The StoneCutter

by Scott Blade

  Quickly, the needle dispersed a powerful tranquilizer into his bloodstream. Instantly, he fell into a deep sleep as his hand emerged from his pocket gripping softly to a cell phone.

  The phone dropped to the floor of Shane's car.

  "You are mine, StoneCutter," I said. I could barely contain my excitement.

  I slowed the car down and reached down to the floorboard. I picked up the cell phone and turned it off. Then I rolled down the window and tossed it out onto the black highway.

  No one is coming for you StoneCutter. No one. We thought.

  |||||

  Nightfall neared. Shane parked his Mercedes in the enormous backyard of a quiet manor. We walked among the wealthy family dwellings of West Hampton Beach.

  A cool breeze swept up off of the private beach in front of us.

  The Mercedes headlights beamed onto the ground, lighting up the six-foot hole that Shane dug.

  Gillard Shutter began to stir. Slowly, he woke up to the nightmare that I had planned for him for so many years.

  I stood tall, wearing Shane's kill-suit. The blood-red scarf wrapped around the bottom of Shane's face, hiding Shane and revealing me.

  Gillard's eyes slowly opened. His sense of touch began to return to his extremities. A few moments passed, and finally he was fully awake.

  He was dazed, but knew that he was lying in a deep hole in the ground. He lifted his head and investigated his surroundings. A tight rope bound his hands and feet together. He tried to speak, but a thick strip of duct tape impeded this action. I didn't care about what he had to say. I didn't want to hear his voice or his lies about being innocent. Gillard Shutter was going to die.

  After he realized that he lay in a hole, it also dawned on him that he was encased in a wooden box with no lid. He started to squirm violently. He struggled to free himself from his bonds. Terror filled his veins like rushing blood.

  "StoneCutter, I can't tell you how long I have waited for this. You are my opus. Truly, I relish this moment," I said.

  Gillard Shutter seemed to beg for mercy with his eyes. Mercy was something that only humans expressed. Shane was the only one living in this body that was human, and he had recused himself hours ago. This was one kill that he wanted me to enjoy.

  "StoneCutter, you kill people by burying them alive. So I am going to do the same to you, but I have added a twist to your ritual."

  "Ugh," Gillard mumbled through the duct tape.

  "StoneCutter, you created headstones for your victims. That takes some talent. To carve their names into stone, you must have spent a lot of time doing that. Picking out the right words to use and picking the right sized stones," I said. After circling around the grave, I reached down and picked up a small, stone tablet.

  "StoneCutter, here is yours," I said, holding up the tombstone that I created so that he could see it plainly.

  Gillard studied it in horror. His tombstone read:

  Here Lies the StoneCutter:

  The creator of me

  Again Gillard struggled with his ropes. It was useless. I tied them far too tight for him to escape. He was all mine.

  "I see that you approve of my work. Good. I feared that you were going to think that it was amateurish."

  "Mmmm," Gillard mumbled through the duct tape.

  I moved out of his view for a moment and placed the stone firmly into the hole I made just above his grave. It slid into place. I hammered it with the shovel. The sound upset Gillard even more because he began to flail around like a fish out of water.

  Finally, after a few hits with the shovel, the tombstone rested upright and perfect. It appeared just as a real gravestone would.

  I returned to Gillard's view and said, "Now for one last twist. StoneCutter, you are the ultimate prey. You created me. In many ways, you are my mentor. Without you, I would have never been born. Without you, I would only be Shane. So I have to pay homage to your killings the right way.

  "When you carried out your dark deeds, you forced the father of the family to bury the mother and children alive at gunpoint. Then you killed the father. I don't want to kill you just yet, but I don't want to short change you either. I don't want to short change your work.

  "You are an artist," I said. From behind my back I revealed a silver colt 1911 handgun. The silver finish glimmered in the moonlight like the shiny scales of a barracuda beneath the murky surface of the Atlantic at night.

