The Playing Card Killer

by Russell James

  He pulled the tape from across Brian’s mouth. It felt like a lot of skin went with it.

  “Ouch!” Brian spit some residue from his lips. “Who are you?”

  “I’m your id. Your alter ego. Finally surfaced.”

  Brian’s face screwed up in horror. He really was going insane.

  The killer smiled and slapped him on the shoulder. “Just fucking with you! Long story. But we have time. C’mon.”

  The killer pulled a large pocketknife from his jeans. A lifetime of hard use had left nicks and gouges in its thick, cherrywood handle. The killer snapped it open to reveal a thick blade nearly five inches long. Unlike the battered handle, the blade’s edge sparkled where it had been honed to perfection.

  The killer bent over and cut Brian’s ankles free, but not his hands. He helped Brian out of the trunk. Brian’s knees creaked as they stretched back to a more human position. They stood in a two-car garage. A battered red Honda compact with Virginia plates sat in the other parking spot. A few older lawn tools hung on one wall, with a rusting push mower beneath them. A dusty home gym took up the front of the garage, the type with a stack of weights at one end, a bench at the other, and a pull-down bar suspended over the bench. Nothing in the garage looked like it had been moved in a very long time.

  The killer led him into the main house. Brian shuffled in as feeling returned to his legs, but the killer’s gait was odd as well, with a little drag from his right foot. They stepped up into the house and into a tiled, spacious kitchen.

  Four high-backed chairs with woven wicker bottoms surrounded a glass-topped kitchen table. The closest chair had the middle of the wicker seat chopped out. A set of locking rollers crudely attached to the legs raised the seat an inch or two higher than the rest. The killer yanked Brian’s arms behind him so they hung over the chair’s back. He sat Brian down on the modified chair. Then he grabbed several zip ties from the kitchen counter and added a second round of constraints to fix Brian’s bound wrists to the back of the chair. That jerked him into a painfully upright position.

  The killer grabbed more zip ties from the counter, and bound Brian’s ankles to the chair. The frosty air-conditioning cut through Brian’s thin socks and chilled his feet.

  The killer pulled another chair opposite of Brian. He spun it around, straddled it, crossed his arms over the top, and rested his chin on them.

  “Now, you have a million questions,” he said. “Let me answer half of them before you ask. First off, I’m Tyler.” He extended his hand for a handshake, feigned a look of embarrassment, and gave Brian a chummy slap on the shoulder instead. “My friends call me Ty.”

  Tyler laughed, a really off-kilter snorting laugh, like this was some big inside joke. Then he straightened up and took a deep breath.

  “I’m guessing you noticed our stunning family resemblance.”

  Tyler turned profile, then lifted his chin in an aristocratic pose. He didn’t just resemble Brian, he damn near duplicated him. His face was just a bit fuller, his body was certainly more robust. But there was no way he could be Brian’s.…

  “Yes, indeed,” Tyler said. “We’re twin brothers. Separated at birth by the callous hand of man, reunited by my tireless efforts.”

  “That can’t be.…”

  “Central State Hospital, Petersburg, Virginia. April 17, 1999.” Tyler pointed at himself. “Two-oh-three a.m.” Tyler pointed at Brian. “Two-oh-nine a.m.”

  Brian couldn’t deny that Tyler was his doppelganger. But the details of the location and exact time of his birth were something new. “I didn’t know any of that.”

  “Of course not,” Tyler said. “Those double assholes Derek and Camilla demanded a closed adoption. The agency said they never even asked about any siblings, just wanted you cut off from your birth family, forever. You have a redacted birth certificate, dude, like you’re some secret government project.”

  “How did you know about me?”

  “Well, while you got adopted, I just got borrowed. Fucking foster homes, every one another step deeper into hell. My records weren’t sealed and I could see that I had this baby brother out there somewhere. One bitch social worker tried to tell me that you died at birth, but I knew that was a load of shit. I could feel that it wasn’t true.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Haven’t you had the sensation of being, like, partial your whole life? Like there was something missing, some reason you didn’t really fit in?”

