I found him in a deserted barn on the edge of town. Somebody had come running to the station house to tell me that something terrible was going on there.His name is Abner. He works as a clerk over at First Bank. Very mild-mannered.When I got there, I found him sitting there in the middle of the barn. He had a lantern nearby and a completely naked dead woman stretched across his lap. This one, it was her face he mostly mutilated. The eyes were dug out, of course.He was skinning her.I drew my service revolver and walked over to him and told him to put down the mule knife he was using to skin her.He put the knife down, the naked woman with most of her skin stripped off still on his lap, and he said, "I didn't want to kill any of them, officer. I really didn't."Then he started telling me about this well up by one of the line shacks the electric company uses. He said there was some kind of Martian or something in the well and that it was the Martian who was making him kill all these women.All I could think of was when that meteor crashed out there several years back.
