Autumns Ashes: A Chapel Black Casefile

C: Files Uploaded: Freedom of Information Act—California Bureau of Investigation. Violent Crime Task Force. Authorized by the CA Attorney General.

Subject: Applied Criminology—Special Agent Rachel Tempt. Audio files are attached.

Every bullet leaves a trail of paperwork behind it, a lawsuit etched in brass casings. There’s no honor in it anymore. Just silence after the gunshot, then the endless colonoscopy of post-shooting committees. They’ll pick apart the moment, frame by frame as if that could explain why we stare down the abyss and still pull the trigger. 

But there’s one thing they won’t see—one thing I can’t shake. That smile. That wide, lifeless grin stretched across the mask. No amount of paperwork or debriefings can erase it. It’s burned into the back of my mind, like the scarecrows in the Central Valley.

We used to pass them, standing watch over the empty fields. They never moved. But we did.

We were the living scarecrows, running across those cracked, dead lands, chasing shadows and scaring off the ravens. We thought we were in control, thought we could keep the dark at bay.

But then the summer faded into autumn, and the days grew shorter with it. The shadows came sooner, crawling across the fields like fingers, cold and grasping. A drifter came to the fields, and gutted a few of my friends as they played ghost games.

We weren’t hunting anymore. We were stalked, running from something that moved in the dark, something that never left.

Our parents locked our doors twice and the pastors claimed the pews were the only safe place from the devil's holiday.

You could feel it in the air, in the weight of those scarecrows watching, as if they knew something we didn’t. Fate was resourceful like that.

The body lay twisted on the charred rock, skin blackened, flesh curled and split like those pink hot dogs my uncle used to leave on the grill too long when he got a little too deep into the booze. But this wasn’t the product of a careless BBQ—this was ritual.

Purposeful.

Out here, in the orchards, the air always carries the scent of smoke. It’s the time of year for controlled burns on the farms, flames licking the underbrush, setting the night sky alight in shades of orange and crimson. You’d see the fire dancing beneath the violet sky, the stars dim, swallowed by the blackness that crept down from above. But this time, the fire wasn’t to clear the land. This time, it was to purify something darker.

They said the killer had a vision. They always do, don’t they? But this one—his vision was a twisted altar. A place where he was finally organized, where all the chaos of his life clicked into place. among the trees, in these killing fields, the orchards became his temple, the charred rock his sacrificial stone.

To him, the flames weren’t destruction; they were offering. Every flicker of fire was part of his ceremony, his hands creating what the soil demanded—the blood, the burnt flesh.

The flames weren’t out of control. Not here. Not where he stood in the center of it all.

It seeps in your pore and In the thick air, in the scorched earth beneath your boots.

You could feel his presence still lingering, watching over the fields as though waiting for another offering.

The black stars hung far above, just out of reach, as though they too knew to stay away from this place.

This was his world now, and nothing from above or below could touch it. 

The smoke from inside the hollow bodies had long gone cold, snuffed out like fleeting breaths. Their grinning faces—those jagged, smiling Jack-o'-lanterns—stood sentinel over the killer’s handiwork, mocking in their silence. They smiled because they were empty. They had no idea what it meant to feel anything.

Forensics would later pick through the charred remains, their latex gloves moving with a grim efficiency. Beneath the ash and scorched skin, they’d find the incision points.

The work of a blade. Precise. Intentional. And I couldn’t help but pray—if such a thing wasn’t futile—that the blade had done its work before the flames ever kissed their skin. Before the heat dug in, before the pain spread like wildfire beneath the surface.

I prayed they bled out, that their bodies went numb before their nerve endings had a chance to scream from the sizzle.

The Jack-o'-lanterns kept smiling. Their hollow eyes watched as the scene unfolded, as if proud of what had been left behind in their glow. The orchard had always been a place of harvest, but tonight, the crops were something different—something torn apart, something sacrificed in the name of whatever delusion this was.

And in the cool, settling night, I could almost feel it: the weight of those smiles, the smoke in the air.

The air was heavy with the silence of the dead, the ghosts still watching as if nothing had changed.

But everything had. Here is where the skulls knew our names and whispered. Only a fool answers.

The orchards had become a graveyard, the crops just rows of headstones for the dead. And at the heart of it all was his vision—his catharsis turned this place of life into a field of ash. It shouldn’t be this hot in October.

The air should carry the first bite of cold, enough for the sweat on my neck to turn into a chill. The sun felt relentless, baking the ground beneath our feet, pulling the water back into the sky like it couldn’t stand to let the earth hold on to anything. Even if we weren’t hardened from the job, there wasn’t enough water left to spare from our tear ducts.

Not here.

Not today.

