The First

by Michael Santana

  The First

  A Look Through The Eyes Of

  The World’s Oldest Serial Killer.

  M Santana

  The First © 2011.

  A Look Through The Eyes Of The World’s Oldest Serial Killer.

  By Michael Santana

  Contents

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  For Renee, Thanks for always believing.

  Prelude

  The door flew open wide as Casey burst through it, the knob busted into the drywall securing it in place.

  “He’s here! I know it! I have to get out of here. Jesus, please help me.” She crossed her chest with this silent prayer.

  She ran through the halls at breakneck speed. Her heart pounded, and her thoughts raced as her eyes darted frantically searching for an exit. Time slowed as she rushed down the winding corridors, desperately trying door handles. The doors, some locked, others not, had done nothing but lead her back to where she had started.

  For a brief moment, her thoughts switched to her friend. Where is Mandy? Why did we split up? Has he gotten her? She prayed he hadn’t. But if it must be one of us, please let it be Mandy. The morbid thought made her shudder. The reality of what was happening took its toll, and she started to cry again.

  Somewhere behind her a door slammed. Her legs moved even faster. She ran another thirty feet before a door opened in front of her and the floor disappeared, plunging her into darkness. She struck the ground with a thud, painfully realizing that throwing her hands out in front of her to break her fall hadn’t been the best idea. Her wrists gave way to the weight of her falling body as a sickening crunch rang out in the small windowless room. She almost screamed but remembered why she had run, what she had seen. She bit down to drive the pain into the deepest recesses of her mind. She knew he would hear her if she uttered a single sound, and when he found her … Oh lord, please no, she thought.

  Tears streamed down her now dirty face when fire shot from her hands to her shoulders as she pushed herself slowly up off the ground. Wave after wave tore through her, causing her wrist to give way once again, smashing her face into the floor. Her front teeth shattered as they met the concrete. Casey rolled onto her back, and her hands instinctively rushed to cover her now bleeding mouth. This caused her swollen wrists to send another flash of excruciating pain through her limbs. It took a few seconds before she could push herself up off the floor. When she finally steadied herself, she probed her now swollen hands along the wall, searching for a door.

  On the third wall, she found it. The near ice-cold metal gave little relief to her aching hands. Fresh tears made new tracks down her face as she moved her hands around the door. There was no knob! Someone had removed it. She was trapped! Then she heard voices. One voice, smooth and melodious, traveled through the air. His voice. He was in the next room! The muffled cries of her young friend came from only a few feet away. She pressed her ear close to the wall, her body shaking. She heard him say something that sounded like, “Starting with the basics?”

  *****************************************

  Mandy’s eyes opened, slowly adjusting to the light. The back of her head pounded, and she was cold, so cold. It took her only a few seconds to notice that something was bizarre about the room. She was looking at an upside-down room. Someone had nailed the chairs and tables to the ceiling. They had even taken the time to hang the sconces upside down. A strong aroma of cinnamon filled the air, incense maybe? Then the room started to spin, and she felt queasy. The more she tried to focus in on the room, the more nauseous she felt. Her stomach tossed and turned. The flickering from the candle flames made her even dizzier. When she closed her eyes, the nausea subsided. That’s when a thought floated in and tickled her consciousness like a feather. “Flames don’t point down.” The flames weren’t pointing at the floor; she was. She was upside down.

  “What the hell?”

  Something covered her mouth before she could scream. It was a hand: a hand with shiny and sharp looking fingernails. The hand wasn’t a woman’s hand, it was too big. A voice whispered in her ear.

  “Hush child.”

  Her head jerked to the right, and she stared into a pair of golden eyes. They reminded her of little swirling pools of honey. The voice, soft and soothing, calmed her, but this wasn’t a time to be calm. She shouldn’t feel relaxed at a time like this. She knew this; still, she couldn’t help herself, she felt completely relaxed. He removed his hand from her mouth and stroked her dangling hair. Something about his eyes, those beautiful eyes, she knew wasn’t right. It wasn’t just his eyes though; it was something else about him. He wore priest’s robes, but she was sure there wasn’t anything holy about this man. She stared into his face, his beautiful face. Her eyes looked up to his nose, and to the lips that whispered to her. His smile then twisted downward, and she saw them. His teeth, two perfect rows of the whitest teeth she had ever seen, marred only by the fangs that protruded down further than the rest.

  “Fangs!” The word washed through her mind again and again, before her body started to shake violently and she instinctively screamed. He once again put his hand over her mouth. This time, she bit down on his palm as hard as she could. If he noticed, he didn’t react. He just kept smiling and talking in his calm and soothing tone, but she blocked him out. It wasn’t easy. The euphoric wave once again washed over her, giving back into the calm. She let go of his palm and bit down hard into her bottom lip. The pain was excruciating, but it shook his spell before it took hold of her again.

