Gleefully Macabre Tales

by Jeff Strand

  I ordered the lasagna, too. A guy at the next table had it and it looked pretty good.

  As we talked and laughed, I realized that I didn’t really want to kill her. We’d had an instant connection, and it seemed like a waste to murder somebody who was such excellent girlfriend material. Of course, once I was insane I wouldn’t need a girlfriend, but still, I really liked Sandy and there was no reason to chop her up.

  I decided that for tonight, I wouldn’t worry about trying to become insane. I’d worry about trying to get laid.

  The lasagna was delicious, and the portions were so generous that we both had to ask for to-go containers, not that it stopped us from ordering dessert. After lingering in the restaurant for another hour or so, we finally left and got in my car.

  "I’m really having fun," Sandy told me with a smile as she fastened her seat belt. "I’m glad you called me."

  "Oh, me too," I said. "It’s hard to believe that the only reason I invited you out tonight was to murder you."

  Faux pas.

  Sandy frowned. "I beg your pardon?"

  Oooooh, this is awkward. "I’m just kidding," I assured her. "Sometimes I have a sick sense of humor."

  "Oh," she said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

  I thought about what I’d said. Confessing my original intentions seemed like a pretty silly thing to do, but was it truly silly…or was it insane?

  Slip of the tongue or insanity?

  Maybe I was on the brink.

  Or maybe I was over the brink! Maybe Sandy was a figment of my imagination, a vision created by my mother-loathing subconscious.

  I reached over and poked her in the side to test that theory.

  "Ow!" she said.

  "Sorry."

  This was interesting. I certainly felt sane and more than a little foolish, but my actions seemed to indicate that my mental health was rapidly deteriorating. Perhaps after I took Sandy home for some hot sex I could give the spiders-crawling-over-my-body thing another shot.

  Instead, I grabbed her by the neck.

  She let out a gasp and grabbed my wrist.

  I squeezed.

  I stared into her eyes as I squeezed, my thumb pressing into her throat. She was struggling too violently, so I began to squeeze with my other hand as well.

  She punched and clawed at me, but I didn’t feel it. Her eyes bulged and rolled up in their sockets. Her face took on a purple hue.

  I kept squeezing for several minutes after I knew she was dead.

  Finally I released my grip and let her body slump against the door. I did a quick glance around the restaurant parking lot, but nobody seemed to have noticed.

  I regarded her body with interest. I’d never seen a dead person before. It was strangely beautiful.

  Then I sighed and cursed. I’d strangled a woman to death in my car and I didn’t feel even one bit insane. No voices in my head, no urge to curl up in the fetal position and cry for my mommy, nothing.

  Damn.

  I started the engine and drove home.

  I carried Sandy’s body up to my apartment. I didn’t really have a good cover story for if somebody saw me walking around with a dead woman in my arms, but fortunately nobody saw me and I didn’t have to ad-lib. I carried her into my bedroom, placed her on the bed, and arranged her body spread-eagle.

  Despite all the blotchy parts, she was still gorgeous.

  I picked up the axe, swung it high above my head, and brought it down upon her wrist. It was a good, solid hit, and it got the job done.

  Still, I didn’t feel insane.

  I chopped off her other hand.

  I felt fine.

  I decided to try going completely nutzo. I brought the axe down again and again, not even caring where I hit, keeping my mouth open to hopefully catch some of the splatter (insane people did that sort of thing), and chopping until my arms were so sore that I lost my grip on the axe and it dropped to the floor.

  No reaction.

  Not a goddamn thing.

  I stared at the unrecognizable mess on my bed, hoping that maybe I’d see something terrifying in it, sort of like a Rorschach ink blot test. But no, I just saw the remains of a woman I’d dismembered with an axe.

  What a freakin’ waste.

  I wasn’t going to give up, though. If there was any insanity in my mind, any at all, I’d find it. I’d sleep in my own bed tonight.

  Some musings on sleeping with an extremely mutilated corpse: The blood is warm and pleasant at first, but when it gets cold it’s sticky and very uncomfortable. Because the pieces are scattered, a chopped-up body is quite the bed hog. Rolling over on a protruding bone while you’re half-asleep wakes you up real quick. And brain matter makes a crappy pillow.

  But did I feel like I’d lost my mind when I got up the next morning? Noooooooo. I didn’t even have a lousy nightmare.

  The most disturbing part was when I woke up in the middle of the night and briefly considered following through on my desire to get laid, but decided against it because it seemed too icky. That’s right; I couldn’t even handle a bit of necrophilia. I was an absolute disgrace.

  I was sane, I would always be sane, and I was just going to have to deal with it.

  Sometimes life sucks.

  ««—»»

  I know what you’re thinking as you read this. You’re thinking "But, sir, you’re clearly insane! You just chopped up some chick with an axe and slept in a pool of her gook! You’re like the narrator in ‘The Telltale Heart’ who gives the whole ‘Very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?’ speech when he’s quite obviously a total whack-job!"

