Psychomania: Killer Stories

by Stephen Jones

  I returned to the sacrifices again and again. Sometimes I discovered that the corpses had been further mutilated. At the time I thought that foxes or crows had found them. Now I know that you were leaving signs of your presence.

  ~ * ~

  Are you lost or did you come here deliberately? Are you experimenting with the town? Or did you come here because of me? Did I draw you here? Perhaps we are the first of a new kind of being.

  You have much to learn about me. You should know that after dark the town is mine. I see everything.

  ~ * ~

  I was too unworthy to recognize any messages you left me then. I had not yet ascended to a higher level. I will tell you how I began that long climb. I will tell you how I killed a man.

  I was still obsessed with Janice Turner. I broke into her house several times and found her diary. I learned the names of the men she was having sex with. One was an American sergeant from the airbase. She met him every Sunday evening. Her parents believed that she was practising the clarinet at a friend’s house or that she had gone to the cinema. In fact she was fucking her boyfriend.

  He was a burly man with a thick moustache and a severe crew cut. He drove a red Mustang. It had left-hand drive. The American Air Force allowed their men to ship their cars over. His name was Kowalski.

  He had a flat in a big house at the edge of town. The relatives of the old woman who died in it had sold its large garden to developers. Unfinished yellow-brick houses stood where the orchard and lawns had once been. These houses overlooked Kowalski’s flat and it was easy to keep watch from the outside.

  One day I decided to break in.

  All that week I had practised being invisible. It was a matter of sidling along and not meeting other people’s eyes. It was a matter of concentration. I was sure that I could do it long enough to see what Janice Turner and her boyfriend were doing. I wanted to see Janice having sex. I wanted to see him fucking her.

  I dressed in black. I rubbed coal dust on my face. The lock on the front door was a cheap imitation of a Yale. I knew how to open it using a slip of plastic. My heart was beating fast as I eased inside. My chest felt very full. I was taking many small breaths.

  It was very hot inside. It stank of cheap perfume and booze. I could hear a TV roaring at full volume. There was a kitchen to the right. The cooker was black with grease. The sink was full of pots and pans and dirty plates soaking in grey water. The main room was to the left. In a later era estate agents would call it a studio flat but it was really a glorified bed-sit.

  Candles burned everywhere. They were stuck to flat surfaces with their own melted wax. A gun lay in front of a half circle of red candles on a side table. I picked it up. It was very heavy. Its cross-hatched metal grip was oily and cold. It was real. TV light flickered over the pull-down sofa where Janice Turner lay.

  She was naked. Her white skin shone with sweat. Her thighs were slick. Her big sloppy breasts rolled on her ribcage as she looked up at me. Her eyes were glassy and black. She looked at me and my heart beat even faster. Then I knew that she was looking past me. She was looking at the half-open bathroom door.

  Kowalski was in the bathroom. He was naked too. His back was to me. Black hair swirled over it. He bent over the bath. One end of a taut strip of cloth was in his mouth and the other wrapped around his arm. He had a glass hypodermic and was searching for a vein. There was old blood spray on the white tiles.

  I must have made a noise because he turned. I stepped backwards. Despite the noise of the TV I heard the hypodermic clatter in the bath. He said something and reached for me and the top of the bathroom doorframe exploded in dust and splinters. The gun had gone off. I had not heard it but I felt the shock of it in the muscles of my arm. Kowalski was screaming. His hands were over his face. Blood squirted between his fingers. I shot him twice and he went down.

  Janice Turner giggled. I dropped the gun and ran.

  ~ * ~

  I know now that you recognize me. I know that you have read this poor confession.

  I first saw you running from one side of the high street to the other. You had taken on the appearance of a naked man. You vaulted a parked car and disappeared down the side of the library. You moved so quickly that by the time I zoomed in you were gone.

  I saw you again four weeks later. This time I remembered to use the video. But when I played it back it showed only the street and its pools and light and shadow. You did not register. You have the true power of invisibility.

  But I saw you.

  I remember your face. It flashed ghostly white as you passed beneath a streetlight. I saw the round dark moon pools of your eyes. I saw the slather dripping from your pointed teeth.

  You came again last night. I found your sacrifice. I hid it for you. It took all night but it is done. No one will find it.

  You know me now.

  You know what I am.

  I wait for you to come to me. The others are like sheep. They are blind to our true nature. I am the only free man here. I am too tired and too excited to write more. Be patient. Tomorrow I will write about how I broke free from my father.

  ~ * ~

  There was a huge scandal after Kowalski’s death. It was revealed that he had been supplying heroin to many of the personnel of the American Air Force base. He had injected heroin into Janice Turner’s arm that night. She was convicted of manslaughter but the sentence was suspended.

