by Ed Gaffney
Terry looked back out the window. “As long as it’s after lunch,” he replied. “I’ve got plans.”
Monster
IT HAD TAKEN MORE THAN A YEAR OF PLANNING, and countless hours of painstaking effort, but finally, finally, all of the elements were in place. The monster sat down, turned on his computer, and attached his digital camera. His masterpiece was truly under way.
The Corey Chatham experience had been such a pleasure. Such a relief. It all had gone exactly as planned.
When he’d approached the house, he felt a thrill like he hadn’t experienced in quite a while. He was smiling by the time that Mr. Chatham finally answered the door, which was terrific, because it very quickly put the rather large man at ease.
Not that he needed much help, thanks to the stun gun. In seconds, Chatham had collapsed to the floor like a demolished building as the waves of shock pulsed through him. In a matter of several seconds, except for some involuntary muscle spasms, he was completely incapacitated.
It was like poor Mr. Chatham had been sentenced to die by hand-held electrocution.
But he didn’t die, of course. He was just immobilized, until he could be brought to what was obviously his favorite chair—a nice, plush recliner, directly opposite his television.
Dragging him across the living room floor wasn’t as bad as it could have been—Corey had good taste, and both his entryway and his living room featured hardwood floors, so he slid rather smoothly from one area of the house to the other.
But getting him into the recliner took some effort, because Mr. Chatham was no lightweight. It was a bit comical, actually. First, he had to pull Corey over so that the unconscious man was sitting on the floor with his back against the chair. Then, while standing on the chair, he had to hoist the limp Mr. Chatham up by his underarms until his rear end finally found its way onto the recliner’s seat.
Once that was accomplished, he climbed down from the chair, pushed Corey back into a normal position on the chair, gagged him, and taped him up good.
But Corey was out cold, and it would probably be a while before he came to, so the monster decided to have a look around.
The most interesting things were always in the bedrooms, so he went right up the stairs, and found himself in a narrow hallway, featuring four doors—one right at the top of the stairs, and three at the far end of the house.
He correctly guessed that the nearest door was a guest bedroom. Some dusty books were stacked on a long shelf running along one wall, and some boxes of what looked like old clothes lined the same wall beneath the shelf. The rest of the room seemed to be a holding area for furniture that didn’t have a place elsewhere. It looked more like a storage room than anything else. It was totally uninteresting.
He moved down to the other end of the hall, and opened the first door he came to, which was a small linen closet. The second door opened to a surprisingly clean bathroom, and the third, finally, brought him to Chatham’s bedroom.
It was furnished with a lot of style. On the far wall, a queen-sized bed sat on a dark cherry frame, on either side of which stood matching end tables.
But it was the framed photos, diplomas, and other memorabilia on the wall to his immediate right when he entered which really caught the monster’s eye.
Apparently, Mr. Chatham was something of a do-gooder. Next to a replica of a movie poster for Casablanca, there was a framed certificate attesting to the fact that Mr. Chatham had donated more blood to the Red Cross over the past five years than any of his coworkers. Another indicated that he had “adopted” an impoverished family living in some godforsaken place in Africa, and five of the blackest faces the monster had ever seen smiled at him from a photo that was attached.
How noble.
Chatham had attended the University of Rochester, poor bastard, and some high school in Cleveland, Ohio.
Too bad for him he had ended up in Springfield, Massachusetts.
One of the bedside tables was bare, but the other had a prescription pill bottle sitting on it, a bestseller, and a photo of a cat.
Jeez. The guy was sick, and he had a cat. God Almighty. The most boring victim ever.
Maybe the first floor would prove more entertaining. He started down the stairs, but before the monster had a chance to see if Corey had a secret den where he kept photos of underage girls, he heard a sound from the living room.
Corey Chatham was awake.
A quick look determined that the hero of the Red Cross was only starting to revive himself, so the monster took a seat on the edge of the coffee table across from his victim, and waited until the man was sufficiently recovered from the effects of the stun gun to enjoy his reaction when he learned that he was about to make his final donation of blood.
And it was worth the wait.
When Corey’s eyes finally flickered open, he was quite groggy for a few seconds. He clearly did not understand his situation. He blinked at his attacker a few times, but without real recognition. He tried to stand up, and noticed that he was stuck in place.
And that’s when the neurons that had been fried by the Taser started coming back on-line. He looked down at his arms, saw the tape that bound them, looked back at his captor, tried to speak, and then realized he was gagged. Next, he tried to stand, and that’s when he realized that his ankles had been taped to the base of the chair.
The look of panic that flashed onto his face at that moment was spectacular. It was like in one moment, he was working hard to free himself, and the next, he was fully cognizant of the fact that he was minutes from death.
It was just what the monster was looking for, and he was ready with his digital camera. The repeated flashes as he took the pictures further surprised Chatham, which was just as well. It was always best to keep victims on their toes.
Figuratively, of course.
Next came the real shooting. The one with the gun and the bullets.
The monster stood up, and moved so that he was directly in front of Chatham. He switched the camera to his left hand, and with his right, he slowly withdrew the handgun that he had been keeping in his jacket pocket. He readied the camera, in case another expression passed over Chatham’s face that he wanted to capture.
