Freedom From Conscience: Melanie’s Awakening
Michael Cross
Copyright Michael Cross 2012
Published by Black Rose Writing, Publishing at Smashwords
Black Rose Writing
www.blackrosewriting.com
* * * * *
© 2012 by Michael Cross
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.
The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.
First digital version
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Print ISBN: 978-1-61296-124-8
PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING
www.blackrosewriting.com
Print edition produced in the United States of America
* * * * *
With great appreciation to Josefine Faber for photography and cover design, Ciara Mullally for editing assistance and Katja Lundgren – featured on back cover.
* * * * *
It is said that all the choices one makes in life lead you to were you are at the present moment. The experiences of childhood, adolescence, adulthood – every choice you made placed you in this very moment. An awesome thought to say the least – and one which leaves you to ponder how life would have been different if, rather that choosing one path, you would have taken another.
Well here I am…alone in this room waiting for the results of the choices I have made. Am I nervous? Yeah, for one thing I hate needles…the idea of some metallic object entering one’s body just creeps me out. For another thing, while I have always enjoyed pondering the unknown issues of life, like when does one’s soul become formed or what happens that moment you gasp for your last breath, I don’t particularly look forward to that moment of discovery.
I hate being alone and anxious. My path led me here but I cannot say that I would have done things differently if I could have. My life has been filled with the desire to be wanted, to be connected, to feel that someone really cared for me. For that reason I embarked on a journey most would never had dreamt of.
The clock is ticking for the inevitable… and what of Mr. Lindberg? It is, after all, his fault I am here right now. I hope to see him soon though – even if I do feel abandoned at this very hour. I guess I really want him to greet me and tell me he loves me. Maybe once the needle goes in he will appear to me, or maybe he won’t, which will, I suppose, just leave me feeling lonely again. Yet I am used to being alone so why should the next phase of my existence be any different? I guess I should be patient and just concentrate on being ready when someone comes in and leads me to that cold, sterile room.
Chapter 1
It had been several years since my last year in high school. It almost felt as if my memories were actually a fantasy – something that the mind of a young woman might concoct in order to deal with the pain of loneliness. I certainly had the mind to create elaborate fantasies, but there was no denying that my last year in high school was real – and that it had been filled with great hope coupled with intense despair.
Where there had been isolation I was introduced to friendship. Where I had no clue of being able to feel for someone I met a man who I dreamed, against all odds, was the one for me. Where there had been an outsider with a history of persecution inflicted against her, a powerful woman emerged who was willing to go to extremes to right so many wrongs in life. Of course the resulting body count would totally amaze anyone who ever were to uncover the truth of my past.
At first I thought the people who entered my life that fateful year merely had vivid imaginations and were to introduce me to their role-play…a rather morbid serial killer game. Yet I eventually discovered that the teacher I fell in love with, Mark Lindberg, and my two classmates, Nicole and Daniel, were the real thing. The day they introduced me to the young woman in the woods, my intended sacrificial victim, I became a part of their group…upon plunging the knife into the heart of the victim they had supplied me. Of course they were not monsters killing for the joy of the sport – they only sought to avenge the powerless. As I joined them we were united in a quest to clean up society. It was only later that we were faced with the agonizing task of taking the life of an innocent friend, which in turn would result in the death of the man I had hoped to protect…and to share my life with. In the end that led to the death of Mr. Lamb – who became famous for being a cold-blooded serial killer with a taste for young college females. He was so convenient, and expendable.
Though what did I have to show for it? My new-found friend, Nicole O’Brian had moved across the nation with Daniel to start a life together that did not seem to include me. And Mark, the object of my desire, was buried deep in the cold earth. Alas, I only occasionally let my memories drift back to that year – and I never dreamed about them at all, in fact, for some reason I had never actually experienced dreaming since childhood. So what was the essence of my life? I had buried myself in my schoolwork, had finished my studies early and had acquired admittance to the graduate school for psychology.
Graduate school was so much different than my first few years of college had been. There was more a feeling of equality with the faculty – maybe because of smaller classes or the professors knowing only the most serious students of a subject made it this far. I liked the informality. I also enjoyed the additional challenges in my studies as I buried myself in research, projects and other activities associated with my program. I was determined to get this degree and apply myself towards understanding human nature, and making money in the process.
