When I was a district police officer

I was working as a district police officer at the time, and during one of my rounds, I visited a "troubled" apartment under surveillance. A woman in her forties, a heavy drinker, lived there with a young daughter. She regularly brought men home, locking the daughter in the bathroom. The neighbors often complained about the noise, so I visited the apartment frequently.

When I rang the doorbell, there was no answer for a long time. Finally, the door opened just the length of the chain, and the woman's swollen face appeared in the doorway. In response to my request to open the door, she mumbled something unintelligible, but unfastened the chain. When I entered the hallway, I immediately noticed a strange odor. I was still a rookie at the time and had little idea what corpses smelled like, but the sweetish odor aroused my suspicions. I tried to engage the apartment owner, but she mumbled incoherently and kept trying to sit on the floor. I thought she was drunk, but I didn't smell alcohol. Judging by the silence, no one was in the apartment.

Remembering the girl, I decided to go around the apartment looking for her. All the rooms were empty, and the bathroom was locked. When I approached the bathroom door, the woman screamed and tried to push me away. Words like "monster" and "blood" began to slip into her incoherent speech. Terribly frightened, I called the police on the radio. I don't know what exactly scared me then—at the time, I convinced myself I was simply worried about whether I could handle this crazy woman on my own (I was still almost skinny at the time), but now, looking back, I can say the fear was almost inexplicable, terrifying. Ten minutes later, two colleagues arrived. Together, we managed to detain the apartment owner and open the bathroom door.

 The body of a nine-year-old girl, dressed in a nightgown covered in blood, lay on the floor near an old cast-iron bathtub. Her face was disfigured—her lower lip was practically torn off and hung in a flap, revealing a jaw with missing teeth, and her eyes were scratched out. The nails on her little fingers were broken, and we found bloody streaks and deep scratches on the door, with fragments of nails later found in the jagged edges. Traces of dried blood were scattered throughout the room. The toilet (the apartment had a combined bathroom) was flooded with an incomprehensible liquid, which turned out to be a mixture of blood and feces. A strange trail, similar to those left by slugs, led from it to the body.

At the sight of this, the woman screamed and lost consciousness. We, having overcome our nausea, called a "morgue." The forensics team arrived and escorted us out the door. I never heard anything more about this story. To be honest, I wasn't particularly interested.