This Is How You Die Page 16

  I picked up my paper, slipped it under my arm, and turned to leave. “You’ll see.”

  I took the paper to a nearby bench, carefully positioned myself in the center so no one would feel the desire to sit next to me, and continued to flick through the pages. I found what I sought in the back: three whole pages of personal advertisements—a plethora of singles, swingers, and sex nuts spouting their personal wares in small, neatly laid-out columns.

  The ads were an assault course of abbreviations, juvenility, and cringe-inducing desperation. One middle-aged man wanted his perfect girl, holding hopes to the highest that he would find someone who was attractive, athletic, and professional, as well as three different synonyms (and one abbreviation) for good-humored, and two for intelligent. He was clearly none of those things himself. His ad was akin to a lottery ticket.

  God loves a trier but the world hates a dickhead.

  Another man didn’t seem as picky, stating that he liked his women fat or thin and didn’t have a preference for features, hair color, or creed. I skimmed the first two pages, bypassing more desperation and impossible hopes. I found the gay section on the final half of the final page and slowed down, reading intently.

  Among a plethora of poor spelling and egregious grammar, one of the ads stood out. It was longer than the others, the writer presumably having bought two squares. And there were no abbreviations, spelling mistakes, or grammatical errors. It stank of desperation and lies, of someone who was possibly just as confused sexually as I was and had been living a lie for at least some of his life. This was the twenty-first century, after all, with speed dating, online dating, and mobile dating. There was very little need for classified dating ads and the only people who used them—those who could actually spell their names—were hiding something.

  He posted his email address, so when I returned home, I sent him a brief email. I told him I was a professional looking for some fun. I told him I was “new to the scene” and “needed someone to show me around.” I felt goose pimples crawling on my skin as I wrote it. It was terrible. Cringeworthy. But it was better than the truth, and it seemed like the sort of tripe that would wash with someone who signed his safety away to a personal ad.

  The dating scene wasn’t for me, and even if it was, I struggled to imagine what scenario I would be comfortable with. There were very few men or women who interested me in this world, and none of them did so for sexual reasons. A blind date would be tedious and would result in me trying to kill them before dessert just so I could have an excuse to leave. Dating sites were the worst, a place for big egos and bigger idiots where so many beautiful people were available that everyone felt entitled and capable of shooting above their station. I would have tolerated meeting people at clubs—that way I could only talk to those who intrigued me and only if there was anyone intriguing to begin with—but the atmosphere of such places was anathema to me. With so many sweaty, drunk idiots, it would be difficult to stop myself from killing every last one of them in order to assist with the advancement of the human species.

  I expected a reply to the email but I sent my phone number out of courtesy. He phoned me the following afternoon.

  “Is that Mr. Anon?”

  He sounded posh, which took me by surprise.

  “It is.”

  “Rather cliché, don’t you think?”

  He also sounded like a dick, but that came as less of a surprise. I told him I was nervous and wanted some assistance. I noted an edge to his voice, an irritation, an urgency. It didn’t take me long to ascertain he was probably in a heterosexual marriage. After all, other than serial killers, adulterers, and plain weirdos, who uses the classified ads?

  I told him to meet me several miles away from my house on a street corner. Anyone else would have been worried at that point—few people will meet strangers on street corners for anonymous sex—but that was the beauty of the classified ads and of a married man who wanted to get his end away with a homosexual virgin. I had used the classifieds before. They were a good way to satisfy some urges and kill some time. But I didn’t meet all my victims on there, at least not the special ones.

  A job had never suited me, but I still needed to earn some money. In the beginning, I tried to get work in factories and as a laborer, but the hours were tedious and the people were worse. My lack of official documents also made it nearly impossible to get anything worthwhile. I had been offered cash-in-hand jobs, possibly on the assumption that I was an immigrant without any legal papers and not a serial killer on the run. But the cash was meager and would barely cover the cost of a lunchtime sandwich.

  I earned my way by killing. When it eventually occurred to me, it seemed obvious, but it took some time to do so. Killing was so natural to me and getting away with it was easy. When there is no motive and no link to the victim, few killers are caught, and that’s why serial killers become serial killers and not just murderers. I wasn’t a hit man, and would have never associated with any gangs, certainly not those who considered me as anything other than their superior. I was only doing what my father had done, satisfying my urges by killing anyone who I found interesting, anyone I deemed worthy of death. I wasn’t continuing his legacy anymore, but my methods and my motive was the same. In the beginning, I killed for pleasure and for experience. I was honing my craft. But I also killed to get the money I needed to survive.

  My first murder for cash was a woman I met through the classifieds. She was wealthy and looking for a young and kinky man. A bit rough. I gave her more rough than she could have ever hoped for and I took her for every penny. I cleaned out her purse and her bank accounts, and I also took all of her jewelry before dumping her body. I had also used the Internet a number of times. My favorite pastime was to pose as a young girl, getting horny old perverts to meet me in secluded areas, bringing enough cash for us to run away together. It was a win-win for me. They brought a lot of money with them and they were unlikely to tell anyone where they were going. Few of them had anyone to tell.

