by Mandy White
After eating a huge meal of BBQ burgers with potato salad and canned beans, topped off with a large bowl of bran flakes cereal, I crawled into bed, exhausted. Missy curled up next to me on the duvet and fell asleep, looking like a tiny ball of dandelion fluff.
I woke early the next morning to something tapping on my cheek. I opened my eyes and found myself face to face with three black dots surrounded by white fluff – two sparkling eyes and a wet black nose. Seeing that I was awake, she lunged forward and planted her cold nose on my cheek in an endearing puppy kiss, then bounced backward with a squeaky little yip.
I took Missy outside for a doggy pit-stop and then returned to brew a nice strong pot of coffee. To my surprise, I found no puppy-related accidents inside the cabin. She must have stayed on the bed with me all night.
“What a smart little girl you are!” I told the puppy. She sat on the floor, her little head cocking to one side as she hung on my every word. It was nice to have someone listen to me for a change.
I wouldn’t have punished her even if she had made a mess on the floor. I was delighted that she had waited and even woken me up to take her outside at such a young age. It also angered me because Pete must have left her with absolutely no choice when she soiled the seat of his car.
Pete. The dirty fucker deserved what he’d gotten. I wondered if he was still alive, and if he was conscious.
After my morning coffee, I felt the urge to use the outhouse and decided that it would be the ideal opportunity to see if Pete had survived the night. After shutting the generator down for the night, I had heard no more screams coming from the hole. I brought a flashlight with me so I could get a good look at him.
He looked dead at first, but moved and groaned when I threw a couple of rocks at his head.
“Good morning, Fucko!” I greeted as I positioned myself on the toilet seat.
“How’d ya sleep, Pete?” I reached over and selected an old, yellowed copy of Guns and Ammo from the magazine rack we had installed in our deluxe shithouse.
“Hope you’re hungry, ‘cause here’s breakfast!” I called down into the hole, just before releasing my previous night’s meal on top of him. I thumbed through the magazine for about the hundredth time while humming the melody to “Little Green Bag”, my favorite tune from the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack. I hoped Pete was enjoying his meal. It had been pretty good when I ate it.
I opened a package of Rot-It, a nitrogen-based compost accelerator I kept on hand to keep the contents of the outhouse decomposing and keep things smelling as nice as possible. I dumped in the entire bag of the white powder. I guess it must have burned because Pete started screeching like a teakettle.
Back at the house, I fired up the generator again and filled the bathtub half full of warm water to give Missy a bath.
I shampooed the little dog, removing all traces of dirt and fecal matter from her soft white fur. I used a washcloth to clean her face, taking great care not to get any soap or water in her eyes and nose. She stayed calm throughout the bath, showing no signs of fear. She gazed at me with nothing but trust and adoration in her liquid brown eyes.
I had never felt such tenderness toward any living thing before, except for Cammie. It was then that I decided to rename the puppy after my late sister.
After Camille was bathed and dried, I sat in the big overstuffed armchair and held her securely in my lap while I carefully trimmed the clumps of matted fur from her coat. Once she was free from mats, I marveled at how thin and delicate her floppy little ears were.
As quickly as the feeling of tenderness had overwhelmed me, it was replaced by another hot surge of anger at Pete as I imagined what he might have done to her if he’d been inclined to try grooming her. One slip of the scissors with a struggling dog and there goes an eye – or an ear gets sliced off. It made me want to go out there and plug a few more bullets into him.
The puppy gazed up at me with an expression of such utmost love and trust that my eyes stung with tears and my throat tightened again. I was a monster; even more of a monster than Pete, maybe. Yet here was this tiny little soul, offering me her unconditional love and acceptance. Lost in the dark pools of her gaze, I could almost believe that my horrible deeds were forgiven. In her eyes, at least, they were.
* * *
It took Pete nearly three days to die. He was a pretty tough little bastard after all. I helped him out on his journey to decomposition by adding a bag of steer manure I’d been saving for the few shrubs I’d planted around the cabin in one of my rather half-hearted attempts at landscaping.
