by Lotta Smith
Instead of my freaked-out, dysfunctional brain, my motor-mouth was taking a charge. Okay, I was truly babbling, but anyone would babble in my shoes.
“Kelly,” Alan tilted his head to one side. “I don’t see your point.” And he sounded totally cool.
“Oh, my point is quite simple: Don’t take the eyeballs out of me. You need to thank whatever you’re given right now. Just like thinking your glass is half-full instead of half-empty. On top of all that, you’ve got eyeballs from other people in addition to the own set of yours. Do the math and you’d be astonished to find out that you’ve got enough number of eyeballs good for not just a lifetime but several lifetimes. Wow! That’s…that’s like awesome, right?”
I tried to make a light chuckling sound because I wanted to keep the atmosphere as light-hearted and cheery as possibly possible. Call me vain, but I was desperate. I needed to talk him out of his obsession so he could change his mind and forget about me. What I’d managed to produce was a not-so-pretty sound that was best described as something between a hiccup and a burp.
“Kelly, you don’t understand.” My abductor shook his head.
“How so?”
“First off, I have extra pairs of eyeballs not out of greed or perversion, just out of necessity.”
“Oh…for what? Like eating?”
“No, I’m not a pervert.” He made a face. “They are proof of my hard work. I understand that you’re making an extended effort to look as dumb as possible, but I won’t let you go. What kind of a moron do you think I am? No one with an IQ that is higher than a turnip lets someone like you go. Considering you’re connected with the feds, that’s asking for a lot of trouble.”
“Oh, I can keep my mouth shut and go away. You know, I’ll just go away to a far place, such as Europe…or Japan. Oh, did I mention I have no tie with the feds?” I said.
“That’s bullshit. Your boss is an ex-FBI agent who still consults the feds on a regular basis. It means you’ve got a tie with the feds.”
I thought about mentioning the current situation with my employer, but didn’t. As much as I wanted to convince him that yours truly is no threat to him, I wanted to keep him thinking that my employer cares enough for me as to come to rescue his assistant and beat the bejeezus out of the capturer.
So I said. “My mother’s in Edinburgh, Scotland. I always wanted to see old, haunted castles and everything. I also have relatives in Japan, so maybe I’d go there and see Japanese koi fishes. Koi fishes at Shukkeien garden in Hiroshima are true warriors, you know. Can you imagine they’re strong enough to attacking an alligator snapping turtle en masse and beating the crap out of the monster turtle? Who said carps are slow and weak?” I gave out a light chuckle.
“That’s interesting,” Alan said.
“I know. And didja know Japan has lots and lots to offer when it comes to yummy desserts? My grandma in Japan once sent us this little jello-like concoction called black soy yokan from Oita prefecture. Believe me, it was the yummiest dessert I’ve ever tasted. And I promise to send you those fine sweets from Japan. Hey, I happen to know many other things you may be interested. We can work things together, can’t we?”
“I’m afraid not, Kelly.” my abductor shook his head.
“Yes, we can.” I replied. Then I repeated, “Yes. We. Can!” As if I was channeling Barack Obama circa 2008. Seriously, we desperately need to do something, anything to keep presidential candidates from employing one-phrase campaigning tactics.
“Alan, you’ve got to be honest with yourself. You seriously need to follow your heart. I know you like me. Being no one, I know I’m not worth taking hostage on the account nobody pays a big ransom just to have me back. So I’ve had a secret admirer who goes so much trouble to snatch me. I’m flattered, you know. Then again, killing me never is an answer. We can be friends. We can do many things together. We can even become soul mates to each other. You know, we’d never know what’s for next…”
I’d managed to give a flirtatious smile. “You really have to keep me alive, you know, otherwise you can’t have all the fun we’ll have together.”
“Kelly, you totally impressed me, and I feel truly honored learning that you’re still open for friendship and perhaps something more intimate.” said Alan. “But I need to pluck out your eyeballs.”
