by E.E. Blake
Killing Sabrina
By E.E. Blake
Copyright 2012 E.E. Blake
Cover art by Franciszek Żmurko
“Girl with red ribbons in her hair”
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
1
He grunted and squatted down, much like a cat getting ready to pounce on a mouse, to try and see how far his pen had rolled under the bedside table. He squinted hard but failed to see anything through the shadows. Avoiding at all costs removing everything off of the table and trying to lift the heavy piece of furniture aside, Roger shifted closer and slid his fingers into the gap.
Roger withdrew his hand from between the table's legs and sat against the wall opposite his wife's side of the bed for a moment.
The whole situation was rediculous, he thought. Getting all worked up over a stupid pen, when he could very easily go back to his study and retrieve another to finish his patient reports.
He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. That's what he'd do – get another stupid pen instead of wasting all this time trying to claim this one back from the depths of the dark caverns of Sabrina's beside table.
Roger slid his glasses back on, and that's when he noticed it.
The flat corner of something rectangular and white was poking out from under the bed. A sheet of scrap paper?
Roger blinked and crawled to the end of the bed. He lifted the bed skirt and found an unaddressed envelope tied closed with a long, red velvet ribbon looking up at him.
Roger touched the envelope with two fingers and slid it towards him.
Curious, he undid the velvet ribbon and pulled a sweet-smelling letter from within the envelope. Unfolding the three-folded paper, Roger sat back against the wall and began to read the letter's contents.
Lustrous.
Dirty.
Passion.
Every single filthy word written in the letter made Roger's body tremble harder and harder. He dropped the letter and tipped his head back against the wall with an awful thud.
How could she have done this to him?
What would bring her to do such a thing?
He was so loyal … so loving…
And this was her thanks?
Roger rubbed his eyes again and noticed something else underneath the bed. He lurched towards it and wrenched out what was one of Sabrina's photo boxes.
The lid was open ajar.
Roger pulled the box into his lap and tossed the lid away.
He gasped in despair.
The photo box was filled to the brim with dozens and dozens of blank envelopes, all sealed with ribbons of red velvet. Roger ripped several envelopes from the box and tore them open with little regard for whom they had belonged to.
He read letter after letter, and his heart and brain screamed with anguish – louder and fiercer with each new disgusting, raunchy paragraph.
The letters contained nothing but filth that another man – a total stranger to Roger, mentioned only as S. M. under each letter – had written.
In some letters, S. M. spoke of Sabrina’s most intimate secrets – secrets he must have masturbated to while recounting these details in each separate letter.
Secrets about Sabrina that not even Roger knew.
Other letters re-imagined sexually depraved encounters between S. M. and Sabrina – there were no descriptive borders in these letters. They wrote of the way her hair smelled; how inexplicitly amazing she was at oral pleasure; how recounting every position and location they fucked drove him totally animalistic and only needed her more.
Roger moaned in agony.
He had read all of the fifty-one letters, and now, sitting like a discarded marionette, propped up against the wall, Roger looked around him. The letters that smelled like Sabrina, as well as the envelopes and strips of red velvet ribbon, lay scattered around him.
Breathing ragged, he closed his eyes.
There were fifty-one knives buried hilt-deep into his heart.
Moments later, he heard a car pull into the driveway. He saw, from the window above him, the headlights spill past the open blinds and light up the bed and some of the strewn-about papers from where they lay in darkness.
Roger heard the car’s tires pull further up the gravel driveway, and the headlights shifted, casting upwards, where their light crept across the ceiling until the car came to a full stop.
Roger’s eyes followed the light, to where it fell upon a portrait of Sabrina and him that a friend painted for their twentieth anniversary, years before.
The rumble of the car’s engine died. With it, so did the headlights.
The painting was once again cast in shadow.
Sabrina was home.
Roger had to act fast. Would he storm out of the house, rip his whoring wife out of the car and demand to know who she was having an affair with, and how many other men were caught in her lustrous web?
Or would he remain calm and collective about the whole ordeal, and just pretend nothing happened?
He couldn't pretend anything didn't happen. His anger would rip him apart from the inside out.
He had to do something though – and fast. He knew this as he heard the door of his brand new 1940 Oldsmobile Coupe opened with a tinny, hollow sound, and then slam shut.
He heard Sabrina's stilettos clack across the driveway and up the front porch.
Roger gathered all of the letters and threw them into the photo box. He set the lid ajar, and slid the white, rectangular tomb of his marital destruction back under the bed.
“Roger!” echoed Sabrina’s voice from down the hall.
The door shut.
Roger fixed his glasses and clothes, then headed out into the front entrance to meet his wife. He embraced her and they shared a brief kiss.
“How were Carol and Parker?” Roger asked, trying to sound calm.
Shrugging, Sabrina slipped out of her driving gloves and tossed them onto the small table next to the front door. “Fine. The same as usual.”
“Is dinner ready?” She asked, walking past her husband and into the kitchen.