Of course to say I had no personal life would have been an understatement. My existence was one of loneliness. I lived by myself in a student apartment and even though I was surrounded by young people, I never encountered anyone interested in pursuing any sort of friendship, much less relationship. The extent of my social interactions was polite greetings when passing on the stairway, or in the laundry room. It seemed nobody wanted to engage in any sort of real dialogue – perhaps it was due to my anxiousness to go deep into esoteric topics that scared people off. I just had no real interest in engaging in small talk – I found it pointless. So there I was…doomed to sit alone at my kitchen table which had become a shrine to my studies, as my sofa was my shrine to recreational TV which consisted of documentaries, and my bed a place for me to contemplate my life at night. Of course many of those nights were spent crying – perhaps in self pity for not having someone in my life to share special moments with. I desperately wanted someone to love me…to embrace me, to cherish me and open their life to me. Perhaps I might have been desperate, but I was beginning to feel like I would sacrifice anything for that affection. Of course my year in high school demonstrated just how far I was willing to go for such love.
Okay, sure I was still young, but I realized that time has a way of passing us by. One day you have your whole life in front of you and the next you are left wondering what happened to all your plans. At that point of my life I perceived my chances of finding someone special diminishing. I felt maybe I had been given my chance at happiness and that someone, within hours of admitting he cared for me, took his life. How cruel to me was that? Maybe the punishment for my sins was to be locked into eternal loneliness and isolation. Oh well, at least I did well in school – it was, after all, the only thing I could pour my soul into.
So here I was – the perpetual outsider who looked at the world through the eyes of a researcher. My field of studies suited me quite we
ll I guess. I was not really a participant in human interaction, just a student with a burning curiosity of what makes people behave as they do. Did I have any particular talents or insights to apply to research? Well, I certainly did when it came to the study of crime and criminality. I was elated when one of my classes focused exclusively on the question of what makes some people violate social norms while others, raised in the exact same environment, grow up to live quite normal lives.
Of course I could not openly relate my own personal insights – even one day when the topic of serial killers came up and somebody in my project group brought up Mr. Lamb. I mentioned the fact that he had been my teacher and all the sudden everyone was asking questions like, “What was he like?” or “Weren’t you scared at all when they discovered he was killing young women and you could have become one of his victims?” I originally enjoyed the attention this gave me and tried to re-enforce the “monster” image of Lamb. It was the least I could do to contribute to the fiction that had grown around this man’s deeds.
Little did my colleagues know that the young woman they were so anxious to learn from was involved in Lamb’s demise, and that I had personal experience in the topic of killing. I had taken lives – unlike some loser like Lamb...he just wound up with the credit. I began to resent discussing him as he had become a celebrity while my importance was merely as one of his ex-students. He would be mentioned for generations to come, he would have his life looked over, yes, in the context of a bloodthirsty killer I suppose, but that is better than fading into obscurity as I feared I might. I had helped make him immortal and that irritated me to no end. In the middle of one of the interviews from my classmates I finally just said, “Can we examine a few psychopaths other than Lamb?” We switched topics that day but it would come up over and over again – and the fact that we were a select group of students meant that everyone identified me as “The girl who knew Lamb.”
Speaking of Lamb, I had not seen my friends, Nicole and Daniel, for over three years – they had moved to Georgia the summer of our graduation. I had not even received any mails from Nicole for over two years until I received their wedding invitation. They were getting married in the middle of November, almost around Thanksgiving, which was somewhat inconvenient. A slight alteration of their date and guests could have avoided taking time off from school or work. I suppose they felt that people might have other plans but still, they could have had it a different time. As it was I would have to take a flight on a Thursday evening and skip a day of school on Friday, go to the wedding on Saturday, only to have to fly out again Sunday afternoon. I guess I had an obligation to them but it still bugged me that I had not even been asked to even participate as a bridesmaid. Oh well, no need to have to buy a special dress for the occasion.
I wondered who would be there – did they have lots of new friends? If I were to get married who would come to my wedding other than my mom? That was a sobering thought – I had nobody except her – and we only saw each other occasionally. My father would never get the satisfaction of even receiving an invitation. Yet how pathetic was I? Here I was thinking of who would come to my wedding while I had no man in my life in the first place. Maybe there never would be. Again, maybe my future would be one of loneliness. Maybe my destiny was to be the archetypical professional woman whose life centered around her work...who everyone thought achieved so much, yet went home at night to ponder what life could have been like with a husband and family. This was not what I wanted but every time I heard one of my female classmates talking about a friend’s wedding, or about their fiancé, I worried that even though I was young, life was still passing me by.
I day dreamed a few times about what my life would have been like had Mark not killed himself. Would we be married? Would I still be in college or would I be home with a child by now? Maybe I would have had both my studies and had started our family – it was not impossible, others could do it, in fact one of the girls in my class was married with two children. I could have done it too, except for the fact that I was apparently not important enough for him to get over his grief and just deal with life – I would have helped him. Had he robbed me of a life of happiness just because of some pathetic guilt complex?I took Cindy’s life to protect him after all.