I also dug up a particularly industrious anthill I’d found in the forest about a mile behind the house, in a spot where I usually disposed of unused parts of carcasses after a successful hunt. They were those angry red ants that fed on dead things. They played a major role in nature’s cycle of decomposition, cleaning soft tissue from bones when animals died. I dug up as much of the anthill as possible, sealing it into a plastic ice cream pail I’d brought on my hike for that purpose. Pete was looking lonely down there. Nothing like a swarm of ants to keep a man company, in both life and death.
Once Pete was good and dead, I went about the business of eliminating all evidence that he had been at my cabin: the most obvious one being the orange car. Disposing of a large noisy car that resembled a Jack O’ Lantern wasn’t the easiest thing to do but I had already thought of a solution.
With my quad still loaded into the back of my pickup, I drove about twenty miles up the lake before turning off onto another, rougher gravel road. It was an old, forgotten former logging road that I’d taken on some of my hunting trips. At one point, the winding road edged along a sheer rock face overlooking the lake. It was a spectacular view, despite the feeling of vertigo I got each time I looked over the edge. Harrison Lake was a deep glacial lake, icy cold even during the hottest of summers. It was rumored that the lake had swallowed a logging truck or two back in the sixties when that road was in active use. Surely it had room for one more vehicle.
I wasn’t sure how deep it was at that particular location, but looking over the edge on a sunny day into the crystal-clear water, I couldn’t see any sign of the bottom. Just ink-black water.
A little way past the cliff, the road widened again and angled away from the lake into the alpine forest. I parked the truck in a small clearing and unloaded the quad. I parked it in some dense undergrowth and tossed an army camouflage net over it. Having an ex-military man for a father had given me a particular interest in collecting army surplus items. After hiding my quad and letting Camille out for a puppy pit stop, I made my way back down the mountain to the cabin.
I checked on Pete, who was still dead. I had covered him with leaves and grass to camouflage him, on the million-to-one chance that someone happened to drop by my cabin while I was away and happened to feel the need to use the outhouse AND happened to look down inside the pit (having also been carrying a flashlight in the middle of the day, of course). I shone my flashlight into the pit to make sure he hadn’t come back to life as some sort of nitrogen-powered zombie and clawed his way out of the pit. (I made a mental note to stop reading so many zombie novels). I could see a bit of white peeking through the grasses, and after using a long branch to brush the grass aside, confirmed that the white was part of his hand.
Nope. No zombies there. Pete was definitely dead. I went ahead with phase two of making Pete disappear forever.
I left Camille locked safely inside the cabin while I took the big orange Dork-Mobile for its final ride. I returned to the clearing where I had parked my quad and turned the car around and took it back down to a bend in the cliffside road. After giving it a wipe-down (just in case) to remove my fingerprints, I positioned the car with the tires turned toward the edge of the cliff, dropped the gearshift into neutral and stepped out of the way. The car rolled down the hill, leaving the road as soon as it reached the curve. The Buick sailed over the edge of the cliff with the grace of a paper airplane, gliding in silence to the lake below. It hit the wate
r nose first, bobbing once, twice, then diving beneath the surface as the water rushed into the open windows. In moments the car was gone, leaving only fading ripples on the surface to reveal that it had ever been there to begin with. I scanned the surface with my binoculars and could find no trace of the orange car. It was unlikely that anyone would ever find it.
I retrieved my quad from where I’d left it and rode back to the cabin, where I checked on Pete one last time. He was still dead. I almost wished I’d sent him to the same watery grave where his car now lay but it would have been far too risky. The lake was different from the ocean. In the ocean, things like bodies were quickly devoured by crabs and scores of scavenging fish. The lake was home to fewer life forms, some of which were likely to ignore a submerged body. By sinking him with the car, it was possible he would be found, riddled with bullet holes. It was much too close to my neck of the woods for comfort. The cabin was my sanctuary and I’d already tainted it with murder. It was my responsibility to ensure that Creepy Pete would never be found as long as I was alive.
