Her Final Victim

by NJ Moss

  But here we are: in the dark.

  I press myself against the wall beside the bottom step, the knife gripped in my hand. My mind is hazy from the alcohol, layer upon layer of intoxication causing my perceptions to waver.

  I call to her: the apex predator within, the huntress. She pushes through the clouding alcohol and heartache, and she is ready.

  I don’t remember the drive over here particularly well. I remember a crash. I remember my forearms juddering with an unseen impact. I am on autopilot now, existing in this moment alone. The past falls away and the future collapses in upon itself.

  I should have gutted him when I first learned of his location.

  Elijah and Philip – Elijah and Frederick – feared Father so intensely they followed his edict even after his death. They did not communicate, which they must desperately have wanted to do. Only the other knew how evil he was, how rotten.

  After they’d summoned enough daring to seek each other out, I forced Elijah to tell me where Frederick and William had gone. That pill-addicted degenerate hasn’t been able to lie to me for years.

  I found, I followed, and I waited. I did not know what I was waiting for: a sign, any sign. And then I discovered dear old Frederick was losing his mind, as though God or the universe or some other arcane force had decided to grant him the mercy of forgetting.

  But there was something else to my delay.

  I, the most effective predator who has ever lived, was frightened. Yes, yes, scared right down to my core. Perhaps it’s the alcohol that allows me to reveal myself to myself, but it’s undeniable. I did not want to face Comrade Philip.

  But I did face him. And I wasn’t scared. I won. He raped me. They gang-raped me. He sodomised me. And now he’s a sad old cunt who can’t even feed birds on his own. So I win, old man. I fucking win.

  The stairs creak as sweet William, as the man who has never spoken his true name descends. I grip the knife tighter and silence my breathing.

  I wish I was sober. If my head wasn’t so groggy, and if my body wasn’t behaving so disobediently, this would be easy work. I’d gut him effortlessly and then perhaps I’d go upstairs and see if Hazel is home. I could reason with her, make her see she’s got it wrong.

  She does love me. She said she loved me.

  Creak-creak-creak, my little brother descends glacially.

  I cannot see him, but I’m sure he’s scanning every twitching shadow.

  Sweet Hazel, you have posted far too many photographs. A comprehensive geography of your home exists online. You did not prime your alarm. You did not even shut your door. It was pathetically simple to slink in and drift over to the fuse box, to flip the switch, to kill this grand house the same way I shall kill its owner: one of its owner’s, at least, and perhaps I will gut you too.

  She deserves it for looking at me like I’m mad.

  Mad Millie, mad Millie, they used to sing when I was a child, those cattle folk who called us Freaks.

  Jamie – William – he of the glittering green eyes, the emerald soul-seeing eyes, walks to the bottom of the stairs. He has a cricket bat in one hand and a torch in the other, aimed at the wall in front of him: an undulating meteor of yellow. He moves the light one way, and then begins the movement that will reveal me.

  I judge the distance and I leap at him, bringing the knife up in a punching arc.

  Instinct makes him spin at the last moment, smashing the hilt of the cricket bat against the blade.

  I push against the bat, biting with the blade, but Jamie is stronger than me and he drives me against the wall. My belly empties of air and conviction when he brings his knee up, cruelly, impressively, causing vomit to try to explode up my throat.

  “Drop it,” he growls.

  I flail, aiming for his face. I will puncture those cherubic cheeks, those cheeks I once squeezed and kissed and loved.

  Why didn’t he cry?

  He ducks and leaps back, swinging the cricket bat in a semicircle of devastating impetus.

  I crouch and the bat crushes the wall behind my head, and I dive at his belly.

  Wet fleshy noises shimmer in the air, and the scent of his blood rises, as I drive the blade into the spot above his hip bone. He gasps, but he doesn’t collapse. He dislodges the bat and knocks me on the top of my skull.

  Liquid agony seeps over my head and down my cheeks, the force of the blow sending me to the floor. He grunts and I feel him moving to strike again.

