by P. Craig
The man squeezed harder, darkening her complexion with every ounce of pressure he exerted. He had such an uncontrollable desire to kill her.
He had reached this point before, a moment or two from ending a life, but on that occasion, a brute of a man had stopped him. This time there was no one who could save this woman, this thing, this grotesque caricature. His grip tightened. The she-devil must die.
The realisation of how close he was to killing her was an incredible buzz. He knew that this was what he was here on this world to do—the act of murder filled in the holes in his mental world, made him feel complete again.
The woman’s body—what little resistance she could offer—was weakening. The man dug his fingertips deeper into the taut skin around her neck, probing for something to grab onto, seeking the arteries that carried blood into her head. The beast struggled, perhaps sensing what he so wanted to do, but her efforts were in vain. His hands, too powerful for hers, were close to choking the life out of her; his ragged nails were digging deep, cutting remorselessly into her skin.
He knew she was close to death now, but that alone was not enough for him. His nails kept digging, pushing through and underneath her skin, reaching further and further inside; her blood was flowing from the wounds, down and round her neck and onto the carpet, where it was already beginning to pool.
The man was almost bursting with pleasure; the buzz of the kill was unlike anything he’d experienced before. At last, even though he was almost laughing from the joy of it all, he felt he was close to regaining a sense of control over his life and a deeper understanding of who he was.
Finally, with the tips of his fingers deep inside her neck, he found what he was seeking—the veins and arteries that pumped life into her head. Smiling, he wrapped his fingers around one of the arteries and squeezed it shut using his thumbnail, stopping the flow of blood that had been continuous from the moment she had formed inside her mother’s womb. There was a flicker of a reaction, a momentary tightness down one side of the woman’s face, but she was well beyond help now. He released the pressure, causing another momentary reaction, a slackening this time, and an image of a puppeteer pulling the strings of one of their marionettes came to his mind. I am the master of this puppet’s house.
Grinning, he squeezed the artery again, angling a nail inwards to gauge how easily it would be to sever, wondering with amusement if he could rip out her insides.
But this isn’t right.
The thought passed through his mind, lingering for the briefest fraction of a moment before it submerged back into the void, but it stayed long enough to cause him to release his grip on the artery; he rested his hands inside her neck while he replayed the notion back through his head. This isn’t right.
The buzz of the kill had been powerful, overwhelming everything, all other desires—but now it had gone, almost as if it had never been.
The thought resurfaced. It’s not right.
His pleasure in killing the woman had been definite; yet was it something he should have done, was it something that he was supposed to do? He had heard someone say—perhaps the same someone who had commented on people’s tendency for their true nature to be revealed under duress—that there is no denying who you really are, no denying your base instincts and desires.
But is this who I am?
There had been something right about killing her; yet, at the same time, there had been something very wrong with it too. But, he wondered, maybe this was how it had always been. Maybe that inner conflict was there when I did these things in the past too. Maybe it’s all simply part of the buzz.
In any case, it was too late now to undo what he’d done; he’d passed the point of no return. The man shook his head and laughed aloud. Enough thinking.
He dug his fingers back into her neck, grabbed hold of all the arteries and veins he could find, and then pulled hard with all his strength, ripping and severing them free with savage, animalistic destructiveness.
A torrent of blood gushed up into his open, laughing mouth.
Three
April 5, 5.45 p.m.
Sweat was pouring down his face. The pounding in his head was urging him to run faster, harder, to get further away to somewhere safer. His feet were flying over the terrain, somehow finding purchase on the muddy ground, yet they were barely avoiding the tree roots and embedded rocks that cropped up all over, threatening to trip him up. His arms were working hard too, pushing past stray tree branches and other thick brush that tried to block his path as he raced through the forest.
For several minutes the man had been running without care for where he was going, guided only by the knowledge that he needed to run, to race deeper into the darkness, in order to escape. Several minutes, however, could very well have been several hours for all he knew; he had very quickly lost track of time amidst the relentless sameness of the woodland.
His legs were stiffening now and his pace was slowing with every stride. His energy levels were falling rapidly too and he didn’t know how much longer he could keep going before he bottomed out completely.
Fatigue kicked in sooner than the man had hoped. His lead foot clipped one of the tree roots he had previously so deftly avoided and he stumbled forwards, tripped on another root and then landed on his hands and knees. Grimacing, more through an instinctive reaction than any real sense of pain, the man crawled on, dragging his tired legs along the muddied forest floor, before sliding down into a shallow ditch.
Head spinning, the man sat up slowly, closed his eyes and then concentrated on trying to calm himself down, catch his breath.
The forest was eerily quiet, his frantic burst through its stillness seemingly already forgotten, as though absorbed by the timelessness of the ancient trees. Night was falling, too, and the forest's growing gloominess was signalling to its inhabitants that the day was almost over.