  So let me clarify some things. First of all, there’s a huge difference between my own actions and those of the guy who got bent out of shape over the old man with the funky eye. I feel sympathy for people with eye problems. One of my uncles has one blue eye and one green eye, and he’s very sensitive about it, and when I was a kid and my cousins made fun of him, I never once joined in the ridicule. In fact, I thought it was in remarkably poor taste and told them so.

  Second, the gentleman in that story was a fictional character, and should not be held to the same standards of sanity as a real person such as myself.

  Anyway, as I stood in the shower, washing off Sandy’s blood, I decided that to achieve my lofty goal, I needed to embark upon a killing spree. Not something where I went berserk with a machine gun, but rather a series of individual victims, serial killer-style.

  To boost my insanity potential, I set some rules. First of all, all of the murders had to be committed with a bladed instrument. No guns, no rope, no automobile tires, and no bare hands (I’d just think of Sandy as a practice kill). Each murder would take place on the same night of the week, preferably within a one-hour window, although I’d relax that rule if it became too inconvenient. And I had to leave some sort of calling card. Maybe I’d take a finger from each victim, but it would be a different finger each time, so that I’d take the right thumb of Victim #1, the right index finger of Victim #2, and so on until I had ten victims and ten fingers.

  No, no…I’d start with the right pinky and move to the left (assuming you were looking at it from the victim’s point of view; otherwise, I’d be moving to the right). Maybe if things went really well, frightened people would start cutting off their own fingers that were next in the rotation just to keep themselves safe from my trophy-collecting! Unlikely, sure, but if my reign of terror was scary enough, anything could happen.

  That was it. Every Friday night at midnight I’d claim a new victim, and I’d cut off a finger. If I were ever caught, I could do an interview where I said "Society gave me the finger, so I decided to take it back!" Well, that wouldn’t be the exact quote, since I wouldn’t need to take back a finger that I was given, but I could certainly figure out a way to connect being given the finger by society to slicing off the fingers of my potential victims. I was creative.

  Maybe I could even eat the fingers. Now that would b
e the actions of an insane person, no doubt about it. I could fire up the grill, add some Cajun spices, and—

  The phone rang.

  I cursed, quickly rinsed the soap out of my hair, and ran wet and naked into the kitchen and picked up the phone on the fifth ring.

  "Hello?" I answered.

  "How was your date?" asked Tracy.

  "She never showed up," I said, sadly.

  "I thought you were picking her up at her place."

  "Uh, no, we changed the plan."

  "But I was on the phone with her and she heard somebody knocking on the door and she said ‘Oh, that must be him.’"

  "Ah."

  "Was it a bad date?"

  "No, no, it was rather pleasant."

  Tanya’s voice took on a "You’re such a naughty boy" tone. "Is she still there?"

  "Yeah, actually."

  "So it was a really good date."

  "Yeah."

  "Can I talk to her?"

  "She’s still in bed."

  "You wore her out, huh?"

  "No, I strangled her and chopped her up with an axe."

  Faux pas again. I froze. This could be bad.

  "You’re sick," said Tracy with a laugh.

  "No, really," I insisted. "I chopped her up and slept with her dismembered corpse."

  I quickly hung up the phone and slapped a hand over my mouth. Curse my loose tongue! I hadn’t given much thought to the possible repercussions of murdering a human being in cold blood, but now I knew I had to flee. Hide out like a common criminal.

  Oh, if only I hadn’t said "No, I strangled her and chopped her up with an axe," how differently my life would have turned out!

  The phone rang again but I ignored it. I knew what I had to do. I’d drive to Florida. A state already filled with whackos might not notice one more. (Well, technically I was a whacko poseur, not a real whacko, but I’d still blend in.)

  I grabbed a change of clothes and some snacks from the refrigerator, threw a sheet over Sandy, turned out the lights, and hurried out of my apartment. I drove to the nearest ATM but in my nervous condition I entered the wrong code three times in a row, so the machine ate my card. I uttered many an expletive. I got back in my car and drove far, far away.

  Well, not that far away, since I only had half a tank of gas. I could’ve used a credit card, but if Tracy had gone straight to my place and seen the mess, she might have already called the police. Or she might have called the police before going to my place. Who knew how the female mind worked? Either way, I couldn’t risk alerting them to my whereabouts by using a credit card.

  Wow, I thought, I’m really screwed.

  Damn, I thought, it sure would be nice to be insane enough not to realize just how badly I’m screwed.

  I left my car in the parking lot of a 24-hour supermarket and walked down the sidewalk, sighing loudly and frequently. I had no money. No transportation. No fake beard. And still no voices in my head.

  What was I going to do?

  A lot of homeless people were insane, so wandering the streets might be effective…but to be perfectly honest, that sounded really unpleasant. No, I had to kill somebody and steal their cash. Which sucked, because if you were killing people for financial gain, there was really no insanity involved. I mean, sure, I could always mutilate the body beyond all recognition and then take the money, but I would always know deep inside that the murder had been committed for practical reasons.

  Still, a man’s gotta eat.

  ««—»»

  I’m going to elect not to discuss my first attempt at a murder for cash in great detail, because it involved me getting my ass kicked by somebody who, in theory, should not have been able to kick my ass with such ease.

