Twelve Mad Men

by Ryan Bracha et al.

  She went in there in the hope of selling some handcrafted Russian matryoshka dolls – you know, those nested things, one inside the other – but all she got for her troubles was a sexual predator with an eye for his first kill. And his eye couldn’t help but fall on her.

  She was pretty, petite, blonde and shy, with big blue eyes that glanced down when she talked. Somehow, Stanley got the girl talking, in her broken, guttural way, about how she’d ended up in Teesside. He asked her about her friends, her living arrangements, and family ties. Not because he was interested in her, but because he wanted to know just how badly she would be missed. She told him that she had no friends and lived on her own. Her parents had died in a recent car crash and she’d settled in England using the inheritance money.

  His excitement increased.

  Natalya was friendless, rootless, and alone.

  She was the one.

  He tried to keep her talking, but she said she needed to leave, so that she could try and sell her wares to other businesses in the area. In a panic, Stanley promised to buy some from her, for his family, if she agreed to go out with him on a date that evening. He suggested that she bring her dolls along for the date, to keep for company. She gave him a perfect white smile that sent his blood lust soaring.

  He picked her up that evening, as the evening sky turned from burnt amber to maroon. He parked his car out of view of witnesses, and hit the horn to get her attention. She got in the front passenger seat and gave him a shy smile. Then she opened the zipper of her handbag and gave him a flash of the Russian doll that lay inside. He laughed, and she laughed too, believing that she was in on the joke rather than the butt of it.

  They went for a long drive onto the Yorkshire Moors, keeping to the back roads. The landscape looked strange at night. Tree branches reached for the sky like withered claws, and in the darkness the plants and shrubs had a metallic solidity and sharpness. Stanley pointed at peaks and valleys arbitrarily, and told her stories about imaginary landmarks, to take her mind off the fact that he was taking her ever further from the beaten track.

  The longer he drove the stranger the landscape seemed to be. Houses looked as flat as card and the people resembled lifeless mannequins. Fields of crops seemed to sway of their own volition, regardless of wind direction. Stanley drove until he no longer recognised his surroundings, and looked for a place to make his move.

  Eventually, he pulled off the road, into a layby that was shielded by a thick bank of shrubs and trees, and told her that he had cramp in his foot. When the she looked into the darkness that surrounded them, the girl began to feel afraid. She chewed at her fingernails and asked a continuous stream of questions in broken English and useless Russian, while Stanley massaged his foot and said the word cramp in a loud voice – as though increasing the volume would somehow bridge the gap in their understanding.

  He told her that there was a pub nearby, a cosy place where they could enjoy drinks next to a roaring wood fire, but the girl wanted to go home. She was frightened and confused and looked around with nervous twitches of her head. Tears rolled down her cheeks, though she didn’t dare make a sound. Stanley stroked the girl’s hair and told her that it was fine; he would take her home.

  Then he dragged her into the back of the car and raped her.

  The act itself didn’t take long, consisting of little more than a minute and a half of savage thrusting, but the exquisite tension of the moment made it seem so much longer. That’s the funny thing about time – it’s a malleable thing that expands and contracts around us. Moments of ecstasy, like the one Stanley experienced, stretch themselves as thin as an elastic band, until it feels like the very fabric of universe might snap at a moment’s notice. Those final vinegar strokes, with his forehead pounding painfully against the cold passenger window, whilst the terrified girl squealed beneath him, seemed like an eternity.

  When he came inside her, time snapped back to normal, and he lay back against the seat for a few moments of satisfaction, his chest heaving from the effort. But the satisfaction didn’t last long.

  He watched the shaking girl pick up her torn panties from the footwell and try to put them on. He’d ripped away the gusset in his frenzy, so that the underwear consisted of one big hole. When she attempted to put her clothes back on, she realised that they were ruined and began to cry.

  Stanley told her to get out of the car. The girl looked at him through tear glazed eyes and pleaded for her life. Her pleas aroused him. He got hard again, and when the girl saw that her pleas weren’t going to help her, she screamed and pushed the door open.

  She wasn’t fast enough. Stanley grabbed a handful of Natalya’s hair and pulled her back. She wailed and sobbed and flailed her arms as he pushed her on her stomach and entered her again. Stanley whispered to her like a lover, demanding that she do the same, but the girl didn’t understand. He attempted to kiss her, but she turned away, so that her face was in the dirt, and cried into the leaves that littered the ground.

  When he finished the second time, Stanley felt no satisfaction, only a sense of emptiness, like staring into an abyss. The abyss stared back. Stanley didn’t like what it had to show him and tried to turn away, but there was no avoiding from what was inside him. He realised that if he couldn’t turn away from what he’d done he could at least bury it.

  Natalya sat on the ground and attempted to straighten her torn dress. Tears ran down her face and occasionally a silent sob shook her body like a shiver. Stanley couldn’t stand to look at it any longer. He saw a large rock on the ground and picked it up. It was heavy in his grasp, and had lots of sharp edges. He made sure that he had a good grip as he approached Natalya. She was unaware of his presence as she fussed and fiddled with various buttons and cried softly.