The man was tempted to stay there, lying against the dirt, shrouded and protected by the trees and the twilight silence, but he knew he would have to move on. Someone, some people, would come looking for him eventually; his flight into the forest demanded it from those that had seen him do so, the woman and the man especially—and they would bring others.
Dammit.
His timing had been poor, the attack itself even more so, yet he had been only moments, mere seconds, from succeeding. Thinking back on it, the man realised he should have waited a fraction longer, perhaps doing more to confirm that the woman was indeed alone. Her husband—or just partner, maybe—must have been working in the garage next to the house, out of sight from where the man had been standing and watching as the woman had arrived home seemingly alone. The man could have kicked himself for his impulsiveness; following her into the house so quickly had been a huge mistake on his part. Have I made such stupid, basic errors before? Was that how I got caught last time?
The sound of a dead branch falling from up high, clattering against other branches on the way down, startled him out of his reverie and immediately forced him to his feet. His legs didn’t feel so tired and weak now, the moment’s respite all that he needed, but his head was still pounding and one side of his face, particularly around his left eye, felt battered and misshapen to the touch. The woman’s partner had been a strong brute and had clearly done more damage than the man had originally believed. He knew his nose was broken—the blood staining his clothing was sufficient evidence of that—but his memory of the blows that had caused the rest of the damage was hazy at best.
How many times did he punch me?
Did I fight back?
Did I kill the brute?
The man shook his head. He didn’t think he’d killed the savage ogre—his abusive shouts were the last thing the man had heard before disappearing into the forest—and he didn’t really think he’d done much to keep the beast at bay either, which only added a layer of misery to the mountain of disappointment he felt at failing to kill the woman. The man knew he should have been able to deal with the woman’s pet monster,
someone’s size and strength never equating to their ability to fight, his own skills surely beyond the range of most men; but his defeat, if that was what it was, if that was what had happened, left doubts in his mind. Old scars on his face and body suggested that he had come across similar situations before, encountering men who had fought back against him, but the very air he was breathing, the very ground he was standing on, was testament to the fact that his skills were good enough to keep him alive.
He concluded his instincts were off-key somehow, perhaps muted by the fog blanketing his thoughts, and he realised he was clearly weaker than he had once been, no doubt due to a period of incarceration—time that had denied him the opportunity to keep his skills sharpened and honed to perfection.
All guesswork, he supposed, as only his mind knew for sure, and for now his memories remained hidden from him.
The forest was coming to life; the creatures of the night were waking from their slumbers and taking their first steps out into the cool air.
The man looked around for a moment, gathering his wits and finding his bearings. He wondered which way, if any, would lead him towards safety. In the fading light, the task of picking a route through the forest was suddenly more awkward, fraught with hundreds of new dangers that hadn’t existed a moment earlier.
The man climbed out of the ditch and started through a gap in a cluster of bushes nearby. The ground was well trodden and free from any obvious obstacles; it was an easy path to negotiate in the darkness. The sounds of the forest moved with him as he followed the trail—animals scurrying out of his way, then back again the moment he passed by; birds swooping and hollering, searching for one last feed before night fell completely. Despite the growing darkness, the man had a sense that there was nothing to fear from the forest for the time being; his only cause for concern was what he had left behind—which was reminder enough to keep pushing on.
The trail, such as it was, soon came to an end. His feet stumbled into long grass where moments earlier there had been only dirt ground. Immediately, the brush seemed to close in around him, gently enveloping and hiding him from prying eyes. In a strange way, it felt like the forest was trying to protect him.
Or is it trying to entrap me...?
That thought bothered him slightly, stupid though he knew it was, but he ploughed on through the undergrowth without stopping to give it further consideration, beating his own path where none seemed apparent.
It wasn’t long before the darkness of night had completely engulfed the forest. The man slowed to a halt and waited for his eyes to attune to the new conditions. It was difficult to focus on anything; his perception of depth and distance was useless in the blackness all around him. Even worse, his eyes were intent on playing tricks on him; moonlight filtering through the swaying canopy occasionally threw strange patches of dancing light on the ground, making him believe that there was something where there wasn’t anything. Like ghostly apparitions.
In that anxious moment, the sounds of the forest became more hostile to his ears. The slightest rustle and creak lost its innocence, trying to convince him that his pursuers, wherever they were, whoever they were, were closing in on him, hunting him down like a wild animal. In the darkness, paranoia had discovered him in a heartbeat; unable to rationalise what he was seeing or hearing, all that remained was a primal instinct to run away.
Without thinking, the man found himself tearing through the forest once more. He ran for what felt like hours, tiring on occasion, though always finding new reserves of energy he didn’t know he had. He clenched his teeth and pushed himself on and on, harder and faster, hurtling through the forest as if being drawn towards some unknown point by some great force.
A rock, half-buried in the ground, ended his run abruptly. Galloping through a thicket, his foot caught on the stone and down he fell, as though someone had shot him, before landing with a heavy thud on the forest floor.