I opened my mouth but words didn’t come. I couldn’t believe he’s crushed my hope of extending my life expectancy with just one sentence. What a killjoy.
“Please don’t chastise me. Or, don’t take it too bad, Kelly.” He continued. “It’s nothing personal.”
“Excuse me?” I spat. “Nothing personal? Are you crazy? You’re telling me not to take it bad because it’s nothing personal that you’re about to pluck my eyeballs out of my eye sockets while I’m still alive and I happen to need those eyeballs? And you tell me not to chastise you for killing all these innocent women, because it’s nothing personal? That’s gross, disgusting, outrageous and frigging unreasonable! Nothing personal, my ass. Are you fucking insane?”
Boy, I was taking it very personal.
“I said don’t chastise me!” My capturer barked.
“Says you!” I snapped. “You know what? You don’t get criticized for no reasons. I’m chastising you because you deserve to be chastised. No, chastise is an understatement, make it condemn. Here I am, condemning you. You are a disgusting, back-zapping, eyeball-stealing nutcase!”
“A nutcase? That’s demeaning, not to mention it’d be more politically correct if you said ‘mentally unstable’ instead.” He said matter-of-factly. A little bit too matter-of-factly, in fact. I was expecting he would show more emotion, such as rage, but I couldn’t sense anything in his voice.
“So, you admit the nutcase part?” I asked, trying my best to keep my voice cool and calm. I tried my best to conceal that I was totally creeped out. According to this animal trainer starring in Discovery Channel, it’s your best interest to keep your confidence when dealing with animals.
Without saying a word, my capturer smiled, spooking me out a big time. Emotion was completely lacking in his voice. There was no sign of emotion even in his eyes. When you get a harsh insult, it’s only natural to react with some anger, rage, or even violence, but none of which was showing. He was giving me an empty, beady stare. At this point, I recognized that his eyes were darker shade of hazel.
“You’re still sporting the good old badass bitch attitude, just like the old days.” He whispered to me. “I’m so excited.” Then I realized his eyes were shining.
“I don’t understand,” I muttered. “What’s so good about that I am called a bitch? First of all, you can’t go around calling every woman a bitch on the account it’s rude. And on the second, on a rare occurrence that some woman was totally, truly a bitch, still, she’s not all that useful for you. Unless…” I gulped, “You have a special interest in bitches, for example, you like to poke the eyeballs out of women that you discriminate as a bitch, and perhaps you eat her flesh.”
In my head, a scene of my capturer devouring the flesh of his prey suddenly started rolling. I felt really, really sick. (Actually, I puked a little in my mouth, but it’s our dirty, stinky little secret, so don’t tell anyone. OK?)
“You know what?” I continued talking through my sour and bitter and disgusting mouth. “Eating human flesh is hazardous to your health. There’s this fatal neurodegenerative disease called Kuru in Papua New Guinea. This disease is a transmissible subacute spongiform encephalopathy and guess what? It’s transmitted by this endocannibalistic funeral rituals that local people eat the brain of the deceased.”
Thanks to hanging around Michael Archangel, I got to learn big words like ‘neurodegenerative diseases’ even though I wasn’t really getting what I was talking about.
“For your information, I’m not planning to eat the eyeballs.” Alan shook his head. “If I was an eyeball-eating pervert, then it doesn’t make sense that I’ve got so many eyeballs with me at home. Besides that, I told yo
u I’m not a pervert, didn’t I?”
“If that’s the case, why are you snatching eyeballs from other people?”
“You don’t understand. I hate this rude nickname Eyeball Snatcher. I’m not a petty thief, and snatching eyeballs is not what I’m trying to do.” He let out a sigh. Then, reached to the chef’s knife on the table. “Why don’t we get started? So much chatter and no work so far, that’s not good, you know.”
I froze.
He took a step toward me.
One small step for the killer, one giant leap for Kelly’s life to vanish…
Can you say “screw-up”?
Chapter 32
One step at a time, Alan a.k.a. Eyeball Snatcher the serial killer advanced towards me.
