This Is How You Die

  Copyright © 2016 by David Jester

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Lilith_C (lilithcgraphics)

  Print ISBN: 978-1-940456-76-8

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-940456-77-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my father, my very first beta reader and the first to believe in me.

  PART 1

  1

  S chool was out. The children were set free upon the world, swarming out of iron gates like animals let loose from a zoo. A variety of species. A variety of noises.

  “Hey, Catherine! Nice ass.” The mating call of the pimpled buffoon, jostling his way through the herd to get to his orange-tinted mate.

  On the main street of Whitegate, where scarce shops nestled inside rows of boarded-up businesses like glistening crowns on yellowed dentures, the voices of excited schoolchildren beefed up the afternoon air with boisterous calls, shrill whistles, and high-pitched laughter.

  In the alleyways and alcoves, the highways and byways of small-town life, sly cigarettes and hastily rolled joints were hurriedly smoked. Between gleeful puffs of toxic joy, little faces lit up the dim gloom. First graders, third graders, sixth graders; first-time smokers, long-time smokers, part-time smokers—all eager for their own dose of disease before going home to questioning parents, home-cooked meals, and two hours of condescending television.

  I was doing what I did every Friday afternoon: I was getting the shit kicked out of me by the school bully, Darren Henderson. He first started beating me in elementary school and had stuck with it throughout the years. He was committed to it and he clearly enjoyed it, so who was I to break with tradition?

  Every boot in my chest shocked the air out of my lungs. Every punt into my back, from his brother-in-torture Barry Barlow, was like a dagger through my spine. Every laugh a hazy taunt to my ringing ears.

  It was hard to tune them out, but I did. I went to my safe place—a room of brilliant white. The floors were a fluffy carpet of the purest color, soft and yielding underfoot. Nothing on the walls; nothing on the ceiling. No distractions, no clutter, just pure white. And there, at my feet, curled into a helpless, sobbing ball of self-loathing, was Darren Henderson. After enjoying his torment, I grabbed him by his fringe and yanked him to his feet. The taut hair pulled his flesh, ripping it from its follicles like Velcro. I stared into his misty eyes, soaking up the sorrow, despair, and fear that swam through the hazel orbs.

  I cut his throat with the serrated side of a hunting knife. I excavated his chest with a single thrust, plunging until the razor-sharp tip shaved his spine. I hacked off his limbs with the blunt edge of the blade and I pricked his legs like a pin cushion. Then, after long and enjoyable moments of extreme torture, I sat back and bathed in the crimson room of my creation.

  His friend wasn’t involved in my fantasies; he was just a pawn. A worthless prick who only did what he did because his psychopathic boyfriend told him to do it. He would have his comeuppance without my assistance, right around the time he finally tells Darren he thinks he’s in love with him and wants him to be his “first.” Suicide through dejection and melancholy, or murder through attempted mutual masturbation with an aggressively heterosexual alpha-bully.

  Eventually they grew tired—their legs fully exercised for the day—and they stopped pummeling me. Their finish, their pièce de résistance, was, as usual, thick slabs of viscous phlegm gathered through thirty seconds of throat-clearing and propelled at my face.

  I watched them go through blurry eyes, almost skipping with joy as they hopped through the iron gates to join their friends.

  I had no friends. I didn’t really like anyone in the school, and certainly no one who liked me.

  While I waited for the coast to clear, apathetic about the gelatinous glob running down my cheek, a wind kicked up and dried my eyes, the tears having fallen through pain rather than misery. A single sheet from a week-old newspaper, discarded on the cold and damp streets, lifted in the breeze and swept into my face, where it plastered itself, the phlegm acting as an adhesive.

  I sat up, the sheet stuck to my face. The movement was excruciating; my back, stomach, ribs, and shoulders screamed out in agony. I peeled the paper from my face, drawn to the smudged words on its front.

  The Butcher Strikes Again.

  A serial killer that had stalked the streets of this county and the next. A legend, five years in the making. A couple of victims had been teenagers not much older than Darren Henderson, kids who were abducted, brutally murdered, and then butchered. Their limbs had practically been torn from their bodies.

  I straightened out a few wrinkles in the paper, using my lap as support.

  “… 27-year-old nurse … in her own home … reportedly hanged with her own …”

  The rest was indecipherable but I already knew the story, as did everyone else in the country. His most recent victim worked as an emergency room nurse at the local hospital, a place where the inept found employment and the funeral homes found business. She had worked for an exhausting thirty straight hours and had gone home, informing her colleagues and friends that she would probably sleep for the next two days. The Butcher had followed, murdered her in her sleep, and then worked his own tireless shift, spending the night and the next morning tearing her to pieces. Her friends discovered her decaying body three days later, hanging from a light fixture in her bedroom, the macabre scarf of her large intestine strung around her neck.

