Chapter 1
Everything was not over. Not yet. That night did not end with sirens or handcuffs or the illusion of safety. It only peeled something open. People think fear fades when the danger is caught, when the monster is named and locked away, but that’s a lie we tell ourselves to sleep. Fear doesn’t disappear—it settles. It embeds itself into memory, into streets, into the silence after power cuts. I kept asking myself why people reacted the way they did when his name surfaced, why voices dropped, why eyes shifted, why even the police looked uneasy. What kind of man creates fear that survives longer than his crimes? What kind of atrocity bends a city’s spine and keeps it bent for years?
Some said he was the son of Lucifer, that no human could do what he did and still breathe. Others claimed he was cursed, possessed, something summoned rather than born. But what I believe is far worse and far more real. People are not terrified because he is supernatural. They are terrified because he is human, and because no one ever truly knew who he was. No name, no face, no history anyone could agree on. Just a title that spread like a disease. The Martinus Butcher. Say it out loud and the room changes. Say it softly and you still feel watched. Thirteen years ago, that name didn’t exist. Thirteen years ago, it was created in blood.
It began with a head. A man’s decapitated head found mounted on a pole in downtown Martinus, positioned carefully, deliberately, facing the street as if meant to be seen, as if meant to speak. The eyes were open. The expression was frozen somewhere between surprise and pleading. No one knew who had done it, and before anyone could even begin to understand, the power across the city died. Streetlights blinked out. Homes went dark. Phones lost signal. Martinus fell silent in the worst possible way. That night, seventeen people were murdered. Not accidents. Not chaos. Treachery. Families slaughtered in their own homes, strangers cut down in alleys, blood smeared across doors and walls like signatures. By morning, the city was unrecognizable. No witnesses. No suspect. Only terror. And one survivor.
His name was Andrei.
Back then, Andrei was just a baseball player with dirt under his nails and a future that felt solid. He had just won a major tournament, his name echoing through the stands, cameras flashing, people patting his back and telling him he was going places. His parents decided to celebrate properly—a party out in a cornfield on the edge of town, music, laughter, bonfires lighting up the night. The kind of night that feels harmless when you’re young, the kind you assume will always exist. At around nine, his parents left the house to finish setting things up, leaving Andrei at home with his younger sister. The house felt calm, familiar, safe. They sat together in front of the computer, videos playing, jokes half-heard, rain tapping gently against the windows. Nothing felt wrong.
Then there was a knock at the door.
Three slow taps. Deliberate. Unhurried.
Andrei frowned. No one knocked anymore. He got up, annoyed more than cautious, and walked to the door. When he opened it, no one stood there. Just the empty porch, the sound of rain, and a thick red liquid smeared across the handle, slowly dripping down onto the floor. His stomach dropped. Before he could even process it, his phone rang. His mother’s voice came through shaky and sharp, stripped of calm. She told him to lock the doors, not to open the backyard door, to stay with his sister. Something in her tone made his heart start pounding. He turned around to answer her—to reassure her—and that was when he saw it. The room was empty. His sister was gone. The backyard door stood open, swaying slightly, creaking with each movement of the wind. And then the lights went out.
Something slammed into him from behind. The impact knocked the air from his lungs and sent him crashing into the wall. Fingers clamped onto him, unnaturally strong, and he screamed as he tore himself free and ran. The house transformed instantly. Hallways stretched too long, corners swallowed light, shadows moved where they shouldn’t. Heavy footsteps chased him, fast and confident, a blade scraping along the wall, breathing close enough to feel on his neck. He locked himself into a room, shoved furniture against the door, listened as something hit it again and again, the wood cracking, splintering. He didn’t wait for it to break. He smashed through the window and jumped.