  ——

  I picked him up an hour later. He was well-dressed, in his mid-forties, but his suit was well worn and creased, as was his face. He was a businessman, his attire and his stance gave that away, and he also had a fair bit of money.

  He flashed me a smile when he entered the car, but it wasn’t a contented smile. He was on edge, still without his fix. I would have preferred him relaxed—that would have made my job easier—but if the fix he needed required me to suck on whatever horrid member he kept hidden in his polyester pants, it wasn’t going to happen.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  He was tanned and it wasn’t fake. It didn’t have that chemical taint so common with self-tan products, and he didn’t have the raccoon eye indicative of spray-on tan or sun-beds. If he was married then the tan line of his wedding ring would have been obvious, but in an effort to hide that, he was wearing a bandage that covered two fingers on his left hand.

  “Broken finger,” he said when he caught me looking.

  I gave him a smile and then drove on. When we arrived at my flat, he nearly bolted out of the car. I let him into the house and offered him a drink, at which point he excused himself and went to the bathroom. I could have poisoned his drink at that point, but that would have been too easy and poison wasn’t my style. Instead I waited for him to come back and then realized that he had been ingesting a poison of his own.

  The edginess had gone. He was smiling and he looked content. Whatever he had snorted or shot up hadn’t fixed the tiredness or the red streaks in his eyes, but it put a smile on his face and had calmed him down.

  “So …” I asked, playing the part of the anxious fool. “Where do we begin?”

  He took the glass of whiskey from my hand, sat down on the couch, and then patted the seat next to him. “Let’s relax first,” he said. “We can see where we go from there.”

  I wasn’t great at relaxing in strange company. I had developed enough social skills to fake it, but I wasn’t sincere. I d
idn’t have a pocket full of chemical glee to make the anxiety go away.

  As the night wore on, I realized that I was correct in my initial assumptions: he was a prick of the highest order. He was a narcissist, an ignorant fool, and he was also a terrible liar. Not only did he drop several names and contradict himself on stories of meeting celebrities—most of whom I had never heard of—but he also told me that he had been single for ten years, even though he accidentally dropped the name of his wife, and what I assumed were his kids, into the conversation. He was apparently an “openly gay” man who was actually so far in the closet he was one step away from Narnia. He also told me that he was a self-help guru, a yoga master, and a student of insight meditation, when it was obvious that the only insight he got came in crystallized form and could be traded for a blow job.

  I have nothing against the homosexual lifestyle. All forms of human sexuality confuse and disgust me equally. If anything, I am more understanding of the homosexual side of it. To me, it seems that a relationship with two men or two women will have fewer disagreements and fewer arguments than a heterosexual relationship. In terms of procreation, it has its disadvantages, but who needs more humans?

  Once he finished talking about himself, he told me more about himself. We had moved into the kitchen by then. I had gone in to get away from him and to pour myself a large drink, but he followed me like some energetic kid with abandonment issues and an inability to shut the fuck up.

  “… I hate people like that,” he was saying. “So stuck up their own ass. They need a good slap, or a good fuck, if you know what I mean.” He laughed and shoved me on the arm. I wondered how long it would take to squeeze the life out of him if I started now. “I also hate the ones who think they know it all, like they have life sorted out. I mean, I’ve come close, but those guys? They haven’t got a clue. That’s why they’re stuck in their nine-to-five with their obnoxious kids and their ugly wives. That’s why they have a shit job, a shit car, and a home that’s falling to bits—”

  He either didn’t understand irony or he didn’t realize that he was talking about himself in third person.

  “You’re smiling,” he noted with a lethargic and somewhat drunken nod. “You agree with me, don’t you?”

  “You could say—”

  “Of course you do.” He paused to take a sip of whiskey, making the pause as short as possible in case anyone else tried to steal his limelight. “You know …” He pointed the glass at me as he prepared another rant. “I think it’s people in general. I’m not a people fan. They do so much that pisses me off, so much that I can’t stand.”

  I could agree with that, but there wasn’t a hope in hell that he would let me.

  “I hate people who love themselves. I hate people who project their own failings onto others. I hate the old. I hate the young. I hate the weak. I hate people who state ‘there is nothing worse than’ and then follow it up with something trivial, because believe me, there are many things worse than overcooked steaks, running out of eggs when you’re baking a cake, or whatever other shit they come up with. I hate people who pronounce cashew like a sneeze. I hate the news: why do we only hear about the deaths, the wars, the rapes and the football results?”

  He was on a roll. I allowed him to continue and he allowed me to move behind him, almost forgetting there was something else in the room other than his own ego.

  “—I hate religion, all of them, take your pick. I hate the fact that we’re all dominated by television, that there are no new ideas, no more great minds, and that everything we do and everything we are is dictated by some stupid fucking TV show penned by some coked-up fucking idiot in Hollywood. I hate the modern world, the computers, the super-quick, super-sleek shit that serves to turn us all into zombies and—”

  At that point, I opened up his throat with a kitchen knife. His skin split like a ripe tomato and ran a torrent of crimson down his suit.

