“She looked at me,” he said. “Her face was full of anguish, pain, sadness ...can you even imagine?”
I could, in fact; I imagined her face like a detached leaf softly glowing, curled at the edges, tiny veins beneath the skin.
“I placed my hand between her shoulder blades.” Richard blinked and several tears spilled on to his cheeks. “She nodded, or jerked her head. I’ll never know. But I pushed, and down she went. Her head hit the newel post, the bottom wall, and then the floor. I’ll never forget the sound - like three gunshots. Then I took a deep breath, walked downstairs, and watched her die.”
“Good God, man,” I said. Actually, I didn’t; I slurred it. A crash of thunder echoed my unease. Richard was lowering his mask, showing me the shadowy thing beneath - a thing I had only glimpsed until now. It was all so disturbing.
I tried to stand but my limbs felt loaded with Novocain and I dropped back into my seat with a little gasp.
“Her eyes,” he said. “I saw the life leave her body through her eyes, and it was sublime. They shone fiercely for three or four seconds. Exquisite, tiny novas. I almost felt that I could scoop one into each palm and carry them into every dark place. It was awe-inspiring. Invigorating. Then they faded, and I held her hand and stroked her hair. I wept, too.” He wiped his eyes and showed me the tears on his fingers, fat as pearls. “Haven’t stopped weeping, in fact.”
“Please,” I said. “I don’t want to hear any more.”
“It had to be done, Martin. You understand that, don’t you?”
“No, Richard, I don’t.”
“Her house was in ruins,” he said, a touch impatiently. “It couldn’t shelter me any more, so I razed it to the ground. I released her.”
Again I tried to stand. Again I slumped, boneless, back into my seat.
“Then I stood alone,” he continued. “Yes, I had regular sessions with a psychiatrist. Yes, I was prescribed seemingly countless meds. But they didn’t help. When the hurricanes came - as they did, and often - I recalled the light in Constance’s eyes. It gave me the strength I needed, and the darkness went away.” His mouth twisted into a strange shape, too wide, too greedy. “At least for a while.”
I reached for my whisky and knocked it over, quite deliberately. No more of that.
“What did you give me?” I asked.
“Rohypnol,” he said. “Just enough.”
“Why did ...?”
“It will all become clear, Martin.”
“Thought you were ...” I twirled the leaf between thumb and forefinger. Red and gold. Such a pretty leaf. “I thought you were my friend.”
Richard smiled and righted the glass. He used three Kleenex to mop up the spilled whisky. “Moonlight Sonata” started to play, a piece I have always loathed, due mainly to it being the one composition that even philistines are familiar with. Now I have cause to loathe it more.
“That light was so alluring, so powerful.” Richard disposed of the sodden tissues and strolled over to a handsome mahogany cabinet. From its bottom drawer he took a box, and from the box he took a stack of newspapers. Thunder crashed. The windows trembled. Similarly, I shuddered as Richard stepped towards me and dropped one of the newspapers face-up on the table. It was an edition of the Bucks Free Press from November 2005. A young woman’s face stared at me from the front page. She had short blonde hair and a smile that could lift your feet from the ground. A memory-feather tickled the back of my mind, but I was too numb to grasp it. The headline - unimaginative but succinct - read: VICKY STILL MISSING.
“Victoria Channing,” Richard said, and with her full name the memory clicked into place. She was a local woman who was believed to have been murdered by her boyfriend. He had passionately maintained his innocence, and no charges were brought against him, but Vicky was never found, dead or alive. Now her eyes regarded me brightly and with faint accusation, the way they had for several weeks, until they disappeared from the newspapers altogether.
“From Great Missenden,” I said, voicing details as they resurfaced in my mind. “Twenty-three years old. Worked at the Roald Dahl Museum.”
“Yes.” Richard nodded and grinned and every one of his six hundred teeth glistened. “I stabbed her three times and she died in my arms. I thought the light in her eyes would last for ever.”
I jerked in my seat the way I sometimes do on the verge of sleep. That myoclonic spasm. That flash of terror. Only this time the terror was sustained. I looked at Richard with eyes like pools of cracked ice. “No,” I slurred, my drumming heart adding syllables to the word. I shook my head and slurred it again: “Nuh-oh-oh-oh.”
“I was wrong,” Richard continued. “Nothing lasts for ever.” He dropped the Reading Evening Post on to the table. It landed with a slap. Another young woman stared at me from the front page. “Rosemary Hill. I cut her throat with a Stanley knife in February of 2007. The light in her eyes was brief, but had a russet tinge that warmed me for months afterwards.”
“Richard, I—”
Another newspaper. Slap.
“Elaine Emmington. Seventeen years old. My youngest victim. In my defence, she looked so much older.”
I screamed. It was more of a warble, really, while “Moonlight Sonata” played and the thunder boomed.
“Her eyes,” he said. “Goodness, her light...”
