This Is How You Die Page 7

A mixture of anger, self-loathing, and despair built a torrid and turbulent picture on his face. He moved with a frothing mouth to grab me, spraying spittle at my bloody face, then he decided against it, his despair taking over. He swung one last kick, heavy against my ribs, and then walked away, leaving me a bloody, agonized, and hysterical wreck on the forest floor.

  ——

  I stumbled home, cutting a disturbed figure as I staggered along with my back hunched lamely, my face covered in dried blood, my arms holding my chest as if to prevent my lungs from falling out. A permanent smile on my face. Many people looked, but no one spoke and no one offered any help.

  My uncle was asleep on the sofa when I staggered through the front door. I stood over him, breathing heavily. A drop of fresh coppery blood gathered in my mouth and popped out with my breath like crimson bubblegum.

  He gently stirred to the sedate pulses of some unknown dream. A whimper on his lips, a twitch in his neck. The sight of him made me sick—so much waste of human life. He served no purpose to me or to anyone else, yet he still managed to get in my way.

  An empty glass rested before him on the chair. Since he had taken to sobriety, he had been drinking a lot of water, whether in an attempt to flush out his system or to substitute his preferred tipple with something a little more innocuous. I hated him more for his sobriety, not just because he was a nuisance to me, but because he did it out of selfish greed, an act committed purely to get into the pants and the mind of a unwitting woman who didn’t know any better than to inject her veins with filth and fuck the first dickhead who offered.

  I flinched at the sound of the phone, a shrill siren that sparked the silence of my body into one terrified jolt. My uncle also flinched. He twitched violently, mumbled, moaned, and then turned over, his swollen body arching toward the other side of the chair.

  I answered on the second ring.

  “Is your uncle there?”

  I recognized the timid tone of Joanne the addict.

  “He’s asleep,” I told her with great difficulty, my voice grating in my throat.

  She paused, hearing my voice and sensing the need to ask me if I was okay. “Oh,” she said, deciding against it, her addiction and recovery having zapped any sense of social obligation out of her system. “I was supposed to come around later,” she continued, half to herself. “It’s just I’m back earlier than I thought and I was going to come around now.”

  I didn’t reply. I enjoyed toying with her sense of uncertainty.

  “Do you think I should?” She pushed through the silence.

  Again I refused to comment.

  “I’ll come around soon,” she said eventually.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, well, bye. I mean, I’ll see you soon.”

  I hung up.

  She was at the house within the hour. A timorous knock, a pitiful rat-a-tat of an approaching visitor almost apologetically alerting the occupants. My uncle didn’t stir at the sound. Even I barely heard it.

  When I opened the door and exposed my face, the blood now cleaned, the bruises and swelling more evident, she recoiled in surprise. She glared at me, a look of disgust on her face. No lack of social obligation would ease her away from the question now.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  I sighed heavily. “It’s a long story.”

  I moved away from the door, standing sideways to allow her inside. She didn’t move. She remained at the threshold, as though scared to bypass me and enter the house.

  “Are you okay?” One of her initial recoiled steps had now been retaken, but she was still standing a few feet away from me.

  I stared at her, absorbing the horror in her eyes, eyes that refused to leave my disfigured face. There was something behind her fear, a personal attachment to my wounds.

  I replied slowly, following her face as I spoke. “I suppose I’ll live.”

  She looked beyond me, her eyes apprehensive as they darted into the house, then to the street beyond, everywhere but at my face as her mind conjured up images that her eyes refused to acknowledge.

  Then it occurred to me: she thought my uncle had beaten me. Her mind was weighing the possibilities of inquiring and finding out. Did she really want to have it confirmed that her new boyfriend was a thuggish brute? And if so, did that mean he had broken their pact and had started drinking again?

  A smile tried to creep onto my face, but I managed to exchange it for a pained expression. “Wouldn’t be the first time, after all,” I said, throwing in a meek look and then staring off into the middle distance to establish a melancholic moment of reflection.

