by P. Craig
Id
By
P. Craig
Id
By P. Craig
Copyright © P. Craig 2014
Kindle Edition
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This book is not set in a particular location or country; however, it should be noted that, for the purposes of the narrative, the gun laws in this fictitious setting are not as strict as they are in the UK.
Please note that this novel is written in British English. While this is generally very similar to, for example, American English, there are a number of differences in spelling, grammar and punctuation, which may at first glance appear incorrect to a non British reader.
Every effort has been made to eliminate errors from this novel, but even though the author and several other people have spent many hours on proofreading the content, it is possible that some errors may remain. If you notice any such issues, please feel free to contact the author via the links in the Connect with the Author online section.
First edition published in 2011.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction and Warning
One - April 5, 8:42 p.m.
Two - April 5, 8:15 p.m.
Three - April 5, 5:45 p.m.
Four - April 5, 5:16 p.m.
Five - April 5, 1:25 p.m.
Six - April 5, 11:42 a.m.
Seven - March 21, 12:13 p.m.
Eight - February 8, 8:23 a.m.
Nine - January 30, 2:45 p.m.
Ten - January 30, 11:29 a.m.
Acknowledgements
Connect with the Author online
ID (abbr.): identification (identity)
Identification (psychology): Identification is a psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property, or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides.
Id: The id is the unorganised part of the personality structure that contains a human's basic, instinctual drives... It is the source of our bodily needs, wants, desires, and impulses, particularly our sexual and aggressive drives.
"It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality... we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations..."
—Sigmund Freud on the Id (1933, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis)
Warning
This novel is not suitable for children or adults with a weak or sensitive disposition—Id contains graphic descriptions of violent acts, and some readers may find certain other aspects of the book (either relating to the protagonist or his situation) to be of a disturbing nature.
One
April 5, 8.42 p.m.
The warm liquid, spraying gently onto the man’s face and into his waiting mouth, gathered in a small pool on the tip of his tongue, tantalising his taste buds with its potent tang.
It’s salty, he thought. Yes, definitely salty.
Yet there was an undercurrent to the taste, a certain piquancy, that was hinting at something a little more, something a little different from what he’d expected. It had a familiar flavour, but his mind, fragmented as it was, was unwilling to provide the key that would unlock the part of his memory that would allow him to pinpoint how he knew it. Perhaps, he wondered, he had sampled something similar in the past—somewhere, sometime—but the thought passed quickly, vanishing in an instant, for he knew the answer was beyond his reach for the time being. Thinking back through a vast, barren emptiness was only ever going to be a complete waste of time, a mere distraction from the pleasure of the here and now. After all, beyond the here and now, there was nothing else.
His mind, free now from its momentary doubt, revelled in the simple pleasure of the wondrous taste. While indeed salty, the liquid was somehow also bittersweet; with his mouth full to the brim, it was easier now to pinpoint every flavour, every nuance, with every taste bud getting its chance to lend its perspective to the assessment. In truth, the man couldn’t picture himself drinking great quantities of the rich, thick liquid, but a little now and again was an intoxicating suggestion that made him smile the more he considered it; he could tell it was a taste, a thrill, to which he could quite easily become addicted.
As he swallowed, tilting his head back to savour the feeling of the liquid running down his throat, one last thought crossed his mind—does everyone’s blood taste the same?
She had stopped breathing now. His hands deep inside her throat had seen to that—all too easily—yet there was still a trace of a pulse and a steady, though diminishing, stream of blood flowing out of her jugular vein.
The warmth of the dark red liquid had surprised the man; he had thought her blood should have been as cold and as unforgiving as she had seemed in her diary entries. After all, what a cold, cold bitch she had seemed. Ugly in every way imaginable.
He may just have been satisfying his own desires in killing her, but in doing so, he felt like he had done the whole world a favour. How could anyone have loved this woman, this thing, this hideous beast? He could only imagine the unlucky man was either blind or deaf or, perhaps more likely, both. Assuming there is a man, of course, he thought; it was equally possible for the great “love” mentioned in the diary to be a woman. He shook his head and snorted his derision. All things considered, why he was even enjoying the taste of her blood was quite beyond his understanding.
Freeing his fingers from her ruined neck, the man pushed himself back onto his feet and headed for the en-suite bathroom to wash his hands. He had only gone a few steps when a movement in the light underneath the door to the hallway caught his eye; he turned instinctively, stepped quietly over to the wall and blended seamlessly into the darkness of the bedroom.
“Mum?”
A girl’s voice. A teenager’s, perhaps. The way she had called for her mum, a certain inflection in her voice, a certain naivety, suggested that she would be easy enough to deal with. The man smiled. A two for the price of one deal in this house, then. From nineteen to twenty-one in double-quick time.