I wanted to run, of course, but there was no way. My body felt loaded with iron ball bearings, that would slip and roll heavily with even the slightest movement. So I closed my eyes and willed myself to float away ... out of the seat, through the ceiling, through an upstairs room where Richard may once have made love to the wife he lulled, through the roof and into the night. I could be as light as the leaf in my hand, carried for miles, until the storm exhausted itself and I landed in the greenest of meadows.
Richard crippled this fantasy by dropping newspapers on to the table and giving summaries of the women he had killed. His voice was an anchor attached to my delicate stem. I twirled the leaf and concentrated on it, and suddenly I remembered my energy healer - Leaf, his name was Leaf - and the breathing exercise he taught me.
Four-seven-eight. I applied it, but was only midway through my second set when Richard dropped the final newspaper on to the table. “Alexandra Locke,” he said, and all the air rushed from my lungs. The fact that she was still in the news, and instantly recognizable, made it all the more real. I looked at her image, my heart thumping against my ribs like a fat fist.
“The police are looking for her,” I said ridiculously, as if Richard didn’t know this.
“Yes. They’ll find her buried in my garden. In fourteen pieces.” He paused before clarifying. “Easier to bury if they’re ...” And he made a chopping motion with his hand.
My fear was absolute. I think that if a crocodile had grabbed me in its jaws and death-rolled me to some deep, dark place I would not have been more scared. I made one last attempt to leap out of my seat and actually succeeded, but managed only three or four steps before collapsing. Richard came towards me. He planted one foot on my upper arm and rolled me on to my back.
“Silly,” he said.
“Gur,” I said. The room swam. Richard stood above me. The light behind gave him a halo. I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so drugged.
“Do you know why I called you here tonight?” he asked.
“Going ... kill me,” I blurted.
“Quite the opposite, old boy.”Those teeth again. “My house is in ruins and the hurricane is more vicious than ever. I can feel it howling in my head, taking me apart. I can’t go on like this.” He gestured at the newspapers on the table and then used the same hand to wipe his eyes. “I want you to release me, just like I released Constance.”
“Don’t... understand.”
“Suicide is so crass. So classless. And if I could do it, I would have already.”
“You want me to kill you?”
“Yes.”
“What on earth makes
you think ...” my eyelids fluttered; I drooled “... could do such a thing?”
Richard smiled. “Because you’re not some wooden figurine living a clockwork life.”
“Gur.”
“You’re just like me.”
“No!” I growled and shook my head. “I’m nothing like you. I could never ...”
“Kindred spirits, remember?”
“Never.”
He crouched beside me and placed his hand on my chest. I wonder what he thought of my heartbeat - a storm unto itself, raging and banging. I faded, gripped his hand, though I didn’t want to. The edges of the room closed in until only Richard’s face remained, as if seen through a keyhole.
“We’ll see,” he said. “I think you’ll be surprised what a man is capable of.”
And with that I drifted away, like the leaf, swirling and gone. Beethoven accompanied me for a while. Beautiful, tormenting notes, but even they faded.
I looked for my green meadow but found only rain, only darkness.
~ * ~
I awoke to find myself in a room I soon recognized as Richard’s garage, but there was no workbench, no lawnmower, no tools hanging from nails on the walls. The up and over aluminium door was the only standard garage feature. Polythene sheeting had been tacked to the walls, and the linoleum floor sloped away on both sides to narrow drainage chutes that reminded me of the gutters found on autopsy tables. A bare bulb depended from a length of dusty cord, its glow attracting two moths that repeatedly knocked their plump bodies against the glass.
Lorna sat opposite me, coarse rope binding her wrists and ankles to the chair, a rag pushed into her mouth so tightly she couldn’t work her tongue to push it free. There was blood in her hair and smeared across her top lip. I remembered that single spot on Richard’s shoe and wanted to scream. Her left eye was a mess of swollen tissue but her right eye was wide and filled with terror. In seven years. of marriage - ten of being together - I had never known her to be terrified. It sickened me.
Richard stood behind her, knife in hand, the edge too close to her throat. “You’re awake,” he said. “Good. Take a moment to compose yourself.”
“Richard, what—?”
“Deep breaths help.”
“What are you doing?”
It was then that I noticed my arrangement: I, too, was bound to a wooden chair, but not completely; my right arm was free. I had a gun in my hand.
“So you don’t believe you can take a man’s life?” More tears leaked from Richard’s eyes. I watched two of them drip into Lorna’s hair. “I believe, under certain circumstances, you can.”
I shook my head. “Don’t do this, Richard.” Tears of my own now. Too many of them. “Please.”
“What did she call you? A pithless cretin?” Richard used the tip of the blade to flick hair from Lorna’s face. “Now’s your chance to prove her wrong, and save her life into the bargain.”
I looked at the gun, fat and oily and real.
“Maybe the love has gone. Or maybe not.” He curled his upper lip and shrugged. “One thing is for certain ... you don’t want to see her die like this.”