  I heard her stutter. Her feet twitched uncertainly as they prepared a path of retreat; the primal fight-or-flight response in her body screamed for flight at every sense of discomfort.

  “Di-di …”

  I lifted my eyes to hers. She looked like she was ready to cry.

  “Di-Did Dave do this?” she spoke in a whisper, almost silencing herself at the mention of his name.

  I nodded solemnly and lowered my head to my chest. “He’s drinking again,” I said softly. “As soon as you leave.” I tried my best to sniffle, emulating a suppression of tears when internally I felt like laughing. “He hides the bottles when you’re here, he says that what you don’t know won’t hurt you.”

  I paused to let my words sink in. When I raised a surreptitious eye to gauge her reaction, I saw streams of tears rolling down her bony cheeks. She looked less agitated now; a feeling of desolation had taken over. She wiped the rivulets away with the back of a hand that seemed entirely composed of knuckle. She made a move to say something, one final word before running away in a fit of tears. I jumped in before she could.

  “Please don’t say anything,” I told her. “He’ll only beat me more.”

  I looked at her and she returned a look that shone with sympathy. Then she turned and left, walking to begin with, then running. I watched her all the way, grinning broadly as she departed from my and my uncle’s life.

  “Who was that?” my uncle asked as I entered the living room and discovered him rubbing his sleepy eyes with his palms.

  “Nothing.”

  “I thought I heard a noise.”

  That noise was the sound of your last chance of sobriety and decency departing in a torrent of tears and regret. Now you have fuck all else to do but drink yourself into a putrid grave and give the earth back the carbon that you so recklessly borrowed.

  “It was nothing.”

  That night, Joanne left a message on the answering machine. She told him it was over, that she didn’t want to see him again, and that she would appreciate it if he never called or visited ever again. She sounded heartbroken, her voice cracking and breaking even more than usual. She sounded like she would burst into tears at any moment during the extended message of goodbye. She didn’t leave him with a definite reason but did offer him plenty of excuses so he could pick his own.

  “I don’t think we fit together…. It’s just not working out…. I have a few problems to work through …”

  I was with him at the time. When the message started, he was smiling, happy to hear the voice of a newfound flame and pondering on what delights she would bestow upon him. As it wore on, his face grew gradually darker. By the end, when her weakened voice fuzzed its final excuse and faded into the electronic beep, he was distraught and looked like death incarnate. He left the house without saying a word, without even looking at me. He returned a few hours later, drunk, crying, and mumbling to himself. He had begun the day as a sober man on a gratifying journey to self-worth; he ended it as a drunk, passed out in a pool of his own piss and misery.

  7

  In the prevailing summer months, I was overcome with a fervent expectation and an almost quivering sense of excitement. I struggled to sleep, tossing and turning a number of empty hours away. When I did sleep, I dreamed about killing Darren in a multitude of ways. Sometimes I ripped open his throat; once with a sharp knife, another time with
the clawed edge of a hammer. Sometimes I strangled or beat him. On all occasions I took great joy in his painful demise.

  My chance to kill him came a few weeks after the incident in the park. His parents had gone on holiday, taking the younger child with them. Darren had either refused to go or hadn’t been invited. He stayed at home, partying with his slow-witted friends and annoying the neighbors with loud music, drinking, drug taking, and general hoodlum activity. It would have been easy for me to slip into a few of those parties, so inebriated and diverse were the attendees, but I kept my distance and studied them patiently from behind the boundary in the back garden.

  On four successive nights in his room, his friends stayed over and drank themselves into oblivion while Darren fucked any desperate and drunken teenage girls he could—the pretty redhead excluded. I made brief appearances just to check in on him and his erratic behavior, having no intention to stay out all night watching him and his cronies fuck and vomit their way into an abyss.