With a butcher knife in his hand and a blank expression on his face, he was coming straight to me. Undoubtedly, he was determined to yank out my eyeballs any minute. I prayed to God to cause a sudden lightening that striketh and killth him on the spot, but no lightening struck. Maybe causing a lightening indoor, not outdoor, was extremely difficult even for God’s standards. I was open to the prospect of Alan dropping dead due to a sudden heart attack, aortic dissection, stroke, or a sudden episode of narcolepsy…something, anything! But none of them had happened.
So I spoke up. “Wait a minute!”
Not that I had much to say in my mind, but I spoke up anyway. My pursuit of becoming an assistant extraordinaire to a detective had finally seemed to be paying off. According to the mystery novels I’ve studied for my job, “Do whatever you can do to distract the killer from killing you” was the rule #1 in dealing with killers. Personally, I’m calling this tactic Operation Sheherazade.
“What?” He tilted his head but stopped advancing.
At least, I did it well on distracting-the-killer-from-killing part. The next step was distracting the killer as long as possible.
I thought hard. Very hard. In fact, much harder than the time I took the SAT.
“Tell me about yourself,” was the best I had managed to utter.
One of his eyebrows twitched, but he didn’t say anything. Obviously, my lameness had taken him aback as much as it did myself.
“Why do you ask about myself?”
“Because I don’t want to be killed by some stranger for no plausible reasons.” I thought about adding “especially, when I know you’ll pluck my eyeballs out,” but I didn’t say that phrase. I was hoping that he’d forget about eyeball-plucking part.
“Where are you from? Tell me about your childhood memory,” I said. I was hoping that talking about childhood may bring back his inner angel. Maybe I might be able to talk him out of the horrible plan by reminding him of his loved ones. He might remember having people who cared for him, those who loved him unconditionally under any circumstances. Perhaps he’d hate to dishearten those people with his horrendous cruelty.
“Are you playing a therapist or what?” Alan made a face, “Don’t tell me about going back to the time when I was in the mother’s uterus. I don’t want to relive the rejection anymore.”
“What makes you think your mother rejected you?”
“Kelly, you ask too many questions, don’t you?” he gave out a resigned sigh.
And he sat down and placed the knife on the table.
Hell yes! It was a really good sign.
He continued, “I’ll tell you what. Actually, I don’t have much memory from my early childhood. I remember moving from one house to another and having new ‘family’ each time. Also, at that time, I didn’t know I was in a foster care program. The most memorable event in my childhood is seeing this vivid, recurring nightmare where I was shivering and suffocating in the coldness. In this dream, I struggle to breathe, I suck in hard, though cold water is all that came into my mouth and nose. The next thing, I find myself in a total darkness.”
“Sounds like a bad dream. Can you think of anything that might have caused this recurring dream?”
“Oh yes, when I was very little, I got drown. Except it was not a pool accident. Also, I was 3-minute old when that happened. The woman who conceived me had decided that she didn’t want a child at that time. That happened when she was in the third trimester of pregnancy and of course, it was too late to seek help from an abortion doctor. So she tried to terminate the pregnancy a la DIY, by dipping her pregnant self in icy cold water over and over in the middle of February in Albany, New York. After expelling the fetus from her body, she had presumably repeated dip-the-baby-in-cold-water process until she was convinced that I was dead.”
I recalled Archangel mentioning it was odd that the killer dumped the body of Leonie Ganong in the wilderness close to a little pond, but not in the pond. Submerging the corpse in the water has its perks, such as making it way difficult to ID the victim, for instance. Now that I heard about his birth, I could understand the reason why he didn’t get close to the water.
