This Is How You Die Page 19

  “Hello,” a voice croaked as a static charge hissed through the intercom.

  “Grandma,” I said with my finger firmly pressed, feeding my flesh with a small static shock. “It’s me. Herman.” I cringed at that. It didn’t feel real. I hadn’t used that name in years.

  There was a pause, as if she was trying to work out who Herman was and why he should know her. She coughed into the intercom, groaned something unappreciative, and then said: “Hold on.”

  I waited for a few minutes. Across the street, in one of the symmetrical houses, an elderly man watched me from his living room window. His hand pressed the net curtain against the wall, his spectacled eyes boring suspiciously into me. I gave him a friendly wave. He gave me an uncommitted nod and continued to stare.

  The door clicked open and a small, frail face popped through the gap, smiling unsurely at me. I grinned back.

  “You wanna let me in?”

  She paused, weighing the question, then she stepped back, shifting her weight slowly out of the way before pulling the door open after her. I walked straight into the living room and took a seat on a sofa reserved for guests and therefore never used. A dust cloud popped into the air as I plonked onto the old and tattered leather.

  She clawed her way across the floor after me, struggling with every methodical step. She lay down her cane by the side of a high-backed chair with all the necessary amenities—including a built-in chamber pot—placed around it. She gave me a big smile, her wrinkled face like a depressed bulldog.

  “So …” her thin blue lips mouthed slowly. “What can I do you for?”

  I gave her my warmest smile and then told her, “I’m here to kill you, Grandma.”

  “That’s nice,” she said genuinely.

  I nodded. “I think I’ll also take all your money.”

  She studied my face and my lips as I spoke, the smile still on her face. “Okay,” she agreed.

  “And then I’m going to cut up your corpse and post you bit by bit to every one of your nosy fucking neighbors.”

  She nodded and looked away. A wooden tray with more compartments than a stationery cupboard sat in front of the chair on a set of squeaky, silver wheels. On its top shelf rested an assortment of magazines, TV guides, and a large box of biscuits. She picked up the box and thrust it toward me.

  I shook my head. “I prefer to murder on an empty stomach,” I told her.

  Her arm remained stretched; her eyes still studied me intently.

  I sighed deeply, shifted forward on the edge of the sofa, and raised my voice as loud as I could. “No thank you, Grandma,” I yelled.

  She finally retracted her arm. I dropped backward into the comfort of the sofa.

  She was hard work. She had been deaf most of her life. My father had bought her a hearing aid a few years before he died and she wore it when she saw fit, which was never. Since his death, it had been gathering dust in one of her many drawers along with keepsakes of a family long since dead and a life long since lost, and her vast collection of biscuits. It didn’t really matter anymore; no one came to visit her. Except, of course, for nosy detectives who couldn’t keep their opinions to themselves.

  I shifted forward on my seat again, a thought suddenly occurring to me. “Who cuts your grass?” I asked her loudly.

  She grinned back.

  I rolled my eyes, lifted my voice higher. “Who cuts your grass?”

  “Glass?” she said with a confused look at the window.

  “Grass!”

  “Grass, dear?”

  “Yes,” I said with an exaggerated nod. “Who cuts it?”

  She looked from me to the window and then back again. She grinned, nodded, and then fell silent.

  “Ah, for fuck’s sake,” I said, settling back into the chair and picking up a newspaper.

  She owned the house, but I doubted she paid anyone to cut the grass. She didn’t leave the house and I wasn’t sure she was capable of using the phone since it didn’t have an amplifier attached. There was a good chance she would assume it was broken or that people were constantly hanging up on her.

  The council probably maintained the houses in the street at the expense of the government, but I didn’t want to push for answers. It wasn’t that important to me and I didn’t know where the conversation would end up.

  She slowly rose from her chair, groaning and heaving with every increment. I didn’t make a move to help her; we both had too much pride for that.

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” she told me with a meek smile.

  I grinned back over the top of the newspaper. I had been reading a piece on politics that was topical three months ago and was now probably just as outdated as the milk she would pour into my tea.

  She used to have home help, and she probably still did. They were nurses who were supposed to visit her on a regular basis, making sure she didn’t choke to death on her own sense of self-loathing. But I doubted they bothered to visit and I was sure they didn’t care. The newspaper would have been brought by one of them, right before they fished through her purse, pissed in her mouthwash, and shat in her kettle.

  “Milk, two sugars, right?” she asked as she bumbled her way toward the kitchen.

  “Not for me, Grandma. I’m good.”

  She mumbled something in reply. She probably hadn’t heard me and had imagined her own answer. She would make the tea anyway.

  At the edge of the living room lay a tattered old rug, as old as she was and just as weathered. She crossed onto its surface like a toddler on the first ominous step of a mighty staircase. When she moved across it, clumps of it moved with her, her bony legs and beaten cane kicking up the material like some miserable, malfunctioning, mechanical toy. When she had passed the rug, it looked like a tartan sand dune.

  I rose to flatten it, leveling it out. She always looked where she was going. She took so long to move that her eyes never carelessly left her path, but if she noticed it and tried to rectify it herself she’d be there all day.

