As the most important guest, I pushed past the constable and demanded to view the scene of the crime. My host made a face for which he would answer later.
Body parts were everywhere. An arm hung from the ceiling fan. But the room had been locked with the butler on the outside, in full view.
Lord Willington shook his head sadly. “That is quite easy to find out.”
“Enlighten me,” the inspector said.
“Perkins,” Willington said, pointing to me, “please kill this man the same way you did the other.”
“Very well, sir.”
I raised my hands and tried to say no. But it was much too late.
Gustavo Bondoni is
novelist and short story writer with over three hundred stories
published in fifteen countries, in seven languages. He is a member of
Codex and an Active Member of SFWA.His latest novel is a dark historic fantasy entitled The Swords of Rasna (2022). He has also published five science fiction novels, four monster books and a thriller entitled Timeless. His short fiction is collected in Pale Reflection (2020), Off the Beaten Path (2019), Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011).
In
2019, Gustavo was awarded second place in the Jim Baen Memorial Contest
and in 2018 he received a Judges Commendation (and second place) in The
James White Award. He was also a 2019 finalist in the Writers of the
Future Contest.
His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com
Gustavo has become a frequent contributor to Stupefying Stories and we have quite a few stories of his stories on this site. Check them out!
The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood
spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a
few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted,
usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries,
determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to
Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.
You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.
This
time the challenge was to write a flash fiction story of no more than 125 words in length that plays off that old warhorse of mystery fiction: “the butler did it.”
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