  He brought the rock down, again and again and again, until there was nothing left but an awful mess of blood and hair and brain pulp. He gazed without admiration at his handiwork for a few seconds. He’d snuffed out what made this girl human, leaving behind nothing more than a flesh container.

  She was an empty vessel that needed to be filled. Part of him understood her plight. He’d been empty for most of his life – devoid of feelings, of empathy, of anything that might be mistaken for joy – so he wanted to find a way to communicate that. In his own way, he felt closer to her than any other person in his life.

  He took the doll from the girl’s purse and thrust it inside her, pushing it in deep with his fingers. Now Natalya was a human matryoshka doll – a little secret for the pathologist to discover, if they ever found the body.

  Stanley pulled a shovel from the boot of his car and dug a deep grave. He pushed the body into the hole and rapidly shovelled earth on top of it. He shovelled the excess dirt into the area around him and used a branch to flatten the ground and make it look natural.

  When he woke the next morning, the air felt fresher, food tasted better, and the world seemed different. He replayed the events in his mind constantly, until they gradually lost their lustre and felt like nothing more than a vaguely remembered dream. His life felt like a flat monotone photocopy of reality, without colour, without vitality.

  He wanted to feel alive again, but there was only one way to do that.

  For the next few weeks, whenever there was a news report on the TV or radio, Stanley paid close attention, with fear tightening his innards until he could barely eat, and hoped that nobody would discover his secret. As the weeks passed into months, he realised that nobody missed the girl. She was just another lost soul.

  It got easier after that. The fear faded, and victim after victim found their way into graves all around Yorkshire. He was always careful to ensure that they were the ones that others wouldn’t miss. Hitchhikers, prostitutes, foreigners that looked like they were here illegally, it was easy for people to disappear, especially when he was careful. The graves were always deep; his kill kit was always at the ready. When the time was right, his preparation was tight.

  He got through a lot of kills in t
hree years.

  When Stanley moved to London, it was ostensibly for the work, but in reality he wanted a larger pool of lost souls to choose from. It worked for a while (it was easy for people to disappear in the big city), but new relationships and maintaining friendships all got in the way, until he couldn’t do what he wanted and his disguise (as a regular human being) became his main way of living.

  So the killing stopped, but the rage continued to bubble beneath the surface: The urge to rape, kill, and wield power over those who were weaker than himself continued to percolate. It crippled him socially, financially, and it took a toll on his body. Comfort eating became his way of dealing with the problem; the more he wanted to kill the more food he ate. He grew fatter and more miserable with each passing day.

  By the time he ended up in Enfield, Stanley was barely functioning as human being. When he looked at women on the street, he saw only victims, he imagined their screams, the terror twisting their pretty features, and most of all he fantasised about the moment when the life left their eyes. It was that moment that he missed most of all – the moment of death.

  He bought a car, despite crushing debts, and cruised the streets for victims. He picked them off quickly, killed them sloppily – raping them fast, burying them shallow, leaving all kinds of evidence in his wake – and eventually paid the price of an uncomfortable seat in a beige interview room with two detectives.

  I’ll never forget the look on the fat detective’s face when I gave him the final figure. It was a look of horror mixed with barely concealed delight. His lips were pressed tightly together, pursed in a look of thin-lipped anger that could just have easily been a smirk. His eyes were narrowed and mean on the surface, but far beneath, dancing somewhere in the jet back pupil, I could sense the struggle not to scream with joy. His horror at the ferocity and quantity of my crimes was plain to see, but his delight wasn’t too hard to notice if you looked for it. Catching Martin Stanley made his career, you see. His name made the papers and the TV, thanks to the killer’s blunders. Word on the lunatic’s grapevine is that they’ve just given the man a promotion. Good for him.

  I also remember the way his face fell when I told him what I actually was, and that Martin Stanley wasn’t really there anymore. The light in his eyes faded just a little, because it meant a madhouse rather than prison.

  They brought in the finest criminal psychologists, and then sent them away – bamboozled. They did MRIs and CAT scans, studying my amygdala for signs of aberrant behaviour. They tested my IQ, and found it to be ‘off-the-charts’, as one of them put it, despite the fact that previous tests put Stanley between 130-140. They prodded and poked and tested, only to find that my ‘fantasy’ was so deeply ingrained that they had no choice but to declare me insane.

  The authorities hunted for bodies in all the places that I suggested and found them one-by-one.

  But they couldn’t find my first victim.

  In my confusion, I suggested several alternative burial sites. Maybe Stanley had locked the knowledge so deep, behind layers of lies, that I had trouble discerning the truth. Everywhere they dug the result was the same. No corpse, no evidence of a corpse, and a lot of police officers left scratching their heads.

  They put me in a room with a criminal psychologist. He was a pale, dark-haired man of indeterminate age in a black suit and white shirt combo. He had a prissy way of licking the tip of his pen before he wrote something on the clipboard he had in his lap. His beady blue eyes studied my face, twitching up and down and left and right for details that he could jot in his report. The man’s lips were locked in a permanent smirk. I wasn’t sure if this was a physical defect or an overwhelming contempt for yours truly – either way, it annoyed me.