~ Chapter 28 ~
Finale
I sat in my father’s La-Z-Boy chair, watching television with Camille snuggled in my lap. I stroked her silky fur and fondled her delicate little ears. How anyone could handle a tiny little being such as this with anything but tenderness was beyond my comprehension.
Even after the atrocities I had committed against members of my own species, I still felt as if I’d retained some of my humanity. Watching the news, I was bombarded with one atrocity after another. An item about the Whistler sled dog massacre made me reach for the remote and turn up the volume.
It was a short blurb about how the man responsible for the brutal slaughter of 56 sled dogs had finally had his day in court.
I was familiar with the sordid tale. A company that offered sled dog tours had prepared for increased business during the 2010 Olympics. Afterward, they had more dogs than they needed and an employee was instructed to ‘thin the pack’.
In a three-day-long bloodbath, dozens of dogs were shot to death execution-style in front of their pack mates, sending them into a terrified frenzy. The man found it difficult to get a clean shot at the panicked dogs and ended up missing some, leaving them mortally wounded. When the story came out, the public learned about dogs running around with heads partially blown off and holes through their bodies, floundering in a pit of corpses that later became a mass grave. When the executioner ran out of ammunition he resorted to slitting throats and stabbing the remaining dogs to death.
The fallen sled dogs were dubbed the Whistler 100, based on the killer’s estimate of how many dogs he had slaughtered. In the end, 56 bodies were unearthed. The forensic investigation revealed evidence of animal cruelty and the man was charged and convicted of the crime. His punishment: a fine and a ban from working with animals.
Not a single day in jail.
The dogs’ remains were reburied in a pet cemetery in Penticton.
The story of the slain sled dogs upset me far more than any of the atrocities I had committed. I supposed it was because the dogs had been innocent – loyal working animals that were slaughtered without provocation.
My victims were different. Not one of them was innocent. Some of them had killed; some had not, but each was guilty of destroying one or more lives in some way.
One had destroyed my life by killing my sister.
I felt no remorse for what I had done but my mind was far from at peace. I would have liked to say I could sleep well at night but it would have been a lie.
There were too many dreams. Dreams of Camille, laughing and calling me a fucktard one moment, then saturated in blood the next. In one of the dreams she sat on the bathroom floor where I’d found her, with her abdomen ripped open and intestines spilling out onto the floor. She kept picking them up and trying to stuff them into her mouth, looking up at me expectantly.
“Like thith?” she asked, over a mouthful of her own guts.
Or, in a variation of the same dream, she removed one of her sliced-off nipples from her mouth and offered it to me, as if sharing a snack.
During the many sleepless nights I had spent, sitting in my chair in front of the television, watching nothing in particular, I’d had plenty of time to think things over. Reliving the murders in my mind always led me backward in time to a place I didn’t want to go but like in sleep, my stubborn psyche insisted on going where it chose to go.
Was I different from the people I had killed? How could I justify what I had done? Was punishing brutality with equal or even greater brutality a good thing, or did it make me no different from the people I had killed?
I remembered something I had written in a paper I’d done for Psych class:
“Good and evil; right and wrong are, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder…”
My professor had liked that idea and asked me for permission to share it with the class for discussion. I agreed to let him use it, provided that I remained anonymous. I had no desire to be put in the spotlight, especially for something that was bound to provoke a heated debate.
I had expected some of my classmates to disagree but was shocked at how many misunderstood the concept I was trying to convey with that simple sentence.
The key phrase of course, was, “eye of the beholder,” but few students actually got it.
What I’d meant was quite simple:
What may be wrong to one person may be perfectly acceptable to another. The perspective of each individual changes what is to be considered acceptable.
