by Неизвестный
Inhumanity
by Phil Buck
The man with the knife wouldn’t have thought so much blood would come out of one person, but it had been fun finding out. He had in his time carved more flesh and bled more bodies than he could really remember, every image kept as snapshots in his brain ready to recall for a moment’s passing pleasure or to build himself up to his next mission. This one had been the best for a long while.
Just the sheer amount of pain, the volume and intensity of the screaming, the begging. Everything about his latest act of butchery had raised the bar for him. Lots of fresh and vivid images for his mental scrapbook.
As blood pooled and got sticky underneath the thick soles of his walking boots, the man with the knife squatted down and looked into the woman’s face. Dead now, of course, but only recently. He had managed to extend her agony and his pleasure, while the husband watched, for hours. That had taken real self control. Ultimately though, the final act had to be committed. So now this woman, he forgot her name and if he was honest didn’t really care, was a pale and exsanguinated corpse, split wide open from throat to belly. He had played with the organs a while, pulling out the intestines just to see how long they were. His usual post-act games.
It didn’t stir him in the same way though. Once the deed was done and the life was gone, it was all a bit dull. The fun had been had.
The evening replayed in his head in fractured moments, out of sequence and arranged according to what had given him the most pleasure. Sliding the knife into her quivering body, that act of penetration, was an image he’d be playing with himself to for days if not months to come. Hearing the screams, watching the blood spill and flow like an undammed river. His first entry into the house where he’d kicked the husband to the floor and dragged the wife off to the side of the lounge by her hair. Basking in the mental agonies of the husband as he alternately screamed, begged and cried for mercy, almost as if he felt every torture that was visited on his wife in his own body.
Now that had been something special.
True, toying with men wasn’t nearly as much fun but there was a certain pleasing warmth in the loins to be gained from a quick slash across the throat, and seeing the sheer disbelief of the realisation of Death’s arrival.
Death. Now there was a figure to be admired. The man with the knife searched for Death’s presence every time he took a life. He knew Death was there, watching, taking in the spectacle. It was just that he didn’t have good enough eyes to see Death with. Once he had actually looked through someone else’s eyes. Nothing – just blood and blurry tissue. If he had been expectation any great revelations on that front he was sorely disappointed.
One day though. One day the man with the knife and his heinous acts would catch that glimpse, and there would be the gateway to ultimate pleasure.
In the meanwhile however....
The man with the knife stepped across the wife’s gutted body as lifeless eyes gazed out, wide and rolled up into the head. All this killing had made him hungry, and he fancied a snack. Couple like this should have a well stocked fridge – no cheap cans of beans tonight.
He was right, so he went about the casual business of making a big sandwich with everything he could find in it. From the doorway, the husband seemed to watch him, thick dark blood still slick on his throat wound and all around. He was as dead as his wife, but the man with the knife gave him a quick wave anyway.
“What do you think, mate ?” he asked, his voice so painfully normal. “Tomato sauce. Hmmm, not sure.” He cocked his head, mock listening, and gave a thumbs up and a big smile. “Yeah, you’re right. Tomato sauce is a bit much. I’ll go for the brown.”
The TV was still on, so the man with knife watched for a few minutes while he ate his sandwich. He didn’t care how it tasted. Food and eating gave him no pleasure, and even if it did the sheer heights he had reached over the past four hours would have burned out virtually every pleasure centre in his brain anyway.
Wiping his greasy hands on the couch, he looked at his watch.
“Fuck me,” he said, “you didn’t tell me it was that late. Now I’ve got all this clearing up to do and I’m going to miss last orders.”
Squatting down again, he poked his knife into the wife’s right eye, puncturing it and letting fluid ooze out, just to let her know who was in charge here.
The man with the knife didn’t like to miss last orders. It was just past ten, so he’d have to hurry. Usually he took time to clean up, get rid of the mess, bag up the bodies and leave the house nice and pristine except for his trademark pool of blood – as if he had simply carved its occupants out of existence and left the life they had built around themselves intact with just his own signature in red to mark his passing. He respected a good house, and these two had maintained a very good house. Lots of care and attention lavished on it.
He appreciated that. After all, it had been for his ultimate benefit. These two were just the caretakers. It didn’t matter who bought it or squatted in it or knocked it down, this house like all the others would always be his.
“Right then,” said the man with the knife. “Where do you keep your bin bags ?”
***
“Horrifyingly savage. That’s what police have called the killer who has now claimed his eighth set of victims in less than a year.
“With more details, our outside correspondent, Nick Roper.”
“Thank you, Gillian. Police have been here for over two hours now, trying to piece together the last moments of Bradley and Hermione Shaw. They’re looking for any clue that might tell them how this normal, happily married couple came to meet their end at the hands of the most brutal and violent killer England has seen this century. The scene here is grim, and while little information has been given out so far, a police spokesman has confirmed that the condition of the house may indicate that the killer was disturbed. They are hoping this will provide vital evidence.”
