Face of Evil

by George Morris De'Ath

  She sits back, takes a deep breath and reaches for her water. This is going to be more difficult than she thought. Not because of the death, she’s written about death before. Not because of the wickedness, that was an inherent part of any premeditated murder. Not even because these were innocent children. No, there is something else here, something quite new to her. A level of pleasure that this killer seemed to take in his work. A pride he felt in its presentation. This wasn’t just torture. It wasn’t just murder. It was a performance, each one different, each so repulsive and sickening in its own way that it makes her uneasy in a way Lydia has never experienced before. A feeling that burrows beneath the surface of both body and mind. A discomfort of the soul.

  She leans forward, turns over the page and finds herself staring at a photograph of the two children, just the way the police found them. Just the way their parents had found them. At a glance, they look quite normal, alive, posed mid-action as though playing on the floor. Only a closer look reveals the fresh scars, the ever-so-slightly sagging skin and hollow expressions. They look like badly made dolls. They were alive when he did this to them. Lydia feels the hot sickness boil suddenly up inside of her like an erupting volcano and dashes to the bathroom just in time.

  Get a grip, she chides herself, rinsing her mouth with water and then dabbing it dry with a warm hand towel. It’s not going to get any easier. She isn’t wrong. Over the next few hours, she experiences second-hand horrors that most people could not conceive of in their darkest nightmares. Human beings tortured, sliced, crushed, twisted, even liquefied, all in the most deliberately painful ways that their killer could formulate. All made an example of; a spectacle for his audience.

  Me, she thinks with a pang of guilt and horror. I’m his audience.

  The last, and most recent case in the file is that of an eighteen-year-old girl, Alice Redmond, a student at the city’s art college. Alice, like the Dimitroff twins, had been flayed alive, but only her torso. Her skin, stretched and pinned like a canvas, painted upon with her own blood; a swirling pattern, a crimson void. She was probably still alive, the coroner notes, when her killer jammed the paintbrush he used through her eye, deep into her brain, and then posed her as if she had painted the picture herself, brush still protruding from her head.

  Lydia closes the file and pushes it away from her. Now that she knows what it contains, the paper itself seems to exude malevolence and right now she wants to be as far away from it as possible. Sliding purposefully off the bed, she snatches it up, crosses to the dressing table, pulls open a drawer, crams the file inside and slams it shut again. It strikes Lydia suddenly, with those images staining her cranium, that the Jason she knew, that the Jason she had been questioning and examining didn’t seem capable of such horrific acts. It felt… inconsistent, in a way that made her uneasy. Lydia felt she never wore self-doubt well; the shade didn’t complement the rest of her character. Now looking up into the mirror, for a split second she doesn’t recognise the face staring back at her. She’s never seen that expression upon it before. Fear and nausea have robbed it of its usual confidence and composure. She crouches to open the minibar and retrieves two small bottles of vodka, twisting the top off one with shaking fingers and tipping it down her throat. It’s empty in seconds. I’ll regret that in the morning. But she doesn’t care. She won’t sleep otherwise.

  Carrying the second bottle back over to the bedside table, she sets it down and then strips off her clothes, tossing them onto the chair where her jacket lies before slipping between the cool sheets. She twists open the vodka and then reaches for her phone while she drinks. No messages. She feels a pang of irritation that Alex would leave her with this package of nightmares and not even bother to check on her. Who’s clingy now? Lydia curses herself and turns out the light as the warm tingle of the alcohol begins to numb the fringes of her consciousness.

  *

  High-heeled footsteps echo through the dark corridors of Mortem Asylum. Either side of Lydia as she walks, the walls are shifting, writhing, a fleshy tapestry of silently screaming faces. She tries not to look, her pace quickening, her footsteps growing louder. Ahead of her is a door, and through its tiny window she can see bright, white light. As she approaches it, a dark figure moves in the room beyond. Lydia hesitates. The walls begin closing in on her, stone grinding on stone, the squirming, howling faces pushing towards her. She dashes to the door, fumbling the handle and then, just as she feels the breath of those terrible faces on the back of her neck, tumbling through it and falling to the floor.