  On the fifth night, he had plans elsewhere. It was a Saturday and he was going to the pub, an apparent lock-in—a much hyped episode broadcast to him by a semi-retarded blonde kid with aggressive acne. There was a promise of cheap drinks and a night of unadulterated drunkenness, after which everyone—except Darren, for reasons I didn’t grasp—would be going back to the pizza-faced boy’s house to spend the night. It was the perfect chance for me to strike. Darren would return drunk and alone. I would have all night to get my first kill.

  I left my house at around eleven, at which time I was confident Darren would be at the pub, heavily intoxicated. It would give me enough time to sneak into his house and set up a plan of attack. My uncle was semiconscious. He had fallen asleep watching an old western, his beer-riddled half-corpse twitching to the sounds of simulated gunshots as I crept soundlessly into the night.

  On the fourth night, Darren and his friends had spent some time in the back garden, sitting on the patio and staring at the stars while the remaining dregs of sunlight were drained from the glass of the day. This was why I hadn’t spent much time behind the garden wall on that night, and it was also the reason I was able to sneak into the house the following night. There were no kids in the back garden on that night, but Darren was feckless and reckless enough to have still left the door unlocked, giving me the opportunity I needed.

  The curtains were open and moonlight streamed in through the windows, offering me a partial path as I accustomed myself with the layout of the first floor. I skulked around, drinking in the details of the floor plan in case I needed to chase him around. I took a large kitchen knife from the drawer, the biggest and sharpest of a carving set that had seen better days. It made more sense than bringing my own weapon. I didn’t want to carry a murder weapon home. I certainly didn’t want to leave it at the scene of the crime.

  I had bought a pair of gloves for the occasion. They were black, tight to my flesh, and allowed for easy manipulation of my fingers. The blade felt weighty and strong in my hands, as if brushing against my flesh and not a thin coating of synthetic material.

  I found three bedrooms upstairs, two of which I dismissed quickly. One was clearly the master bedroom: a long-mirrored wardrobe rested along the front, a queen-sized bed pushed up against the opposing wall. The other was filled with an array of children’s toys, while a single bed, adorned with a Ninja Turtle duvet set, stood against the far wall.

  The final room was clearly Darren’s. The musty smell, the rank, fetid air, and the detritus scattered around the floor like flecks on a Pollock painting all gave it away.

  In his room, a sense of power and excitement overcame me. Stalking through the place where he rested his empty head and wanked his parental complexes away, with an instrument of murder clenched tightly in my fist, I felt a godlike power I had never experienced before. In a matter of hours, minutes, or moments, I would be taking a human life. I would have power over life and death. I would be the one to choose how much he suffered and for how long. It was exhilarating and overpowering, so much so that I remained standing there for many moments.

  The sound of a key slipping into a lock finally snapped me out of my trance. In that time, the darkness had become my friend—my eyes adjusting to a light only they could see. Darren would turn the light on when entering, but not if I could get to him first. With a broad smile, I snuck in behind the bedroom door, the knife poised and prepared at shoulder height, waiting for the drunken idiot to stumble for the light switch before I pounced.

  The smile dripped from my face like warm ice cream when I heard the sound of a female voice punctuating the silence. Darren wasn’t alone.

  I quickly scanned the room for a place to hide; a chest of drawers to duck behind, a wardrobe to dive inside. There was a small bedside cabinet, a set of drawers barely big enough to conceal a small animal, and a small wardrobe that sat on an unstable foundation. There wasn’t even a bed to slide underneath, just a mattress slapped onto the floor like junkyard treasure in a homeless shelter.

  I edged open the door, looked into the hallway. I could see the lights spilling from downstairs as Darren conversed loudly with his female guest, evidently breaking into his parents’ liquor supply in an effort to appease or sedate her.

  I slipped out, creeped across the hallway, and peeked over the banister, down the stairs. They were in the living room; on the opposing wall their illuminated shadows danced a tentative dance. They hadn’t sat, hadn’t rested. The front door was a tempting target at the foot of the stairs, but they were closer to it than I was.

  I didn’t want to kill them both. A double murder was too risky, too messy. Not now. Not at this point in my career. I wasn’t that desperate.