  I wasn’t offended by what he said. I agreed with most of it. I just didn’t like his extroverted way of expressing, or anything else he had done or said. If anything, the diatribe of personal dislikes had been the highlight of our date, and it was the memory I retained of him as I dragged him into the bedroom, carved the smug expression out of his face, and carefully flayed his skin. The bedroom was set up for such an event, covered from floor to ceiling with sheets of plastic that would be disposed of later. I had actually gotten the idea from a television show—ironic, as I doubted my date would approve.

  The killing happened far too quickly for my liking and I took very little satisfaction from it. It felt like routine, as if my hands were moving on a predesigned course. It wasn’t that it was too easy—although it was—or that killing for me had been rendered monotonous on the whole, because it hadn’t. I just didn’t enjoy killing “innocent” men as much as innocent women, not anymore anyway. Darren had been fun, but he was far from innocent and deserved everything he got. His brother and his father, although accidental, had also been somewhat fun, but more because of the anger I had felt toward Darren.

  I had enjoyed killing the perverts and the pedophiles I met online. I didn’t particularly like kids and wouldn’t think twice about killing them, but there was still something so innately sickening about those people. The children are the ones I hate the least, the ones who have yet to adapt to the world and have yet to turn into the horrible, despicable adults who they are destined to become.

  I had hoped this murder would provide a nice change, that it would take me back to those early days. But it didn’t. I couldn’t put a finger on why I got more satisfaction from women. It wasn’t sexual, I had no interest in that—it just felt right. It had always bothered me, and this egotistical prick had been an experiment more than anything, part of a desire I had to feel as much when murdering men as I did when murdering women. But that experiment didn’t have the desired outcome.

  I enjoyed killing for vengeance, there was no doubt about that, and when it came to the female population, I felt that vengeance and I got the same satisfaction, even if they had done nothing to me personally.

  “Odd, isn’t it?” I asked the skinless corpse of the talkative idiot on my bedroom floor. Humans pride themselves on being different, on their individuality, but deep down they all look alike and in death they all act alike. This man seemed to pride himself on his uniqueness more than others, but underneath his skin, he was exactly the same as the next man.

  It had occurred to me that I could have been homosexual. The truth was that I could see the beauty in people, I could see the things that made both men and women attractive, but still neither of them appealed to me. If anything, something in me leaned more toward women, and to a certain kind of woman. Irene Henderson, the first woman I had ever spared and one who I had dreamed of killing many times since, had been one of those women, but there was nothing sexual about it.

  I cut off his penis and popped it in a pickle jar after removing the pickle. It wasn’t very big, which might have gone some way to explaining why he was such a pompous, overcompensating prick. I had been a little grossed out by the penis when he was alive, as I was with female parts, but once they were dead, I didn’t mind. After that, it was merely a hunk of meat deprived of the filthy connotations it’d had when it was attached to the human.

  There was a cupboard underneath the stairs where I kept all of my souvenirs, safely tucked away behind a false wall. I moved around a lot, but wherever I went, I took those mementoes with me. I rarely ever took things that people would notice missing. That would only create problems for me down the line, and I got the same amount of satisfaction from collecting something small and insignificant. It all depended on how satisfying the murder had been, on how long it would linger in my memory. This one would struggle to remain in my memory for long, but the penis would be an apt reminder. The victim was a cock.

  I smiled to myself as I put the jar next to a small box. It was the same box my father had used to store his memories, the same box that had led me on
this path. It was a good reminder of that part of my life and of my father’s legend, but it was also a disappointing one, as I had let my father down.

  I never quite assumed the role of my father’s legacy. I did try, but things didn’t go as planned. Darren was supposed to be home alone that night, with his parents and his brother spending the night at a relative’s house up north and him insisting, as usual, that he would rather spend the holidays with his friends. But something changed, something went wrong. I had already anticipated and planned for a party or a gathering of his friends at the house, but I never expected his family to be there. I never expected his mother to be there. There was no turning back, though. I wanted to do it. I wanted to kill. I was ready. It was a trial by fire, but it was a rushed, messy trial and one that plastered my face all over the front pages.

  Still, I went there to lose my virginity, and I did just that. I went there to see if killing was as exciting and satisfying as I thought it would be, and I discovered that it was even better than I had ever imagined. The Butcher died that night. I was too young and too sloppy to have been connected with him. A night of violence brought on by years of bullying had nothing to do with the clinical, vicious acts of a calculated killer. In the eyes of the press, he had gone into retirement. No one had found any evidence to the contrary.

  I wanted a large kill count because I wanted people to fear me and to respect me. I wanted the legend that my father came so close to being, but there were kills that I was not proud of, kills that I did not enjoy and made me feel dirty, and now this was one of them. It had nothing to do with his sexual orientation, or the fact that he was an obnoxious prick, but more to do with the fact that my previous victims had been young, beautiful women, the sort of women who made an impact wherever they went. Their deaths would terrify women all over the country, a tightening fist around the hearts of everyone who had known them. That was the sort of fear that created legends, the sort of fear I lived to create. But no one would miss this guy. No one would fear me because of his death.