R/T/M

by Douglas, Sean

  She crouches down in front of it and looks at the spines. She asks, “What do you recommend?” and I answer, “I don’t care. I’ve seen ‘em all a thousand times.” and she keeps reading the spines and says, “I don’t recognize any of these movies.” and I reply, “Well, there are a few dicey ones in there.” and she says, “I can handle anything. Movies don’t freak me out.” so I say “Really?” and I get up and grab a couple DVDs.

  First up is “Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan – Supermasochist”. I lay back on the bed but she sits perched at the foot of the bed and I don’t care. It’s obvious nothing sexy is going to happen between us so I might as well be comfortable.

  We’re both sipping on our beers and the movie plays but she chickens out at the scene where Sherry has Bob laid out on a gurney and she puts pins through the loose skin along the shaft of his flaccid penis. The chick makes some disapproving noises. Then Sherry goes to put a big silver metal ball the size of a bocce ball into Bob’s ass and I stop the DVD and she’s looking a little paler than usual. Maybe a little green around the gills. And I say, “That’s okay. This movie’s not for everyone.” and I put in “August Underground”.

  When I light up she lights up and she smokes Marlboro Lights and that makes me like her even less. Marlboros are bad enough but lights make any room you smoke them in smell like the inside of a copy machine. Like hot toner.

  Surprisingly she makes it all the way to the end of that one, but she’s sitting ramrod straight on the edge of the bed. I just showed her two completely fucked up movies and she doesn’t want to be anywhere fucking near me.

  She stands up and holds up her empty beer bottle and says, “Whelp! Guess I’d better be going!”. I get up and say, “Okay. I’ll see you out.”.

  She starts up the stairs and makes sure to keep a few feet between us.

  She waits in front of the kitchen door and if I was going to fucking knock her over the head, that would’ve been the time to do it, but I lean over and open up the door and hold it open for her. I say, “I had a great time tonight.” and she says, “Me too.” and hands me the empty beer bottle and steps through the door.

  I never heard from her again.

  I could have fucking raped and killed her, but I didn’t find her very attractive.

  It’s tough to get all excited about working over someone you don’t even really like.

  Plus she drove over in her car and I’d have to think about how to get rid of her car and all that so whatever. At least I managed to fucking weird her out and I’m sure that she won’t soon forget that night she went over to this guy’s house and he lived in the basement and he showed her all kinds of fucked up movies. And it’s not like I showed her the worst stuff I own. I could’ve tossed in Gaspar Noh’s ‘I Stand Alone’ or ‘Irreversible’ or Passolini’s ‘Salo – 120 Days of Sodom’. But I didn’t and she pussed out so I view this as a victory. Like usual, I win.

  If they ever catch me and I end up on the news she’s going to be watching and she’s going to yell, “See! I fucking knew it! I told you that guy was a fucking serial killer!” But I’m not planning on getting caught. Not that anyone does plan on getting caught. But it’s funny to think about.

  There were others.

  I don’t want to bore you.

  Sometimes I didn’t kill them.

  Sometimes I just fucked them or just fucked with them and then cut them loose.

  Sometimes the girls walk right into it. “Have you ever been blindfolded?” “Have you ever been handcuffed?” Those that haven’t are curious, and those that will admit they have probably liked it.

  Stupid cows.

  Surprisingly there wasn’t anything in the papers or on the news.

  I figured if enough girls got missing someone would be bound to notice.

  Maybe put together a task force or something.

  But that only happens when you leave the bodies out for people to discover.

  Cops are just people like you and I that for some inexplicable reason decided they wanted to be cops so they went for it.

  Maybe they like wearing uniforms or carrying a badge and a gun makes them feel all macho.

  It’s not like they’re fucking geniuses.

  I probably know a lot more about the thing I do than any of those fucking cops do.

  I even did some research.

  I went to the library and got a bunch of forensic pathology books.

  Not like the boring textbook styled ones.

  More like “Cold Case Files” kind of stuff.

  Read enough of those books and you’ll realize that guys like Henry C. Lee and Michael Baden are few and far between.

  Even though those guys are few and far between I still started to get all paranoid.

  I decided to try to burn the bodies.

  I drove over to the gas station and I bought one of those big red plastic five gallon gas containers.

  I took it over to the pumps and filled it up and popped the trunk and put it in.

  Back home I parked and popped the trunk and took out my brandy new five gallon container.

  It was daylight and the day had warmed up a little.

  I grabbed the crowbar and went over to the lid of the septic tank.

  I put the gas down and pried the lid off.

  The smell welled up and hit me in the face like a ton of rotten shit.

  I gagged and staggered back. I doubled over and gagged a little more.

  Fuck! I never get used to that smell.

  I get a couple clean breaths into me and I hold the third and go over to the hole and take a knee.

  Holding my breath for all I’m worth I heft the container and pour the gas into the hole.