  I stab him in the foot. He’s not wearing shoes and now he remembers how to cry, shaking sobbing noises cracking in the back of his throat.

  Too late, little brother. Much too late.

  I pull the knife out and aim at his other foot.

  The bat slams against my neck. My fingers loosen and the blade slips from my grip. I have his blood on my hand, greasy and hot and alive, soaking my fingers from where I punched him with the blade.

  We dive on the knife, caught in a whirling dance of bloodlust, utterly lost to the song of murder.

  I am smiling. I don’t care what happens now.

  Maybe this is the light. Maybe the light is pain and purpose.

  He pushes against me, aiming the tip of the blade at my heart. “Crazy—fucking—bitch.”

  “I was happy.” I gnash my teeth on his lip, smiling as his blood washes into my mouth, seeping between my teeth, becoming part of me. “When I found you. And I learned. You were like me. You do. What you need. To do.”

  My arms strain with the effort of forcing the blade tip away, but he is strong. Of course he is strong. He is my William.

  “Nothing like you.” His words come out distorted and half-real through his shredded lip. “Just. Die—”

  I bite him again, and in the same instant I lash the knife down. I’m not sure what I catch, but it is flesh, glorious flesh.

  The blade sinks and more blood spurts and then sweet Jamie rolls away from me, gasping as the knife slams against the wooden flooring like chattering teeth: like my teeth chattered when I sat in my bedroom alone, thinking of how relieved I was Philip was gone, and yet how certain I was I’d brave the Rainbow Room a thousand more times to be reunited with my William.

  “Where are you going?” I laugh, rising to my feet and then collapsing against the wall. He hit me very hard, and blood is streaming from my matted hair down my forehead. “Jamie! William!”

  I chase him down the hallway, into their pristine kitchen.

  He’s at the garden door, swaying in his effort to stay upright.

  “Where are you going?” My voice doesn’t sound good, and then I feel it, in my gut: the place where he stabbed me. Somewhere in our scrimmage, he has invaded my flesh with metal. I didn’t feel it then, but I do now, faintly, throbbing from some far-off place. “You can’t run—”

  I stumble and grab onto the kitchen island, pulling myself toward him, the blade’s handle going clip-clip-clip against the obsidian surface.

  “Go to Hell.” He pulls the door open.

  He stumbles into the night and I stumble after him, the world spinning with grotesque speed beneath my feet. He limps toward the rear of the garden, and I look past him and see a trowel buried in the flower bed.

  Oh, little boy. You’ve never bled like this before. You’re not thinking clearly. You passed a dozen knives in the kitchen. Or are you so scared of me, so desperate to be separated from me, when I’m the only person who ever truly cared for you?

  I cared for you, and you betrayed me.

  “You should’ve cried,” I scream, or I want to scream. It comes out pale and fading. “Why didn’t you?”

  Jamie reaches for the trowel and the predator in me roars, forcing energy into my limbs. I stumble-run across the garden and fall into the knife thrust, collapsing against him as he spins.

  He stabs me and I stab him, and we stay like this: pinned against each other, gazing into each other’s eyes.

  So pretty, I whisper, but my tongue is submerged in hot sticky blood.

  He grits his te
eth and twists his implement, and I twist my blade. We waltz across the garden. A gleeful part of me sings and cavorts deep inside.

  I am dying, but so is he, and, and, yes, I am feeling.

  I feel. I am alive. I am dying but I am alive.

  “You’re… insane.”

  We collapse against his oh-so-impressive sauna.

  “Yes.” I spit to make room for speech. “Yes, yes.”

  He lurches and his forehead crushes into my nose. A spider’s web of agony spreads, erupting, pulling my sensation to the point of impact.

  He pushes me and I fall into the cold dark sauna.

  He stands at the door, inhuman in the moonlight, his shirt soaked and his face smeared crimson and his eyes gleaming like precious gemstones. His hand slips on the door and the force almost sends him hurtling to the earth. He rights himself and reaches again for the handle.

