(2011) The Gift of Death

by Sam Ripley

  A metropolis of immorality, where baseness, lust, passion, violence and crime ruled. America had embraced the spirit of self-expression, of self-esteem. Which was all well and good, he said to himself, until it had mutated into the cult of self-interest. People seemed to think they could say and do whatever they liked these days, without due regard for others. Young girls wore slutty dresses and talked like porn stars. Gays congregated in warehouses and rutted like animals. And those folk in the film business all seemed to be high on one drug or another. If LA was supposed to be the ultimate expression of America then what hope was there?

  He sighed to himself and took another swig of mineral water. At least that was pure. He was as clean inside as he was out, without spot or stain or sin. He was careful not to ingest anything full of nasty chemicals or toxins. He didn’t touch coffee, alcohol, junk food, sugary drinks, anything processed. He liked nature and natural things. Farmer’s markets. Organic fruits and vegetables. Pulses and grains. Nettle tea. Good wholesome cuts of meat. He didn’t trust fish, as you never knew what got spilt into the ocean. His stomach turned as he thought of the kind of filth that floated in the sea. The scum on the waves just reflected the scum on land. Dirt-bags like Raymond Cutler, the lowest of human pond life.

  To the outside world he looked kind of normal. A clean-cut guy, well-built, mid-forties. Divorced. With a couple of kids who lived with their mom. A hard-working executive with a steady job in one of the banks in Century City and a home in Westchester West. But what nobody knew – except a few of his sick buddies - was that Raymond liked little girls. Late at night, home alone, Raymond loved nothing better than to search the internet for images of cutesy-looking girls in various explicit poses. Bending over, showing their assholes. Opening their legs to reveal their vaginas. On all fours being penetrated by one man orally and another from behind. They were some of the less disgusting ones. He didn’t like to think of some of the other photographs that Raymond downloaded. Those pictures of tiny children, babies even.

  He swigged some more mineral water, trying not to let those images dirty his brain. He had to remain clean, above it all. He closed his eyes for a moment and took some deep breaths. Meditation was good for clearing one’s mind, protecting oneself from the polluting effect of those around you. After a few minutes he felt he had centred himself, ready for the job in hand, a task that had to be done.

  At four a.m. – the time the two men had agreed – a light came on in one of the rooms inside Raymond’s house. It was the sign he had been waiting for. He got out of the car, took a black satchel out of the trunk and put on a pair of gloves. He walked down the driveway, past the neatly clipped lawn and up to Raymond’s front porch. He didn’t need to knock or ring, as Raymond was already standing there, the door open for him.

  The house was neat, functional, bare of personal possessions. The typical rented home of a newly-divorced dad.

  ‘Have you got it?’ asked Raymond, almost whispering, as he closed the door.

  ‘Sure, and it’s something you’re gonna really enjoy,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Raymond, licking his lips. ‘This way.’

  Raymond led him down a corridor, past a bathroom, to a small study at the back of the house. In the far corner was a desk, on which stood a PC. He noticed that the screen saver was a picture of two kids – a boy and a girl, Raymond’s kids. Could Raymond not see what was staring him in the face? The sickness of it all? How could he look at the picture of his children one minute and the next, at the click of a mouse, stare at the obscene images of somebody else’s kids. He felt the anger rising inside him, but he had to control it, hold it in check just for a few more minutes.

  ‘Here you are,’ he said, handing Raymond a DVD. ‘Your little piece of paradise.’

  ‘I’ll get you something in return next couple of weeks, promise,’ said Raymond, beads of sweat breaking out over his forehead.

  ‘I’ll just hang around to make sure it works,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a couple of instances where there have been some glitches. Pixelation. Freezing. Don’t know why.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ said Raymond, placing the DVD into the computer.

  The machine made a whirring noise, a sound that Raymond had come to associate with the delights of anticipation. He hoped the disc worked okay. He couldn’t wait until he was left alone. The thought of it left his mouth dry. A five-year-old girl with five different men.

  ‘Can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it,’ said Raymond, as he watched the screen come to life. ‘And great that us guys can stick together. Online you never know who’s out there snooping. Cops, feds, whatever.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ he said. ‘Best if we keep this amongst ourselves. A select few.’

  ‘Is this okay? Is there a problem?’ said Raymond, leaning over the desk to look at the computer. ‘It seems like the disc is stuck or something.’

  ‘Try pressing control, return and shift all at the same time. That should fix it.’

  As Raymond’s fingers hovered over the keyboard he felt something prick his arm.