  At first I was scared and then I was elated. I fed on my fear and turned it to strength. After three days I knew that Janice Turner had not really seen me. I had been the invisible man. I had rescued her from Kowalski. I had delivered justice. I lost myself in fantasies in which Janice remembered what I had done and came to me in gratitude.

  I grew bolder. I sneaked out of the bungalow at night and roamed the town. I broke into houses and stood by the beds of sleeping people. Sometimes they woke and stared at me in sleepy confusion but they always went back to sleep. Sometimes I masturbated over them. I violated their dreams.

  I was twice stopped by the police. I told them that I had been seeing my girlfriend. They drove me home in their patrol car and watched as I went in through the front door. I stole from the piles of change that people left on bedside tables and chests of drawers. I had stolen money in my pockets when the police stopped me. I bought a knife from the Army surplus store in Bristol. Its blade was as wide as my hand. One edge was serrated and one edge was razor sharp. There was a notch for cutting twine. I found a medical supplies shop. I bought straight scalpel blades and heavy curved scalpel blades. I bought a surgical saw and heavy forceps. I said that I was a medical student. The shop assistant did not question me.

  I left many sacrifices in the woods where now surveyor’s tapes stretch between iron poles, and yellow crosses of spray paint mark the trunks of trees which will be cut down to make room for new houses.

  I finished school that summer. I scraped passes in three A-levels without much effort. It did not matter. I did not want to go to university. In any case my father would not pay for it. He found me a job in the paper mill where he audited the accounts. I worked as a labourer on shifts. I volunteered for the night shift. I came home at dawn and slept for a few hours and then roamed about town. I read the novels of Philip K. Dick. I read Frank Herbert’s Dune series. I came to believe that most people were zombies or androids. They were no more than machines. Only those who could pass specific tests were human. I had a sudden insight that felt so right everything in my life locked around it. I was the only real person in town because I had passed just such a test. I had murdered a man for true and absolute justice. I began to look for other tests.

  I did not know about you then.

  I did not know that you were my secret sharer.

  I took to following my father. I found out his secret.

  It was very simple and very banal. He was fucking his secretary in the lunch hour.

  She was a spinster. She was only a few years young
er than he was. She was heavily built and had a large mole by the side of her nose.

  I watched them several times. They did it on the desk. They pulled down the blinds but in their haste they often left them askew. My father’s offices were on the first floor over a butcher’s shop. I watched from the flat asphalt roof over the refrigerated store in the rear extension. I was Spider-Man. I tingled with a premonition of absolute justice.

  I knew I had to expose this crime. I made several sacrifices in preparation. My father brought in a pest-control firm. He thought there were rats in the building and that some had died under the floorboards. I sanctified the space and made it my own and then I confronted him.

  He always locked the office door at lunchtime. One Saturday I stole his key and had a spare made. When I came into his office two days later he tried to rear up from under the weight of his secretary. Then she saw me and screamed and fell to the floor. Her nylon petticoat was bunched up around her flabby white thighs. Her grey hair hung around her face. My father’s face was white and red. His penis deflated in little throbbing jerks. I stared at him and went out.

  My father said nothing that night. He did not need to. We both knew I had taken away his source of power. He no longer went to the British Legion club. He drank at home. He drank a bottle of Teacher’s whisky every night. He raged at my mother but no longer hit her. They were sleeping in different rooms. I realized that my father was an old man.

  I came and went as I pleased. I left dead animals on the desk in my father’s office. I dissected them to the bones and spread them on his blotter.

  I saw my father’s defeat as vindication of my power. I knew that I could use my power to do good. I would become an avenger.

  Stolen goods were dealt openly in the Prince of Wales pub. I kept watch and learned that one of the local police detectives was involved. He turned a blind eye and was rewarded with cash. Sometimes he brought in radio cassettes taken from crashed vehicles or jewellery taken from burglarized houses. He brought pornography confiscated from the sex shop in Gloucester.

  I determined to expose him. It was my undoing. I overestimated my powers.

  I broke into the shed at the back of the pub. Stolen goods were stored amongst crates of empty bottles and carbon dioxide cylinders. I taped pornographic pictures to the windows of the detective’s car. I left a stack of VCRs on the step of his house.

  Superheroes left villains tied up for the police to deal with. I thought that justice would flow naturally after the crime was exposed.

  The police came for me.

  I was framed. Stolen goods were planted in my locker at the paper mill. All the recent local burglaries were pinned on me. There was a false confession. The fact that I had been stopped twice in suspicious circumstances added weight to the charges. My father cooperated. I believe that he used his business connections to get rid of me.

  I was over eighteen and considered an adult. I was given a five-year prison sentence. Crimes against property were taken very seriously in the county. I was taken to Birmingham prison. My parents did not visit me.