  I leap forward, even as my body protests, even as the vitality drains from me.

  I grab his wrist and tug him inside.

  He falls and I pirouette with him, and perhaps this is what it would be like to have a brother, a sweet younger brother who grew big and strong and could dance with me on my wedding day: a marriage to a good man, a man who wouldn’t use and deride and hate me, a man who wouldn’t take me to worlds where rainbows rend the sky.

  I land atop him as he collapses onto the floor, wedged in the narrowness between the seating and the wall.

  His hands are vapour at my hips, so weak. “Get… off.”

  “I love you,” I whisper.

  “Fuck you.”

  “I love you.”

  “I hate you.”

  “I love…”

  I cough and something shatters inside of me, and then darkness is falling, complete darkness.

  I smile. This is it. I feel it.

  The darkness seeps away and light spreads, blistering light, impossible light, and the light is me and I am the light, and I am Millicent Maidstone, Millicent fucking Maidstone, and nobody can ever hurt me again.

  51

  Jamie

  I kick my legs, soaring higher on the swing. I love how she laughs as she pushes me. She’s so happy. That’s why I don’t jump off right away. Jumping off is my favourite part, but I live for Mum’s laughter.

  I open my eyes and stare at the dark sauna ceiling.

  Millicent is a dead weight on top of me and the door is open. I can hear wind and music playing softly from one of the adjacent houses. I don’t hear any sirens.

  My eyes fall closed and I open them, and then they close again.

  I’m fading.

  Fuck’s sake, I’m going to bleed out right here, with this psycho’s bloody lips smeared against my face.

  Get off, I roar, but no words come out.

  Why can’t I speak?

  Get the fuck off of me.

  Hazel and I will go to Italy and find Mum.

  I’m sorry, I’ll tell her. I didn’t know I wasn’t your son. I didn’t know that’s why you resented me. I forgive you. I don’t blame you. Please let me be a part of your life. Look, Mum, look… I have a wife and a job and a house and a car. I’m happy. Please be happy for me. I love you.

  Yeah, that’s what I’ll do when I get out of here. Hazel will forgive me. She has to.

  “Jamie,” Mum says, standing at the sauna door.

  I try to lift my head, but I can’t. I need help. I don’t want to die.

  Mum, help me.

  “I have to think of myself, Jamie.” She’s doing an impression of Hazel for some reason. I don’t know why. I don’t want to die.

  Please don’t let me die, Mum.

  “You’ve ruined it all. You have to see I have no choice. I’m going to call the police and an ambulance. But you have to do something first. You have to die. Can you do that for me?”

  My eyes open and close, open and close, and one second I’m soaring higher on the swing and the next I’m staring into the dark.

  “We made vows. I took them seriously. I honoured them. I’d never dream of disrespecting our vows the way you have. And even deeper than the vows, you promised. I think I was very understanding. You can’t say I wasn’t. But you went behind my back anyway. So you have to die. It’s the best way to secure my future. I would say I’m sorry, but the truth… oh, God, the truth is I’m not.”

  I kick my legs and Mum laughs and she’s happy. She’s laughing. She must be happy.

  “You fucked another woman.” I think it’s Hazel. But if Hazel’s here, that means I don’t have to jump. I can keep swinging. I don’t have to jump… Mum is laughing, and it’s the most beautiful sound in the world. “There’s no coming back from that. Not for us.”

  I love you, I whimper, and I jump.

  I soar and I touch the sky and then I’m in the grass. Mum leaps on me with tickling hands, and we laugh and hug and I wrap my arms around her. She hugs me close.

  I close my eyes. I smile.

  52

  Before

  I have decided to tell this story with the distance of language because, simply, it is too painful to remember it all as something I did, as a childhood I was subjected to. It is much easier to make me a she, an other, excised from my true self the day I killed my father. I have spent the time since these sad early years learning how to make them pay for what they did, blackmailing and torturing, threatening, possessing.

