Fallen Apples, PROLOGUE

Fallen Apples,

PROLOGUE

Early; That Morning,

It’s a few hours before dawn, and the skies above are still a murky charcoal of heavy darkness, yet blue hues reverberate across the sky. There are multiple police cars surrounding the secluded house on the hill; no sirens blaring, just intermittently strobing blue lights, creating an insipid haze of colour around the area, as if only highlighting the gloom. The house itself stands still and foreboding. It looks like it could be haunted. But what’s really haunting, is what the house contains, inside, within its walls. Four dead bodies. Two adults, a male and a female, and two children, a boy and a girl, aged four and six. Each have been stabbed, repeatedly; slaughtered in their beds. Blood pools around the bodies, seeped into the bedding, soaking into the carpeted flooring, and splattered onto the headboards, and the walls around, and above. A gruesome and bloodied scene of horror. 

The uniformed police officers are busying around the scene, standing guard at the doors, and at the main gates of the property, and carrying out orders, whilst trying to contain and not contaminate a crime scene. CID officers mix in amongst them, inspecting each room, and each horrific scene and detail displayed in front of them, whilst two young children stand stock still and wide eyed in the locked basement, neither hardly daring to breathe. They’re holding hands. A silent gesture to each other, that they are ok. That they’re going to be ok.