  Her mind raced. She couldn’t remember much at all. As her pain subsided, the fog slowly began to lift, and everything started to come back to her. She and Casey had been selling cookies. Well, taking the orders anyway. They had teamed up just like they always did, and this year, just like the previous ones they were destined to reach their goals before the other girls. They had only seventy- two boxes left between them to achieve their goal. It was Casey’s idea to try the church. This surprised Mandy. Since Casey’s sweet sixteen, six months ago, she had been anything but sweet. But, since they were so far ahead of all the other girls, and no one had ever tried the church, she thought maybe the old priest would give them some ideas as to which parishioners might have a sweet tooth.

  She and Casey had knocked on the rectory door expecting to see Father Matthews. Yet it wasn’t the old priest that met them. It had been him, with the fangs.

  “He didn’t have them then did he?” She thought.

  No, she was almost sure she hadn’t seen them before, but if not, why did they run from him? Her head began to pound again, and she could feel her heartbeat pulsing in her temples.

  She remembered how she and Casey giggled as they followed the man from the rectory and into the church.

  “Nom, Nom, Nom” Casey had said, implying the deliciousness of the caramel colored man. Mandy agreed, well she always agreed with Casey. Sometimes she felt as if her entire friendship with Casey depended on Mandy following her, agreeing with everything she said.

  The few times she hadn’t agreed that someone was delicious, Casey had acted as if she was so much more sophisticated than her. They were only a year and three months apart in age, but when she wasn’t with Mandy, Casey hung out with the older kids f
rom school.

  This time Mandy agreed with Casey though. She had also caught her breath when the man had answered the door. Usually, Mandy would not have found an older man attractive, but he was almost perfect. He was as tall as her dad, which would make him about six feet tall. His amber eyes seemed to dance when they met hers. His skin, a light brown, made his white teeth jump out in contrast. When he spoke, the words rolled smoothly off his tongue. He spoke with a slight accent that she didn’t recognize, and this made him even hotter. They should have known something wasn’t right.

  Once again, he snapped her head back in his direction and looked into her eyes.

  “Who are you? What do you want? Why are you doing this?” Mandy screamed.

  The Priest’s smile widened.

  Chapter 1

  Let us just start with the basics. My name is Manzili. Although I have had many names in my life, this is the name my father gave me. I do not know my exact age; I have lost count of the years that have come and gone.

  I have traveled the world many times over in my lifetime and have seen the lands and the oceans change. I have seen the births of religions have watched them flourish and eventually wilt. Empires have risen and fallen before my gaze. I am the oldest. I am The First.

  The language of my people has long been forgotten; it has not been spoken in more than a thousand years. The last time I had seen anything that even remotely spoke of my people, was in the late tenth century.

  My life began in a little village near the Nabta Playa in the Nubian Desert. The region had been plagued with droughts throughout the years. These droughts drove many of the tribes in that area to a nomadic existence. Every fifty or so years, the rivers and lakes in the region would dry up, and the people would have to move to where water and game were plentiful.

  Mother was fourteen when Father took her for his wife. A few months after they wed, she became pregnant with me. My mother had a hard time with the pregnancy and became deathly ill. The elders of our tribe had told my father that she would not be able to carry me fully. They told him if she did survive, I would be stillborn.

  Father prayed to the gods to give Mother the strength she needed to carry me, and the gods must have listened because I was born at the start of the cold season. This is why Father named me Manzili, it means, “Sent by the gods.”

  As a young child, I spent my time playing in the fields with my sisters, gathering berries for Mother, or in the forest collecting wood for the fires. However, my favorite thing was when I could go out in the canoe with Father. He was one of the village’s best fishermen and sometimes he would take me with him to collect the nets or other traps. Those are my fondest memories of him. We would spend the day together. He would tell me stories and jokes that he was barely able to finish because of his own bellowing laughter. He was a large man by any standards. If truth were told, in all my years, I have never met a man the size and girth of my father nor one with the thunderous laughter he possessed. He wasn’t special. He wasn’t a King or a Chieftain. He didn’t sit on the high council. He was a simple man, but to me, in my youth, he was a God.

  Mother was just the opposite, a slight woman who was quiet and demure. I didn’t know her well. She died in childbirth with my youngest sister. My sister survived her birth, only to fall victim to a sickness that swept our lands. This plague claimed half of the territories very young and elderly alike. We called it “The Screaming Death.” It was an illness so painful and tormenting that the victims wailed, begging for the mercy of death. When my sister took ill, she pleaded with my father to end her pain. He couldn’t bring himself to kill her, and she spent her last hours of life, in agonizing pain. My other siblings fared no better, as the creeping death took them within a fortnight of reaching our village.

  I refused to let them suffer as my sister did. One terrible night, when their pain was at its worst, and I knew they could take no more, I crept to each of their beds and smothered them. With wide eyes and flailing arms, they did their best to defend themselves from the salvation they sought. Out of all the death I have caused, none brings me pain, save these three and one other.