The farm workers had found the bodies, their faces ashen with something more than just fear. Half of them didn’t have official paperwork, and half of those would vanish by nightfall, ghosts disappearing into the fields out of fear of deportation. They’d scatter like leaves on the wind, leaving behind more questions than answers.

But could I blame them? For them, the law was just another threat hanging over their heads, one more shadow in a place already haunted by death.

The bodies lay twisted, contorted in ways that spoke of agony. It was always the workers who found them—those who couldn’t afford to speak. It was always the invisible people who stumbled on horrors that wouldn’t be solved, whose testimonies would be swallowed by the cracks in the system.

The fields, the soil—they saw everything. And the rest of us? We were just trying to scrape meaning out of something that didn’t care to give it.

The sun bore down, thick and oppressive. The bodies had been here long enough to match the heat, long enough to feel like they belonged to this cursed earth. And as I stood there, staring at what was left of them, all I could think was that it wasn’t supposed to be this hot in October.

The world felt wrong. Everything about it.

And yet, the bodies still burned.ut I’m boring you all with this tangent, aren’t I? You nice folks, clicking your pens, shifting in your seats, pretending to sip water while your bladders are ready to burst.

You're just itching to get to the good part. The part about why I have to keep slathering this special ointment on my hands, why the stitches still itch like hell. Don't worry, they'll heal soon. Modern medicine is a miracle, isn't it?

Funny thing—I used to think I was born in the wrong generation. You know, back when people romanticized suffering like it was some kind of badge of honor.

Thought maybe I’d fit in better if I’d lived when pain was raw and pure. But then I experienced the wonders of modern medicine firsthand—morphine’s sweet lullaby, the way you can sew someone back together like patchwork, the fact that they can literally numb the pain while you’re staring down at your own open wounds. It’s beautiful, really.

So yeah, I’ll take the ointment and the stitches over some leeches and whiskey, thanks.

I imagine you're all wondering what happened to these hands, though. That’s the fun part, right? The reason I’m even here, talking to you. Well, let's just say that some cuts go deeper than skin. Some things stick with you, even after the bleeding stops. I thought the pain was the worst part—until I realized it wasn’t just the blood on my hands that wouldn’t wash off. It was everything else.

But don’t worry, I’m not gonna bleed on your nice floors or anything.

The tabloids and late-night cop shows—they’ve all been out of ideas for years. So, they stick to easy labels, tossing around the word pyromaniac like it’s the magic key to understanding a killer. My friends in academia prefer the clinical approach—they call it fire-setting like it’s a simple hobby gone wrong.

It’s cute, really, like they're classifying a type of bird instead of someone who enjoys watching the world burn.

Then there’s the usual laundry list of “risk factors.” Fire-setting, bed-wetting.

Junk science. For all the theories they push, we might as well be reading cracks in bones to figure out where our suspect’s going to strike next. Hell, at least palm readers are honest about their guesswork.

When you’re working the streets, though, the game’s a bit different. You start handing out tokens, get out of jail free cards here and there, and pretty soon the corner girls, the hunk pulling tricks—someone’s bound to start talking.

You start asking questions.

Ever smelled gasoline on a john before? Seen those little burn bubbles on their skin, like they’ve been playing too close to the flame? Someone out there always knows a little more than they let on. They just need the right incentive to let it slip. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this job, it’s that you don’t need a Ph.D. to know that fire loves to leave a mark—on skin, on clothes, on whatever it touches.

Eventually, it all turns up.

And once they start talking? Well, it doesn’t matter if they call him a pyromaniac, a fire-setter, or just another sick son of a bitch. At the end of the day, we’re all just sifting through the ashes.

There’s one woman, Tanya, who’s got a memory like a steel trap and a little black book to match. It’s not just a list of clients; it’s more like her insurance policy. The ones who don’t cause enough trouble to get themselves blacklisted but still trip a silent alarm—that’s who makes it in there.

She doesn’t block them, just quietly notes down the make and model of their car, those little blue letters and numbers off their plates.

It’s almost poetic, really. While the suits in boardrooms talk about “data-driven surveillance,” Tanya’s out here running her own. Doesn’t need an algorithm, just a cheap notebook and a pen. She could probably put a few cops out of a job with what she knows—names, times, dates, quirks. And no one even suspects.

For her, it’s all business. A little safeguard in a world where trouble shows up without warning. But when the time comes, and trouble comes knocking with a badge and some questions, Tanya’s little black book becomes her get-out-of-jail-free card. She’ll flip through those pages like an oracle, her memory sharp as a razor.

The car descriptions, the glint of chrome, the feeling that something wasn’t quite right—it’s all there, preserved in her quiet, practiced handwriting. And maybe that’s the real art of survival: knowing when to stay silent, and when to write it all down.

We run the plates its to a farm on its last limbs. Don’t know how its making just enough to keep the bank from swallowing it up, banks around here are blackened created with long tentacles eating up foreclosed property left and right. It can turn people to accept help from friends in low places.

