Selina was ahead so she shot up the stairwell, only to be knocked down at the second landing to ground level again by a stranger man, unhurt since the landings were used sparingly after only every 5 steps. She turned her head a clockwise 180 degree motion to catch a glimpse of the now faraway shadowy man bustling to escape his surroundings as if wanting to rid himself of the filth of the place or what he had done.
'We should go after him,' one of the more enterprising family member Lucy suggested, while the others just stood there unproductively standing around puzzling. Her intuition told her that something was awry, be it the odd dead psychic silence, the growing acidic stench, the sense of a sticky drear creeping up her skin, inch by inch, or the silence and non-appearance of their Madame from her room. It was felt house-wide as 3 of them obliged, even though by the looked of his world wrestling federation muscular, 6 feet 3 structure, it wouldn't have served much purpose chasing him down. He would have pounded them all down to powdery bits, which is what most of the sisters believed he did with Madame Pricilla.
'Dare I look?' Selina asked, hand on knob, perspiration running down her temples, knowing the panorama would hold a gory tale to tell, since not a peep was heard from Madame since the culprit scramed for the open ground. The rest who were awoken by the commotion were surrounding her, all anticipating the twist of the knob. And there it went, the door, from closed, to ajar, to swung wide open.
Loud, terrifying, nightmarish screams. One went to dial 911, another went to bring the police into the picture and the others just stood there in a semi-circle and and gawked as if sitted in a traditional ceremony where some beauty was dancing in the middle, only this time the beauty was covered in blood and dead.
Selina was flabbergasted, all the while the words playing over and over in her head again. 'I told you so'.
The reality after-shock emotions begin to ignite. Their one and only Madame, many treated like their own flesh and blood was there naked and handcuffed to the bed post, blood spilling from the sheets to the floor, caused by the wound that killed her, evolving from her stomach region which was equally entirely smothered and dripping in blood, and large bruises were sponged all over her body symptomatic of the traces of beatings.
A closer inspection by the forensics determined that Madeline Priscilla's death was due to a stab of the knife to her abdomen which was then stashed in the dresser covered in the life giver of an innocent doter of many. It was weird listening to someone say Madame's real name since it was hardly uttered, much less known by everyone.
'She was sliced quite a few times. Hands, face, legs. This must be the doings of one sick freak,' the inspector shook his head as he shared the envisage of many of such a ghastly demonstration.
The grief carried on for ages or at least that's what it felt like. By the time the evidence was gathered, the body was taken to the morgue, and the 'stick like glue' coagulated blood which had osmosised into air and therefore everyone was feeling before, was tediously scrubbed off the floor, all of the girls who were in mourning, hugging and holding each other like cells bonding and they wouldn't stop their interaction till everyone was merged into a single cell, that is feeling the misery and desolation of their Madame's decease. The air wasn't cleared and foreseeable with the thickness of despondency, wouldn't be for quite some time, so everything was left for the following day.
