I used a penknife to slice the tape. The cardboard flaps popped open, eager to show me the gruesome sight inside.

It was a human head, severed clean just above the Adam’s apple.

Weirder still, I knew whose head it was.

It was an old friend of mine, Sam “Hecky” Burnett. He was a private detective, and a hunter of the strange, bizarre, and outright freakish—just like me. The only difference between us was that he looked for the shit.

I’ve always tried to avoid the craziness and live a normal life, but not Sam. Not that insane old bastard. He savored the hunt. He loved tracking monsters like some folks love music or sports. He was obsessed, a fanatic. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the supernatural, a mind like a thousand forbidden libraries, and I can say without reservation that he was one of the toughest sons-a-bitches I ever met.

Now he was just a head.

The look on his face was peaceful, like he’d fallen asleep and someone had made off with his body without waking him.

I hesitated, and then gave the forehead a poke. Nothing.

When I lifted the head from the box and moved it to my desk, the first thing I noticed was that the wound was almost completely bloodless. The slice was as clean as any I’d ever seen. In fact, the slice was so clean, it looked like it had been cut by a laser. It was so evenly severed, so straight, that I was able to stand the head on my desk by the stump of its neck without any other support.

Sam’s head was covered with old scars from past battles. One ear was gone. The other was hardly a flap and a hole. His nose was bent and lumpy, and the rest of his face was a crisscross maze of healed hacks, scratches, and scrapes. Poor, ugly old bastard. What a way to go.

I sat in my chair and stared at the face of my probable future; the monster hunter, finally beaten. Finally outsmarted. Somebody, more likely something, had done this to him. Now it had been sent to me, I assumed, as some kind of twisted warning. Fuck them. It would take more then a head to frighten me. I wasn’t scared in the least.

Not until the eyes fluttered. Not until the head moved.

I jumped back. Sam Burnett’s severed head spoke.

“Cal?!”

The fucking head was alive! I jerked backward so hard that the legs of my chair dug grooves into the floor.

“Is that you, Cal?”

My chair tipped, toppled and I fell. I smacked my head against the hard plaster of the floor. I opted to stay there until it spoke again.

“Cal? Where’d you go, fer Christ’s sake?!”

Slowly I peeked over the edge of the desk. Sure enough, Sam’s head was sitting there, eyes wide open and alert.

I muttered, I stumbled, and finally spat out a somewhat coherent sentence.