  Pouring the whole thing in there seems to take forever and my lungs feel like they’re going to explode when the last finally trickles out.

  The breath I held bursts out and I get a huff of the reek.

  This time I don’t gag. Maybe I am getting used to it.

  I take a book of matches out and I flip it open and fold one over and snap it against the friction strip.

  The match catches and I hold the book out with my fingertips and all of the matches flare up and I throw the flaming little wad into the hole.

  There’s a “Whoomph!” and some heat vapor.

  There’s lot of smoke, but no flames peeking out. A thickening plume of black smoke snakes up and goes up into the air.

  Thank God no one lives nearby because there’s no way I could just explain away the big plume of awful smoke.

  Someone would probably get curious and wander over and say, “Hey! Watcha burning?” and then I’d probably have to hit them in the head with the crowbar and dump them into the pit too, and their family would notice they were missing and the police would come by asking around, canvassing the neighborhood and I’d have to kill the cops, then someone would come around looking for them and the whole thing would end up in a stand-off with me barricaded in the house and getting kilt like those motherfuckers in Waco.

  But thankfully the house is pretty isolated so I just walk the fuck away and figure it’ll burn itself out.

  There’s only so much air in the tank and the gas won’t completely incinerate the bodies anyway.

  To cremate a body takes a ton of fuel and even then some bone fragments are going to be left behind.

  So I just go inside and microwave some pizza rolls and put on Seven Samurai.

  The next morning the fires dead except for a little smoldering and some light smoke.

  It smells like burnt shit and rotten meat.

  Not like barbecue like I expected it to.

  But wouldn’t that be funny?

  I went to the back of the house and unfurled the green plastic garden hose until I had enough to get out to the hole.

  When I got out to the hole I looked at the end of the hose and for a second I wonder why there’s no water coming out of it and then I realize that I didn’t turn the spigot on back at the house and I wo
nder if I’m going retarded.

  I leave the end of the hose pointing into the hole and jog back to the house and turn the spigot.

  I jog back to the hole and there’s a little hissing as the water cools off the embers

  I’m hoping the water would help the odor but it’s the same smell just now it’s wet.

  I used to get blinding headaches as a kid.

  It would feel like my skull was contracting and my eyes were going to explode out of my head.

  I’d close my eyes as tight as I could and press on the sides of my head and I’d curl up into a ball on the ground and everything would go all white.

  Eventually they went away and I spent a few years worried that they would come back.

  Later on I just chalked it up to the whole being a genius thing.

  Like everyone that’s wicked smart got migraines when they were a kid.

  Maybe my brain was so big it was pressing against the inside of my skull.

  I don’t get migraines anymore but certain things still fuck with me pretty bad,

  I can’t go out to dance clubs because it’s overstimulating.

  The bass fucks with my biorhythms and I just want to go nuts on every girl in the place.

  It’s difficult to resist the urge now that I know the satisfaction of giving in to it.

  Sometimes when I go out in public, big enclosed spaces put the zap on me.

  I can hear the buzzing of the fluorescent lights overhead.

  I have trouble hearing people talk to me and the piped in music and murmuring voices cause me to withdraw inside myself and I begin to hallucinate.

  Everything becomes all light and space.

  It’s not like that all the time, everywhere.

  I’m not schizophrenic.

  It’s just that places like that seem designed to hypnotize people.

  To put them in a trance.

  That’s why I try to stay the fuck away from them.

  Especially big indoor malls.

  I’m trying to just get from Point A to Point B and there’s someone walking slow in front of me or a group of obnoxious teenagers and I try to get around them but someone bumps their shoulder into me and I just want to start punching and kicking and stabbing.

  I just want to grab a baby stroller by the handles and hum it over the edge and when the mother lunges at me to scratch my eyes out, I want to catch her by the wrists and use her frantic momentum to swing her into the guardrail, using the guardrail as a fulcrum to toss her over the edge after her precious spawn.

  But that would be the point of no return.

  After a man loses his virginity.

  After a man has had sex with a woman, he views every woman differently.

  Well, maybe not every woman.

  Maybe not your mom, or your grandma, or your sisters or cousins or aunts.

  When you see a girl or a woman that attracts you sexually for whatever reason, you wonder what it would be like to run your fingers through her hair. What it would feel like and how it would smell.

  You know the way that men think about fucking every woman?

  I do that with rape and torture and murder.

  Fucking and killing.

  I don’t know if that’s how it is for everyone.

  I don’t know if taking that step changes everyone.

  People that do what I do don’t exactly have online message boards.

  There aren’t a lot of rapists or murderers that write about it in their blogs.

  Sometimes they keep journals.

  Rape diaries. Torture diaries.

  But by the time their actions become public, but the journals become evidence.

  Maybe if I ever get caught I can write a book and make a million dollars.

  Maybe I can take up painting like John Wayne Gacy.

  Ha! Yeah right!

  I watched a talk show about that once.

