The Killer in Me

by Margot Harrison

  I passed through a phase where I thought the boy could see me in his dreams, too. I tried to send him telepathic messages; I arranged my posters and stuffed animals in new ways to keep him interested. No message ever returned. Maybe the boy didn’t see me like I saw him, or he went to sleep too late to find me awake. Maybe he wasn’t real.

  But he did some things I couldn’t have imagined.

  One night when I was nine, the boy took the top sheet off his bed and rolled it into a long, skinny rope. He knotted one end of the rope to his bedpost and looped the other around his neck. Then he braced his feet against the footboard and pushed till the sheet cinched around his windpipe and he saw nothing but blackness with starry flashes of white.

  I couldn’t breathe, only silently scream at him: No. No! What are you doing?

  He didn’t hear me. Just a second more, he was thinking. Prove you have the stones to do it, just like he did. Just a second more.

  Then his feet were scrabbling against the footboard, and he breathed in huge gulps, tearing the noose from his throat.

  Dammit, he thought. It’s way harder than I thought.

  In a flash of light, I saw his dad’s smiling face. The apple tree. The sheet.

  The whole thing mystified me until a few years later, when I watched a TV show about a convict who hangs himself with a bedsheet.

  Could the boy’s dad have hanged himself that way? From the apple tree? Or in jail, where a sheet is all you have?

  Suddenly, I understood better why the boy’s mind sometimes went cold, rotating around a nameless, faceless fear. It’s coming for you. It could happen any minute. The most you can decide is when.

  As he got older, the boy started taking his mom’s car out on long night drives in the desert. The stars blazed overhead, the road was a straight ribbon, and he smoked American Spirits and played oldies stations.

  One station played the Kinks and T. Rex, and another played jangly sixties pop songs in French, and that’s how I came to love old music. At first I thought the boy loved it, too. Later I realized it was just neutral background for him, white noise that didn’t interrupt his thoughts.

  But, oh, he loved smoking. He loved making that tiny flame blossom, fostering it, controlling it, inhaling till his lungs burned, and tipping the ashes out the window. He loved feeling in control.

  He loved watching the neon of truck stops and gas stations floating through the dark. He loved the black silhouettes of mesas on the horizon.

  And he loved knowing anything could happen on a highway at night, and he’d be able to handle it. Anything.

  That dark thought kept revolving in his mind: You will die. The most you can decide is when.

  When he was eighteen and I had just turned twelve, the boy joined the army. For two years, my nights teemed with sweaty guys in camo striding down dusty streets. It was usually morning there, because of the time shift. These visions were blurrier and quieter than usual, as if distance muffled the transmission.

  The boy didn’t kill anyone over there as far as I know. He was jittery with fear and anger (at his own fear) most of the time, though, and a spot grew in the corner of his eye, a presence he couldn’t blink away.

  It was the sheet dangling from the apple tree, turning dappled sun to shadow. White as bone. His own death might not happen today, but it waited for him, perhaps just around the corner.

  I will decide when.

  Then, the spring I turned fourteen, the boy came home.

  It was Saturday night, the night of the March day in eighth grade I came back from Warren’s house, wishing I would never see him again. I remember everything about that night: the whole-wheat mac-and-cheese with broccoli, the book I stayed up reading, my mom taking a long bath. I remember hearing a text alert and not picking up the phone, because it would be Warren. I remember laying out my outfit for Monday a whole day ahead and thinking that I’d look very mature in this cardigan with pearl buttons, and no high school boy would dare mess with me. I remember lying in bed willing myself to fall asleep.

  Without warning, I’m standing in shrubbery, looking in someone’s window.

  An old window with cracked panes. The shrubbery is cedars and junipers—northern trees like ours. He’s close to me.

  But the boy isn’t thinking about where he is or where he’s been. He’s watching an old man alone inside the house, making instant coffee.

  The boy goes around and knocks on the door. He tells the old man he’s just gotten out of the service and is hitchhiking to the bus station in Oneonta, and might he have permission to sleep on the old man’s property? He’ll leave it just like he found it. He gives a name he makes up on the spot.