  She hears the door slam shut behind her, and as she looks around a strong arm grabs her around the throat, lifting her clear off the ground. She screams, struggles, fights, kicks, claws, but it’s no use. The strong figure carries her to a steel table in the centre of the room and slams her down on it, his hand pinning her down by the throat, and a bolt of fear shoots through her as she sees the wolf-like face of Jason Devere looming over her, his lips curling into a sly smile.

  Lydia squirms desperately, but his grip is like a vice. He grabs one of her wrists and drags it to the edge of the table where a heavy iron manacle on a chain rests. “No!” Lydia chokes as she feels the metal close around her flesh.

  “Yes,” the killer growls softly in her ear as he forces her other arm to the far side of the table and clamps that one too. “You’re mine now.”

  “Please,” Lydia begs, still fighting desperately to free herself, the bloody images of the Krimson Killer’s victims racing through her mind. “Please don’t.”

  “Oh come now,” Jason moves around the table so that he’s looming over her head, “fair’s fair. You wanted to get inside my head, didn’t you?”

  “No.” Lydia starts to cry, her legs still twisting and kicking in vain.

  “Well, now I’m going to get inside of yours.” He raises his hands high above her, and Lydia sees that he’s gripping a huge meat cleaver, its polished steel glinting eerily in the bright, fluorescent light.

  “NO!”

  The blade plummets towards her, propelled with brutal force, and in a split second she feels its impact, feels the sharp edge cut through her, hears the sickening crunch of her own skull.

  Lydia wakes, sitting bolt upright in her pitch-dark room, screaming.

  Fourteen

  In the Eye of the Beholder

  “So where are we going?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  Lydia shifts to glare at Alex, the leather of his passenger seat squeaking beneath her. “I don’t like surprises.”

  “You didn’t like your present?” he asks, nonchalantly.

  “Yeah, thanks for the nightmares.”

  Alex glances at her, his face a mixture of hurt and disbelief. “I thought that’s what you wanted.”

  Lydia doesn’t answer. She’s still mad at him for not checking in with her last night, mad at herself for slightly caring, and to top it all off that dull thump has started up in her head again.

  “You alright?” he asks. “Not still hungover, are you?” Lydia closes her eyes and presses her fingertips to her forehead. “Damn, you must be getting old.” He sees her expression. “I mean we, we must be getting…” Lydia stares daggers at him. “Nothing. I didn’t mean anything.”

  The car slows, and Alex pulls over to park outside a large, concrete building. Lydia cranes her neck to peer through the driver’s side window, and sees a large, bronze plaque fixed to the front of it.

  DECANTEN MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

  “Really?” she looks at him doubtfully.

  “Yeah,” Alex replied, uncertainly. “Why, you don’t like art?”

  “Do you?”

  “Sure,” he unfastens his seatbelt, “I come here all the time.” Lydia’s eyebrows almost disappear up into her blonde locks. “Alright, fine. I’ve never been here before in my life. Are you happy?”

  “A little bit, yeah.” Lydia smirks. “Are you trying to impress me?”

  “Na, I just heard the restaurant here did a
decent chili.”

  “Well in that case,” Lydia unfastens her own belt and reaches for the door handle, “we’d better walk around a bit, so I can work up an appetite.”

  Inside the building is a series of vast, open rooms with high ceilings and polished wooden floors. The walls and fixtures, Lydia can tell, were once a crisp, clean white, but time and mild neglect have seen them fade to a slightly sour cream. There aren’t many people here, but that might not be so strange. She has no idea what the average footfall of a place like this must be.

  “What do you think of this?” Alex asks, standing in front of a large canvas. Lydia joins him and takes a moment to consider the mess of coloured shapes.

