The rain in Seattle didn’t wash things clean; it just made the grime slicker. Detective Mark Harrow sat in the dim light of the precinct’s basement archive, the hum of an old VCR the only sound competing with the building’s settling groans. On his desk sat a stack of VHS tapes, their plastic casings smelling of mildew and something sharper—something like copper and dried paint.

They called him “The Painter.” The media loved the name. It was catchy, sophisticated. It masked the butcher beneath. Harrow lit a cigarette, ignoring the ‘No Smoking’ sign. He needed the nicotine to steady his hands as he slid the first tape, labeled simply FACES, into the player.

The screen flickered with tracking static before settling on a grainy image. It wasn’t a video of a murder; it was a slideshow of aftermaths, presented with the cold detachment of a gallery exhibition.

“Six months ago,” a distorted voice narrated.

The first painting appeared. It was crude, violent, yet possessed a terrifying anatomical understanding. A woman’s face, mouth gaping, void of enamel. Carla’s Teeth. Harrow flinched. Carla Gray had been found with 36 stab wounds. The painting didn’t just depict her; it mocked her.

Then came Floating Jackie. Jackie Gran, drowned, stabbed in the perineum. The art style was shifting, evolving with each kill. Then James’ Secret Face—a man tearing his own visage away.

Harrow paused the tape. He looked at the file photos of the real crime scenes spread across his desk. The paintings weren’t just depictions; they were trophies. They were accurate down to the smallest laceration. The killer wasn’t just watching; he was studying.

“Why send them to us?” Harrow whispered to the empty room. “Why the show and tell?”

He swapped tapes. THE LIGHTHOUSE.

This case had broken the rookie, Miller. A family, the Collins, wiped off the map. Officer Bill Collins had gone missing first. The tape showed a painting found in Bill’s own home—a harbinger. The investigation had led to a defunct lighthouse on the coast.

On the screen, grainy footage from a flashlight’s beam cut through the dark of the lighthouse interior. Harrow watched, his stomach churning, as the camera panned over a barrel. Inside was a soup of biological matter—the liquified remains of the Collins family. Amphetamines and acid.

And then, the photos. The killer had arranged the family portraits around the barrel like a shrine. But there was a fourth photo. A pale face, long black hair, eyes that looked like holes in reality. Self-Portrait.

“We thought it was a drifter,” Harrow muttered, exhaling smoke. “We were so wrong.”

The escalation was exponential. The killer wasn’t satisfied with simple anatomical dismantling anymore. He was getting creative. He was getting bored.

The next tape, IN THE WALLS, was the one that made Harrow stop sleeping. It detailed the fate of the Beck twins, Cory and Margaret. Eleven years old. They had gone to a remote cabin near Tiger Lake on a dare.

The painting flashed on the screen: two halves of two different children sewn together. The top half of Margaret, the bottom half of Cory. A clay brick jammed down Margaret’s throat with the word “MEAT” scrawled on it. It was grotesque, absurdist violence. It felt like the work of a demon trying to understand human biology by taking it apart and putting it back together wrong.

Harrow rubbed his eyes. The sheer cruelty felt manufactured, almost performative. It was shock value weaponized. The public was terrified, the press was voracious, and the police were helpless.

He picked up the file for Shawn Kaine. Kaine was a private investigator, a good man who got too close. The tape titled THE CLUE mocked his efforts. Kaine had found Tom Harris encased in a pillar of hardened candle wax, suffocated. A week later, Kaine was gone.

Harrow watched the footage of Kaine’s apartment. The blood trail. The number ‘2’ painted in blood on the doorframe. And the painting: The Man in the Pipes. Kaine had been stuffed into the plumbing of his own home.

“He’s laughing at us,” Harrow said, his fist clenching. “He’s inside the walls, inside the pipes.”

The security cam photo from Kaine’s basement was the only lead they had for months. A face, distorted, peering into the lens. It looked like the Self-Portrait, but… wrong.

The violence spilled out of the cities and into the rural quiet. The PIGS tape was a descent into madness. Ian and May Ford. A farm that smelled of death from a mile away. The police had found May with her hands ripped off, handcuffed to a stall.

But it was the barn that broke Harrow’s composure. The killer had taken a pig carcass, sliced it open, and stitched Ian Ford inside. He had replaced the pig’s eyes with the eyes of their granddaughter, Fiona.

Harrow fast-forwarded through the gallery of horrors at the end of that tape. Breeding Mount May. Flesh Head Fred. Four Holes Fiona. The titles were juvenile, puns made of gore. It suggested a killer with the mind of a child and the strength of a monster.

Then came the FAMILY tape. This was the one that had nearly caused a mutiny in the precinct. Isabelle Jackson, the teacher. Janice and Paul, the expectant parents.

The killer had cut the fetus from Janice. Jigsaw Baby. The head of the unborn child found lodged in the father’s throat.

“Jesus Christ,” Harrow hissed, looking away from the screen. It was too much. It was absurdity. It was violence pushed past the point of fear into sheer, numbing disbelief.

But the FAMILY tape held a clue. Isabelle Jackson’s murder involved a drill to the frontal lobe and a riddle left inside her skull. I live where I can’t breathe and I eat without teeth.

Also, footprints. Two sets.