He ran barefoot through gravel and mud, through trees that clawed at his skin, through darkness that seemed alive. Every sound felt like pursuit. Every breath felt borrowed. When he burst out of the woods and into the cornfield, music and lights and laughter collided with his terror. He screamed. He collapsed. Blood soaked through his shirt. That was when people started dying again. Two figures at the edge of the field were dragged into the darkness, their screams cut off so suddenly it felt unreal. Panic exploded. People scattered. And that’s when he found us. Jake and me. I remember his eyes—wide, frantic, haunted. He grabbed us and told us everything in broken gasps. Jake called the police without hesitation. It didn’t matter.
The crowd parted.
And the man walked in.
Tall. Silent. Carrying death like it weighed nothing. People rushed him, bottles and sticks and fists flying, but desperation is weak against intent. He cut through them without effort. Andrei saw the flamethrower near the bonfire, didn’t think, didn’t hesitate. He pulled the trigger. Fire screamed into the night and swallowed the man’s face whole. The scream that followed wasn’t human. It echoed across the field, across the years. The butcher fell. Sirens arrived. Red and blue lights tore the darkness apart. Police dragged the burning man away. Andrei collapsed into his mother’s arms, shaking, alive. The Martinus Butcher was captured.
Inside the station, the air stayed heavy long after he was brought in, as if the building itself had absorbed something poisonous. He was processed in silence. No resistance. No struggle. Just dead weight guided by hands that didn’t quite want to touch him. His face was wrapped completely now, layers of gauze hiding what fire had left behind, but no amount of cloth could hide the shape of damage underneath. Burned skin pulled tight, uneven, wrong. He didn’t look at anyone. He didn’t need to.
They sat him in the interrogation room anyway.
The camera recorded everything—the stillness, the slow rise and fall of his chest, the way his fingers twitched once and then went still again. Detectives rotated in and out, asking questions that echoed uselessly in the room. Name. Motive. Numbers. Silence answered every one of them. Not defiance. Not fear. Just absence. It was worse than screaming. It felt deliberate, like he knew that words would only make it easier for them.
Behind the one-way glass, officers began to talk instead.
Not loudly. Never loudly.
“He hasn’t said a word,” one of them muttered.
“He didn’t back then either,” another replied, flipping through older reports. “Thirteen years ago, same thing. No statement. No confession.”
A senior detective leaned over the table where files were spread out, some new, some so old the paper had yellowed. “He didn’t stop after Martinus,” he said. “He scattered.”
Someone pointed at a map taped to the wall. Red marks dotted it unevenly. Cities. Towns. Highways. “These cases were never connected,” they said. “Different jurisdictions. Different excuses. Power cuts blamed on weather. Deaths blamed on everything except him.”
“And the gaps,” another officer added. “Years between major events. Months between smaller ones. He let the heat die down.”
The room went quiet as the implication settled.
“He learned,” someone whispered.
“But martinus didn’t,” the detective said. “And after that, nothing. No confirmed kills.”
“Confirmed,” the analyst emphasized.
They all looked back through the glass.
He sat there unmoving, chains loose enough to allow comfort, tight enough to ensure control. He didn’t look defeated. He didn’t look relieved. If anything, he looked finished with something—like a man who had completed a task and was waiting for the next instruction.
“Why come back in public?” a young officer asked. “Why risk capture?”
No one answered immediately.
Finally, the senior detective spoke. “Because silence doesn’t mean stopping,” he said. “It means waiting.”
They moved him before dawn. No press. No statements. A transfer ordered quietly, signed by hands that hesitated just long enough to show fear. He was classified unstable, high risk, and sealed into a facility designed to make people disappear from public memory. No name released. No trial date announced. Just another file locked away.
As the transport doors closed, one officer lingered, watching through reinforced glass.
“You think this is it?” he asked.
Another officer shook his head slowly. “Men like him don’t end,” he said. “They pause.”
The transport pulled away. The city lights flickered once as it passed. No one noticed. No one wanted to.
Years later, when the power went out again and Bruce walked home through the rain, the police would remember that night. They would remember the silence. And they would understand too late what it had meant
