The corpse had been a corpse for only a few minutes when he found it. He could tell by the way steam still rose from its gaping wounds: the inch-long vertical slits under each of its eyes, and the foot-long gash across its abdomen. Intestines slowly leaked out onto the light covering of snow on the ground beneath it.

The arms of the corpse were twisted, and several fingers had been detatched entirely. Those missing fingers were nowhere to be seen. Its left leg was bruised, and the right calf was charred, as though a blowtorch, or some other flame, had been held against it.

His nostrils twitched as the smell of burnt flesh invaded them.

The size nine footsteps leading up to the corpse obviously belonged to it, as the heel of each print was dotted with red, evidence of further tortures the shoeless body had been subjected to while still alive.

The man who’d found the corpse stood, looking down upon the mangled thing, and as he stood he muttered softly to himself:

“I wondered how far you’d get.”