  “I think their mother must be very proud,” she says finally.

  “You don’t see anything of value in this picture at all?”

  She peers up at him, trying to figure out if he’s messing with her or not, and is surprised to find that he appears quite sincere. “What do you see?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know, but someone did take the time to paint it; they must have been thinking about something when they did.” He points to a bold, bright red brushstroke. “Maybe that represents anger. And that blue area there is like… a sea of sorrow, or something.” He catches Lydia’s eye, and she bursts out laughing. The sound fills the huge space, bouncing back on itself so that it sounds like there’s a whole room full of women laughing. “Or not.” Alex blushes. “Whatever.”

  “A sea of sorrow?” Lydia tries to control her cackling, but she just can’t help herself.

  “Hey,” Alex holds his hands up, “it’s not my fault if you’re dead inside.”

  “I am not.”

  “If you say so.” He moves along to the next painting, leaving Lydia behind.

  “Hang on,” she chases after him, “just because I don’t see a web of deep and meaningful emotions in some childish painting, that means I’m dead inside?”

  “I guess I just expected more from one of the world’s foremost experts on the human mind.” He looks at the painting straight ahead, a cacophony of black blots and splashes, and determinedly not at Lydia, which she interprets as a deliberate attempt to wind her up.

  “I’m a psychologist,” she replies flatly, “not an art critic.”

  “Evidently.”

  Lydia shoves him hard, and Alex is so surprised that he almost falls onto the painting. “Hey!” He spins his arms in the air to steady himself. “Watch it.”

  “Sorry,” Lydia replies, her nose in the air. “I didn’t realise you were so weak.”

  “If I’d damaged that, you would have been paying for it.”

  “Do you want me to buy you a picture?” she asks, stepping slowly along to the next one, a harlequin pattern of metallic blue and silver. “Something to remember me by, after I’ve gone?”

  “There’s no need to be mean.”

  “You can look at it while you drown in oceans of sorrow because I’m not here.”

  “Stop.” Alex nudges her gently, his hands in his pockets. “You’ll make me cry.”

  “You’re a sensitive soul.” She looks up at him.

  “More than you know,” he replies, gazing right back. The softness of his eyes is disarming, making Lydia forget the snappy comeback she had already.

  “Let’s move along,” she says briskly, snapping out of it, “I’m getting hungry.” She heads through the doorway into the next room, then stops so suddenly that Alex walks straight into the back of her.

  “What’s wrong?” He looks past Lydia into a smaller room with only three giant paintings, one on each wall. They’re all of the same theme: irregular black borders fading inward through dark shades wine-red, to crimson, to scarlet, to glimmers of palest pink, almost white. Lydia doesn’t answer. She’s staring at the painting straight-ahead, and starts to approach it in a kind of trance, as though drawn forward by some invisible force.

  Closer up, she can see the thousands of individual strokes, meticulously placed, a flick here, a swirl there, a flurry of movements designed, she can see as clearly as she has ever seen anything in her life, to create the impression of blood, rushing to escape a fresh wound from the inside out. But that isn’t why Lydia’s own blood has suddenly run cold.

  “This is it,” she whispers.

  “Huh?” Alex stands at her shoulder.

  “Don’t you recognise it?”

  “What are you talking about?” He looks the painting up and down. “It just looks like—”

  “Blood.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He shrugs. “So what?”

  “It’s just like the painting Jason did,” she hisses through gritted teeth, trying to suppress the sickness rising within her again, “on that girl. The student. Alice.”

  Alex’s jaw falls, his eyes wide as he stares at the canvas. “Jesus Christ…”

  “Who painted this?” They both dash towards a small sign hung to the right of the blood painting.

  “It doesn’t say.” Alex frowns, scanning the words printed on it. “Don’t they usually say?”

  “By a local artist,” Lydia reads. “It doesn’t even say when.” She turns to him. “How many people saw what happened to that girl?”