  "I apologize that I couldn't find your gun. I prefer to use the murder weapon of my victims, but you hid that gun too well," I said.

  Gillard Shutter began to struggle so hard in his bonds that I was sure that he might actually break free of them.

  I pointed the gun down the deep hole at him. Slowly, I moved the sights down his body to his legs.

  I fired twice, one bullet into each kneecap. He gasped behind his duct taped mouth. Tears flooded his eyes. He was no longer going to be mobile even if he could free himself from his restraints.

  "Don't worry about bleeding to death, StoneCutter. You will run out of oxygen long before that," I said, grinning.

  After I slipped the gun back into Shane's jacket pocket, I stepped out of his view again to grab the lid to the coffin. I tossed it down on top of him. There was no need to nail it shut. Gillard wasn't getting free. At least I hoped that he wasn't.

  I returned to the car to grab the shovel that leaned against the driver's side door.

  When I returned to the grave, once more I peered down at the StoneCutter's coffin. I heard him, squirming in complete agony. It only took about twenty minutes to shovel all of that dirt back into the hole. Afterwards, I patted it down gently with the tip of the shovel.

  The StoneCutter was dead and buried. At least that was what I had thought.

  Shane began to regain control of our body as my murderous deed disintegrated into the background of the night. He peered down at the mound of dirt. He looked at the shovel in his hand. He felt satisfied.

  One more time, Shane patted down the dirt and peered out over the bay. The turbulent waves crashed onto the private beach.

  Shane returned to the Mercedes. He popped the trunk and put the shovel inside along with the gun.

  He sat behind the wheel and drove away.

  Leaving the manor's backyard, we drove past the silent old house. At the end of a long, twisting driveway, Shane glanced over at the mailbox before we pulled out onto the main street. The mailbox read:

  S.Lasher Residence

  Shane and I never thought we would actually catch the StoneCutter, but we had. And now he was buried in the place where we were born—Shane's family manor.

  3

  Wounds Run Deep

  "I liked not being hurt. So send the pain below."

  ––Chevelle, Send the Pain Below.

  |||||

  "Ally, I need to take a personal day," Shane said into the microphone built into the steering wheel of his car. His iPhone was plugged into the console near the radio. Ally's Facebook picture was displayed on the touch screen in the center of his console. It was Ally showing off her toned body in a bikini, her long hair fluttered behind her like she was in front of a wind machine. She must have done modeling on the side, but I didn't know for sure. Shane stayed out of her personal life. Unless she volunteered the information; he didn't ask.

  "Shane, are you ok? I can't remember the last time that you took a personal day," she asked with genuine concern in her voice.

  "I'm fine. Just move everything up for me. Do not contact me unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything else can wait until I return," Shane said. He hung the phone up and turned up the volume on the car stereo. He listened to Chopin's Nocturne.

  The memories of killing Gillard Shutter were not enough. Shane decided to visit the place of our birth, the same place that we buried Gillard Shutter a year ago, our family home. He pulled the car into the long driveway to Lasher manor. He followed the driveway to the front of the house, parked, and got out of the car.

  The morning da
ylight showered through the trees, leaving the impression that we stood under a rooftop of leaves. A dark shade covered most of the ground. Shane walked around to the back of the house and down the long path to the private beach.

  The house and the backyard looked just as deserted as it did that night that we buried Gillard Shutter.

  Long ago, when Shane was a child, Terrance Graves hired caretakers to oversee the house. They trimmed the hedges and kept the yard up. They cleaned the outside of the house. They swept the leaves off of the roof. Once a month, a cleaning crew would enter the house and clean it from top to bottom, detailing every square inch. They always left it immaculate. We were never really sure why Terrance took such good care of it in those days. It remained empty, and we never visited the house. I supposed that it had something to do with the grief he felt for Shane's parents and their deaths. Shane assumed that he felt responsible for it, like the house belonged to his own brother. We had no siblings, so Shane wasn't sure what that kind of attachment felt like. We only had each other.