***
Out in the woods, a couple of miles outside the city where there were no streetlamps and nature was free from the constraints of so-called civilisation, an old man rode his bike. His name was Maurice. Maurice with the long straggly beard and the trousers that didn’t fit properly. Local oddball to some, luvable eccentric to others. Whatever. Everyone knew Maurice. He was harmless, simply a man who had seen eighty plus years of life. It had undone his mind a little, certainly, but that freedom let him live his life however he wanted.
He had never bothered with any of the medicine the doctors had prescribed for whatever they said he had. He wasn’t getting locked up in a home, and he wasn’t selling his house, perched on the very edges of town and stacked floor to ceiling with every conceivable object that a man could come across. Maurice collected everything. His house was a shrine to a life lived through hoarding.
People moaned about the smell, but they could just piss off away. His house was nowhere near anyone else’s, and nobody had to walk past it to get anywhere. They just liked to have a nose, poke fun and phone up the Council to complain, as people always did. Especially people who thought they were better than him, who were somehow self-appointed watchdogs for a community that viewed them as irritating busybodies.
In reality, as long as he kept the rat problem under control and didn’t bother anyone else, the Council considered Maurice a mild nuisance at most, one that with all their cutbacks they didn’t see the need to address.
So he just got on with his life and his unique routines, one of which was his nightly bike rides. Just a few miles in the cool air and the quiet, when everyone else was asleep and he could pretend that he was alone in the world. That way it was just Maurice and nature.
He had memorised the route, knew all the shapes of the trees and the length of the grass. He knew exactly where each flaw in the road would be and where every bush or branch extended out that bit too far. He could make the journey blindfold, and with the lack of lights he sometimes wasn’t far off doing exactly that.
It was thi
s knowledge and memory that alerted Maurice immediately to the fact that something had changed.
About a mile in, just past the old abandoned brick house long boarded up, and near the gnarled oak tree that loomed ominously in front of a dull quarter moon. Something wasn’t right, not the way it should be. Things like that ate away at Maurice until he was compelled to do something about them.
His route needed to be just right before he could go any further, so he parked his rickety old bike with its squeaky back wheel against the oak tree, and took a closer look.
It was oddly silent as Maurice stepped off the path and onto the raw land. He might have expected to hear something, perhaps one of the owls that roosted in the barn down the path and often hunted around. Occasionally he had even seen them, graceful in their cruel, predatory way.
Not tonight, though. There was no noise tonight. Almost as if he has stepped out of the world and into a place where sound had no bearing on anything. It unnerved him. But not as much as what had dragged him from his nightly route in the first place.
Perhaps a hundred yards past the tree, out past a clump of bushes that knitted themselves into a thorny web, was a small hump in the earth. As Maurice looked closer and slowed his already tentative steps, the darkness began to reveal more. He could see the hump was fresh and he could smell the turn of the earth. It was messy, not something that nature had smoothed. This was the interference of man.
He wondered if people had been digging for badger sets again. There were a few around these parts that Maurice knew of and had spent time watching. The badgers never came out though. Nature had its way of keeping people locked out.
Maurice knelt down by the hump, and immediately realised it was a grave. A shallow one, hastily excavated at the very edges of a field where it could be left largely unnoticed. But there was no mistaking the shape and the dimensions of a body. It couldn’t be anything else.
Closer still, and Maurice saw something else sticking out of the earth. It caught the glint of the moon with a plastic shine, and as he gingerly reached to touch it with a couple of fingers its familiarity startled him. A bin liner, ragged and ripped.
Maurice’s breath caught in his throat. He may have lived a strange life but he watched the news, and he knew about the savage killer who hunted down families in their homes, butchered them, bled them and then vanished with the bodies. Could he have found one of the ravaged dead? One of the butcher’s victims given back to the ground?
Curiosity drove Maurice to reach out for the bag and tug, just a little. He recoiled as an arm flopped out into the air and stuck at an angle, palms up, almost pleading. It was still attached but barely, and Maurice could see the wetness of blood and tissue exposed by the blade that had hacked away at it.
It was a sickening sight, but even so all sorts of strange thoughts hurtled through Maurice’s mind. He saw newspaper headlines, an interview on the news. Perhaps even some sort of reward.
He couldn’t bring the dead back, but he could certainly let people know the final fate of their loved ones. Surely that would be worth a few quid out of anyone’s pocket. Maybe one of those awards they showed on the TV. In his slightly deluded way, Maurice even thought that he might even be responsible for cracking the case, leading the coppers to the killer and bringing peace and safety to the city again.
Now that he liked.
He was contemplating this, rubbing congealing strands of his dirty grey beard together, when he started to feel that there was something else here in the darkness with him.
Just a hint of presence at first, then a sound, one that chilled him through the ears as the winter might chill him through his skin.
Maurice looked around, seeking the source. The sound came again. Somewhere on the dividing line between something and nothing, in his head more than anything else.
Maurice was afraid now. There was definitely something here. Something that shouldn’t be here – something in between his senses and his thoughts.