  Brian considered the word partial. For the first time, a foggy feeling he’d had forever became perfectly defined.

  “Let me answer that for you,” Tyler said. “Yes, you did. Because I did. We spent nine months together in a womb, dude. We shared blood. There’s no bonding like that anywhere else.”

  Tyler stood and started to pace the kitchen. The drag of his right foot didn’t slow him. His face became animated. Jerky gestures punctuated his words.

  “Then, when I was like eleven or twelve, I was put with the Dunhams, a family who didn’t give a shit if I went to school at all. A sweet setup, for sure. I stayed up all night, slept until noon. I started seeing shit in my dreams, like another life or something. I thought they were just dreams, but they were so seriously boring, I didn’t think my imagination was that totally lame.

  “Everything I saw fit the real world too much for these visions to just be dreams. I did internet searches of signs and stuff that I saw each night, like your middle school, your address on mail, stuff like that. Gradually, I pieced it together. In my dreams, that more pathetic version of myself I saw wasn’t me at all. It was you, my long-lost bro.”

  “That dream connection didn’t happen to me,” Brian said. “Not until recently.”

  “That’s because your adopted overlords kept you drugged, bro. A system full of chemicals suppressed your abilities. Once you dropped off them, I could sense you tagging along with me, the way I had for years with you. I might have had a string of foster parents who treated me like an ATM for state aid, but in their neglect, they did me one favor. No one shot me full of mind-killing meds.”

  That fit the timeline. Brian had started having the visions when he quit taking all the medications.

  “See what they did to you, dude?” Tyler stepped next to him, tapped Brian’s head, then Brian’s chest. “Those drugs, they stunted your brain, stunted your growth. You’re supposed to be like me.”

  Brian watched Tyler flex a pretty healthy bicep. Brian had spent a lot of embarrassing gym-class periods wishing he had half the muscle mass his brother displayed.

  The phrase his brother kind of bounced around in his head a few times as he got used to the idea.

  “Because, really, you’re me,” Tyler said. “I’m you. Identical twins. Same blood type. Same DNA. Now even with that, I am the big brother, so it falls on me to help you out, to help you up.”

  “How about untying me, for starters?”

  “When you’re ready, bro, when you’re ready. First you need to see what you’re missing, have me clue you in on why I’m strong and you’re weak.”

  Reality reasserted itself, and Brian remembered he wasn’t talking to a long-lost brother. He was talking to a serial killer.

  “I’ve seen what you’ve been doing,” Brian said. “I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  “That’s because you’ve only seen it. You haven’t experienced it. I’m going to give you the full behind-the-scenes tour, let you savor every step from start to glorious finish. Then you’ll understand, see your full potential, see our full potential.”

  Tyler pulled Brian’s cell phone from his own pocket, tapped in the passcode and called up Brian’s email. “See, I’ve been prepping you for this for weeks.” He swiped through the email list and frowned. “Oh, dude, you deleted them. The messages from Totally You, about your upcoming new beginning.”

  “The spam? That was y
ou?”

  “Absolutely! Totally You. T-Y. Ty. Get it?” Tyler let out another snort-laugh.

  Brian realized how easy it would have been for Tyler to get into his phone, his email. He’d seen every password through Brian’s eyes. That had to be how he knew the passcode for the Sheridans’ home security system.

  Tyler pulled the velvet rope from his pocket. Brian’s jaw dropped. That was it, the instrument of death that had starred in all his nightmares. Totally real.

  Tyler swung it around over his head with one hand, like a cowboy with a lasso. “You and me gonna round ’em up, pardner! Yeehaw!”

  “Ty, look, I—”

  Tyler’s face went crimson. He stepped forward and cracked the rope like a whip against Brian’s neck. The end carried around, wrapped over Brian’s Adam’s apple, and continued over to where Tyler caught it with his other hand. He gave the two ends a little yank. Brian’s windpipe collapsed. Tyler bent to Brian’s ear.

  “Only my friends call me Ty,” he whispered, “and I don’t have any friends.”