“Please.”
“I’m going to cut her throat in exactly ten seconds.”
“No ... dear Jesus, no.”
“Then I’ll chop her into easy-to-manage pieces and bury her in the garden.”
Lorna screamed through the rag. A raw, muffled sound. Her throat bulged as it filled with air that couldn’t escape.
“But you can stop me, Martin.”
“Nuh-oh-oh-oh.”
“You can save us all.”
I whimpered like a scolded dog and considered putting the gun to my own head.
“Ten seconds,” Richard said, and pressed the edge of the knife to Lorna’s throat. “This is it, old friend. It’s time to see how alike we really are.”
~ * ~
“Ten.”
I wonder, now, if Lorna’s uncompromising attitude, not to mention our bitter separation, in some way impacted my hesitance to pull the trigger. It was easy to remember the ember of derision that so often burned inside her - evident in her behaviour at Gee’s, when clemency would not have cost anything, and despite my efforts at accord. Nor had I forgotten that she’d wished a “crippling” car accident on me. Cancer, too. Heat of the moment, maybe, but still hurtful.
I looked at the gun in my hand as the memory of her cruelties teetered in my mind. I’m fairly certain that if our marriage was intact, and blissful, even if Lorna had shown an iota of affection, that I would have blasted Richard’s brains against the polythene wall. But that wasn’t the case; Lorna didn’t like me - an understatement; she hated me - and I didn’t like her much, either.
“Nine.”
I could let her die, or kill Richard. Neither choice appealed. It was like being faced with two doors - one leading to hell and damnation, the other to insanity and rue. The gun trembled in my hand, as foreign to me as a Neolithic relic or alien rock. I have no idea what type it was. Something beastly, with a squat barrel and a magazine locked into its grip. I didn’t know if I had to load a bullet into the chamber or release the safety catch (if I could find it). I assumed Richard had made it as simple as possible - just point and shoot. Not that there was anything simple about that.
“Eight.”
After all, what makes someone a killer? What rare ingredient makes them capable of taking another person’s life - of determining who lives or dies? Maybe it’s something we all possess, a chemical or electrical impulse locked deep in the brain, that for most of us can only be accessed via extreme circumstances ... and maybe not even then.
“Seven.”
Rain rattled against the garage door. An explosion of thunder made the roof creak and the bare bulb tremble. Would this storm never end? I had a feeling that, whichever door I chose, I would hear it for the rest of my days.
“Six.”
Thix. Stupid lisp. Stupid Richard. I looked at him and screamed. Raw, cascading sound. My throat felt like a rainstick filled with broken glass.
“Five.”
Lorna screamed, too - or tried to, at least. Her throat was dark with the effort, veins as thick as the ropes that bound her. And how could her eye - that single, glaring orb - be filled with such terror and reproach? Yes, reproach. For me, as if she didn’t have more pressing things on her mind. Her body shook, wrists and ankles pushing against the ropes. She couldn’t believe that I hadn’t yet pulled the trigger, or that this was even difficult for me. She always said I lacked backbone. Pithless, the ever-famous adjective. And here I was proving her right, my spectacular nothingness on display.
“Four.”
Yet more thunder boomed outside and I looked at my soon-to-be-ex-wife (maybe sooner than she’d hoped) with broken eyes. I saw things - random details - I’ll remember in my nightmares for years to come: the fine hair on her forearms and a loose thread hanging from the hem of her skirt; the scar on her knee she’d got from falling off a see-saw when she was eight years old; the pale band of skin where her wedding ring used to be. There was blood on her blouse. One of the buttons was missing.
It was easy to imagine her getting ready that morning (I knew her routine as well as my own), drying her hair and applying make-up - small things done daily, not knowing that she was doing them, perhaps, for the last time. I saw fresh blood trickling from her swollen left eye, and a damp corner of the rag dangling from her mouth.
“Please, Richard,” I gasped. It was a wonder I could speak at all. “Please, I’m begging you—”
“Three.”
So vivid, her blood, trickling too perfectly, as if it had been painted on. I saw tiny pink sequins embedded in the varnish on her fingernails. Bruises on her legs. A broken shoe strap.
“Two.”
I brought the gun to chest level and extended my arm. Tears blurred my vision and I blinked them away, then curled my finger around the trigger. Richard had positioned
himself so that his head floated above Lorna like a lunatic bull’s eye. I could barely see the curve of his left shoulder, and his right elbow was cocked to the side, but they were such small targets and too close to Lorna. I couldn’t risk shooting at one in the hope of disabling, rather than killing, Richard, and couldn’t move to a better position because I was tied to the chair. It was a hopeless situation. I closed one eye (possibly the wrong one) and stared down the barrel. The sights trembled somewhere between Richard and Lorna. I tried to steady my hand but couldn’t.
It was over. I had failed them both.
“Sorry,” I whimpered.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 49