  Throughout his life, Shane did not stay in the manor very often. We mostly spent our years away at school. During the holidays, when Shane was young, we stayed at Terrance's penthouse apartment in New York City.

  Shane never visited any aunts or uncles. After our parent's deaths, Shane's extended family retreated into the background of their own lives. The tragedy was too much for them to bear the sight of us.

  The closest thing that Shane ever had to a father was Terrance Graves. Although, he saw after our well-being, he was a poor substitute for a real father. He was more of an absent guardian than anything else.

  The only real guardian that Shane ever had or needed was me.

  Near the beach, Shane stopped at the small family cemetery. He carried a shovel. He looked at the tombstones. His father's, mother's, and the StoneCutter's headstones were all there, lined up together like a grouping of the dead people who influenced us the most, our family.

  Shane grabbed the shovel and began to dig up the StoneCutter. We needed to make sure that he was still buried, that he didn’t escape somehow. When we arrived I half expected that the StoneCutter's grave would have been dug up, like a ghost had risen from the dead. I thought that he had come back to haunt us.

  Still, we found it as we had left it a year ago. It was undisturbed. I almost wish that it was dug up, that he had come back from the dead because now I started to doubt. I started to believe that I made a mistake, that I had killed the wrong man. Although, I was sure that there was a killer in Shutter, the new murders meant that I could have been wrong about him being the StoneCutter. There were a lot of psychopaths out there. I could have mistaken him for the one that we spent our life searching for.

  What have I done? Shane thought. The words whispered through the walls of his skull and into my domain. The guilt, it came, crashing into my walls like a tidal wave. I had to stop it. I had to make it right.

  After forty-five minutes of digging, Shane reached the top of Shutter's coffin. He stood on top of it and tossed the shovel out of the pit.

  Please Shutter, you bastard, don't be on the other side of this lid, Shane thought.

  Shane peered down, closed his eyes, and with all of his might, jerked open the lid.

  Lying in a mound of worms and dirt, Gillard Shutter's skeleton stared back at us. The empty sockets in his skull looked directly through Shane's blue eyes and into mine. For the first time ever, I felt fear. It was Shane's fear, seeping through the cracks and invading my side of our brain. It began to leak into my home, like a water valve busting on a submarine. I had to plug it up before it drowned me.

  Shane and I began to think back to our genesis. We were here because of the StoneCutter.

  |||||

  More than twenty-five years ago, a young, rich couple lived in Shane's house. Their names were Shannon and Sebastian Lasher, our parents.

  It was a hot summer night. A warm breeze swept off the bay and onto their private beach. The leaves on the trees bloomed jauntily with a colorful scheme of green hues.

  The sun slowly set. Shane's parents sat on the back porch, witnessing the grand sunset. Sebastian studied an important case brief. It was detrimental to the success of his and Terrance's firm, back then they were partners, Graves-Lasher and Associates. Their firm was only five years old. They had worked hard to build it from the ground up.

  Shannon Lasher, Shane's mother, was seven months pregnant with him. A large bump protruded from her belly. Yet, she still had several weeks to go. She was only twenty-eight weeks pregnant.

  She sat reading Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That was one of her favorite stories. It was the tale of a successful doctor who was really hiding a madman inside himself, a killer. It took a special formula to allow the killer in him to take over and wreak havoc on the city and Jekyll's loved ones.

  Hyde destroyed Jekyll's life.

  I related to the story. Shane and I were constantly balancing our needs and our lives. The mistake that Hyde made was that he took control over Jekyll's life and actions without caution, without self-control. I could do the same, taking Shane's personal life hostage, but that would lead to our demise. I needed Shane in order to survive. I needed people to believe that he was alone in our body. I needed them to see only Shane and never to look upon me. He was my disguise. If I went around killing, like I wanted, we would both face the electric chair, not just Shane. We would be no better than Jekyll and Hyde. We would be a killer and a man struggling to take control over one vessel. Instead, we lived together like two roommates of the same body.