  His voice is formal, a little stilted. He’s trying not to drawl like the desert rats back home, because he’s a soldier now. A warrior.

  Someone who can tighten the sheet around his own throat—or anyone else’s. Someone who watches in the night, unseen. Someone in control.

  The old man says the boy shouldn’t sleep outdoors on a crisp night like this, not after serving his country. The old man invites him in.

  I see and hear their conversation in a watery montage, because the boy isn’t paying close attention to it. Whenever his eyes go to the cast-iron skillet hanging above the stove, though, he focuses so sharply I nearly pass out.

  It makes him dizzy, looking at that skillet. It’s perfect.

  Eliminate the target with his own weapons.

  Usually the boy’s thoughts are a humming murmur, but now they become sharp-edged objects crowding into my head and taking up space. Not another soul for miles. Too good to pass up. They won’t miss him for weeks. Months, maybe.

  No photos in this house. No grandchildren. A hermit.

  Hasn’t he lived long enough? Why not? I could take him like a thief in the night.

  The boy’s inner voice isn’t snarky or snide. It’s flat, assessing the terrain like he’s a soldier on a mission.

  Maybe he is a soldier on a super-secret mission. Maybe the old man is a terrorist in hiding, or an aged war criminal. It doesn’t seem very likely, but—

  No, something’s wrong here. Nothing makes sense, and suddenly I feel like I don’t know this boy, this young man who’s practically part of me. Why not? That’s not how you think about killing a terrorist.

  For the first time ever, I try to open my eyes and stop the dream.

  I imagine my own hand, my real hand, clutching a handful of the comforter. I imagine reaching out to grab my cat, Sugarman, who was purring against my hip when I dozed off.

  I don’t have a hand to reach. I’m a pair of eyes spinning in blackness, dizzier and dizzier, and when I return to the light, I’m standing over the old man and raising the skillet a second time.

  Blood trickles down the old man’s cheek. I missed the look on his face when he grasped what was happening.

  That look is the worst part, I will learn. After the realization that You’re going to kill me, after the surprise and terror, come the dull eyes. Once their eyes go dull, it’s generally easier to finish the job.

  It doesn’t feel easy this first time. Inside, I’m screaming—Help! Murder! Stop!—even as I heft the skillet’s weight and bring it down three, four, five. As I wait for the crack. You don’t just hear it, you feel it.

  Like an eggshell. Only duller, more resonant. A skull is much harder to shatter.

  The spittle at the corner of the old man’s mouth. The blood-matted hair. The half-open eye rolled to white. If I had a body right now, if I were me, these sights would make my throat close with terror and empathy.

  The boy feels nothing like that, just the noose tightening around his own throat. Then he feels something being released, and everything goes white like heaven and he’s floating and soaring, looking down on the world, lighter than air.

  The soaring and floating last only a few seconds, but it’s worth it. Down he comes.

  He’s been sloppy with this first kill, sloppier than he’ll ever be again. Lucky the
blood is concentrated on the tattered rag rug. After the old man stops breathing, the boy sits with the body, watching the clock move on the wall.

  A body without life is different. It’s special. The boy respects it in a way he’s never respected a living person. Though he’s kept his work gloves on, he brings two fingers of his right hand to the old man’s forehead and says, “This was your time. Go with God.” He has no idea if he believes in God, but it sounds good. Ceremonial. Final.

  He wraps the corpse in the rug and hoists it on his shoulder and stows it in his car trunk.

  And with the trunk’s thunk, I wake at last.

  That Saturday night I crouched in bed with my eyes wide open, muscles locked, struggling to shake what I told myself was a nightmare.

  He couldn’t have done that, not really. I knew him.

  The images wouldn’t go away. My room melted into the old man’s kitchen, his flowered wallpaper creeping up my walls. The world pulsed—in, out; here, there; my room, his room—till my stomach twisted and I curled up in a ball. Sugarman growled and sprang off the bed.