  I imagined her not noticing the bumpy rug and envisioned her tripping over it on her way back, ending her life and my dilemma by splitting her head open on the sideboard, or simply crumbling to dust as she clattered against the solid floor, her bones capitulating inside her decrepit body.

  That wasn’t fair to her, though. I was there to kill her, but she deserved something a little less grotesque than that.

  She gave me a steaming cup of tea, which had almost cooled and emptied by the time she hobbled over and lowered it toward me. I took it with both hands, gave her a smile, and then sipped as I watched her hobble back to the kitchen to fetch her own cup. Before she returned, I emptied the tepid tea into a flowerpot.

  “What’s wrong with the door?” I said at the top of my voice.

  She mumbled something into her tea, took a sip, swallowed, and then pointed to the intercom system that rested on the arm of her chair. It was a normal-sized phone with a huge red flashing light, presumably to alert her when the buzzing tone inevitably failed.

  “Knackered,” she said with a dismal shrug.

  “Isn’t there someone who can fix it?” I shouted.

  She grinned back.

  “Fix it!” I clarified with a yell.

  “I can’t, dear,” she told me. “I’m not very good with that sort of thing.”

  I glared at her for a while, mentally taking back my previous thoughts about her not deserving to die on the crumpled carpet.

  “A man was here to see you a little while ago,” she told me.

  “I know.”

  “A policeman.”

  “I know. And you gave him all of my photographs, didn’t you?”

  “I gave him all the pictures of you as a little boy, I did. Odd that he wanted them, wasn’t it?”

  “It was, yes. And it was even more odd that you gave them to him. What if he was a pervert?” I said at the top of my lungs, making sure I was heard.

  “Well,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not my place to judge,
is it?”

  She was an amusing woman, but she was on her last legs and she was going to become a nuisance. She had probably already done all that she could do to get in my way, but I was worried about my father, about what she knew and what she would give away. I doubted that she knew about him being The Butcher, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t holding onto some incriminating evidence that would implicate him.

  My dad was dead and a small part of me wanted the world to know what a great man he was. I wanted them to know that he was the man who terrified a nation for a decade, but then they would also find out how he died. They would find out about his life. If they knew that the beast from their nightmares had wet the bed as a child, been involved in a difficult marriage, and then died of a heart attack, he would lose his edge somewhat.

  “I was wondering,” I said. “Are you scared of dying?”

  She shook her head immediately. “I welcome it, son. My life isn’t much of a life. No one comes to see me, no one treats me like a human being, no one cares anymore.” I was rather impressed by that. Times had changed; in the past, a lot of what she said was tedious or obscene, she never did profound. “Also, I shit myself the other day and the stench was unbearable.”

  I sighed.

  “When your guts start producing that sort of toxic waste,” she continued, “and your ass doesn’t have the power to keep it in, then you know you’re not long for this world.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, nodding slowly. “So, how would you like to die? Hypothetically.”

  “Hypothetically?” she said, twisting her face. “No, no, that sounds far too brutal for me. I’d much rather go in my sleep.”

  “What—”

  “Or as I’m being ravaged by a big black man with a monstrous penis.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I could go either way.”

  I spent the next few hours with my grandmother and I actually enjoyed the time. My throat was a little hoarse from all the talking, and I was sure that half of what I shouted was missed, but she seemed to enjoy herself and I tolerated much of it. She reminded me of my father, her son-in-law, a man I hadn’t thought too long and hard about over the years, but a man I respected.

  We watched television together and she gave me a running commentary on the latest happenings in soap operas, before offering her opinions on the news. It seemed she had very little understanding of what was going on in the world, but as far as I could tell, she hated everyone in it. From minorities and immigrants, to musicians, celebrities, and even the entire southern hemisphere, which she insisted wasn’t to be trusted because they couldn’t even get their seasons in the right order. I hadn’t seen the woman for years, but I found myself admiring her.

  As soon as darkness fell, she drifted off to sleep and I made my move. She had plenty of strong narcotics in the house but most of them were in tablet form, and I didn’t want her to spend her final few moments choking down a handful of tablets before waiting for them to kick in. I had a small vial of morphine I had taken from my homosexual fling that would be perfect for her.

  I filled up a syringe, bought from a local pharmacy, and then searched for a vein on her arm. She looked so peaceful as she slept. I pricked her skin and injected the drug. I then apologized, said my final good-bye, and waited.

  She never opened her eyes again. Within a matter of minutes, she had stopped breathing.

  5

  Happy holidays!” she called with a joyful wave. “Have a good Christmas!”

  I hate that. There is nothing wrong with a simple goodbye, or even a smile to punctuate the end of the conversation and the point where the parties involved can respectfully move on. She doesn’t want me to have a happy Christmas—a happy Christmas for me is one spent ripping her throat open and watching her peppy joy gush onto her cream carpets.