  Prison terrified me. Prison gave me discipline. Prison taught me that justice is arbitrary and administered by fallible men.

  I had to watch myself every minute of every hour. I had to watch what went on around me. It was lucky that I already knew how to become invisible.

  Most of the men inside were recidivists who wanted to do their time quietly. I learned to keep away from the few blowhards and troublemakers. The others left me alone. I was not worth bothering with.

  I cultivated my isolation. I knew that I was a political prisoner amongst criminals. I read my way through the library. I listened to men talk. I learned how to hot-wire cars. I learned which alarms could be deactivated. I learned how to pick locks.

  I still had a misplaced sense of justice. I learned that one man controlled the flow of drugs through the jail. I snitched him to the warders. Two days later I was ambushed in the showers by two men and severely beaten. In a last flash of lucidity I recognized my assailants and then they were both wearing my father’s face. I screamed and writhed under his blows.

  The men who beat me were warders. No doubt they were the men who brought the drugs into the prison. This time I kept quiet. My nose and jaw and cheekbones were broken. I almost lost the sight of one eye. I had to have surgery to reconstruct my face. I recovered in hospital and was transferred to Wormwood Scrubs.

  I did the rest of my time quietly. I was promoted to the kitchens and ate as much prison food as possible. It was much better than my mother’s cooking. I exercised. My frame filled out.

  I served three years of my sentence. I was taken into the chaplain’s office a few weeks before I was released. He told me that my father was dead. He asked if I wanted to apply for compassionate leave to attend the funeral. I shook my head. I looked down at the institutional carpet to hide my dry eyes.

  I had learned of several security firms which employed ex-cons. I got a job with one of them. It was run by a retired police inspector. The word was that he had retired because he had been caught taking bribes from sex shops in Soho. The pay was low. You had to buy your own uniform.

  I loved it.

  I was rotated through several low-grade assignments. I stood night watch in an empty office block. I patrolled the grounds of a hospital. I patrolled an engineering factory. I took pornography from the workmen’s lockers and burned it.

  I got a job in another security firm. I was working under a false name. The firm prospered. It won a contract to staff one of the new privatized prisons. I guarded prisoners between prison and court.

  Five years passed and then I saw the advertisement which brought me home to you.

  I knew at once it was mine. I applied. My references were good but I knew that they were irrelevant. My old sense of certainty surged back. I knew I was one of the masters of the world.

  And so I returned home. I returned to you.

  ~ * ~

  The town has changed. There is a housing estate where beech woods once stood. There is a triple set of mini-roundabouts on the site of the old brewery. A bypass skirts to the west. Warehouses and supermarkets are strung along it. It could be anywhere. There is much unemployment and crime is high. The police do not dare patrol parts of the council estate at night.

  There was a small riot in the town centre. Youths refused to move on after the pubs had closed. They sat around the market cross. They were drinking and shouting and playing ghetto blasters. The police were outnumbered. Someone threw a petrol bomb. A police car was overturned and set alight.

  The council responded by putting in a system of closed-circuit television cameras. I am one of four security officers who keep permanent watch on the bank of TV screens in the little office in the council building.

  I spy for a living. No one knows who I am. My face has been changed by the beating and by time. I keep my hair in a Number Two crop. I wear contact lenses. I am no longer skinny. I have followed my mother down the street several times. She did not recognize me. I keep watch on her.

  I have visited my father’s grave. He can no longer harm me. He is in my power now.

  I keep watch on those of my former schoolmates who have not left town. The police detective still works here. I watch him. I watch everyone.

  I spend my nights watching TV screens that glow with intensified black-and-white images of the streets of the town centre. I can pan and zoom on anything. A video recorder makes a time-stamped recording of any behaviour I feel is criminal or suspicious. I have an open line to the police station.

  That’s how I saw you. That’s why I know what you are. That’s why I know what you can do.

  I last saw you four weeks ago. I was just coming on shift. I always arrive a few minutes early. Roland Miller was on duty. He is a scruffy and overweight young man. He had the radio tuned to a pop music station and was flicking through a tabloid newspaper.

  I saw you on Camera Six
teen. I saw you run from out of the scruffy bushes that line the patch of ground by the war memorial. You ran very fast and by the time I had slapped Roland’s hand from the joystick and taken command you were already off screen. I switched through Cameras Fifteen and Twelve and saw you again. Roland was complaining loudly. I shut him out. I saw you run beneath the halo of a streetlight and the camera overloaded. I backed the sensitivity down but you were gone.

  Roland did not see you. I ran back the videotape but there was nothing there.

  Roland laughed at me but I knew then that I was the chosen one. Because I had practised invisibility, I alone had the power to see you.