, hence leaving the interior of the cardboard box unstained. That explained why the box wasn’t dampened with blood. And if one of the party guests had somehow wounded themselves last night, it would’ve been known. So how come there was blood on this table lamp shade? Only a ‘breaking and entering’ could tally all this.
She suddenly asked, “Who was the last person to be up last night?”
“I guess that would be me,” Jen said after a moment of hesitation. “I went to bed at around one o’clock.”
“And was the front door locked?” Charlie asked again.
Jen nodded, “Of course!”
Dom immediately turned to Tara. “Hey babe, what time did you say you went out?”
“What?” she said. She was still a little distraught by the events.
Dom repeated slowly, “Did you go out onto the terrace before or after one o’clock?”
Tara rubbed her eyes with shaky fingers, trying to rub her mind out of its inertia.
She said, “Huh… I don’t know––after one I guess. But the front door was always within my sight. And I locked it when I came back in.”
“Are you sure?” Charlie asked.
“Yes. I even checked the windows to make sure they were closed.”
Carol, who’d been restlessly shifting from one foot to the other, made a contribution to the discussion. She addressed Charlie with controlled irritation. “Look, Jen and I were the first to wake up this morning and everything was closed. Now where is all that getting us? We’re wasting time here.”
“I’m simply asking questions.”
“I’m sorry, but I just don’t see the point of that.”
Her voice was quite contentious and her face was working rather tensely.
Simon interceded like a watchful arbitrator. He said, “Alright now, time out!”
He took Charlie aside.
“I can sense something’s bothering you,” he said. “What is it?”
Charlie looked at him; then she looked down at the floor. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just have this feeling I can’t shake; I … I cannot explain it.”
But she could explain the feeling all right. It was the same cold thing knotting her stomach muscles she’d felt the night her father had been wrongly taken away. And she feared the past was about to repeat itself on this day, but this time in a twisted version.
IV
Alvin reflexively thumbed away at his cell phone’s keypad. Charlie saw it and quickly came at him, raising her hand.
She said, “Wait a minute, hold it.”
He’d already dialed in the police number, but he held off pressing the “call” button.
“What for?” he said. “We have to report this mess.”
“And say what exactly?”
Charlie’s question sort of took him by surprise and he hesitated to answer.
“Well…” Carol said in his stead. “We’ll tell the police what happened.”
Taking the floor, Charlie said in a measured tone, “We don’t know what happened. We don’t know how this poor man’s head got here. I mean the windows were closed; the apartment wasn’t broken into. His presence in this room simply doesn’t make any sense. And now, there’s the blood. So why would the police believe anything we say when it’s unbelievable?”
Alvin recovered his voice and said at once, “Because it’s the truth! No one in this room knows the victim. It just happened that we found him. And that’s the story.”
“And I still don’t believe it myself,” Dom said, shaking his head.
“Believe it or not, this is it.”
Dom’s face stiffened at the curtness in Alvin’s words. He paid no heed to it though. They were all faced with a terrifying situation.
“I can’t believe this is happening to us…” Jen murmured. “I can’t.”
“Listen,” Simon said, opening his mind to an idea, “maybe … maybe this happened during the hours of the party last night.”
“How?” Tara said.
“I don’t know. But if we assume that the murder was committed elsewhere, to me the party offered the only time window that could allow the culprit to slip the box into the apartment with relative ease. It was a party after all, it wouldn’t be something unusual if, say, an intruder dropped it off as a gift and then ran out.”
Jen contended, “Except there wasn’t such a thing as an intruder.”
“You can’t be sure. With all the people we had in here…”
“I know,” Jen said, her chin going up. “Carol and I sent out the invites ourselves. And Tara helped too. And I’m telling you, no one that I didn’t know or recognize set foot in this apartment.”
“Well,” Simon said with a shrug, “that leaves us with the other possibility then…”
“Wait a minute,” Tara said, an expression of absolute disbelief flitting across her face. “You think one of the guests could’ve done this?”
“The thought crossed my mind, yes. I guess it’s a possibility.”
Dom said with tact, “Yeah, I don’t see any other explanation.”
“This is absolutely insane!” Jen threw her body backward from the shoulder in disdainful rebuttal. Her slender finger flicked from left to right at Simon and Dom.
She said, “I think you two Sherlocks have been reading a lot of kooky detective stories.”
Simon didn’t like her tone. He said, managing to sound passionless, “Everything is possible, isn’t it?”
Alvin made a suggestive gesture toward Simon. He said, “Come on, man, seriously, we’re not talking about some nobody here. We’re talking about friends, schoolmates. People we know. We go to school w
ith them, hang out in the same joints. You’re not going to tell me that one of them suddenly turned into a cold-blooded, machete-wielding butcher overnight.”
Alvin looked at Charlie as he spoke and saw that she was agreeing. When he was finished, she concurred:
“Maybe it’s a little bit too farfetched.”
Simon added nothing more. He suddenly felt embarrassed by such incongruity in his line of thought. He swallowed quietly and resolved to think twice next time before placing in another comment.
Carol passed him up and cut everyone to the quick. She said, “It’s not up to us to determine who may or may not be responsible for this. This is way bigger than us, guys, and we’re not even remotely fit to handle this thing. It’s just … it’s … it’s too much. And the why and how it happened, we’re not going to solve that by ruling people out on the sole basis of our best judgment.”
Jen gave Carol a curious look as if her dispassionate speech had stung her. She said to her, “You don’t really think one of the people who were here…”
“Doesn’t matter what I think, Jen,” Carol said, her voice carrying less authority. “What matters is that we do the right thing and calls this in now.”
In response, Charlie said, “Look, it seems to me that there’re a few things… maybe they don’t mean anything but––”
“—What things?” Carol said. “What are you talking about?”
She looked slightly annoyed at all the unnecessary prattle. Charlie perceived it but went on regardless and with her temper intact.
“That thing with the head for instance,” she said. “I mean, I can buy the theory that it was done elsewhere and someone, somehow, got it in here. It’s plausible. But the bloodstain we found out may also well indicate that something, at some point last night, went down within the walls of the apartment…”