  I can’t bring myself to remember it in full vivid terror. It comes in bursts, fired at my mind like weaponry, and that’s why I’ve written it down; maybe I can push it away forever, dampen it so I never have to think about what they did. It belongs to the page now.

  I don’t like to pity myself. I’ve always looked down upon people who indulge in such unproductive behaviour. And yet when I look back at that childhood – at the abuse and the rape and the gaslighting and the pain and the molestation and the neglect – I can’t help but feel something.

  Something.

  Not the light: the gasp before the kill, the ephemeral ascension. This is something mundane and human. I want to wrap my arms around her, the little girl, myself, and tell her everything’s going to work out in the end. I want to steal her away and let her develop in a decent place, surrounded by loving people.

  I think I could’ve been different.

  There were times when I valued the closeness of my mother’s body over the call to the wild: the whispering that I should stab or steal or hate. But then she would turn on me, laugh at me, call me sick names that made me feel worthless.

  There is so much I could write about if I was willing to delve into the true perversion of my upbringing. I could paint these pages with the most grotesque torture methods, the most depraved sexual acts imaginable, committed against a girl too young and naïve to know she was doing anything wrong. Everything men and women can do to a child, they did to me.

  But no, no… you see, by thinking of the past in distant terms, I can imagine things happened in a distant way, and with that little mental trick I can remake reality. Father was a foolish idealistic sadist but he was right about a few things.

  Reality is nothing but what we make it, projections of our minds sending neurons fluttering like autumn leaves, and we choose which ones we catch.

  I don’t have to be pathetic. I don’t have to hate myself.

  I don’t have to wish things had been different. If I believe hard enough, they already were.

  53

  Hazel

  Several Months Later

  It’s my twenty-third birthday and I’ve just surpassed two million followers.

  I stand in the art gallery, aware everybody is acting awkward about being near me while trying not to act awkward. They’re behaving like I’m famous.

  And I am. Not Insta-famous. I’m famous-famous.

  The gallery is displaying my art, and not as part of a larger event. Every single piece in here is mine.

  I sip champagne and study the painting in front of me.

  Droplets of rose-red fl
are across the upper part of the work, joining the nature-greens and the big swathe of sun-yellow. It’s an abstract nature scene, with lots of vivid colours and personal expression in the piece. It’s the painting I was working on when this all started.

  I didn’t know what was really going on between Millie and Jamie. I didn’t know Jamie had once been called William, and he and Millie were brother and sister. That came out a few weeks after their deaths.

  Lots of ex-cult members have started to speak up now Millie isn’t there to stop them. One of the cultists has been arrested for meeting with an underage girl. Penelope – Diana – is being bothered in Italy, which is a shame, but also: fuck her for abandoning Jamie. She was the one who screwed him up to the point where he’d cheat on me.

  After their deaths, I also learned Millie murdered Ray in his flat. One of his neighbours smelled something and called the building manager to investigate. I learned she caused some property damage the night she drove to our house, smashing into a bus stop, driving over somebody’s garden, almost causing a car crash when she pulled out in front of a red light. She was so drunk it’s a miracle she even made it to our house.

  I guess she really wanted to kill. Or die.

  Maybe I’m a little fucked up – I know I am – but what infuriated me most was learning Millie was behind my follower count plummeting. The lunatic had hired some low life on the Dark Web to mass-report inactive accounts, getting them banned from Instagram so it seemed like I was being abandoned. She orchestrated it to make me feel alone, pathetic, needy… and I’m guessing it’s because she wanted to swoop in like the predator she was and make me rely on her. She was using me the same way Jamie did, to justify some evil aspect of themselves.

  I hope they’ve got adjoining rooms in Hell.

  I take another sip of champagne, focusing on the bubbles instead of my rage. I hear somebody approach me in high heels and turn away at the last second. I intimidate people now. It’s crazy. It’s awesome. I’m proud, and I’m not ashamed of being proud.