  “Do you know what I think, Martin?”

  I smiled at him. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

  He tapped his left temple with the end of his pen. “Of course. So what would you like me to call you?”

  “It’s unpronounceable.”

  The psychologist cast a glance at the two guards, who shuffled and snickered softly. I glared at them. They returned my glower with interest, but my gaze darkened to such a degree that they turned and looked away.

  I slouched in my chair and said: “The human tongue’s incapable of generating the sounds required to pronounce it. It’s a question of biology. You just don’t have it.”

  “Maybe because that’s the way you want it.”

  “No. It’s just the way it is.”

  “Then how about I call you Mr Stanley?”

  “I guess it’ll do.”

  He propped his elbows on the clipboard and leaned forward. “Wormholes, alien worlds, body snatching, it’s all very convenient.”

  “Not for me,” I replied. “I’m trapped in this body.”

  “You could always end it.”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  He smiled. “No, Mr Stanley, a hypothetical point.”

  “We’re not allowed to endanger our hosts,” I replied.

  “Why?”

  “We’re not savages.”

  “And yet you’re debating whether or not to end the human race.”

  “We’re gathering evidence to determine how dangerous humanity is – there’s a difference.”

  “Did you know that your amygdala function is almost non-existent when faced with images of horror that would make a normal person’s scan light up like a Christmas decoration?”

  “His amygdala function.”

  “No, Mr Stanley. Yours.”

  I decided to not argue semantics with him.

  “Which proves what exactly?”

  The psychologist’s smirk intensified. “Nothing. It’s just interesting, that’s all.” Then he used the pen to tap his temple again. “Has it ever occurred to you that the Russian girl and the dolls might’ve been an imaginary event?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the memory’s too vivid to be a dream.”

  “Haven’t you ever had a dream so real that when you wake you have to pinch yourself to remind you where you are?”

  I often dreamed of my home world, and of those I’d left behind. “Maybe.”

  “There are no records of this girl anywhere. Not here, nor in Russia. Believe me, we checked.”

  I shook my head. “Means nothing. People disappear all the time. Russia’s not exactly renowned for the detail of its records. After all, Stalin was responsible for more deaths than Hitler, yet it’s not something that’s widely recognised.”

  “And Chairman Mao was responsible for more deaths than both of them combined,” the psychologist replied. “There’s always a psychopath with a bigger kill count.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “I know what your point is, Mr Stanley. You say she’s not on the records… maybe because they’re lost, or they’re being held somewhere off the beaten track.”

  “Something like that.”

  “And my point is that maybe this was something you wanted to happen. A dream so lifelike that it convinced you that it was real.”

  “Bollocks.”

  “No, no, Mr Stanley. Sometimes we have dreams that we believe are real. Alien abductions, for instance, often stem from sleep paralysis. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  He jotted that down. “There’s no convincing many of these people that what they experienced was in fact a sleep anomaly. This is despite the fact that many of them don’t ever remember seeing their abductors, just a sense of isolation, of dislocation, and an inability to move. Their brains fill in the rest and make it seem real.”

  “So?”

  “You wanted it to be real. A dream so vivid that you convinced yourself it was real. The girl was a figment of your imagination, but it laid the groundwork for what you are now.”

  Grinding my teeth from side-to-side, I glared at him and tried to think of something to say that would cut the meeting short.

&
nbsp; “And her Russian tongue? The matryoshka doll? I made them up, too?”

  “The doll’s a metaphor.”

  “For what?”

  “For you, Mr Stanley.”

  My eyes sought his. I tried to stare him down, make him blink and look away, but his gaze was unflinching.

  “You’ve been hiding yourself for a long time. I doubt anybody could truly get to the bottom of you – I certainly can’t. After all, you’re the student who gambled during university and lied about it for years, shielding your debts from your family. You played the devoted boyfriend to numerous women, shielding them from your murderous instincts. You covered your tracks by creating a hard-drinking, gregarious persona, shielding your friends from the quiet, soulless predator you really are. You’ve been covering yourself in new layers for years. And this alien persona is simply the latest.”

  I felt cold, yet sweat dripped down my back and nestled unpleasantly in my waistband. “I know who I am. What I am.”

  “Do you?”

  I tried glaring at him again, but his gaze was so intense and ferocious that I was the one who blinked and looked away.

  “It’s awfully convenient that you were possessed in mid-chase,” he said. “Just as you realised the trouble you were in.”

  “This isn’t a persona.”

  “I’ve got no doubts you believe that.”

  “I want to go back to my cell.”

  The man smiled. “Fine, but you can’t avoid the truth. You have to face it eventually.”

  “I know what I am.”

  “A murderer.”

  I shook my head. “That’s him, not me.”

  “It’s you.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  The man sighed and looked at my chaperones. “Take him back.”

  So here I am, sitting in the dark, quite alone. Nobody believes me, not even you. And why should they? After all, it sounds so outlandish. But we’re everywhere, watching you all the time. It’s not a lie.

  That’s why you should turn away for a few seconds and let me run.