  I knew the boy, but now the boy was the Thief, and I’d been inside the Thief, so close that he still seemed to be in the room with me. Through his eyes, I looked down at me on the bed and Sugarman on the rug: lumps of flesh. Future corpses. He’d hunt us like the cat hunted mice, pupils swallowing his eyes.

  The Thief’s muscles were my muscles, flexing as he lifted the skillet like Tupperware. He was so strong, and I’d always loved being inside him, feeling sinewy and invincible. Till now.

  Something lay huddled on the rug just beyond Sugarman, a dark mound. Rag rug. Could the old man’s lifeless body still be here? Hadn’t I wrapped it in that rug, lifted it, gotten rid of it?

  No, it was just a pile of clothes I’d tossed aside as I built Monday’s outfit.

  Inside me, the Thief laughed at my cardigan and pearl buttons. Rye Witter laughed. Everyone laughed. Clothes couldn’t keep me safe.

  Breathe. Breathe. Bow your head, be small, don’t look. Maybe he’s coming. Looming above you with the skillet ready to arc through the air. How many swings would it take to crack my skull?

  He was so close to me. I’d let him be close.

  Would I ever see his face? Would I see it soon?

  I lurched into the bathroom and went fetal on the mat, my shoulders shuddering, not sobbing but whining a little with each breath.

  It’s a dream; it’s always been just a dream.

  Suddenly, I had to check on my mom, and I crept to her door, taking underwater strides on my tiptoes. She was a hump in the covers, still breathing. No one had slipped into her room and stabbed or strangled her.

  I didn’t wake her. When she came downstairs at dawn, she found me on the living room couch, rigid as death and clutching the fireplace poker, watching the front door.

  “Nina, my lord!”

  I couldn’t tell her. I could never tell her. My mom lived in a world where horrible crimes could be explained by horrible childhoods. Her boss, the attorney general, believed in rehabilitation, and she came home from the courthouse and told me stories where killers wrote earnest pleas for forgiveness, and victims’ relatives were forgiving.

  “I thought I heard somebody downstairs,” I said.

  She pulled the poker from my limp hands.

  That’s how it’s been for the past three years.

  A dream every night. More bodies: the homeless man, the hitchhiker, the campground lady.

  When I went back to school after the Bad Weekend, I could see how eager Warren was to make things okay between us. I could barely remember why they weren’t okay. Since Saturday afternoon, my world had split from his, and I was caught in a dark maelstrom that tore people like Warren apart.

  For all his enthusiasm about guns and hunting and kick-ass video games, Warren was the kind of person who always sympathized with the hero over the villain. When a movie hero did something “gray”—like a detective roughing up a suspect—I could see him fidgeting. Heroes could not also be bullies. Lines were not supposed to be blurred.

  For me, there were no lines anymore. And I worried I’d do or say something that crossed his.

  One of the last conversations we had was about Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Warren asked if I remembered the scene where Pee-wee Herman saves the animals from a burning pet shop. He hates snakes, he’s not going to save the snakes, but at the last minute he dashes in and comes out draped in snakes, his face twisted with comic repulsion.

  “He doesn’t want to care about them, but he does,” Warren said. “That’s why Pee-wee is the perfect movie hero. He does the right thing even by reptiles.”

  He was eyeballing me too hard, and I suddenly wondered if Warren was Pee-wee and I was the snake. Was this his weird way of saying he still liked me, even though I never sat with him anymore? Had he noticed when Maddy Penner called his sweater “gay,” and I laughed?

  Well, he wasn’t going to make me feel worse than I already did.

  “One of those snakes should’ve bitten Pee-wee,” I said. “No, seriously. I think that would be a lot funnier.”

  Warren just looked at me.

  “Because,” I said, “whether you’re nice to them or not, that’s what snakes actually do.”

  For a while, I thought the solution was to embrace the bad. To keep the good at a distance. I let Warren drift away, and I went through what my mom calls a “dark teen period.” It involved wearing black, reading every book I could find about war atrocities and serial killers, and sneering cynically at my mom’s view of the world, which I characterized as “sickly-gooey sweetness and light.”