“Mum, are you okay?”
The door groaned against the frame as it slowly opened on its hinge. Light from the hallway tiptoed into the room and crept towards the crumpled, lifeless body lying on the floor.
“Mum?”
The man slid slowly along the wall, keeping to the blind side of the opening door.
The light from the hallway reached the tip of the dead woman’s outstretched arm, where her fingers had curled and frozen into a grotesque, mangled claw. The door stopped opening.
“Mum?!”
It came out as more of a gasp this time—a weaker, tearful, involuntary gasp. It was more than the dead woman had managed before the man had ruptured her larynx with a blow to the neck. She had still tried in vain to shout for help, the man recalled; it had raised a smile at the time.
The door opened fully and the girl’s shadow fell long into the room, elongated and distorted by the light that must have been somewhere low on the wall behind her head. The man could tell by the shape of the shadow around the upper torso that the girl’s hands were covering her mouth—a typical primary reaction to a devastating shock. He knew it would be followed quickly by the likely secondary reaction—a scream of alarm.
“M-m-mum...”
Her shadow grew larger in the illuminate
d rectangle on the carpet, her head blocking the light from falling onto her mother’s arm; it was clear that her shock was dissipating and slowly giving way to the need to do something. The cry of alarm, the man reasoned with cold calculation, was only seconds away.
He moved swiftly round the doorway, swung both hands together high into the air and then bashed them down onto the bridge of the girl’s nose with sickening force. There was a satisfying crunch of bone, followed by an even more satisfying silence as the shock at what had just happened overrode the girl’s thoughts and emotions, stifling her instinct to scream.
Her bloodied nose splayed across her cheek, the girl staggered back into the hallway, her hands rising instinctively to her damaged face, but the man moved quickly again, grabbing her by the hair, and hauled her roughly all the way into the bedroom. She swung her arms wildly, trying to break his grip, but he swatted her blows aside with ease and then, spinning round, launched her towards the dressing table by the window, ripping a mass of curly dark hair from her head in the process. The girl wailed in alarm, her flailing hands trying to slow her descent, but she succeeded only in knocking the vanity mirror from the table; it smashed against the chest of drawers nearby, the shattered pieces joining the scattered shards of glass lying on the floor below the window.
For a moment, the girl lay face down and motionless on the carpet, but as she stirred, she began to make a long, high-pitched whining noise that grew louder and louder with each passing second. The man sensed that the anticipated full-blooded scream, delayed though it had been, was now imminent.
Grabbing her by the hair again, he pulled her head back, smiled at the tearful, bloodshot eyes staring up at him in horror, and then chopped his other hand down like a cleaver on her exposed throat. There was a loud crack and her eyes, her big blue eyes, exploded into the back of her head like the spinning wheels of a slot machine giving up its prized jackpot.
The man waited a moment, studying her closely, holding her upright by her hair alone, and then slapped her hard on both cheeks. Her eyes, vacant and lifeless, rolled lazily back into view. Satisfied, he loosened his grip on her hair, letting her drop onto the carpet to lie at an angle, he noted with some amusement, almost perpendicular to her mother’s body.
The man studied the older woman’s face for a few seconds and then looked down upon the girl’s. There was little obvious similarity between the mother and daughter—same colour of hair, perhaps; same colour of eyes, possibly; but beyond that, nothing.
The man bent down over the girl’s body and brushed his hands over her face, gently caressing her cheek and gathering some of her still warm blood onto his fingers. It was difficult to tell, what with her nose now squashed into her face, but he figured she’d probably been a reasonably pretty girl, albeit in a plain, harmless kind of way. In time, she might have become quite an attractive woman.
Looking again, he really couldn’t see the mother-daughter link between the two dead women. Had the girl been fated to end up like the cold, shrivelled wretch her mother had become? He had heard somewhere, from someone presumably, that all women ended up like their mothers; if that was true, perhaps he had done the girl a favour in killing her while she still had her looks and vitality. After all, if she had known she would end up like her mother, the beast, then she might have ended up killing herself anyway.
I would have.