“They aren’t alone,” Harrow realized, echoing the epiphany the department had weeks ago. “It’s a team.”

The final tape in the stack was marked HELL.

Harrow hesitated. This was the breakthrough. The anonymous tip from the phone booth. The raid on the abandoned textile and paint factory.

He pressed play. The footage was from a body cam, shaky and chaotic.

The factory was a charnel house. “The Cage Room.” “The Paint Room.” Bodies hung from the ceiling like wet laundry. The Jones family, threaded together with a chain. Sarah Stone, the dispatcher, and her husband, forced into a ‘human centipede’ configuration, their mouths stuffed with rocks. Stone Loop.

Harrow watched the police descend into the sewers beneath the factory. The graffiti on the walls screamed a warning: ONCE YOU’VE BEEN TO HELL, YOU NEVER COME BACK.

That was what Tina Rosenberg had said. Tina, the girl who survived the woods, who watched her sister die. She was the key.

The footage cut to Officer Nathan Cole’s body cam during a wellness check on Tina. Cole sprinting toward the house. The door kicking open.

“POLICE! SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!”

Harrow leaned in. This was the moment the nightmare had a face.

In the bedroom, a figure stood over Tina. Tina was screaming, crawling across the bed, naked and terrified. But she wasn’t looking at the officer. She wasn’t looking at anything. Her eyes and ears had been punctured with knitting needles. She was in a world of absolute darkness and pain, unaware that salvation had arrived.

The figure turned. It wasn’t the long-haired man. It was a woman. Masked, manic, moving with a jerky, frantic energy.

Officer Cole tackled her. The camera tumbled.

“We got her,” Harrow said, the relief washing over him as cold as the rain outside. “Mona Lenius.”

The investigation unspooled rapidly after the arrest. The autopsy of the second suspect found in the house revealed the truth that twisted the knife in the department’s back. The man wearing the mask wasn’t a drifter. It was Bill Collins. The missing cop. The man whose family was dissolved in a barrel.

He hadn’t been a victim. He had been a participant.

Harrow picked up the final transcript, the interview with Mona Lenius. She had been denied a trial, expedited toward the death penalty after trying to smuggle a homemade explosive into the courtroom. She was chaos incarnate.

Harrow read the transcript, hearing her voice in his head—high-pitched, mocking, utterly devoid of remorse.

Interviewer: “Why did you do it?”

Mona: “Well, wouldn’t you like to know?”

She spoke of a childhood in an orphanage, of torturing animals, of breaking Fred Baker (Flesh Head Fred) long before she killed him. She spoke of Bill Collins as her pet, her “brother,” a man she broke until he worshipped the ground she walked on.

But then, the interview took a turn into the esoteric.

Mona: “The truth is… they made me do it. It was rigged from the start.”

She spoke of machines. Machines buried deep underground that emitted a sound, a frequency that pushed against the mind until it cracked. She claimed these machines manifested a presence inside her.

Mona: “A Red Man. He was manifested inside me. He makes the paintings. He tells me who to kill.”

Harrow scoffed, tossing the transcript onto the desk. “Classic insanity defense. The devil made me do it. The radio waves controlled my brain.”

She claimed Bill knew. She claimed the police knew. She claimed she was just a host, a vessel for this “Red Man.”

Mona: “It won’t end with me dead. It will only get worse.”

Two weeks ago, Mona Lenius was stabbed to death in prison. Justice, swift and brutal. The case was closed. The Painter was dead.

Harrow stood up, stretching his back. He needed a drink. He needed to wash the images of Jigsaw Baby and Carla’s Teeth out of his brain. He reached for the remote to turn off the TV.

But the VCR didn’t stop. Static hissed, and then a new image appeared.

It was a map of the United States.

Harrow froze.

A red dot appeared on the East Coast. Then another in the Midwest. Another in the South. Within seconds, the map was covered in pulsing red indicators.

Text scrolled across the bottom of the screen, typed in that familiar, jagged font.

FORENSIC ANALYSIS SUGGESTS PAINTINGS MADE BY THE SAME PERSON.

Harrow grabbed the phone, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. “No,” he whispered. “She’s dead. Collins is dead.”

The screen cut to a montage, moving too fast to fully process, but slow enough to traumatize. New paintings. Dozens of them.

FRYING RYAN. DECAY OF JAY. PETER LICKING HIS WOUND. THOMAS IN PAIN. BENT BECKY. LONG-SKINNED LOGAN.

They were everywhere. In homes, in schools, in police stations. The handwriting on the back matched Mona’s. The style matched the Red Man’s.

Harrow dropped the phone. The buzzing dial tone merged with the static from the TV.

The final image burned onto the screen. It wasn’t a victim. It was a face Harrow had seen in the shadows of the Kaine footage, in the sketches, in his nightmares.

A face painted in broad, violent strokes of crimson and black. Hollow eyes. A mouth that wasn’t a mouth, but a gash in the fabric of the world.

SELF-PORTRAIT.

It wasn’t Mona. It wasn’t Bill. They were just brushes.

Harrow looked out the basement window. The rain had stopped. The streetlights were flickering. In the reflection of the glass, for just a split second, he thought he saw a flash of red.

The machine was still humming. And the Red Man was just getting started.