He could have run away, but it was too dark across the fields and he would end up hopelessly lost. Stumbling back a little onto the dirt, his eyes darted from point to point until the final, fateful second when they fixed upon the source of the noise, the something that squatted as much within his mind’s eye as it did out in the dark fields.
And in that fraction of a second, one last impossible sight was seared into his mind forever.
Maurice staggered back, screaming as he jammed his hands to his suddenly destroyed eyes and their smoking sockets. Yet even as he stumbled around in blind agony, he knew deep in his soul that he had witnessed the start of something terrible.
***
Elsewhere, with the bright lights of the city shining in through the shutterless, curtainless window of a third floor apartment in a grey concrete block of flats, the man with the knife lay back in a bath full of blood. Thick and warm, it soaked into his flesh and made him tingle all over. He relished its feel, reliving in his broken mind every step he had taken to procure each drop.
Of course some he had left behind, just so they would all know that he had been in those houses and touched those people’s lives. That was part of the fun. Only part though. What it was all about was the touch, the taste, even the smell of the blood.
He had lost track of the amount of time he had been in the bath. Long enough to construct another elaborate fantasy of murder and bloodletting, one which he would need to enact very soon judging by the way the mental images of his most recent work were dissolving. They seemed to fade more and more quickly each time, so he needed fresh ones more and more frequently.
The first time had seemed so fresh, so vibrant. The murderous orgasm that had made him feel as if he was the king of the world. Now it seemed, like any addict, he needed just such a fix to keep things at a baseline level. He even put blood in his beer these days.
Then again, more killing meant more fun, and much more blood to play with.
The man with the knife reluctantly hauled himself out of the bath, enjoying even the slick feel of the red liquid as it clung onto his shaved body. Hair just got in the way, and he didn’t need it anyway. He stood in front of the floor to ceiling mirror in the bathroom for a long time, like he always did, watching as each rivulet, each blotch, succumbed to gravity and ran down his arms, his chest, his legs.
This was not vanity. He was simply driven to exact every single last fragment of pleasure from his experience. No doubt if they ever did catch him the psychologists would have a field day trying to unearth his secrets, when really there were none to be had. There was nothing in his past to suggest such a diabolical present. No vampire fantasies or obsessions with menstruation that could act as easy markers.
The man with the knife just wanted the blood. It excited him, brought him ever closer to that tantalising glimpse of Death, and made him want to kill people to get it. When he did that, he found out he enjoyed killing people as well. It really was as simple as that.
Letting the blood start to congeal before he started to clean it off, the man with the knife had started to the feel the urge. As always, it started in the room. At the back of the flat, where the lounge should have been. His sacred room, the very centre of his life.
Wrapping the towel round his waist, he strode out into the tiny hall that split the bedroom, so neat and normal, from his sanctum.
“So what have you got for me today?” he asked himself as he tapped in the combination to a digital keypad and heard the lock – the one that had cost him thousands – slam back with a metal thud.
Bracing himself for the rush of excitement, he hauled open the heavy door as he had done so many times before.
Inside, in the centre of a room perfectly chilled to the temperature of a meat locker and bare but for anything else, was his shrine.
It was a headless, limbless torso, suspended from the ceiling by metal chains that hooked deep into the flesh underneath the arms. The wounds at the five points of severance were old and long scarred over with tiss
ue, yet still young enough to be recognisable as wounds. Not smooth cuts either. The limbs and head had obviously been hacked away, leaving the remnants of their departure jagged and slashed.
Things had been added as well as taken away. From about ten points all around the body, plastic tubes snaked out of the flesh, stretching out several feet each and ending in silver-grey cylinders that had been placed strategically around the floor.
Along every tube pulsed blood.
Not the rivers there had once been. Just a slow trickle now. And that was what the man with the knife was driven to fix. Almost as if the torso was commanding him as it hung there like some vile octopus.
“No doubt about it,” said the man with the knife. “Tonight’s the night.” He reached down to one of the cylinders, carefully closing off the tube’s seal to ensure not one precious drop was spilt, not now it was running so low. “And I’ve got just the people in mind.” He raised the cylinder to his lips. “Cheers.”
***
Halfway along a dark unlit side road that led to their big new house, a young couple, married perhaps eight months ago – recent enough for her to want to dress for him and for him to not want to slouch on the sofa watching football – drank each other up. Their night out had been a nice diversion, but want they really wanted was to screw each other’s brains out for hours. Maybe they could tape it again, load it onto that website. That had been fun, although some of the e-mails hadn’t.
As the two of them whispered sweet fantasies in each other’s ears, the man with knife watched them from nearer the house. Hidden behind tinted windows in a car that looked like it had always been parked there, unnoticed in plain sight, he waited for them. He always picked these sorts of streets, these sorts of houses. That way there was no rush, and he was at liberty to indulge himself to the fullest without fear of disturbance.
He watched, keenly, building up the fantasy in his mind. He had some ideas to try new things tonight. New games to heighten the payoff to the maximum. New ways to capture that murderous, bloody high.