Hey everyone, welcome back to Short Story Sunday. It’s been a while since I’ve done one, but here we are. Hope you enjoy.

The Maze

Detective Carter Henry had been on the job for twelve years now. It had been a long stint, but it was completely worth it. The countless cases he had solved, the lives he had saved, the families he had brought closure to, & all the people he had met along the way. It all made the job worth doing. The Detective still remembered the day he had been promoted to this very special position. He had been a regular cop for five years before he had been recognized as one of the best, & had subsequently been handed a detective’s badge with his name & face on it. The detective job had always been his dream. As a kid on the streets, he had played games with his friends, many a day pretending to be a skilled detective. And now here he was, twelve years in & still going strong. Mind you, it did take a slight toll on his mentality at times. There would be late nights & early mornings, days where he was downing coffees just to keep himself awake. And then there were the cases.

Some of the cases Detective Henry had worked were light, & there wasn’t too much in them. They were relatively clean & simple. But then there were the ones which were harsh, confronting, something else entirely, a world apart from the others. There had been some really brutal ones. Crime scenes from hell. Places soaked in the blood of innocent victims. Although there had been a few cases where the victims weren’t always innocent, but they were few in number. The thing about being a detective was that you had to be ready to face absolutely anything. You had to mentally prepare yourself. You had to have garnered complete control over your emotions. It was absolutely essential. However, for Detective Henry, one who had capably centred his emotional & mental state, there had been a few cases that were simply too much. The crazed lunatics who had created these crime scenes had gone way overboard. It seemed as if these criminal had absolutely lost their minds. Yet they were still found, prosecuted, & locked up thanks to the Detective. Because whilst the job wasn’t always pretty, it had to be done.

Of all the cases the Detective had seen, nothing could have prepared him for the one he had just been assigned. He had been through a lot in his life, & seen a multitude of crime scenes, some similar in nature, some different. But this one was exquisitely unique. It was something that only a delusional mastermind could accomplish. The Detective was out on a fifty acre block of land. Now on any other day, he may have found a nice big house, maybe some animals living out in the remainder of the land, or maybe even a community building, or a theme park, or anything other than what he was looking at right now. In front of the Detective was a giant maze. Cut from deep green hedges which were at least seven metres tall, and spanning at least three quarters of the block of land, it was like nothing he had ever seen before. This was allegedly something which needed to be investigated due to its unnatural & mysterious nature. And there he was, standing at the entrance. There was only one way to investigate, & that was to enter the maze. And so into the depths he stepped.

The Detective followed the maze around for about three minutes before he came to an intersection. He chose to veer right. After continuing on for another two minutes, he noticed something different about the small leaves on the hedge to his right. Their colour was dissimilar to the rest of the maze, or at least what he had walked through so far. They were a deep red. He took a closer look, reaching out & lightly touching this part of the hedge. He rubbed some of the leaves between his forefinger & thumb, attempting to determine if they had a different texture. As he pulled his hand away, he looked down, & noticed a section of the ground he was standing on was also a deep red in colour. He knelt down, reached inside his coat & pulled out a torch. Shining the torch into the hedge, he began to notice something inside it. He decided to reach in, just to check if something was indeed hidden inside the leafy walls of this maze. He could feel something soft in the hedge. He got a grip on it & pulled it out. As soon as the Detective saw what it was, he immediately dropped it. His eyes had widened, his jaw dropped. He felt feint. He thought he could pass out at any moment. This was pure evil.

What the Detective had seen was truly horrendous. Whoever had done this had been completely corrupted by all forms of evil. He knew he had to call this in right away. He had to get a team out here. A search team, a forensics team, the whole nine yards. This was not something which could just be done by one experienced Detective. It was so much bigger than that. For what this humble Detective had just seen, what he had just physically held, was the work of nightmares, something he would never wish upon any other human being. It was worse than being in a horror film. This practically was one. The Detective, going against all his better instincts, glimpsed down once more just to be certain this was real, that what he saw was actually there. And sure enough, there it was, a severed human head.

When the teams he had requested had arrived, the Detective had remained on the scene for a while, searching with them, combing the maze for anything hidden within it. After a few hours, he had decided it was best for him to go home & attempt to rebuild the wall that had just come crashing down in his mind. As the search went on, it was found that there were human body parts scattered throughout the maze. Many were hidden, some were left out in the open for anyone who walked through to see. It took a few weeks to search the entire maze, & after multiple searches were carried out, it was found that the remains of at least 42 people had been scattered all over this real-life nightmare. Detective Henry was astounded. He was genuinely appalled, disgusted at what was such a vicious crime, something which had never been seen anywhere in the world. But he knew that he had a duty, no matter how hard it was, to find whoever had done this, for the sake of those who had known these people. He had to close this case so that he could get justice for them. It wasn’t going to be easy, & it wasn’t going to be pretty, but it had to be done. No matter what.

That’s it. Hope you enjoyed it!

JJ