“According to the record, she visited the local ER carrying an unconscious, non-breathing, hypothermic, bluish newborn with weak pulses. And she was carrying the baby in a cleaning bucket made of cheap plastic, saying, ‘I guess it’s probably dead, you can just get rid of it.’ The baby didn’t have anything on to cover his body, not even a cloth, much less a blanket. She told the nurse that she just had a miscarriage. When asked if it was intentional that she had a ‘miscarriage’, she shrugged saying ‘I dunno and it’s none of your business.’ In the meantime, the newborn was successfully resuscitated from the catastrophic condition. The doctor who was treating her mild hypothermia asked her if she was 100% sure she didn’t want to see the baby but she was firm saying, ‘No, it’s none of my business, much less yours,’ and that was it, she left the hospital totally refusing to see her own child.”
I was at a loss of words.
“When I was young I didn’t know the meaning of the recurring nightmare, or the fact that I was actually drowned just after the birth. Anyway, I saw the nightmare over and over and over… like I was living in that. I cried and shrieked maybe a couple of times at first, but soon I learned to just suck in the feelings, lock it up and act like nothing had happened. That didn’t stop me from living the nightmare, but at least that saved me from getting spanked by some of foster family members that got fed up with the troubled kid making a fuss in the middle of night, each night. And getting spanked wasn’t the worst thing that happened in foster homes. Before turning three, I was raped. And it was not just once or twice.”
I gasped.
“Newsflash, huh? Foster care program where adoptive agencies, facilitators, attorneys are involved, it’s all about money. When I was five, the agency that had supposedly arranged my custody got busted for fraud and deaths of kids in foster homes, and my case was handled by a better agency. So I was placed in a very rich family who had kindly adopted me. Then again, it was not happily ever after with some major drawbacks. Say, the adoptive father had a thing for boys and only adopted boys, and the boys had to accompany him in bath and in bed every night, taking turns. Not to mention all the other boys were bigger and stronger than me and they often abused the little, weak, naïve newbie. Again, shutting the feelings out strategy helped me survive that.”
“And you survived,” I muttered. A part of me wished he didn’t. It was mean to think of it that way, but I couldn’t help it. Now I remembered one of my faux-dads (the orthopedic surgeon) mentioning the trickiness of helping people’s lives as a doctor. So it’s wonderful to save a dying person’s life, sometimes not save this person’s life is the best interest for the better good. Gosh, he was right. If it was not for the brilliant medical professionals at the hospital, Alan the Eyeball Snatcher had been dead decades ago, which would have, ironically, helped the murder victims live much longer, probably as healthy persons.
“Yeah. As much as I was a survivor, I was a fast learner. In no time I learned to say the right things and act just the right ways so that I can take control and get the most of the situations.”
He said as if he treasured the
memory.
“As I grew up, I got better and better. Fortunately, I’d managed to become the only stepson in the household when I was thirteen.”
“What happened to other boys?” I couldn’t help asking the question, but I wasn’t real sure if I wanted to know the answer.
“Some died from unexplained illnesses, some from freak accidents, and others just disappeared.”
“Did you, like—off them?” I asked, a half of me wishing to just shut up and the rest of me driven by this little monster called curiosity.
“Maybe, maybe not,” he shrugged. “Who cares? Things happen.”
He continued, “When I went to college, I was pretty wealthy. The step-parents passed away, they were both killed in a freak golf cart accident in Florida. Again, things happen. As the only heir, I had inherited their money.”
And I was positive he had something to do with the freak accident.
“Kelly,” he said abruptly. “Can you imagine how I felt back then?”
“Happy?” I said. “Blissful, delighted, euphoric… maybe, victorious?”
“Wrong answers,” he shook his head. “On the contrary, I felt miserable. Indeed, I felt much worse than the hard times back in the old days. When I was struggling to outsmart others and survive, I used to imagine the future of living happily ever after. I believed I’d be happy if I could manage to get by all on my own, but when my dream was finally realized I felt just empty. Maybe it was a post-victory blues. After all, throughout all those years, I’d been in a fight-or-flight state 24/7. When I was busy surviving, I often told myself I’ll be a happy person without a care in the world if I could make it on my own. Even though I couldn’t picture happiness, since I had no idea what happiness is all about. You can imagine things or situation only based on your past experiences and feelings, and you just can’t go beyond who you are. So, I was clueless.”