White Bikers and our friends South of San Diego. The blackened sheets of smoke rose above the orange and yellow flames that clawed their way towards the sky.  People have caught serial killers for a busted tail-light stop.

That's probable cause if I ever seen one. 

 The Massive rows of wild sunflowers blocked my vision. I followed the blackbirds in the sky, there was something approaching death. I approached and found a scarecrow perched like Christ. The smile was a mile wide the straw seemed to soak up strains of blood, and if you blinked you would miss it.

The middle of the sternum of the scarecrow moved it fought for air. The accelerant mixed with  the straw this man was about to go up like a sin eater. He rushed me, a nozzle attached to a rustic tank spouted a sea of fire.

Those stories of hell and weeping came alive as the liquid dragon breath searched to turn me into a botched bbq. The visor on his head was bright orange like a jack o lantern, the oxygen-exposed blood on it created a twisted chesire like grin. The scarecrow’s chest heaved, a grotesque mimicry of life, as if the very essence of the harvest had been summoned to fight for breath.

the accelerant was seeping into the straw, a dark promise of fire and fury. This man—this wretched figure—was about to ignite like a sin eater, a sacrificial offering to the ancient spirits that haunted these fields.

The harvester approached From the tall green stems where my smoke and sun blocked my eyes. lunged at me, a nozzle affixed to a rusted tank, unleashing a torrent of flames that roared like the banshees of old.

The air thickened with the acrid scent of burning straw and something far more sinister, as the liquid dragon’s breath sought to consume me, eager to turn my flesh into a charred offering for the harvest gods.

The tales of the village echoed in my mind—whispers of the cursed and the damned, of those who had danced too close to the fire and paid the price. The flames flickered, casting eerie shadows that twisted and writhed like the lost souls of the fields, and I felt the weight of their sorrow pressing down on me.

His visor glowed an unsettling orange, reminiscent of a jack-o'-lantern, but it was the blood smeared across it that sent a chill racing through my veins.

It formed a twisted grin, a Cheshire cat’s smile that seemed to mock my very existence. I stood paralyzed, caught in the grip of a nightmare woven from the fabric of folk tales, where the line between man and monster blurred, and the harvest was not just a season, but a reckoning.

The heat of the flames licked at my skin. Was this the same man who carved into the flesh of my childhood friends, who turned summer nights into blood-soaked nightmares? I remembered the brutal precision of his early kills, the surgical, almost detached way he sliced through life, leaving us only with questions and scars that never healed. But now—now, it was different.

It was as if he had abandoned any pretense of control, like he was answering to something older, something that wanted every strike to be a twisted offering.

He wasn’t just killing anymore; he was creating scenes of horror, each one worse than the last, each one feeling like he’d unearthed something buried deep in the earth, demanding blood for a harvest we couldn’t see. Each body he left wasn’t just a victim but a monument to his obsession, a sacrifice to whatever madness had crept into his mind.

I could feel the air thicken with the reek of accelerant and decay, as if the soil itself had begun to hunger alongside him, urging him on.

As he stepped closer, the sickly grin painted on his visor glowed in the flames licking around us, each smear of blood twisted into something that mocked me, daring me to run.

Every instinct in me screamed to move, to escape—but part of me knew he’d already buried something of me here, with the others. .He aimed the nozzle at the scarecrow, and the victim's lips—stitched shut and trembling—split, fresh blood seeping through as he tried to scream.

I raised my gun, drawing a bead on the back of his tank. In movies, this would be the cue for a bullet-induced explosion, a roaring fireball swallowing him whole. But reality has its own ways to kill the magic; modern tanks are riddled with failsafe's, each designed to prevent exactly that kind of catastrophe.

My bullets pinged against the metal, leaving only dents and frustration.

He snarled and dropped the tank with a heavy thud, reaching instead for the harvest blade hanging at his side. Its edge gleamed dangerously, smudged with dried blood, and looked ready to do his bidding. Just then, he hesitated. The blade, so close to striking, hung in the air as his orange grin seemed to falter. For a moment, he watched me, the mask's grin stretching across the brimstone-colored fog around us.

Then he stepped back, the grin fading into the sulfur haze as he retreated into the smoke. 

I can still smell the blood clinging to the blade, mingling with the charred stems and scorched earth. The visions from scenes like this usually fade quickly, replaced by the next case, the next horror. But the smells—they linger.

They settle in the back of my mind, sticking to my clothes, and my skin. I know for sure I won’t be enjoying grill season anytime soon. Just one more piece of myself, left behind, sliced off like so much dead weight for the harvest. Each case takes something, carving away pieces I barely notice until they’re gone—until I realize just how much has been left out there in the fields, waiting to be gathered.