2
All through dinner Roger stared at Sabrina from across the table, while steadily consuming his red wine and roast chicken.
“How was your day?” Sabrina asked.
“Interesting,” Roger said. You filthy whore.
Sabrina’s eyes flicked up at him while she cut into her chicken.
Roger stared at her, taking a long, generous mouthful from his wine glass.
Sabrina looked back down at her dish and stuck a forkful between her thin, red-painted lips.
He would make her pay for this.
“Is it good?” he asked.
But how?
“A little burnt,” Sabrina said, chewing. “It’ll do.”
Roger looked down at his right hand. It was convulsing – stricken by a violent tremble. Roger took hold of his steak knife and squeezed it tightly to try to regain strength and control in his hand.
He looked across the table at Sabrina. Behind his rectangular, wire-framed glasses, his eyes were wide, with pupils tiny dots.
She looked up at him with her oval, seductive, green eyes. Her pupils were big – dilated.
Without a thought or word, Roger picked up the steak knife and reached across the small table, thrusting the utensil deep into Sabrina's left eye.
He stared at her – his fist still clenched tight around the knife’s handle – as a white liquid pulsated around the blade.
He thrust the steak knife deeper, and then slowly twisted it clockwise, watching as a thin flow of crimson,
mixed with a chunky, white fluid, leaked out from Sabrina's eye socket, and ran down her delicate cheek.
Roger found amusement in Sabrina’s quiet state. He had assumed that she would have been screaming and flailing her arms, begging him to pull the knife out.
He shifted his grasp on the knife and wrenched backwards, pulling the blade out, bringing with it Sabrina's large, green eye. The flowing river of blood coursing from her socket became a torrent, and covered the side of her beautiful face.
Roger sat back in his seat and breathed hard. He lifted his knife and rotated the blade a bit to study the eyeball. He then looked back at Sabrina, who lifted her fork and placed a piece of roast chicken between her lips.
“Roger, for God’s sake, don’t play with your food,” she sighed, and then lifted a napkin from her lap and dabbed at her gushing eye socket. “Damn mascara...”
“What did you say?” Roger blinked at her.
“I said, don’t play with your food,” Sabrina repeated, looking at him with deep scorn. “You’re not a child – although you do have a genius knack for acting it so frequently.”
Roger, stared at her for a moment, and then back at his steak knife.
Impaled on it was a chunk of chicken breast.
He looked back at Sabrina. Her left eye was back in its rightful socket, undamaged.
“I need a scotch,” Roger murmured and excused himself from the table. While pushing off his chair, he accidentally bashed his knee against the end of the table, sending its contents wobbling slightly.
Sabrina rolled her eyes, but said nothing.
There could be no other way to teach Sabrina her lesson, Roger thought as he shambled into the den. He wrenched a glass from behind the bar and poured himself a tall scotch.
Kill her.
Roger shuddered. No. There had to be another way.
Kill the bitch.
Kill the stinking, fucking, whore bitch.
Roger caught sight of his reflection in the mirror across the room.
Eyes locked with his reflection, he downed the scotch in a single gulp.
3
A couple of days passed. Plenty of time for Roger to think over how he would murder Sabrina, and what precautions he would have to take to be sure his plan didn't backfire on him. He had to make sure there was no struggle when he went to killing her. If there was a struggle, the pathologists in the morgue would catch it immediately when performing the autopsy.
Killing Sabrina would have to look like an accident: Strangling, smothering, poisoning, dismemberment, and jugular laceration were totally out of the question.
That brought Roger to the conclusion that he would have to bring Sabrina to a sleep somehow. He considered taking a bottle of Chloroform from his wing’s medical inventory – but soon crossed the idea out in his mind. If he used Chloroform to make Sabrina pass out, there would definitely be a struggle, and someone at the hospital would know that it would be missing from the shelf.
A sleep-specific medication was another idea. But, that was almost immediately crossed out of his mind as well. The medication he prescribed to insomniac patients was used immediately before going to bed, and usually worked instantaneous. For this "accident" to happen, Sabrina would have to be at least semi-awake.
He tried to fend off the thoughts for the remainder of the day. But as he took in patients and addressed house-calls throughout the day, he couldn’t help but let his mind wander back to the possibilities.
A sleep-specific medication.
Sabrina took sleep medication in pill-form.
That was it.
Maybe, he thought while checking a boy for bronchitis, if he used pills instead of a liquid. That way, he would be able to gauge how much Sabrina would take, and therefore crush one into her glass of wine.
Perhaps, he thought, on the way to bed, while she would fend off the growing sedation in her system, he could sneak up behind her, yell in her ear, and send her sprawling down the basement steps...
No trace of foul play. Roger knew from the amount of stress many of his patients were under due to unemployment and the bubbling carnage of the war, that sleeping medication in general was highly used these days.
Now, all Roger needed was an alibi.
4
When Roger got home that night, Sabrina had just finished setting the roast on the table. She smiled at him from where she stood bend over the table with her mittened hands on either side of the platter.