  Startlingly, the front doorbell rang. Sebastian rose to answer it. As he began to enter the manor from the backyard, the telephone rang.

  "Damn. Shannon would you answer the door? I need to take that call. I'm expecting a call from Terrance," Sebastian said.

  "Okay, honey. It's probably just Mrs. Livingston from down the street anyway, looking to gossip," Shannon said, placing her book on the patio table. She grabbed both arms of the chair and heaved herself to her feet.

  "Thank you, darling. I know that it hurts you to move about so much, but I really must answer Terrance's phone call. He said that he would call about the case this evening," Sebastian said.

  "Of course, honey. Don't worry about it. I need the exercise anyway. I still have another two months to carry around our son in here. I don't want to get lazy now. In three weeks I might weigh another twenty pounds," she said.

  They both chuckled.

  Sebastian went into the den and picked up the phone.

  "Hello, Terrance. I've been eager to hear from you," he said.

  Shannon steadily made her way to the front door. She fell out of earshot of her husband. She wondered what was so important to the case that made Sebastian so eager to speak to Terrance.

  The doorbell rang again. She reached out and pulled open the door. The figure on the front porch was tall and lean. That was all that she had seen before he punched her with a hard right cross. Shannon flew back off of her feet and onto the stone floor.

  She cried out in pain. Her vision blurred. She couldn't see anything. She tried to roll over onto her stomach, but the intruder kicked her. She let out a scream that felt like it would burst the windows, but the kick had knocked the wind out of her, so all that came out of her mouth was a muffled and painful gasp of air.

  The intruder pulled her by the hair and dragged her down the hall towards her husband's voice.

  "Hold on a second. Something is going on," Sebastian said. He put the phone down by the receiver and walked out into the hallway.

  He saw Shannon lying on the floor. Her nose and mouth were bleeding. The front door was wide open. Dirty footprints were tracked across the stone floor leading into the living room.

  "Shannon?" Shane's father blurted out. He hurried to help his wife. Before he could bend down to help her, the intruder stepped out of the shadows. He wore a ski mask and black clothing. He held a silver
handgun, a colt 1911.

  Before Sebastian uttered a word, the intruder struck him dead center of his forehead. Sebastian fell flat on his back.

  The intruder walked back to the den and hung up the phone. Quickly, he returned. He pointed the gun at Sebastian.

  "Get up," the intruder whispered. His voice was dark and raspy.

  "What? What do you want?" Sebastian asked.

  The intruder stepped closer to Shane's father.

  "Ask me one more question, and I will shoot your wife in the stomach. Do you understand?" the intruder whispered.

  Nervously, Sebastian nodded.

  Shannon started to cry. She was terrified.

  "Now get up. Both of you," he ordered.

  Shane's parents rose to their feet.

  The intruder motioned for them to walk toward the backdoor. He returned to front door and closed it.

  "Go outside," he commanded.

  Shane's parents followed his instructions. Shannon moved slowly. She was terrified and Shane started kicking profusely inside her stomach.

  The intruder didn't seem to be irritated by the sluggishness of Shannon Lasher. He waited patiently for her to climb down the steps and off of the back porch.

  "What now?" Sebastian asked. He held his hands out to assist his wife as she neared the bottom step. He helped her onto the grass.

  "Now, we take a little walk down toward the beach," the intruder said. He pointed the gun clear at Shannon's stomach and at Shane.

  Shane's parents followed his orders and walked toward the sandy beach. The sun had almost set completely. It gave off a deep reddish hue that pierced through the trees, transcending the skyline into a spectrum of red colors leading to black.

  As Shane's parents struggled to reach the beach, they noticed something only meters away. Just before the grass became sand, there was a long, thin object jutting out of the ground.

  Shane's father first realized what they walked towards. There was a shovel stuck out of the ground ahead.

  "What is this for?" Sebastian asked. He halted their walk just paces away from the shovel.