  The newspaper article brought a smile to my face, a flicker of delight that twitched through the agony. I was thrilled to live in times of a legend. A killer with more infamy and respect than Jack the Ripper, and deservedly so. Here was a man who had butchered more than fourteen young men and women without preference. A man who killed purely for the joy of killing.

  In years to come, he would be remembered. Even if they caught him tomorrow, next week, or next month, bringing an end to his spree, his reign of terror, these five years of reverence and fear, would never be forgotten.

  I rose to my feet with a smile on my face. In my head, I was back in my happy place, only now I had company to help me murder the delinquent who had made my schooldays a living hell.

  ——

  School was over for the Easter holidays. Spring break—two weeks without the misery of being surrounded by tedious people who hated me, and who I viewed with similar contempt.

  As I strolled along the pavement, the noise of my fellow pupils faded to a mere background holler. The remaining few were making their way to houses on the edge of Whitegate, the rest having already boarded the buses and cars that would take them home. One of those buses passed my house, stopping just a few feet from the rusty gate that s
naked down a gravel path to my doorway, but I preferred to walk. The thirty minutes it took to trudge through the streets and fields to my home was usually enough to force the endorphins into numbing the pain.

  It didn’t matter if I returned home in this state, because I was going back to an empty house. In the past, I had hidden my distress from my father, despite his apathy to my regular beatings, but his indifferent demeanor wouldn’t be there to greet my distress. He had taken a short working holiday, keeping up with an erratic schedule that saw him take sporadic flights from our homestead, sometimes for a week or two at a time.

  “Don’t be throwing any parties,” he often mocked before his excursions. “But if you do, leave some booze for me!”

  Ever the joker, never the comedian. I kept up appearances. I smiled and nodded when I thought it was necessary. But despite being drawn from the same vein, we were completely different people.

  My father was a pleasant man, a friendly man. He wasn’t overpowering, rarely spoke out of turn, and never interrupted anyone. He was a man seemingly trained in social etiquette and a man who made it his goal in life to please everyone he encountered. He had his moments, of course, moments of vicious anger that seemed to flare up out of nowhere and for no discernible reason, but I was usually the only one to witness them, and I rarely minded. If anything, I was relieved to see him angry; it was comforting to know that he was human and not a machine hell bent on pleasing the entire fucking human race.

  My mother also saw him angry, and one of my earliest memories was of a fight between them. Her face a picture of regret and fear; his the flared red of an archetypal psychopath.

  He beat her to within an inch of her life and seemed to enjoy himself. I watched him tear the fear from her frail face and then mock her sobbed pleas. When he saw me sitting wide-eyed on the bottom step, his face a snarling, frothy mess of madness—mine an ambivalent collage of fear and confusion—something changed inside him. In an instant, he reverted to the innocent man everyone knew and loved. He helped my mother to her feet, apologized more times than was necessary, made her a cup of coffee, and then spent the day doting on her. He didn’t acknowledge me until the following morning. The incident wasn’t mentioned.

  My mother left a year after that. I was eight at the time. She never said good-bye; never gave me a reason. She didn’t even leave a note. I didn’t blame myself; I didn’t blame my father. I blamed her. If either of us had meant anything to her, regardless of what we had done, she would have at least said good-bye.

  “Good afternoon, Herman!”

  A little old lady popped her head out from behind a bush she had been pruning. I smiled at her, watching her wrinkled features morph into something that also resembled a smile. Her skin, worn like a tanned sheet over a science-class skeleton, looked like a piece of balled-up paper someone had frantically tried to straighten out.

  “Afternoon, Mrs. Jones, how are you today?”

  “Well, you know.” She put her hands on her hips, exhaled deeply.

  I prepared myself for a long lecture. A boring story about a boring day from a person I gave less than two fucks about. She said something about her cat. It had either died or had given birth; I wasn’t really paying attention and it didn’t matter. She referred to the cat by name, despite the fact that I had never even seen it, let alone did I know its fucking name. I did my best to pretend I was interested in what she had to say. I had seen my father do something similar on a number of occasions. I knew he couldn’t really be interested in some of the shit people said to him, it wasn’t possible, but not only did he stand and listen, he did so with enthusiasm.

  I tried to be like him. Despite my apathy to his existence and my hatred of his social acceptance, a part of me respected his ability to conform to the mundane protocols of a tedious society without the slightest modicum of visible resentment.

  “Well?” Mrs. Jones said, seemingly not for the first time.

  My efforts were futile. She already looked annoyed. I let my smile fade, allowing a natural look of disinterest to take over.

  “You haven’t been listening to a word I’ve said, have you?”