“Just in time,” she noted.
Roger said nothing. The corners of his mouth twitched as he eyed the table – two candles lit in the centre, with the roast a centrepiece, and other things, such as olives and beets, set surrounding.
He hung his coat up and, shrouded in the shadows of the hallway and sitting room, wandered to the table. He stared down at it.
I wonder if she plans to kill me, too, he wondered, eying the plump roast, glistening with the gravy Sabrina learned to muster together from her mother, years before the old crone succumbed to heart failure.
His eyes shifted up beyond the table, and he saw Sabrina, her back facing him from the kitchen portal, gathering things together on a plate. She turned and smiled at him, holding a plate of fresh-cut bread and a tin of butter.
“I need a scotch,” he murmured and walked to the den.
Peering over his shoulder to make sure his wife wasn’t in view, Roger slipped down the hall into their bedroom. As quiet as possible, he went to her bedside table and opened the drawer. Inside, he found his weapon, and stuck it into the pocket of his suit jacket.
When Roger entered the den, he slunk behind the bar and withdrew two glasses: one for scotch and one for red wine. He poured his scotch first and, staring at his reflection on the wall across the room, downed it in a single swallow.
After slamming the glass down on the oak surface of the bar, Roger’s hand slipped into his suit jacket and retrieved a bottle. He raised it to eye level and turned it so that the small, white label faced him.
Xypholin – 36 capsules
Cochran, Sabrina – 08/23/40
1860 Ridgeway Crt
Radartz, LEOLA REGION, L5G G8Y
5
He rattled it. There weren’t many inside the bottle. He flipped the top, turned the bottle, and two large, lavender-coloured capsules bounded out, into his palm.
Roger took an ice pick out of the bar’s drawers and went to stab at the capsule, when a thought struck him.
I’ll be the first they suspect. Renowned doctor murders wife in cold blood with her own medication.
He inhaled sharply.
Roger’s insides exploded. His deserved vengeance would go mocked and stamped out like a disgarded cigarette -- Sabrina would get her way this time, just like she got everything else she wanted.
...everything else she wanted...
Roger looked over at the wine rack. There was a red wine Sabrina insisted he bought on a regular occasion – He put the medication back into the bottle – which he put pack into his pocket.
“Roger!” Sabrina called out to him from the dining room. “I want to eat and it’s getting cold!”
“One moment!” Roger rang out.
“Whatever are you doing?” she demanded.
Roger ignored her and poured a tall glass of Sabrina’s favourite merlot. It was her favourite for a reason.
Roger went back into the dining room and set the wine glass in front of his wife’s wide, annoyed eyes.
“I didn’t want anything to drink, darling,” she sighed.
“I went to the trouble to pour it,” Roger muttered and sat himself across from her.
Sabrina stared at him with a dark look in her eyes.
He stared back.
“Well, won’t you start?” she nodded at the bowl of mashed potatoes in front of her husband.
“Let’s toast first,” He suggested and raised his glass.
“You’re toasting with scotch?” she blinked.
“To us,” Roger raised
his glass forward. “To our marriage – a testament to our undying love and devotion to one another.”
He noticed an uncomfortable twitch in Sabrina’s mouth. Her eyes flicked to one side, and then back at him. She sighed and raised her glass as well.
“Roger, you’re being silly. But have it your way.”
They touched glass rims with a gentle clinking sound.
As he took his time to drink the scotch, Roger watched his wife with wide, hungry eyes as she took a long sip from her glass.
She may have protested – but Roger knew that one glass of that specific merlot was never enough for his darling wife.
It was amazing he hadn’t thought of it before.
6
Sabrina drained the last of her third glass of wine, and pushed her cleaned plate aside with satisfaction.
“What a lovely, happy, roast I make,” she declared.
“Indeed, you do,” Roger said behind his glass of scotch – still his first from an hour before. He closed his eyes and downed the rest of the glass’s contents.
Sabrina tried to fend off a yawn, but it was no use.
“Are you all right?” Roger asked.
Sabrina nodded. “If you don’t mind ... I may just have a nap. ...Excuse me.” Without waiting for approval from her husband, Sabrina pushed away from the table and weaved back and forth, stumbling, down the hall.
Roger took his time to clear the table away, wrap the leftovers, have a cigarette by the fire, and pocket the keys to his Oldsmobile. He had waited a half hour when the reality of his planned actions settled on his shoulders.
He still loved her.
Very much.
Slightly disturbed, he went into the den and had a few more drinks to reassert his feelings of justice.
When another half hour passed, Roger exited the den, leaving behind an empty scotch bottle and an ashtray full of smoking cigarette butts.
He went to the bedroom and, standing in the door way, watched as his wife lay above the covers of the bed, curled in foetal position as she slept, still in her day clothes.
The shell of a man crept along the floorboards like a nosferatu, his shadow cast across the wall from the light that spilled in from the hallway. He leaned over his wife as she slept.
