Here I am, all alone. Without my sister, without my best friend in the world. I'm now being interrogated as though I murdered my sister and her friends. Because the statutes of limitations on murder don't exist, I could be facing the death penalty for keeping something to use as evidence for my campaign to save others from a similar fate. As I sit here, I think about what happened and how it all started.
"Come on! The new show is starting; it's going to be exciting!" She begged me to watch it with her, but it wasn't something I'd be caught dead watching. It'd be boring for a grown male to be watching it, and that's exactly what I told her when I turned back towards my research and fixed my glasses. When I think about it now, this is probably the moment when I lost her. Over the weeks she had become obsessed with that disgustingly colorful show; it seemed to me that it was good that she had found something to keep her happy while I'm locked away in my library. She had been making friends and even had weekly slumber parties with them, and that seemed like a good thing, which is why I never questioned it when they started to borrow my books on the subject. "Turning an interest into an educational experience, how wonderful!" I thought.
"How wonderful" indeed. While I had my eyes fixated on text and paper, she had her mind set on something sinister. I think about it now and I regret ever having taken the job I had been contracted to do at the time. If I had free time, I would have noticed the changes that my sister had been going through. I had no way of knowing what I know now, but I don't think I would have believed it back then either way. "Brother, can I borrow a couple of books and some tools?" she approached me with her dark plan in mind, she never told me the truth, she simply claimed that they had a science project for school and they were going to be doing more reading after finishing the project. It had been so long since the show had taken hold of her mind that I just attributed her messy appearance to the probability that she had been up late with her friends during their weekly slumber parties discussing the show, or preforming one of those pretend rituals of theirs based upon their fantasies. It all seemed so harmless and I never believed that any of the things she claimed could have been real, it just wasn't logical. There was no evidence. The occult and other such things are make believe, it's all just the building blocks for good scary stories. That's what I told myself, and that's what I believed.
Before I go any further, I should explain some of the things that escaped my gaze because of my foolishness. I was not present to witness or have known any of this information first hand, but I learned it when I discovered my sister's plan.
During the first sleepover, they had begun that first ritual of theirs, something had infected them, something lodged itself into their minds and created the disease that eventually led them to come up with the plan and act upon it. Whether it was merely a placebo effect causing them to believe they had gone insane and were being made to do it or if something really did take hold and steer them towards it, I will leave it up to you readers to decide. They slowly descended into the darkness and became obsessive over the things that they read about, practicing what they could get away with in secret. I can only thank the heavens that they hadn't plagued their parents with worry by cutting themselves. They were beyond treatment, and it would have probably been worse if their obsessive behaviors had been discovered.
I remember that last day as if it were yesterday, the sky was dark and the heavens wept because they knew of the tragedy that was unfolding before their eyes, but there was nothing that could be done to stop it. It was nearly dinner time, and I thought it odd that my sister and her friends had been out so late, perhaps they had decided to take their sleepover to one of the other girls' houses, so I got on the phone and called their families, but none of them had seen any of the girls. They were probably just out talking about their show, and unaware of the time, and they'd be back sooner or later. "I'll just let them have their fun, they'll come in when they get hungry" I supposed, I went back to work and ended up falling asleep at my desk for the third night in a row. When I awoke, I looked at the clock and began searching for the girls. In a panic, I called the parents of the other girls to organize a search party, and we went looking for them.
The floor of the clubhouse and the ground around it was running crimson as the rain began to thin out and wash the blood away, mutilated and severed limbs lying on the floor next to the corpses that they had once belonged to. I and the other members of the search party gazed in horror at the mess, when all of a sudden one of them groaned. She was still alive, when she finished explaining to us what happened and why they did this to themselves, she smiled and lifted one of her ruined limbs, not completely severed, but badly damaged. She probably lost consciousness when she was working on it. She seemed to be admiring the work she had done on it, "I did good, and it looks pretty, doesn't it? Don't you think we look more human now?" the light in her eyes dimmed as she faded away.
So, you might be wondering why I'm in trouble. After discovering the bodies, I picked my sister's body up and took her into the house to clean her up. I didn't want to remember her as the terrible, dark creature she had become in the end, I wanted to remember her as she was. My beautiful sister, my beautiful, best friend in the world sister. I washed her body of the blood and cleaned out her coat to undo the mess she had allowed it to become as she planned her mutilation. When I moved to washing the limb that she hadn't successfully severed, most likely because she faded away before doing much to it, I noticed that she didn't take the time to cut it up. Again, she probably hadn't had the time, she most likely just wanted it off, and that's exactly what happened as I was carefully washing it. The joint she had been severing from loosened and then popped out of place, the limb was now free from her body. I sat there examining the hoof, something about it made me remember how much she loved me, and so I took it into my lab and put it in a plastic bag before I placed it in my cold storage where I keep the other articles I need preserved for my research.
I lost my sister that day, and I vowed to Celestia that I would make sure that human related media gets banned from schools and public reach. She was obsessed with humans, and now I can't stand them.
The story has great imagery and flows very well. I liked the surprise ending, too! Aside from what law enforcement would consider desecration of remains, I don't see the possibility of criminal charges feared by the narrator, as there were enough witnesses in the search party to the last girl's admission of self-mutilation. That point seems weak, but it is only a minor thought compared to the entire story.
I actually plan to explain how the narrator came to the position he was in with another story. It's actually going to make sense why that's a point then. This is sort of a side story that happens within the main story..
Technically he didn't desecrate his sister's corpse, because he did in fact report the deaths, he just cleaned her up before they arrived. And as for the limb falling off, it would have had to be intentional for it to have been desecration.