  ««—»»

  I’m also going to skip my second attempt, although in this particular case the ass-kicking was much more justifiable.

  ««—»»

  The third attempt was a rousing success. The elderly gentleman put up very little struggle after I poked out his eye with a stick. I tried to poke out his other eye, but instead the branch went up his nose and got stuck, which caused problems for him when he fell forward and the stick hit the ground first.

  He had $181.76 wadded up in a small change purse with "World’s Greatest Grandpa" stenciled on the front. He sure couldn’t be the world’s greatest grandpa with a poked-out eye and stick in his brain, now could he? Heh heh heh.

  Was that an insane laugh?

  Nah.

  I dragged the old man’s body behind a dumpster and then walked until I found an affordably crappy motel. I paid for a week in advance, raided the vending machine, and decided to just hang out in the motel room until this all blew over.

  How long did it take for a dismemberment to blow over?

  That evening, I sat on the bed, watching the news and eating stale peanuts (I didn’t realize that peanuts even got stale; this whole thing was a learning experience). The chief of police was on-camera, addressing a group of reporters.

  "Obviously, we’re dealing with a madman," he said. "A very disturbed individual."

  "Bullshit!" I shouted, flinging some peanuts at the television screen. How could somebody be chief of police and not be able to tell that I was completely, frustratingly sane? Who hired this dork?

  I immediately regretted throwing the peanuts, because they’d probably have to last me for a while. And I wasn’t nearly insane enough to want to eat them off the floor of this particular motel room.

  To be honest, I was starting to wonder if this whole "losing my mind" thing was such a good idea. Maybe I’d been too anxious to become a lunatic and hadn’t weighed the pros and cons carefully enough. Was I really so unhappy being sane? My life had actually been pretty decent. And now here I was, a fugitive in a foul-scented motel room having a food fight with an inanimate object.

  I slept poorly.

  ««—»»

  I spent the entire next day in bed, pouting. I was already getting stir-crazy, but it wasn’t safe to venture outside in the daylight. I watched TV and played Tic-Tac-Toe against myself (3 wins, 297 draws).

  When night fell, I snuck outside to refill my ice bucket. The ice cubes screamed in terrified agony as I scooped them up, which was odd. They were screaming so loud that I didn’t realize until it was too late that a man was standing next to me, regarding me with great interest.

  "I know you," he said. He looked about fifty, had a thick beard, and wore filthy jeans and a t-shirt.

  "No you don’t."

  "I do! You’re the guy who axed that chick!" He stuck out his hand. "Nice work, buddy!"

  I shook his hand, not wanting to seem impolite in the presence of somebody who was in favor of mutilating people. "Uh, thanks."

  "I mean it! I’ve read all about you! I keep wanting to do something like that, or at least the voices in my head tell me that I do, but I’ve never been able to work up the nerve. You’re an inspiration, man."

  "You hear voices?" I asked.

  "Oh, yeah, all the time. Right now one of them is telling me to bite off your left nipple. I won’t, though."

  "When did you start hearing voices?"

  "Around the time I quit drinking."

  It wasn’t fair. Why did this guy get to hear voices and not me? He probably didn’t even appreciate them!

  I wanted to kill him. I wanted to bash him over the head with my ice bucket and shatter his skull. Only the certainty that he would deliver a rousing ass-kicking before my goal could be accomplished kept me from giving it a try.

  "You’re looking kinda twitchy there, pal," said the man. "Don’t worry, I’m not gonna report you. I want to be your friend. I want you to teach me."

  "I’m not sure if I can," I said. "I really don’t have any mentoring experience."

  "I learn quick," he insisted. "And I’ve got a nice big black van that we can use to lure unsuspecting victims, and it’s filled with knives and stuff. Please. We could be partners."

  I stared at him for a long
moment. "Do you think insanity is contagious?"

  He shrugged. "I don’t see why not."

  "Then you’ve got yourself a deal."

  ««—»»

  I never did ask the man his name, which seemed kind of strange. Although not as strange as his habit of suddenly disappearing while I was talking to him, and having his beard change colors, and sometimes appearing in multiples of three. But, as I said, I’d slept poorly the night before.

  He had to be real; otherwise, where had the van come from? And who had put the tied-up teenage girl in the back?

  "It’s important that you hold your hacksaw correctly," I told the man. "You’ve gotta have a tight grip. And you should cut straight down, not at an angle. Let your arm do the work instead of your wrist."

  Yeah, I was bullshitting, but he didn’t know that. As long as I kept pretending to offer nuggets of homicidal wisdom, I could continue to hopefully soak up his lunatic aura.

  "What if I want to saw off her hands?" the man asked.

  "Now that’s a problem area, because she’s got her hands bound together. If you saw them off, that frees what’s left of her arms, and she might be able to injure you with her stumps."

  "I see."

  "What you would do in that case is compromise. Saw off her fingers, but keep her wrists tied together. Here, I’ll show you."

  The girl shrieked so loud that I wouldn’t have been able to hear the voices in my head even if they existed. It was so annoying that I stopped cutting off fingers after seven of them dropped to the floor.