  “I don’t know.” He shakes his head, confused. “Not many. The teacher who found her, the first officers on the scene, the detectives who worked the case…” He swallows. “Her family.”

  “Oh my god,” Lydia mutters under her breath.

  “Look, I’m sure this is just a coincidence.” Lydia shoots him a warning look. “Lyd, Devere’s been locked up for years. If he had painted these before then, how on earth would they have got here?”

  “I don’t know,” she breathes, taking one last look at the monstrous image before turning and heading for the door. “But I know who will.”

  Fifteen

  A Fallen Angel

  The heavy steel door slams shut behind Lydia, making her jump, the nightmare still fresh in her memory. Taking a deep breath to compose herself, she crosses to the table in the centre of the room and takes a seat.

  “Can’t stay away, can you?” Jason leers at her through lank curtains of hair, slumped back in his chair. Lydia’s eyes flick down to his hands, manacled together in his lap, and remembers vividly the terror she felt when he clapped them around her wrists. He didn’t, she reminds herself forcefully. It didn’t happen.

  “Tell me about Alice Redmond,” she says flatly. Jason frowns, and a startling thought occurs to Lydia. Has he forgotten her name? After what he did?

  “Alice…” he turns the word over. “Yeah, the art student.”

  “That’s right, the girl you tortured and murdered. Tell me about her.”

  Jason pauses and then shrugs. “You probably know more than me.” He grins. “I just killed her.”

  Lydia fights to hide her hatred, her teeth gritted behind pursed lips. “Are we really not past this yet?” she says, in a bored tone. “Honestly, it’s like babysitting a child.”

  “Tell you what,” Jason lifts his bound hands onto the table with a thud, and Lydia jumps again, “you promise to read me a bedtime story, and I’ll tell you all about little Alice.”

  “We already made a deal, Jason. I held up my end. Will you hold up yours?”

  “I’d love to,” he nods towards his crotch, “but you’ll have to take it out for me. As you can see, I’m a little…” he pulls apart the manacles until the chain between them tightens, “tied up.”

  Lydia tilts back her head and eyes him with supreme disdain. “You’re disgusting.”

  “I’m whatever you want me to be,” he replies, his smile fading. “Isn’t that how this works?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jason looks about to elaborate, but then shrugs and shakes his head instead.

  “What do you mean?” Lydia repeats more forcefully.

  “You didn’t come to find out who I am.” Jason’s eyes narrow. “You came to make up a story and put me in it.”

  “M
ake up?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you denying that you did those terrible things?”

  “See,” Jason says quickly.

  “What?”

  “You’ve already made up your mind. You’ve defined me by a handful of events.”

  “Events?” Lydia stares at him, incredulous. “You tortured children.”

  “It’s not simple like that,” Jason replies, with… is that a smile? Is he smiling, fake smiling or grimacing? She feels a powerful urge to leap over the table and strangle him for the answer.

  “Complicate it for me.”

  “Alright.” He sits back in his chair again, like a king holding court. “I will. You see, none of us is ultimately responsible for the things that we do—”

  “Of course we are,” Lydia interrupts, dismissively. “Who else is responsible for your actions if not you?”

  “You’re not seeing the big picture.” He shakes his head. “We are all of us part of something much greater than ourselves. A chain of events, set in motion long before we existed and whose conclusion none of us will live to see.”

  “Determinism?” Lydia says, scathingly. “That’s your excuse? Well it’s hardly an original one.” Lydia looks closer and notices Jason’s now twitchy demeanour as he lowers his chin, and knows exactly what it indicates. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “No one’s truly good,” he bitterly murmurs with a hint of regret.

  “Most people are.”

  “No,” Jason shakes his head sadly. “No, they’re not. People are good and bad, at different times and in different ways, but the balance doesn’t tip to one side. Our nature is far more mixed than we care to admit.”