  When Tyler’s face reappeared, he’d reapplied that artificial salesman’s smile. Brian shivered. The velvet rope went slack and Tyler pulled it from Brian’s neck. The friction left the slightest of burns.

  “Now,” Tyler said, “I’ve got some errands to run, some shopping to do. I’ll have to leave you, but want to make sure you’re comfortable.”

  Tyler went behind Brian. For the briefest moment, Brian held out hope that he was about to be untied. Instead, Tyler grabbed the back of the chair and held it steady as he released the locks on the wheels at the base of the legs. He pulled Brian backwards and down the hall.

  “You know,” he said, “I was this close to getting a wheelchair for this phase, but then I realized it so totally wouldn’t work for this.”

  Tyler opened a door to a half bathroom and snapped on the light. The room was just big enough for the toilet and a small sink on the left. The toilet’s lid and seat were missing. He spun Brian around and backed him in over the john. The chair cleared it by an inch.

  “See,” Tyler said, “this is the part they always skip in the movies. The prisoner’s got to take a piss and a shit every now and then. Just human nature. And any one smart enough to engineer a kidnapping isn’t stupid enough to spend time cleaning all that up.”

  Tyler pulled his knife from his pocket again and snapped it open. A shocked look crossed his face and he paused.

  “Whoa, kidnapping. That was an unfortunate choice of terms I used there. You aren’t a prisoner. This isn’t a kidnapping. This is a reunion. A reintegration. You’ll see.”

  Tyler bent and with the knife, sliced through the hem of Brian’s sweats. He slit them up one leg, then the next, all the way to the waist. With a rough yank, he pulled the flayed sweats free. Two more slices and Brian’s underwear was gone as well.

  The conditioned air raised chill bumps across Brian’s ass, exposed through the missing seat. He felt his exposed manhood shrivel and his testes beat a quick retreat somewhere deep inside his pelvis. His face flushed in humiliation.

  “Oh, dude,” Tyler said. He raised an eyebrow as he looked at Brian’s crotch. “Might be something we aren’t identical in after all.” He snorted back a laugh. “Seriously, can’t have you sitting around with your wee-wee out, can we?”

  Tyler pulled a towel from the rack. He flapped it open and across Brian’s lap like a blanket at a country picnic.

  “Ta da! I’ll be back soon and we’ll really get to know each other. Sit tight.” He let slip another snort-laugh as he amused himself. “Sorry! Oh, I just kill me sometimes.”

  Tyler backed out of the bathroom and closed the door.

  The shredded wicker seat dug into Brian’s bare butt cheeks. His shoulders ached. Despite the chill in the room, beads of nervous sweat rolled down his sides. It was all too much to process. Serial killings. Kidnapped. A twin brother. The hope that this was another one of his withdrawal hallucinations briefly surfaced, and then sank back into the morass of despair that spawned it.

  He remembered as a kid how trapped he’d felt living under Derek and Camilla’s roof. He didn’t know what trapped really felt like until now.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The water kept the time.

  Not in a meaningful way. The drip from the sink could not tell Brian whether it was a quarter past seven or half past three, but it did confirm that time was passing, a plink of a reminder every four seconds. From his vantage point he could watch each tiny sphere swell from nothing but damp to a pregnant drop overcome by gravity. Each drop fell from his line of sight and trickled down the drain, along with another four-second slice of his life. He had no idea how many of those had passed since Tyler shut the bathroom door.

  To the right, a mirror filled the wall over the sink. The rest of the walls were yellow, the shade of it more suited to a banana than to home décor. A white hand towel hung on the chrome rack by the sink. The rack to his left was now empty since its towel covered his lap. The bathroom had no decorations. A few off-colored rectangles on the walls testified that some had been there at one time. Tyler must have removed them. Was he afraid they might give Brian comfort, or that they might somehow become a means of escape? There was no telling.

  After Tyler had left him, anxiety had taken him on a wild ride. He’d struggled against his bindings in a mindless bout of thrashing until muscle strain forced a halt. Exhausted, he’d given up his thoughts of escape. The attempt hadn’t delivered a millimeter of slack in his bindings. His shoulders screamed at him from the exertion, amplified by hanging backwards over the chair.