One day my project group met and asked who wanted to concentrate on what in regards to criminality and psychopathy. I immediately jumped at the opportunity to investigate the topic. I was intrigued with seeing what factors contributed to one becoming a person who could seal off emotion and yet interact in the world as a perfectly normal person. During my undergraduate studies I had investigated the topic many times. The conclusion I always came up with? I mostly fit the criteria. Yet I was not without emotions. I still could feel something when I would lie in bed late at night and get that feeling of sadness that Mark was gone, and that Nicole was no longer a part of my life. No matter how much I tried to erase them I could not succeed.
Yet I at least was close enough to the criteria to be able to benefit from my traits, even to see myself as blessed. Who knows, had I possessed the feelings others were burdened with I might have chosen not to endure all the hardships of my life of isolation. I could seize upon my superior attributes and gain what I wanted in education and hopefully in my career. Still, I was nagged deep down by the notion that I might never find anyone to fill the void in my life – someone that could love me and see me as the special person I was.
Seeing myself the way I did, one can only imagine how irritated I was when we had our first project meeting, and my fellow group members, future psychologists, started discussing psychopathy. To hear them talk you would think someone without the standard emotional baggage was in some way a degenerate thug, an accident of society or of biology. I had to interject my thoughts when some guy did a Norman Bates stabbing motion, complete with sound effects, “Okay, you think the character from that movie was a psychopath? The guy was emotional and delusional – if that is how Ed Ghein was then that is not psychopathic really.” One of the girls reacted, “Yeah right, psychopaths are messed up.” I responded, “Look, they are just lacking in empathy, the way you react when you read about a thousand people drowning in a flood in Bangladesh. You don’t cry, you see it as a news story. A psychopath reacts the same way on an emotional level to people around them, or who their actions might affect.”
The girl objected to my characterization of her as uncaring of people in remote parts of the world. Of course, she often wore buttons and shirts with slogans proclaiming peace and solidarity with all peoples. She had mentioned being active in the last presidential campaign so I asked, “So, you think your president loses sleep when he orders a bombing that he is fully aware will kill civilians? Do you think he doesn’t order the CIA to do nasty things all in the name of national security?” She started ranting about how it was his job to protect the country and I replied, “Precisely, he had to step on a lot of people to get elected and he has to learn to disassociate himself from actions that hurt innocent people – so he is probably a psychopath, just like the guy before him, and the one before that one! Most regular psychopaths cause far less death and destruction than the ones who make it into high office.”
My “save the world” colleague was clearly getting agitated but several other group members nodded their heads and one admitted, “She has a good point.” I looked at my adversary and smiled in a condescending manner. She never spoke to me again – no big loss in my books.
I was doing quite well in all my classes – this one in particular, but why take chances? Just to solidify my position I would do some research into what my various professors had written about in journals. I would then make sure to stop by their offices occasionally and talk with them. During the course of our discussions on class themes I would interject my interest in whatever subject I had found they had written about and, acting like I had no clue of their interests, suddenly act surprised when they would say they had published articles on that subject. Occasionally I had to ac
t really interested when they discussed some boring, obscure subject for what seemed like hours.
Did I actually use flirtation to insure better grades, or perhaps to be seen in a positive light in case I might want some position in a research project? I suppose I did. After all, one time I was talking to one of my male professors who seemed to be feeling me out, “So, do you have a boyfriend?” and, “Aren’t modern social constructs like marriage just a hindrance to personal expression?” I immediately deflected his hints by giving intellectual answers, but then lying and saying my “boyfriend” and I had discussed marriage, but I made sure to drop a hint that we were sort of having troubles. His eyes brightened at seeing me as a potential opportunity for conquest. One of my female professors, after a lengthy talk in her office on gender issues, asked if I might like to accompany her to a “women’s retreat” for a weekend. Having noticed her ear ring with interlocking female symbols I just used the same “boyfriend” lie to avoid her advances as well. Of course I dropped the hint of problems to her as well. Afterwards, both professors seemed to take a special interest in me to make sure I was reaching my full potential in classes.
All is fair in love and war, and in advancing one’s objectives as well. And as the date approached for me to fly to Georgia to see Nicole and Daniel exchange vows, I could say I had no doubts as to my position in my classes. I was always called on to give my insights by the professors, praised in front of other students, and all work that had been reviewed had received exceptional assessments. Yet I was still lonely and feeling left behind. For all I knew Nicole and Daniel would soon be starting a family and I would be sitting home at night watching some educational program, or surfing debate sites on the internet and waging war on people I would probably feel were not worth my effort if they sat next to me at some café.
Melanie's Awakening Page 1