  ‘Hey – what the fuck –‘ he said. He tried to form more words – then he tried to shout, to scream – but nothing. It was like his throat and voice box had been paralysed. He looked at the man next to him, implored him to help, but he just stood there, smiling. Had he had a stroke? What was that other thing he had seen on the medical channel the other day? An aneurysm? A blood clot? He tried to reach out to his friend, but found that he could not move his arm. Then the man took hold of his shoulders and sat him down on the chair in front of the desk. He was going to help him. He would know something had gone wrong, he’d call 911 and get him into see a medic. He had medical insurance – his company had a great plan – so that wouldn’t be a problem. His friend would be wise enough to take out the disc from the computer. He wouldn’t want to be found with that kind of material on him, would he?

  He looked at the man standing before him, but it was hard to focus on him. His body felt like jello, sort of numb all over.

  ‘This way,’ said the stranger, taking the disc out of the computer. ‘We don’t want to leave a mess, do we?’

  He heaved him out of the chair and supported him as he manoeuvred him out of the study. He was taking care of him, after all, thought Raymond. Making sure he visited the bathroom before the ambulance turned up.

  ‘Okay, Raymond, this way,’ he said. ‘Just sit down in here while I get the rest of my stuff.’

  Why was he sliding him into the bath? He only needed to pee, for god’s sake. Nothing more than that. Where was he going? Was he calling 911? But he couldn’t hear his voice.

  The man came back into the room carrying his rucksack, out of which he took what looked like a case for spectacles or some kind of slimline camera. He must have one of those fancy new mobiles, thought Raymond, with email, internet, MP3 and camera all in one. As his friend opened the case, Raymond saw a flash of reflected light. He tried to focus on the object in the case, but it kept slipping out of view. As the man walked towards him Raymond realised his friend was carrying a scalpel.

  Again, Raymond tried to scream, but no matter how hard he tried he could not utter a sound.

  ‘Do you know what I’m going to do?’ said the man. ‘That’s a purely rhetorical question, as I know you can’t answer me. So let me fill you in. By the way, just so you’re up to date and running with what’s going on, I’ve injected you with a drug that renders you paralysed and unable to speak. That does not mean, however, you will not feel pain. I think you’ll find that your nervous system will register every little cut that I’m going to make into your skin. Let’s see, shall we?’

  Raymond tried to struggle, but he remained as immobile and inert. Only his eyes seemed to register the terror.

  The stranger began by cutting the clothes from Raymond’s body, occasionally letting the scalpel graze his skin. He worked quickly and efficiently and, in a matter of minutes, had stripped Raymond down to his underw
ear. Blood seeped out of the tiny cuts on his body, gradually turning his white boxer shorts a deep shade of red.

  ‘That’s better, we can see what we’re working with now, can’t we?’

  The man looked Raymond up and down like a piece of meat, ready to be carved and butchered.

  ‘You’re most probably wondering what I’m doing and why I am doing it,’ he said, calmly. ‘By now you’ll have probably worked out that I am not one of your net buddies nor do I regularly visit web sites devoted to the abuse and exploitation of small children. In fact, you and your sort disgust me, do you know that?

  ‘And it’s about time somebody taught you a lesson. You should realise that you can’t go about satisfying your every whim, satiating your sick appetite for filth and obscenity with as little thought as a kid reaching for another cookie from the cookie jar. There have to be consequences, you see. You have to be punished. You do understand that, Raymond, don’t you?’

  With one quick flick of his wrist the stranger cut Raymond’s boxer shorts from his tubby waist. He picked up the swathes of the blood-soaked material – they reminded him of something from his childhood, the jolly red ribbons at an Easter parade – and dumped them with the rest of the clothes in a large black refuse bag which he had placed next to Raymond in the bath.

  ‘You see, Raymond, I’ve been watching you,’ he said, staring down at his victim, his penis a shrivelled, bloodied snail almost curled in upon itself. ‘Listening into a few of your chat room exchanges. And what you’ve been doing just isn’t right. Looking at the pictures of those poor kids. Night after night masturbating over those images. Swapping sick photos with your pervert buddies. But why choose you, I hear you think. Good question, Raymond. You’ve never actually touched a child, never done anything with a kid. True. But I always think prevention is better than cure, don’t you? And it would be awful if you ever did anything to hurt little David and Jo-Ann. Yes, that’s right, I know the names of your kids. And your wife, Toni. So you see, what I’m doing now is actually for your benefit, Raymond. You see the logic, right?’

  With his gloved hands the stranger manoeuvred Raymond on to his back. He took hold of his hairy legs and pushed them forwards, so that Raymond’s knees were almost touching his face. Drops of blood from his groin dropped on to his cheeks and a stream of dark red liquid ran into the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Can you taste that, Raymond? How d’you like the taste of it? Nice, eh?’ He smacked his lips in mock appreciation, as if he were pretending to eat a delicious strawberry sundae. ‘My guess is you are in quite a bit of discomfort at the moment. Your skin is stinging, your cuts smarting, and this position isn’t doing your back any favours. But did you ever imagine what it was like for one of those poor kids? Being bent over as if they were a rag doll? Prodded, poked, fucked and fingered just for your delight. Not much fun, I’m sure you’ll agree. So you see, Raymond, I just wanted you to appreciate that. Just so you know what I’m doing here isn’t completely without rhyme or reason. Okay?’