  I was waiting in the waiting room of my doctor’s office and some talk show came on.

  I think it was the one hosted by John Walsh.

  He was all pissed off about what he called “Murderabilia”. You know, like “memorabilia”?

  That’s what he called the phenomenon where people are fans of serial killers and they collect and trade and pay large sums of money for stuff from the killers like letters and paintings and murder weapons and whatnot.

  And John Walsh is all pissed off and pious because someone killed his kid, like, a decade ago.

  But fuck him. Grief should be a private thing and he’s flipped it over into celebrity.

  Whatever.

  If I ever get caught, it’s all over anyway.

  There’s no way I’m going to serve my time.

  I’m not gonna end up like Jeff Dahmer. Get sodomized with the splintery end of a broken off broomstick and dying with a splintered broomstick up my ass? No thanks.

  I’ll hang myself before I ever see trial.

  The septic tank is full.

  Not full of bodies.

  Heavens no.

  Thankfully I didn’t dump the bodies into my new septic tank.

  It’s not like I can call up the septic service and get the fucker pumped.

  You might deal with tons of human shit every day, but a couple dozen dead bitches is sure to get noticed.

  I filled in the hole with trash.

  Not all at once.

  Just every time I threw out a bag of trash I stuffed it into the hole.

  Over time it filled up.

  When it got near the top I knocked in the cement top with a sledgehammer and threw the lid out into the woods over the stone wall out back the house.

  When I knocked the top in, it settled in a little so I covered it up with dirt.

  It should be fine for a couple decades.

  The grass will grow a little thicker in that spot.

  Even if someone decided to dig there, they’ll just dig up trash and figure I filled up the old septic tank with trash then knocked it in and covered it up.

  I should be fine unless later owners are the kind of jackasses that try to install a khoi pond in the backyard. And if so, then so be it. I’m long gone and invisible and that’s what they get for being pretentious assholes. Unless you’re Asian you’ve got no fucking business fucking around with goldfish ponds.

  I stopped killing bitches and without a proper outlet for those urges everything started to seem surreal.

  I stopped going outside.

  Not like out in my backyard, but out in public.

  I’d go shopping at the supermarket late at night so I wouldn’t have to bump into too many people.

  Stuck inside out at my house I started to imagine doing ridiculous stuff.

  I want to tie girls arms together and push them off the roofs of tall building.

  I want to feed girls into wood chippers feet first and watch the expressions on their faces.

  I want to take them out in a boat to the center of a lake with their wrists handcuffed and toss them off the side and watch them drown.

  I don’t trust myself around women anymore because now that I’ve crossed that line I don’t know that I can keep myself from acting on these urges and I don’t want to be in a restaurant and be unable to resist the urge to hack the waitresses throat open with the steak knife from my table setting.

  Things were getting surreal and life was getting hard to endure.

  Thankfully my parents died.

  I’m not glad that they died. I mean it’s not something that I would have wished on them.

  My mother died from cancer, and my father died, like, a month later from grief.

  I didn’t feel very sad.

  I hadn’t seen them so long it was like hearing someone else tell you about their parents dying.

  You know they’re sad but it doesn’t really affect you.

  Like something you watch on television or read in a newspaper.

  I sold the house.

  Both houses.

  First the house my parents
lived in.

  Then when that money was in the bank I figured I’d just about worn out my welcome where I’m at now and I put my house up for sale.

  The real estate market was a little depressed but I still made hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  It’s not like I’m planning on filing a tax return anytime soon.

  So I’ve got plenty of money.

  I bought a nice roomy vehicle.

  The kind you can sleep in the back of if you’re driving a long distance and you get tired or the kind you can stay in the back of when you’re between apartments.

  I’m going on tour.

  I’m taking my act on the road.

  I always wanted to see this great nation of ours and I figure there’s no better way than by the nation’s highways and byways.

  You know, like Henry Lee Lucas.

  He managed to get around and have a pretty good time while it lasted.

  Maybe if I want to pretend to fit in I could wash dishes.

  Or get a job as a construction worker.

  You know, anything I can get paid for doing under the table.

  Maybe I’ll sell shit door to door.

  That’s a pretty good way to get to know you neighbors.

  It’s true that I never told you what my name was.

  Maybe you might think that was rude.

  But I’m sure you understand that I have my reasons.

  I could be anyone.

  You could be thinking that you might even know who I am.

  I’m the quiet guy at work always sits by himself and eats his lunch out of a brown paper bag.

  He doesn’t really talk to anyone unless he has to.

  You wonder what it is that keeps him going on day after day, but you never ask him.

  Because then you’d have done something.

  Started something you can’t see through till the bitter end.

  Begun something that you had no intention of finishing.

  You’d own a part of him.

  Or maybe I’ll be that friendly guy that comes to your local coffee house and flirts with the waitresses. Everyone knows that guy, or at least they think they know him.