  Books taught me the Thief was no anomaly. All through human history, people had been robbing and raping and killing and doing unspeakable things to their enemies. Suddenly, it seemed like a miracle that nothing bad had ever happened to me. The only way to be safe from bad people, really safe, was to strike first.

  I begged Mom for a home security system—yes, right here in Vermont; it can happen anywhere. And when I realized she wasn’t going to give in, I struck first.

  I didn’t plan it. I just came home from school one day and found a kitchen window halfway open, practically inviting somebody to break in. So I did.

  I’d learned a few quick-and-dirty tricks from him. I checked to make sure our neighbors weren’t home. I put on latex gloves from Rite Aid, snuck around to the back, slashed the screen with kitchen shears, and climbed in.

  So easy.

  I longed to take our twenty-inch TV so we could replace it with a plasma, but it was too heavy. The set of silverware was an heirloom. So I settled for throwing pillows and newspapers on the floor and overturning a vase of flowers. Sugarman watched, flicking his ears, and strolled out through the mutilated screen.

  I unhooked the cute little speaker dock Mom bought to play her music while she cooked. I started feeling queasy as I shoved it in my bag, and worse as I pedaled my bike to the “dump site”—a sandy spit in the river. As I tossed that maybe ninety-dollar gizmo into a swift current, my stomach lurched.

  I was a criminal now. The speaker was crap, but it was Mom’s. Even if somebody fished it out of the river, it would never work again.

  And then I realized I was feeling the same way Pee-wee did about the snakes. The same way Warren did about me. The same way the Thief did not feel about his victims.

  Whether I liked it or not, empathy weighed me down like a stone around my neck. Empathy for people and snakes and sometimes even for inanimate objects just because they were connected to people.

  The police weren’t impressed with our burglary. They called it a “crime of opportunity.” My mom bought me the security system, but I didn’t feel triumphant—just empty.

  I hugged her as if we’d been through something terrible. And I stopped telling her she was too sweet and naïve. After all, who did we have but each other?

  After the second year and the fourth murder, I started reading the signs. The Thief was an addi
ct now, and when he was jonesing, I could tell. I brewed pots of coffee, stayed up all night. As long as I was awake from sundown to sunup, I’d never have to see him in action, never have to know what he’d done.

  It was a brilliant solution, I thought, except soon I needed stronger stimulants than coffee and NoDoz. I tried faking ADHD, but my mom was skeptical. So I ended up buying Warren’s wares.

  Months of topsy-turvy sleeping ensued. I developed an eyelid twitch in the wee hours, which creeped me out, because I knew he had one, too. But by doing all my sleeping in two daylight blocks, from sunrise to seven and during the late afternoon, I could avoid him. Feeling awful half the time, deceiving my mom, and acquiring a nervous tic were small prices to pay.

  Except there was another problem. I missed him.

  Maybe that was why, one week last September, I let the pills run out and didn’t call Warren.

  For five nights in a row, I ignored my schedule. I slept and slept, and it felt so good—not just because I desperately needed the rest. It felt good to be back at his place, to check in on Eliana and Trixie. It felt good to see him working on his latest model, to watch his familiar big hands handling tools. It felt like coming home.

  Until the fifth night, when he traveled. And his urge blindsided me.

  The Thief thinks he knows about girls and women. He knows how to make them smile and move closer to him. This is how he thinks:

  Sometimes there’s a chick sitting alone in a bar, and she’s not young anymore, not old either, and you just know she wants a guy to sit down next to her. There’s something about how she leans to one side, like she wants to lay her head on your shoulder and just rest.

  A woman like that, you can make her trust you.

  One night in a honky-tonk in the Texas Panhandle, the Thief sees a woman like that.

  He doesn’t sit down next to her. Too obvious. He gets his single Coors and hunkers down at a table in the back. When he figures the woman is about tired of being lonely in this redneck hot spot, he slips outside and smokes, leaning against his Sequoia with the darkly tinted back windows.