  The windowless room uncomfortably mimicked a tomb. It certainly sounded like one. Silence ruled the vacant house. No sounds from outside penetrated the walls, no lawn mowers, no barking dogs, no leaf blowers. He imagined he was in some cookie-cutter subdivision, maybe even mostly timeshares. Places like that had a little going-to-work traffic, a little coming-home-from-work traffic, and that was it. Florida’s heat and omnipresent humidity kept everyone inside as much as possible.

  The idea of shouting himself hoarse crying for help was laughable. Even if the mailman was at the front door, Brian doubted the guy would hear his screams. He reasoned that if it had been even a remote possibility, Tyler would have kept Brian gagged.

  Movement caught his eye along the base of the door. One spindly spider leg peeked out from between the door and the floor tile, then another.

  In slow motion, the spider crawled out. Three inches long, with so much brown hair that it looked furry. Even at this distance, its big, black eyes shined, glossy, malevolent. It crawled towards Brian.

  He shuddered against his bindings. He hated spiders, all insects actually, but spiders had their own special circle of Hell. Too many legs, unblinking eyes, fangs.

  He’d been bitten when he was little. He reached into his drawer for socks and felt the sting. He yanked his hand back. A spider scampered out behind it, dropped to the floor, and beat a fast retreat under the bed. It left a small, red dot on the back of Brian’s hand.

  Four hours later, he really felt the impact. The bite felt like someone had driven a spike through his hand. Everything from the wrist down swelled up like some scarlet balloon creation. His fever spiked to the stratosphere. Nausea rolled through him, and he vomited until he thought he’d left the lining of his stomach in the toilet. He passed out and woke up in the hospital.

  His parents were there. Camilla did not look too relieved at his recovery. A brown recluse spider took the rap. The doctor said Brian had an allergy, another item to add to Brian’s list of problems and anxiety triggers.

  The full nightmare of a potential bite came into focus. Trapped in this chair, alone. Tyler might not be back for hours, maybe days, and might not even help Brian if he was here. Brian conjured a vision of himself alone, bound in this chair, burning up with fever, layered in his o
wn stinking vomit.

  The spider crept closer.

  “Go away!” Brian shook in the chair as he shouted. “Get the hell out of here!”

  The spider continued, undeterred by, or Brian thought, maybe attracted by his screaming. It crept up on the toe of Brian’s sock. He imagined he could feel the spike of its feet through the cotton weave. He wiggled his toes. He jerked his foot back and forth against the bindings at his ankle. The spider advanced, surefooted as a sailor on a gale-swept deck.

  The spider crawled up his sock and paused at his bare leg. Brian froze.

  “No, no,” he whispered, pleading. “Go away. Please.”

  One furry leg touched his skin. Memories of the sting of his previous bite rushed back with a vengeance. He went stock-still, worried about pissing it off and having it sink its fangs into his flesh.

  The spider crawled up his calf. Its legs plucked at hairs like harp strings as it moved systematically towards Brian’s knee. Every touch sent tingles across his skin and shivers up his spine. Beads of sweat formed on Brian’s forehead.

  The spider free-climbed his skin, slow and steady, and reached his knee. It disappeared under the towel that covered Brian’s lap.

  That only made it worse. With the spider unseen, but still felt, Brian’s mind amplified every pinprick touch of the spider’s legs, anticipated the piercing bite he feared was about to follow. The creature moved step by step up his inner thigh, and touched one of his testes.

  Brian stifled a scream. If the thing bit his balls…the pain…the swelling…damn it.

  Fear squeezed his bladder. His eyes went wide. Oh, no, not now. If he pissed on the spider, it would sure as hell bite, probably more than once, sinking its fangs into everything it could find underneath the towel. He clenched his teeth, and everything else he could below the waist. The pressure built to bursting.

  Legs touched his penis.

  He screamed and bounced in his bindings. All control was gone. Hot urine sprayed his legs, sprayed the towel. The chair banged back and forth against the toilet as he writhed in panic. He waited for the stabbing pain of the spider’s bite.