Whispers and Severed Clues

Honestly, I almost laughed. I’d seen plenty of gruesome corpses in the morgue these past two years. Not me. I don’t buy into that ghost stuff—not for a second.

Big Tom took a drag from his cigarette, the tip glowing in the drizzle, and said, “Problem is, there might be a body in that old house now.” Then he flicked the ash, eyeing the house like it might bite.

“What do you mean, might be a body?” I asked, scratching my head.

“Two kids found an arm in there,” Big Tom said, waving his hand like he was swatting away a fly. “We’ll talk more once we’re inside.” He didn’t seem eager to stand around in the rain either.

Honestly, when we got there, I finally understood why Big Tom had been so cagey. Calling this a ‘case’ was… well, complicated, to say the least.

There really was an arm, but it wasn’t just lying out in the open—it was down at the bottom of an old well, black as midnight, out in the yard.

The well’s opening was narrow, but it looked deep—so deep you couldn’t see the bottom. When we shined a flashlight down, the beam caught on a ghastly pale arm, limp and lifeless across the stones. My stomach did a little flip.

The local cops told us they’d tried to go down before, but it was too risky—slick walls, too deep, no safe way to get it out. Their gear wasn’t up to the job, and they didn’t want to mess up any evidence, so that’s why they called us in. Figures, right?

Definitely a job for forensics. Lucky me.

We called for a water pump to drain the well. The officers were ready for once—no kidding, got the pump going in no time flat. Maybe they didn’t want to hang around any longer than necessary.

There wasn’t much water. As it drained out, my heart started pounding in my chest—felt like I was waiting for something awful to crawl up from the dark. Nerves, I guess.

Once the well was dry, we found that, among all the old junk and muck, there was only that one arm. Nothing else. Just the arm.

No body. Just the arm.

“So, does this count as a homicide?” Big Tom said, his eyes flickering in the half-light. He sounded half-joking, but there was a tension in his voice.

I didn’t know what to say. By now, a crowd had gathered around us—word travels fast in a small town, let me tell you. The minute the pump started, neighbors came crawling out of the woodwork. When they saw we hadn’t pulled out a whole body, the whispering started, gossip spreading like wildfire. As we packed up, I could feel their eyes burning holes in our backs, their voices buzzing like a hive.

I found a quiet spot and carefully examined the swollen, pale severed limb. Looked like a woman’s arm, and judging by the muscle and how far along the decomposition was, it’d been separated for a while. Not a pretty sight.

“This arm wasn’t completely chopped off,” I said, pointing to the ragged, swollen end. “See here? There are cut marks, but it’s not a clean slice.”

“Then what tore it off?” the officer next to me asked, his voice all shaky.

“Hard to say. All I know is, it wasn’t cut clean through with a sharp tool, and the bone’s busted off sudden-like—a blade wouldn’t do that. But tearing it off? I mean, what could be strong enough to rip off a human arm?”

The officer just stared at me, silent, like he was picturing some monster lurking in the dark.

“One more thing—it’s hard to say if the woman’s still alive, but odds are she’s not,” Big Tom said quietly, almost to himself.

I’d just finished a close look—based on the wound, I couldn’t tell if the arm was severed before or after death. But even if it was postmortem, the person couldn’t have been dead long. That part gave me chills.

The big question now: who did this arm belong to?

The officers told us they’d checked every resident—everyone was accounted for, nobody missing an arm or a leg. Weird, right?

But there was an odd detail: the house had a reputation for being haunted. That part stuck with me.