Blowing hard, a dull pain in his head, the man struggled to his feet and cast a long, dark look in the direction of the treacherous rock. The moment gave him time to catch his breath. Soon, the frenetic pounding of his heart had eased down to a gentle drumming, and the stillness that had descended on the forest was finally able to penetrate through the dispersing mist of his anger.
The silence was unnerving, almost unnatural in its intensity. The man’s paranoia immediately convinced the better part of his mind that the forest was conniving against him, betraying his wonder and comfort in its protection, whispering his whereabouts to those hunting him down. He shook his head briskly; ill-conceived notions such as those offered by his paranoia did little for him other than aggravate his situation. Too many negative thoughts were filling his head and clouding his judgement; too many little sloppy mistakes were proving more costly than he had envisaged. His capacity to deal with things mentally was not what it should have been—what he believed it used to be.
This is so frustrating.
The pain in his head—the throbbing numbness, if there was such a thing—wasn’t helping matters either. It only reminded him of the punishment he had taken at the hands of the woman’s partner, a memory—vague though it was already becoming—that hardly cheered his mood.
His countenance darkening, the man turned and carried on through the forest, though his eyes lingered on the rock that had tripped him; finally, they snapped round with the rest of his head to focus on where he was going.
He stopped almost instantly.
Up ahead, flickering between branches hanging in a gap between two large trees, there was light. It startled him; his mind struggled to decipher its meaning, the unnerving grip of fear strangling his ability to think. His survival instinct kicked in quickly, though, and forced his legs to move him behind the cover of a nearby tree. He stood there for a moment, statue-like, frozen, wondering if he should take flight in another direction or if he should step out from behind the cover of the tree and try to discover the source of the light. He knew, of course, there shouldn’t have been an unnatural light like that in the forest, yet he felt compelled to look, to move forwards and investigate.
His hands gripped the tree, digging in, as though they were trying to hold him back from moving too soon. The memory of recent mistakes was still fresh in his mind; the possibility of his pursuers out-flanking him, trying to tempt him out with a simple trick, was a little all too real.
But the compulsion to look was strong, and his curiosity reminded him that fortune favoured the brave and the foolish in equal measures. His fingers relaxed their grip on the tree the more the thought crossed his mind.
He shook his head. His recent experiences—in truth, his only experiences—pointed out that the thought was wrong, that his logic might yet be flawed.
Still...
The man pushed himself away from the tree and headed for the light. He stayed low and close to anything that might keep him hidden should anyone be looking out for him. The forest was ominously silent as he bore through the last remaining thicket between him and the light. He briefly wondered if all the other creatures had more common sense to trust their instincts and shy away from the illumination; their silence was perhaps a sign that they were watching him with an amused interest while he made what might prove to be a mistake. In truth, he didn’t care; his attraction to the light, which was glowing brighter and bigger with every step he took towards it, had now completely obliterated his capacity for rational thought.
It didn’t take long, just seconds, before the man reached such a point that the source of the illumination became clear. Standing near the edge of the forest, tucked close behind a thick oak tree, he peered out into the open, letting his eyes take in the bewildering sight of a house situated in the wide clearing that lay before him. From a large window on the ground floor, a strong light beamed out across the glade until falling close to the edge of the forest.
A house? Here?
It hadn’t been what the man had expected to discover, but its presence brought a whole raft of
mixed thoughts and feelings into his mind that almost made him wish he had listened to his better judgement and walked away the instant he had first seen the light. The compulsion that had pushed him on this far was now turning into more of a temptation, pulling him in to take a closer look at the house. It seemed like such an unlikely place to locate a home, buried deep in the empty heart of a forest; there was something so intrinsically wrong in the suggestion of it, he wondered if it wasn’t just some kind of hallucination generated by his overwrought mind.
Yet there was a light—a strong and very real light—and that meant someone lived in the house. The question was, who lived there? And why were they living there, deep in the middle of nowhere?
The man couldn’t fathom an answer to either riddle; his thoughts only threw up more questions.
He made up his mind to find out. The need to clean up his injuries was another concern that added its weight to the argument; frankly, now that he had come this far, any thought of keeping his distance was never going to seriously enter the equation.
The man stepped out from behind the oak tree and quickly skirted along the edge of the forest, taking great care to keep an eye on the window in case anyone appeared and happened to glance his way. He kept away from the light, staying in the shadows until he was out of sight of the window and able to make an approach to the side of the house from the safety of darkness. He hesitated briefly as he left the trees behind, but soon he was clambering over the wooden fence separating home from the rest of the clearing. Quietly, he started across the gravel that surrounded the house, listening out for even the slightest hint of his detection. It wasn’t long before he reached the veranda that skirted round most of the building.
As he ducked under the railing and stepped onto the decking, he had an inkling the old boards might creak under his weight, yet they remained resolutely silent. After negotiating a pair of rickety old chairs that were blocking his path, he peered round the corner and looked towards the window. The glare from the light was blinding, so bright it disorientated him; it took a moment of frantic blinking before he was finally able to study the front porch.