  Raymond repeatedly tried to close his eyes. If only he could pretend he was some place else. He tried to think of that beach he’d been to with Toni and the kids a couple of years back. In the Bahamas. The breeze on his skin. The feel of sun on his skin. He tried to push back the pain that was gradually consuming his body. If only he could get through this, he promised, he would never look at those pictures again. Holy God, he wouldn’t. If only he could tell this deranged madman that. He’d erase those discs that he had hidden at the back of the cupboard in his bedroom. He’d even go to the police and give the cops the names of his internet buddies. Yeah, he was prepared to snitch on them, if only he would let him go.

  Fuck. What the fuck was that? He felt something sting in his groin. He couldn’t move his head to look, but he felt the warm flow of blood on the inside of his left leg. He felt his heart race, couldn’t catch his breath quickly enough. What the fuck was going on?

  ‘Just brace yourself, Raymond. Be brave. And just think, I’m helping you become the best you can be.’

  The stranger wiped the blood from the scalpel, pausing for a second as he examined Raymond’s midriff. He moved closer, taking up Raymond’s shrunken penis in his gloved hand. He pushed the scalpel into the skin at the base of the organ, circling it with a ruby red ring. As he began to cut through the membranes, hacking away at the stringy tissue, a spurt of blood streamed upwards into the air, a bloody ejaculation.

  Raymond’s body started to shake as it went into involuntary shock. A couple of more strokes of the scalpel and all that was left of Raymond’s genitals was a pair of testicles and a bloody stump.

  ‘That’s my boy,’ he said. ‘You did good.’

  He looked at the pathetic thing sitting in the palm of his hand. To think that this slug of an organ used to cause all those problems, he thought. Not any more. Raymond had been cured and cleansed of his sins.

  He set the dismembered penis to one side as he started to clean up the bathroom, wiping down surfaces of blood and bleaching the bath so as to try and lessen the amount of clean-up that had to be done. His mother had always told him to be as neat and as tidy as possible and, even now, he didn’t want to let her down. By the time he had finished the only messy object was Raymond himself, a mass of fat and hair and blood. There was just one finishing touch. One thing lacking to make the scene complete.

  He went over to Raymond. He was still breathing – just. Then he opened Raymond’s mouth, picked up the flaccid penis and stuffed it inside. He gathered together his things, checked he had not left anything behind, and let himself out. As he drove away into the night he felt a pleasing sense of a job well done.

  Sin eats itself, he thought, and smiled.

  4

  The smog of Los Angeles hung low over the city. The haze transformed the low-lying urban sprawl into something approaching a mirage, a fragment from a half-remembered dream. Nothing was what it seemed in this city, thought Kate. Appropriate really, considering its main industry was the manufacture and export of illusions.

  Sure it was dirty, crime-ridden, superficial, traffic-bound, and, in parts, pretty ugly. Yet no matter how many times she had tried to leave LA – her college days in New York and in London, a summer in Paris, a couple of years working for her doctorate in Manchester, England – she always returned back to the city. Who said of LA, ‘there is no there there’? She couldn’t remember, but whoever it was summed it up pretty well. Perhaps that was why she liked it, she thought. It was a place you could make your own, shape it according to your own desires and fantasies. That and the fact that she had grown up here.

  Her closest friends knew that her mom had once been big in movies and that her father had composed the scores for a dozen or so famous films. But it wasn’t something she liked to talk about. Josh had always accused her of being something of an inverted snob. But it wasn’t that, far from it. She was proud of her parents’ achievements – neither of them had come from particularly wealthy backgrounds; in fact her mom’s family had all been in service in England. In a city that worshipped the motion picture industry like a religion or some kind of cult – and in which folks would have looked up to her parents as if they were minor deities – Kate didn’t want to create an artificial divide between her and potential friends. She hadn’t told Josh about her parents until they had been dating at least a couple of months. He had repeatedly bugged her with dinner invitations until she had no choice but to finally gave in.

  ‘What’s the big secret?’ he had joked over dinner at that restaurant up in the hills.

  ‘Those no big secret. I told you they were in the entertainment business.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘What did they do?

  ‘Both worked in the film business. Sort of on the edges.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘You are curious. I can see why you became a detective. Did you always want to be a cop?’

  ‘Don’t try and change the subjec
t. I’ve done enough talking about myself. Now it’s your turn.’

  ‘Okay, I take your point. But it’s no big deal, honest. My dad is a composer, Saul Cramer, he’s a bit frail now, and my mom was an actress.’