  The sickness moved through our village leaving nothing but death in its wake. After two months, I was the only child still alive. Strangely, I didn’t even become the least bit sick. This was the reason they cast me out. Superstition as it is, I had to be the reason. Grieving parents, lost in their misery, accused me of being a bringer of death. The elders lost in their own grief agreed and sentenced me to death by burning. I begged my father to help me, to speak up for me. He didn’t. He was angry with me for having the courage to do what he couldn’t. When they came for me, I did the only thing I could do. I ran.

  If I had been a man the size of my father, I would like to think I would have fought. However, I was only a child, not even in my thirteenth year. So, I ran hard and fast, day and night. I ran until I felt my lungs would collapse and my heart would give. For days, I distanced myself from the village that I grew up in, from all that I had ever known.

  The first few days that I was out in the wild, I survived on fruits and berries. I soon switched to the small animals that were in abundance. I realized that even though I didn’t have the skills of a hunter, I did have the instincts of one. Covered with the dirt and grime from sleeping on makeshift beds made of leaves and twigs, I was a horrid sight, when I came to the “Village by the Stone.”

  Now although I had never been to the “Village by the Stone” before, I knew that was exactly where I was, because of the great monolith that stood in front of me. It was the height of the tallest tree and the width of four huts; another slab of stone protruded from its side. The slab, cracked and chipped, was covered with what looked like dried blood and meat. Torches were lined evenly all around. I could tell that they had been recently burned, from the smell, and the soot on the ground beneath them.

  When I was a young child, I had heard many stories about the “Village by the Stone.” We were warned to stay away. The elders told us about children who had wandered into the village never to be seen again. They said the people changed into beasts when the moon was full. Stories like these were common in the old days. The villages used them as a defense system. The better the story, the more horrific it was, gave invaders pause. Who would want to go into a village where they cooked and ate you, or the inhabitants turned into animals when the sun fell?

  Strangers were rarely welcomed into any village, especially male strangers. Men tended to disrupt things. Men challenged authority. It was common for a male to be murdered on sight upon entering a strange village.

  Females were treated a little differently of course. In most villages, the men had multiple wives. The girls were bartered for, auctioned off, or sold into marriages at very young ages. A man’s station could usually be determined by the number of wives he had. The more wives, the higher in hierarchy he was. Unfortunately, I was male, and I knew there would be no welcoming committee, so I had to be as quiet as possible.

  As I examined the great stone wondering if the meat on it was still edible, I heard a rustling in the brush near me. In a panic, I raced to the other side of the stone and ducked out of sight. Nothing could have prepared me for what was about to happen next.

  Staring at the rustling brush, I watched as four children emerged carrying spears. Their backs were well formed and muscular, their arms thick and taut. Their black skin gleamed in the sun from the sheen of their sweat. These were like no children I had ever seen in my village or the neighboring ones. I watched quietly as they spoke to each other in clicks and ticks. This was a language I had never heard before. I tried to make myself even smaller lest they see me and go screaming for the adults.

  While trying to press myself closer to the ground, I kicked one of the torches, and it began to wobble. I tried to steady it with my feet and didn’t notice that the children had moved closer to me. I peered up over the slab to see eight eyes tur
n in my direction. Yet the eyes weren’t what captured my attention. It was the faces. These weren’t children at all. They were men, full-grown, adult, miniature men. I stared at their faces astonished. Then I noticed their teeth. Jagged little points of ivory, like that of a wild animal. They had filed them down.

  I remember wondering how, and even more, why had they done this? That was when I felt a little sting on the side of my neck, it felt like an insect bite. Then everything went dark.

  ***********************************

  I woke to the sounds of drums beating. I could hear people chanting softly in the distance. I tried to rise, that’s when I realized that my hands and feet were bound. A cloth had been stuffed into my mouth, making it hard to breathe and impossible to speak. Something was hitting me in my sides causing sharp pains. When I turned my head, I saw that children, the real children of the village, were pelting me with stones. Others were running up and poking me with sticks.

  I tried to scream, but of course, the cloth made the sound no more than grunts and howls. I kicked at them with my legs and only managed to tighten the ropes that bound me. This predicament just amused the children more. They continued their laughing, while every now and then charging in for a poke or a prod before quickly dashing away.

  I turned my head to the other side and saw a group of men dancing around an enormous bonfire. Their faces had been painted with different colors of mud and clay. Their spears rose and fell as they danced around the flames. I could see women talking with one another and laughing. Every so often, I would catch one stealing a glance my way. When our eyes met, they would quickly avert theirs and continue their conversation.

  One of the men approached me, his face made up into that of a skull. He grabbed my head roughly, jerked it up, then pulled my lips apart looking at my teeth. He said something to the other men, which must have been amusing since they all started laughing and pointing. He pulled my loincloth to the side and stared strangely at my manhood. Once again, he said something to the others that made them laugh. Then he grabbed it roughly, jerking and tugging. The pain was so intense it brought tears to my eyes and blurred my vision.