Smiling wryly, the man stroked his fingers down over the girl’s eyes, gently closing her eyelids, giving at least part of her face a sense of peace in death. As he admired the dark bruise that zigzagged across her throat, he brought his wet fingertips to his lips and slowly licked them clean. Her blood was thicker, more pungent and perhaps a little sweeter too; it certainly lacked some of the bitterness of her mother’s. Perhaps, he wondered, the taste changes depending on the happiness of the soul. That the mother’s blood tasted bitter, in that scenario, was perhaps no surprise. Still, he had only the experiences of a sample of two to draw upon in his study of the matter. Would the subtle nuances of taste in everyone’s blood reflect their character and age as precisely as these two had? One to investigate in the future, even if—
The mother’s arm twitched suddenly. Spooked, the man’s head whipped round; his heart pounded in his chest, hurling blood into his muscles to prime them for action. His eyes narrowed on the offending limb. The arm twitched again, the gnarled claw of a hand jerking in spasm, but it seemed to be nothing more than a reflexive action caused by the sudden release of trapped energy in the muscles. Still, the man found it oddly disconcerting. Grabbing the woman’s wrist, he planted a foot firmly onto her chest and then, leaning back, wrenched the arm out of its socket. It seemed to have the desired effect—no more twitching.
As he stood over the mother’s broken body, the man glanced through the gap between the thin curtains where the window catch was still jutting into the room. His eyes narrowed in concentration once again; there was a hint of a flashing blue light coming from somewhere near the front of the house. A cold chill ran down the man’s spine. He dropped the woman’s arm and then moved quickly over to the window, where he peered cautiously outside.
A police car was cruising slowly past the house. There were two cops inside the vehicle. From where he was standing, the man couldn’t make out the driver’s face, but he could clearly see the passenger—he was leaning out of the window while shining a flashlight across the ground floor. They were looking for something, someone—me, the man guessed. He hadn’t really thought much about covering his tracks while making his way through the forest, but now it was clear he shouldn’t have been so careless. The trail, as little as he could think there was, appeared to have betrayed him, leading others to find him here.
The car turned slowly in the yard and started back for another pass of the house. The driver’s face came into view and the man was surprised, though it may simply have been a trick of the poor light, to see a lack of urgency in the cop’s eyes. That’s odd. Would the driver really be that disinterested if they had expected to find me here? The man shook his head; he didn’t think so. The trail’s still cold. The presence of the police car probably owed more to luck on a standard routine check-up than on any real expectation of finding him.
The man watched as the passenger directed the flashlight up onto the top floor. Whether the police were there by chance or not, when their light reached the broken window, he knew their suspicions, if they had any, would be confirmed in an instant. But if I can pull the window back into its frame, then I might just be able to—
The light swung far more quickly across the window than the man had expected. He froze to the spot, watching in wide-eyed fear as the beam flashed in front of his eyes before vanishing from view. The man held his breath, scarcely daring to move, and hoped that his fear wouldn’t become a reality.
But the light didn’t swing back.
The man watched the car drive off in the direction of the gates; relieved, he slowly released his breath.
Suddenly, the police car turned sharply and swung back towards the house. The passenger sneaked a hand out of the window and, a split second later, fired a beam of light in the man’s direction.
Instinctively, the man stepped back and then watched with a growing feeling of sickness in his gut as the light poured through the gap between the curtains. Cursing his lack of foresight, he crept to one side of the window and, using his finger, pulled back the curtain until he could more clearly see and gauge the cops’ reaction.
They were still sitting in the car, parked a short distance from the front of the house, with the flashlight now hooked onto a catch on the roof. The man had expected to see them standing next to the car at the very least, if not already approaching the front door, but there seemed to be something of a debate going on between the two officers. Under the circumstances, a broken window wasn’t something they could readily ignore—it was a clear sign something wasn’t quite right—but as to what exactly a broken window might represent... well, that was clearly up
for heated discussion.
The man knew he should take advantage of their hesitation and try to make his escape—after all, debate or no debate, any police officer worthy of the name would eventually have to enter the house to investigate—but for some unknown reason, he found himself hesitating, strangely reticent to leave the room. In truth, though he was reluctant to admit it, there had been something of an alien quality to what he had just done, as though killing the two women hadn’t felt quite as right as he thought it should have. The feeling of emptiness inside his mind, which he had hoped to fill by a return to his natural instincts, was still prevalent and still getting to him in much the same way as it had before. Yet, as strange and as futile as what he had done had been, there was something about these surroundings, something familiar, comfortable even, which made him feel as though the house, the idea of a home, was somewhere he belonged.
The thought lingered, confusing him, peppering his already beleaguered mind, until finally the urge to take flight began to reassert itself—though not quickly enough.
The police car doors opened in unison and the two officers—thickset men with no necks and nervous looks in their eyes—stepped out onto the gravel; they stood looking up at the broken window for a moment, their hands resting on their gun belts. One of the officers, the older of the two, reached behind his back, pulled a small flashlight from his belt and then illuminated the path. Nodding to his partner, he stepped towards the house.
The man watched as the policeman disappeared from view. A moment later, the faint rattle of a door handle told him exactly what the officer’s intentions were.