"I swear I left it in the office! It's hella strange, I swear!" This is what inspector Jasper Robbins kept saying with a brittle laugh when he brought the killer's rifle to the office two days after the easy capture of Silas Godwin – The Bath Butcher – who was discovered kneeling, calm and silent beside his last victim with the rifle lain beside him freshly fired. The cops had employed every means to arrest him but all attempts failed until he surrendered.

That day, after a long and tiering period of work Jasper gathered his stuff and just before getting out of the room, he took a glance of the killer's rifle on his desk, the barrel streaked with dry blood, the polished stock gleaming like a relic in the afternoon sun. He felt creepy and walked out.

When Jasper got back home in the evening, he saw the rifle leaning against the wall of the hall. he stood still; breath caught like a stone in his chest. The house was silent, he felt like something was listening. Watching...

As soon as he gained back the control of himself and could breathe again, he rushed to the gun, taking it back to the office and putting it into the locker. He swore that he left it in the office but it somehow came to his house!

The inspector sat in his office, lost in thought and filled with strange feelings after the incident. And sank into sleep, a long but fitful sleep. His mind gnawed by weird nightmares. nightmares of blood, screams, and finally a gunshot which jolted him awake. Jasper found himself with the rifle on his lap! He almost jumped and the rifle fell down. It shocked him!

His gaze was drawn to something he never noticed before. When he looked closely, he noticed some engravings on the stock – S.G. and beneath that almost faded: A.F. He frantically shoved the gun in the locker and ran out of the office.

On the way back home, he kept thinking about how Godwin surrendered: No fight. No resist. No confession. Just that soft creepy smile on Silas's face when he said, as he was looking down at the rifle: "I'm done hunting"

On the fourth night after the arrest, Robbins had nightmares of every kind. Godwin's cries, his owns shrikes and again a gunshot! It woke him up, his face wet with sweat. He looked into the hall through the door of the bedroom and there was the rifle! "For god's sake, what on earth is happening!" he shouted.

Inspector buried the rifle under the coal in a furnace but the next morning he found the damned rifle upright leaned against the same wall. He even cracked the rifle open and threw its parts in the Avon River. But the rifle came back every night.

It was madness, like the one he had seen in Godwin's eyes, in the frightening writings he had left behind in his room, memories of his murders etched in metal sheets, creepy sentences in his journal like: "The rifle remembers what the mind forgets" or "Out of mind, but not out of heart".

Jasper didn’t believe in curses, he didn’t believe in supernatural forces, he never did, but something about the rifle and the arrest had never sat right with him. No chase. No resist. No shooting and shouting. Just surrender and the silence. "The damn silence and the sparkle in his eyes…" he said to himself. Godwin never spoke a word after the first and last line.

"I'm done hunting"

The town was calling Godwin THE BATH BUTCHER, a mad monster which writers would write horror stories about. And Jasper the Hero who had beat the monster.

But the hero himself had begun to believe and drown in madness he witnessed.

On the sixth night, he dreamt he was back in the crime scene. A man knelt on one knee, head bowed, his rifle upright in his hand with its stock pressed to the ground.

Not Godwin. It was himself! Weeping. And bang! a gunshot. He heard it in his bones, not in his ears!

When he woke, the rifle was in his armes, he held it like a baby on his chest, a heavy one.

Jasper took a walk to the office that day, the spring morning breeze caressed his face, but the air was spoiled with a stench, sharp and nauseating. When he got to the office he went through Godwin's records. He scanned all the files specially his journal, and a pattern began to shape, not just in the killings but in the victims!

One had been the doctor who refused to treat Silas's father and let him die due to infection, just because they didn’t have the money.

Another, a schoolmaster who slept with Godwin's mother to let him study in the school.

An old shopkeeper who had struck Godwin and his friends for playing with too much noise in front of his store. He was in his death bed when The Bath Butcher shot him dead.

Another… the name struck the inspector cold! A girl, 22, the little girl had come with her sister and humiliated Godwin in the school graduation party 8 years ago.

It wasn't just murder; it was a slow well-organized harvest of memory. Some kind of justice twisted into revenge.

Jasper felt the rifle calling him, the same scary impulse, not to kill, but to remember. To settle the unsolved forgotten memories.

That night after much drinking, he sat across the rifle staring at it like a little girl looking at the broken doll she crushed.

"Tell me" He whispered with a fading grin. "What is it you want?" Silence

This time with a mad cry: "What the hell do you want!" A slow scraping sound.

The rifle fell.

Jasper startled. Frighted but frozen as a rabbit before the butcher's knife.

He felt a gunshot in his bones and saw her. Joline Graves. The little girl who the Bath mafia was trying to smuggle out of the country and Jasper… Jasper took the money to look the other way. A week later the cops found her head in the River Severn. They never found her body.

The rifle remembered.

Another gunshot and then came the face of a boy, barely sixteen, who Jasper had beaten a confession out of for a crime he hadn't committed. Just for convenience.

The rifle remembered that, too.

On the polished stock, Jasper saw his own reflection, but older, eyes cold and face folded like a paper in a child's fist. A man who buried all his sins in duty and found them now, slapping him in the face.

the rifle was just a mirror.

The next morning the maid found Jasper in the hall, eyes wide open staring at the chandelier. His face was pale as white chalk. the rifle lay his lap.

The doctors said he died of a stroke, or fright.

They buried him two days later.

But the rifle was gone.

Officers never found it. But the maid saw it! Some of his crew believed the rifle had vanished into inspector's coffin, the way it always followed him. Others thought it was stolen.

But the truth?

It turned up again. In a different town. in a different house. Leaning against the wall, blood still wet.

The hunter is never at peace. There is always another memory to hunt.