Nestling on a wooden trestle table amid discarded ammunition outside the Beslan High School is displayed a grim reminder of the short and bloody battle that took place here.
A man's hand, severed at the wrist and putrefying in the heavy rain, sits amid casing from a mortar round, a rocket-propelled grenade, a broken watch and a black glove. The display comes with no explanation but none is needed.
These are the artefacts of the hostage-takers who have visited horror on the town. The troops and police have withdrawn from the school which is open now to visitors who arrive in stunned silence.
With no officials present, the relatives of the dead who tour the building remind each other that some parts of the site are still not safe, with unexploded ammunition possibly still hidden by rubble or the gigantic puddles that have formed around shell holes in the playgrounds.
Attention has turned from the blackened husk of the school house to the waves of funerals now being held outside town and the unprecedented grief unfolding within it.
Svetlana (29), buried her husband Sergei yesterday. Dressed in a black dress, she stood in a field now used as a makeshift graveyard looking down at her husband's coffin.
They both had proudly accompanied their son Vadim to school for his very first day last week. They wanted to hold his hand and give him courage as he got used to the new life in High School.
When the terrorists seized the building, Svetlana and Vadim were ordered to join the crush of people in the gym but her husband was marched away.
"The terrorists took him and he never came back," she said. "The next time I saw him he was dead."
Sad columns of mourners are everywhere on the streets, showing the same blank expressions that affect the police waiting outside their barracks and the dozens of visiting journalists.
The people of Beslan are coming to realise that they have suffered a fate almost without parallel in modern times. The slaughter of so many children, some shot in the back as they tried to run from the school gym, makes this town the true Ground Zero of the war against terrorism.