  I needed to be patient, to hold my nerve. I put my foot on the top step, prepared to move toward the door. The step creaked and groaned with a sound greater than I remembered on my ascent. It sounded deafening. I closed my eyes until that noise, and that of my own quickening heartbeat, faded. Then I took another step, my hand firmly gripping the banister to alleviate the pressure I was applying to the creaky floorboards.

  “Come on,” I heard Darren saying. The annoying laugh that had taunted me for many years was now present in its drunken form. “Down it. Down it. Down it,” he began to chant, almost grunting.

  The female gagged a choking sound in reply, her voice strained through the efforts of forced alcohol consumption. She groaned, coughed. I moved onto the third step.

  I heard the sound of a vigorous kiss, a sloppy, noisy caress. Then I heard glass on wood as a bottle was put down. I held my breath, praying they would do what they intended to do on the couch and leave me to an unheeded escape.

  The kiss finished with a passionate breath. “Not here,” the girl said. “Upstairs.”

  I gulped and instinctively moved my right heel backward, to the second step.

  “What’s wrong with here?”

  That’s right, you tell her. Couch, bed, floor, it doesn’t make a difference; she can be equally disappointed on all three.

  She sounded a negative groan. “Not here,” she asserted. “Bed!”

  I moved my left foot back to the second step.

  “Fine!” Darren spat, annoyed. I heard movement, quick, eager footsteps.

  I quickly turned, jumped the final stair, ran across the hallway, and ducked into the master bedroom on my left. The sound of my own heaving heart canceled out the noise of the creaky floorboards, but I was sure they would have heard me.

  I listened, waiting for the inevitable questions, the paranoia and the panic. It didn’t come.

  In his parents’ bedroom, with the sound of keen footsteps beginning their ascent, I headed straight for the walk-in wardrobe opposite the door and adjacent to the bed. It was large enough to accommodate me until I could make my escape.

  I waited for them to go to Darren’s room so I could slip out of the house during their thirty seconds of breathless passion, but instead they stumbled into the master bedroom.

  Darren t
ugged the unfortunate female behind him with an eager and desperate lust. As he opened the door, the room bathed in light from the hallway and I twitched under its glow, fading further into the wardrobe and watching the action unfurl through a thin opening in the door.

  I watched Darren pull his prey aggressively into the room, practically throwing her onto the bed before beaming down at her with a lustfulness that threatened to pop his eyes from his skull.

  His eyes were wide, glassy and desperate. The crotch of his faded blue jeans bulged.

  “You ready, baby?”

  He whipped off his shirt. I threw up a little in my mouth.

  I turned my attention to the girl. She was propping up her chubby physique with her elbows, watching the undressing simpleton with wanton eyes. She wore a short black skirt, tight around her ample backside and short enough to expose her thick thighs, the skin of which was bruised and red in places and heavily tanned everywhere else. She instinctively opened her legs, gesturing with her short dumpy body for Darren to enter her.

  While Darren undressed, struggling to remove his pants, she stroked a finger between her legs, toying with a moistened pair of white knickers.

  I found myself scowling at her face, at her dimpled, ruby cheeks, her glossy eyes and her protruding tongue. I didn’t know who she was; she didn’t go to my school and I had never made her acquaintance, but I had seen her before. She had been at Elizabeth’s party. She was the little fat fuck who had been enthralled with the thought of tricking and humiliating me, even though she didn’t know who I was. She was the one who had been swapping saliva with my classmate while trying to stop his hands from probing the depths of her infectious cunt.

  Fucking trampy little waste of space.

  Darren undressed and set to work on her, quickly tearing off her knickers and tossing them away. They flew toward the wardrobe, toward me. The moistened skid-marked material slapped at the wardrobe door and rebounded onto the floor with the faintest whisper.

  In my head I urged him on, encouraging him to go where everyone had gone before and to contaminate her with whatever bulbous, warty disease he had festering and fermenting on his sweaty, unwashed, overused penis.