But by this point, Chatham’s expression had become less entertaining. He seemed committed to hyperventilation more than anything else. His eyes merely moved insanely rapidly from the gun to the monster’s face and back, repeatedly.
For some reason, this upset the monster, and without even thinking, he jammed the gun into Chatham’s crotch, and fired.
Chatham grunted heavily, and, as much as he could with a piece of duct tape across his mouth, began to moan and cry.
This, also, angered the monster. After the fearful looks that had taken over Chatham’s face when he’d first realized his predicament, the monster had been hoping for something more unique in Corey’s post-shooting reaction than mere blubbering. He screamed “Shut up!”, and pointed the gun right at the center of Chatham’s forehead. “Shut up, or I will kill you right here, and right now!”
In retrospect, it was a stupid demand. Corey Chatham had just received a bullet to the sexual organs. It was ludicrous to expect that he could just sit there and not make a sound.
But the monster was in no mood for disobedience. Even though Chatham had quieted himself somewhat, he was still making small noises of pain as the waves of agony crashed over him. So the monster stuck the gun in Chatham’s left eye, and said, “If you don’t shut up, I will shoot you in the eye.”
It was actually somewhat pathetic. At that point, Chatham gasped. He was clearly trying to stop making noise, but under the circumstances, that was virtually impossible. The gunshot had probably destroyed his penis—and maybe one of his testicles as well. That entire area of his body must have been on fire with pain.
Chatham groaned, quietly.
The monster responded immediately, and shot him through his eye.
The bullet tore through the man’s brain, ripping a path directly through
whatever was responsible for telling the lungs to work, because Corey ceased breathing immediately, and death was virtually instantaneous.
The sudden nature of the monster’s own assault had taken him somewhat by surprise, but despite the excitement of the moment, he did not forget to take the necessary photos with his camera.
Now, several hours later, he downloaded the images onto his computer, so that he would be able to manipulate them as necessary.
And then, he surfed the internet over to the feed from the webcams that he had installed in the home of the woman who would be his final victim.
Researching her comings and goings had not been particularly difficult, but it had been a critically important part of his preparations. He had needed a considerable amount of time to be able to effectively plant both webcams with their associated audio bugs in her apartment. One was in the kitchen, in the overhead light fixture, pointing at the small table where she ate most of her meals, and the other was in the bedroom, in the housing of the ceiling fan. That one needed to be positioned perfectly, so that when she stood facing her full-length mirror, he would be, in effect, looking at her reflection, from over her shoulder.
In other words, any image he captured from that camera would include both a front and a rear view.
And even though it was wrong to dwell on the fact, it was beyond dispute that she had a very nice front and rear view.
In fact, today he was expecting to capture the image that would serve as the focus of one of his most crucial projects for the coming weeks. This was the first day since he had planted the bedroom camera that she was showering before going to her second job that evening. If she dried herself off in her bedroom…
Yes! She was coming out of the bathroom with just a towel wrapped around her, holding a hairbrush in one hand. She came into the middle of the room, turned to face the camera, and then reached up toward it.
Holy shit! Had she discovered the camera? What a disaster that would be. Police would be called, she might put a security system in place, his whole operation could be thrown into chaos.
But it was a false alarm. She was just pulling on the chain to start the ceiling fan. Then she turned away from the camera, checked to be sure that all of the windows were covered with curtains, dropped the towel to the floor, and walked to the front of the mirror, brushing her hair, naked as the day she was born.
Oh my God. This was perfect. But happening so quickly. One minute, his whole plan was on the verge of discovery, and the next minute, jackpot.
Life was really good.
He recorded the images from the camera for the next two minutes, as she ran the brush through her shoulder-length hair repeatedly. When she stepped out of the camera’s field of view to dress, he stopped recording, and went to work.
First he reviewed his footage, waiting for the time she took a short break from brushing, and stood, hands by her sides, completely nude, facing the mirror. He froze the video, captured the still image, and saved it to a file he labelled “The Final Moment.”
Then, leaving that image on the left side of the screen, he brought up on the right side the image of Corey Chatham that he had saved from one of the photos he took of his corpse sitting there in his recliner.
Using the photo-editing program, he cut out of the Chatham image the bullet wound that had taken the place of his left eye, and brought it over to the nude photo of the woman. Then, very carefully, he pasted it over her left eye in the picture.
Then, he repeated the procedure with the gunshot he had delivered to Chatham’s groin. Carefully taking only that part of the Chatham photo that depicted the lower wound, he excised it, and superimposed it over the pubic area of the naked woman’s photo.
“The Final Moment” now was a somewhat macabre composite of the front and back of a naked young woman facing a mirror. The rear view was exquisite—the unblemished flesh of an attractive female. But the front view was quite unsettling, featuring an otherwise perfectly fine-looking person with a hideously disfigured left eye and groin.
He intentionally left the differences in skin coloring, lighting, and other features alone, so that the total effect of the new image was something like that of a ransom note composed of glued-on letters and words cut from a variety of magazines.