  I was a little offended that she was angry. If anything, she should be embarrassed that her story had sent me into a fucking trance. That’s the problem with neighbors—they force themselves to adhere to the pathetic principles of small talk in an effort to be nice and neighborly, when the nicest thing they could do is shut the fuck up and let everyone get on with their day. I don’t want to hear about your fucking cat and I don’t care if it’s going to get warmer, wetter, or windier later in the week; if I did I would check the forecast instead of relying on some dimwit who stops me in the street because they live near me and thinks that gives them the right to interrupt my peace with their banal bullshit.

  I tried my best to suppress my rising anger. I cleared my throat and averted my eyes from hers when a thought of ripping them out of her cardboard skull and stuffing them between her accusing lips entered my mind.

  “I’m sorry,” I said with an apologetic shake of my head.

  She sounded a disapproving tut tut noise, her head shaking from side to side like a lopsided Nodding Dog, her bony hands pressed to her hips all the while. “You’re nothing like your father,” she said with a sneer.

  I nodded and hung my head. “Tell me about it,” I muttered when she was out of earshot.

  I slumped down the path to my front door and tried the key in the lock, but it didn’t turn. It took me a few more tries before I realized the door was already unlocked. I figured my dad had canceled or delayed his trip, and that his blank expression would be waiting for me on the other side of the door. He would be ready to ignore my distress and gloss over my wounds by making me a cup of tea and watching television in silence for the rest of the night, punctuating the sitcom laugh-tracks, soap opera exaggerations, and newsroom gloom with small talk and sexism.

  I found my father in the middle of the living room floor. His expression was blank, but it wasn’t aimed at me. He was lying flat-out, staring through lifeless eyes at the dusty light fixture that hung from the yellowed ceiling like an abscess on jaundiced skin. His left arm was elevated, casually flopped onto the brown leather sofa; his head was resting against the cold laminate floor. A small trickle of blood had leaked out from underneath his head, drying and darkening on the wood like congealed varnish.

  The front door was still open, my left hand on its edge, my right still grasping the keys. I didn’t know how I was supposed to react, what I was supposed to do.

  A strong stench hung in the air, something I had never encountered before fused with plenty of smells that I had. My father was a clean freak, and when he wasn’t scrubbing or dusting, he was bleaching the surfaces and the floor. The pungent smell of bleach and scented polish had become impregnated with the smell of feces. The odor faced me like a wall as I finally found the courage to move forward, leaving the door open.

  My heart was pounding and my legs were trembling, but I made it over to my father’s body. I knelt down on unsafe legs, stretched a wobbly arm, and touched the flesh around his neck. He was cold and I couldn’t find a pulse.

  I looked into the face of my father. Eyes that had previously shone with utter contentment and flared with demonic rage were now blank and void of life. The blood that had pooled on the floor came from a small cut at the base of his head. There was no blood anywhere else. No cuts, no obvious signs of injury. All of my medical know-how came from TV shows, but any idiot could spot if someone had been bludgeoned to death or not, and he hadn’t.

  I sat by his side, staring blankly for what could have been minutes but may have been hours.

  2

  The flashing lights and the pace of the ambulance seemed a little redundant as it screeched to a stop outside my house. My father was dead—I told them as much over the phone—no amount of haste was going to save him.

  The paramedics spoke in dulcet tones and went about their macabre business in relati
ve silence, bagging his body and carrying it to the back of the ambulance. They said it was most likely a heart attack, which I had already suspected. Years of bottled-up anger, a lazy lifestyle, and a bad diet had finally caught up with him. The paramedics had a practiced look of pity, but they didn’t really seem to know what to do with me. I was too old to console by getting on one knee, patting me on the shoulder, and telling me everything would be all right. I was too cold and indifferent for a hug.

  “Where is your mother?” one of them asked when my father’s body had been carted away like a broken appliance.

  I shrugged. I had been asking myself the same question for years.

  “Is she alive?” he pushed.

  A little insensitive, but I understood his intentions.

  “She doesn’t live here anymore.”

  He nodded slowly and fired an inquisitive glance at his partner, standing idle by the back of the ambulance.

  “Someone will be here for you soon. Is there anyone who can look after you?” he asked with a furtive glance down the street.

  A few neighbors had appeared to watch the unfolding drama, their heads popping out of open windows and through hedges like predators sensing prey. The heads that were close enough to hear the raised voice of the paramedic ducked out of sight.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  He gave me a creased smile, a half nod, and then he disappeared. The lights on the ambulance turned off, the speed minimal as they carried the deceased cargo to the hospital.

  Ten minutes later, two police officers came to the house. They began by offering their deepest regrets and sympathies, and then they invited themselves in and asked me questions.

  They asked about the cut above my eye, sustained during Darren’s earlier attack. They asked which school I went to, their fine-tuned observational skills failing to notice the large crest on the school uniform I was wearing. They asked how long my journey to and from school was; if I walked, if I took the bus, if there was ever any variation in whether I did or did not.