  I grinned back, hiding a sneer. I instinctively looked to the case I carried. It looked nondescript, harmless. I could easily pass as a businessman, a smiling, caffeine-fueled solicitor off to ruin someone else’s life and set another criminal free, or a teacher set to poison the minds of more hopeless future criminals. But it stocked a lot more than papers, books, and the pursuit of the capitalistic dream.

  She beamed at me as I dragged my attention back to her Prozac smile. “See you soon!” she said.

  Fuck you, bitch.

  She didn’t even know who I was and had interpreted my vacant smile as a friendly invitation to a brief conversation. I knew who she was, although it had been fifteen years since I had last seen her and a lot had happened since then. She was the vicar’s wife, born in Stepford with a stick up her ass and a silver spoon between her smugly pursed lips. She was everything I resented about the holidays and religion. I watched her with a look of utter contempt as she greeted the next person to pass her on the street, a look of reciprocated joy on both of their faces, a glimmer of something else on his. He was probably sticking it to her when her husband was at church sticking it to all the little choir boys. I knew the little cunt when I was growing up. I had sought solace in his church when Darren and his cretinous cronies were chasing me. I tried to hide in the confessional as the bullies waited outside. Instead of providing refuge and doing the Christian thing, he had thrown me to the lions. I still held a grudge, but that wasn’t why I was here.

  I turned from his wife and her fling in disgust, catching a snippet about some odious fucking newsletter. These people disgusted me—more skeletons in their closets than most and not an ounce of irony about their twisted little secret lives. It was for people like this that I wanted there to be an afterlife; a God and a devil. Just to know that when they arrived at the pearly gates, he was wiping away their smug expressions and sending them down to hell, where I’d be waiting for them, preparing to spend eternity perpetually murdering them.

  I made my way to the top of the street, into the backroads and onto the path that led to the church. The Old Lady was a three-hundred-year-old piece of architectural brilliance that had once been a beacon of light and hope in my hometown, but had since degraded into a place of bullshit and blasphemy. Easter egg hunts; weddings between airheads who should be barred from marriage, never mind encouraged to procreate; and christenings for lower-class fuckwits who should have gone the way of a worthless Spartan child, thrown into a pit and left to die.

  The Old Lady was still a home for the local religious types, who were thankfully few and far between. If I had been christened then I would have been christened there, but my father was no man of God and he was no hypocrite.

  My grandmother lived on the outskirts of town. River Acres was untouched by the hellhole that was Whitegate and unspoiled by the detritus that lived there. I spent the night in a local B&B not too far from where she lived, but ventured into the town in the morning for the first time since the night I lost my virginity. I had no fond memories of what I had left behind, but as I sat on the bus and watched the wilderness rush by my window, I remembered the journey I had taken fifteen years ago, following the demise of my unfortunate uncle, the somewhat-accidental deaths of Darren’s father and brother, and the joyous deaths of those four imbeciles. I had taken everything that I could carry, everything that was important to me or my father, and I had destroyed the rest. At the epicenter of the fire that destroyed my home were all of the things that I didn’t want anyone to see, the things that could implicate my father as The Butcher.

  I had always intended to get away unseen after my first murders, to be a shadow as my father had been, but that night I had been too impulsive. I had made far too many mistakes. I got lucky, and after that, I vowed never to act on impulse again.

  In the years that followed, I did my best to change my appearance. This was aided by my growth into adulthood, and despite my young face having been all over the news at the time, no one ever made the connection. I became a creature of the night after that, and I took to wearing hoods, hats, and anything else that could shadow my face when I was out and about. I honed my skills, realized my mistakes,
and learned from them. I had done well to practice restraint in the past but had failed in the moment, acting on impulse, so I learned to restrain myself and to think about my actions even during the kill.

  That fear of being recognized and that obsession with disguise also led to my new persona, although the mask was there for witnesses and for CCTV, as I knew my victims would never live to tell anyone who I was. The mask was a mottled gray, a diseased skull. I found it in the house of one of my first victims, someone who had provided refuge, someone I had killed for money after they had tried to exploit me for something else. It wasn’t spotted with blood or guts, it wasn’t your typical Halloween mask, but it was chilling. It was a prop for a play, a rendition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” It had been a story I knew little about when I was younger, but one I became fascinated with after discovering the mask. That was purely coincidental—although the connection had been made by a few journalists—but in time, when the plague came, laid a path of devastation, and then departed, it would be clear to everyone.

  The Old Lady church was tucked away in a grim and uninspiring swath of woodland that enclosed an overgrown graveyard. No one had been buried there for two hundred years; the names that hadn’t been covered by moss and dirt, or lost to the elements, were forgotten, dying along with the people buried there.

  Death had always struck me as a bizarre ritual. Nobody wanted to die and nobody wanted their loved ones to die, so life was all about clinging on in desperation and then staying around for as long as possible, in one form or another. There were only so many graveyards in the world, only so much space. The world wasn’t growing, but people didn’t stop dying.

  I left the bright, fresh afternoon and entered the cold, spacious confines of the church. A place big enough to hold a congregation of hundreds, when a small shed with a few benches would probably suffice for the number of locals that actually gave a shit about religion.