Disturbing. Upsetting.
Perfect.
He saved the images on the hard drive of his computer, and then returned to monitoring the woman.
She was dressed now, and had returned to the mirror. She was looking at herself somewhat critically, as if there was something wrong with what she saw.
Hardly. She was ideal, in so many ways.
Because she was the ultimate goal. Corey Chatham, and the others who would follow, were mere appetizers, preparing the palates of all involved for the final, exquisite, main course. These preliminary deaths would all be satisfying in their own small ways. He would take care to make each special, to make each a true contribution to the final moment.
But the deaths of the first victims would not bring to him what he truly craved. For that, he would need to build a pattern of murders, a pathway of evidence, leading to the innocent man who would ultimately bear responsibility for the carnage that had only just begun.
The final victim was the key to this perfect plan. For she and she alone would seal the fate of the innocent man, in so many more ways than one. And so the young woman who was scheduled to die within a matter of weeks must be the focus of his attention. No matter how many others were killed on the way to her death.
He returned his attention to the computer. He saved the file he called “The Final Moment,” as well as the images of Corey Chatham, both the terrified expression on his face as he realized that he was being held captive by a man who intended to murder him, and the post-mortem shots of his wounds. He labeled that file “S,” and again opened the window that showed the images being broadcast from the kitchen.
She had not yet moved into that part of the house, but she would be coming soon. She didn’t have a lot of time before she had to get moving to her night job.
Finally, he heard her say a single word: “Whatever,” and then move into the kitchen camera’s field of view.
And into the silence of the monster’s very solitary sanctuary, he uttered only the words, “I’ll be seeing you.”
THREE
SPRINGFIELD MEMORIAL HOSPITAL PEDIATRIC nurse Stephanie Hartz glanced in the direction of the full-length mirror standing in her bedroom, pushed a strand of her shoulder-length brown hair back behind her ear, noticed nothing else tragically out of place, then hurried on down the hall to the kitchen, sighing, “Whatever.”
Her freshman roommate, an amazingly popular blond firecracker from Tennessee named Michelle Merlan, would have been appalled. “Boobs and butt, Stephanie!” Michelle would cry out in her Dolly Parton accent, if Steph didn’t spend the appropriate length of time in front of the mirror before heading off to classes. “Boobs and butt—you better check ’em out, darlin’, because everyone else is going to.”
Now it was almost twelve full years since Steph had lived in a college dormitory, and significantly more important priorities demanded that all boob and butt checks be indefinitely postponed. In fact, starting about two months ago, when Steph had begun moonlighting at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hartford, there had barely been enough time left to breathe on the days she worked her second job, let alone try to look attractive. Not that there was anything to do about the red-and-white-striped smocks that St. Joseph’s made all their nurses wear. Even gorgeous Michelle would have been hard-pressed to look good wearing that catastrophe.
And why in the world was she wasting time daydreaming about her ugly uniform? Normally, if everything went just right, Steph had exactly nine minutes to eat her gross microwave dinner before she needed to head off to Hartford.
And today everything had gone far from right. Steph was already well behind schedule, in part because her neediest patient, a weepy little boy named Clay, had had a mel
tdown when he found out that today’s Jell-O flavor was lime.
As she hurried into the kitchen, Steph noticed a vaguely familiar image on the little portable television she had set up on the counter next to the stove. The sound on the TV was muted, so she didn’t know why the news station was showing some obviously dated footage of a suburban house, and she couldn’t remember where she’d seen the house before. If it was important, it would come back to her.
She moved hastily to the microwave, and peeled back the plastic cover from this evening’s culinary disaster: Asian vegetable medley. She set it down on the small table in her dining nook. Steam was rising from the dish. It looked—against all odds—almost good.
But as the steam dissipated, the meal slowly began to reveal itself to be just like all of the others she’d been feeding herself these past few months. A bit awful, and quite a bit more pathetic. Fortunately, Steph was too hungry to care. In about twenty seconds it would be cool enough to eat, and she’d wolf it down, no matter what it tasted like. She opened the refrigerator, poured herself a glass of iced tea, took a quick sip, and set it next to her dinner. Then she went over to the window seat where she’d tossed today’s mail, looked up briefly to see if the rain had stopped, and oh my God, eighty-seven-year-old Philomena Giordano was in the driver’s seat of her ancient Dodge Omni, peering into the rearview mirror, preparing to back out of her driveway.
Steph dropped the mail, bolted to the front hall, threw open her door, and rushed over to her elderly neighbor’s car. Thankfully, it was still stationary, idling noisily while Mrs. Giordano struggled to disengage the parking brake. The idea that this tiny, half-blind, and more than half-deaf widow might actually drive on a road traversed by other vehicles was nothing short of terrifying. Mrs. Giordano was lovely and intelligent, but she had no business behind the wheel of a car. It was a virtual certainty that she’d get into an accident, hurting or killing herself and God knows how many others.
Steph tapped on the window, startling the old woman, who had just begun the process of creating a five-minute, two-handed project out of shifting into reverse.