For example, we accept in our society that cannibalism is ‘wrong’, yet in a cannibal tribe it is considered a normal way of life. What about those stories about humans eating each other for survival, like the Donner party, or that soccer team that crashed in the Andes? I’m not saying I recommend going all Hannibal Lecter on the Avon lady, I’m just saying that it is what it is.
A matter of perspective.
Take pornography. The televangelists and door-knockers wail about the evils of adult films, magazines and other things of that nature. The people who enjoy those things have a different perspective on the matter. The people behind the scenes: actors, filmmakers, photographers and models have built careers on what the holy rollers are calling ‘evil’ and ‘wrong’.
Perspective.
Those were some of the more mainstream examples. The whole ‘eye of the beholder’ thing takes an ugly turn when you approach topics such as child abuse, pedophilia and similar horrors that nobody in their right mind could find acceptable. It’s impossible for some people to comprehend that these things could ever be considered anything but wrong. For some, to even theorize that some people (however sick and disturbed) might see such things as acceptable is akin to condoning them.
And that was when the shit hit the fan.
The whole class erupted when some of the more disturbing examples were used to test my ‘eye of the beholder’ theory.
The general argument went something like, “Child abuse is WRONG, and in no case is it EVER right! You’re sick to even suggest that it could be!”
I didn’t disagree with that. In fact, I couldn’t agree more.
From those people’s perspectives, they were absolutely correct. From my own perspective, it was also correct, since I agreed with the people who made that claim.
BUT, (and it was a big ‘BUT’ to swallow, for some) from the perspective of the sick fuck who was doing the abusing… was it as wrong to that individual as it was to us? It couldn’t be, or it wouldn’t be happening to begin with.
For an individual to voluntarily and knowingly commit an atrocity, there must be some kind of justification in that person’s mind for what he or she is about to do. Either the individual does not believe that the act is wrong, or he feels that he is in some way justified in doing what he is doing, thereby making the act ‘right’.
See? It really is a can of worms, isn’t it? Kind of a ‘Schroedinger’s cat’ sort of thing, only more disturbin
g.
Even the things one mind can never accept may be considered acceptable by another.
Pimping was, in my eyes, wrong.
Getting rich by preying on young and naïve women, exploiting them for their dreams of becoming famous, drugging, raping and torturing those women; all of those things were wrong.
The fact that it had happened to my own sister made it a thousand times more wrong.
In my eyes.
Slicing off a girl’s tits in a fit of rage? Well, I couldn’t find anything right or acceptable about that.
Feeding a man his own dick or intestines? Leaving a gut-shot asshole to die in a shit pit?
Wrong, to most people.
But that was where the variable of perspective got thrown into the equation.
The difference was, the scumbags I killed had deserved to die.
The ones they had victimized deserved to be avenged. The fact that I had taken it upon myself to be the bringer of vengeance for those individuals was simply a matter of my being in the right (or wrong?) place at the right time.
If any of those assholes had demonstrated even a shred of humanity, they might have been allowed to live.
I doubted anyone else would see my unique perspective on the situation, though Camille might have.
It simply was what it was, and it was now in the past…
I was done with killing.
For real this time.
You could only murder so many perverts before you realized there was no end to them. It was like that old video game, Space Invaders. No matter how many of those pixelated aliens you shot, more and more just kept appearing. It was impossible to win the game; it just kept getting faster and faster and more complicated until you either died or gave up. My killing game had become like Space Invaders.
I chose to give up rather than be killed. I was tired of punishing unknowns for the sins of ones long dead.
No number of deaths could ever bring Camille back – I knew that.
I wasn’t sure when the killing got out of control but at some point it had become some sort of addiction. Dispatching an asshole gave me a weird kind of high unlike any drug. I’d never used any drugs, but I somehow knew there was no substance on earth that could ever recreate or surpass the feeling of righteous justice that came with ridding the world of a piece of human garbage. If murder was an addiction, then I’d beaten it. I’d kicked the habit just before I left for the cabin that last time. When I ran into Pete, I’d had a little relapse but I was okay now. I had it beat. I didn’t need to take any more lives.