The Human Stain

An excerpt from the diary of a serial killer, perhaps- a dark look into the mind of the violent and demented...

What was going on?

           

            I couldn’t move for a moment, and my vision blurred into a symphony of yellow and white flashes. Colours first, and then faces, and then voices, all swimming into my consciousness to tell me things that didn’t quite make sense. It was then that the present escaped me.

            ***

In amidst the screams that rang in my ears I could hear my father’s voice. Recognisable, even though I had not heard it in so many years. “You know what you are?” he spat down at me as I slowly blinked my eyes open. “You’re a nobody… You never will be anything more son, that’s just the way it is,” The slur in his voice made my skin prickle with anger at his terrible deceit.

            “I’ll give up alcohol,” he said. “I’m sorry,” he had said. “Never again,” he had said. They were all lies. I felt so betrayed.

            I was lying on the floor, face down, with my hands on either side of my head. My vision went in an out of focus and I felt something warm flowing through my eyes. I knew what it was. None of this was new. “Jake, are you listening?” My father’s voice nagged at me as he placed a foot on the back of my head to weigh me down.

            I nodded a little and whimpered.

            “Good, that’s good,” he sniggered.

            I heard him c**k his Revolver.

            “I’m doing you a favour son,” he sniggered some more, “You just don’t know it yet… but you’ll understand.

I heard my mother screaming in the next room. She was calling out to me, and to him, telling him to stop hurting me and to leave me alone. I heard the door knob of the master bedroom rattling. He had locked her in there again.

“You ready, Jake?”

“Please don’t,” I whispered into the hardwood floor, sputtering a little as I tasted blood on my lips.

“What did you say?”

“Please,” I started to cry, sobbing into the pool of crimson red under me.

A gunshot…

There was nothing for awhile. I waited, and felt nothing. Then I opened my eyes, and saw he had missed. A bullet hole laid in the ground just a few metres from my head. My mother started screaming more violently from the next room. Why had he missed? Because he was so drunk? I felt him stumble off me and relished at the sick little twisted thought in my head. Maybe, just maybe, he loved me too much to do it. Maybe, just maybe, this was his way of showing how much I meant to him.  

Suddenly there was a crashing sound and my mother came storming into the room. “Jake! My baby! Jake!”

I tried to respond but only choked instead.

Another gunshot…

He didn’t miss.

She fell to the ground.

***

The same way Anita Turner fell to the ground.

I moved towards her and saw her eyes staring up at me, her jaw dropped as if in a perpetual scream. It is a vision I will never forget. Suddenly I fell to the ground and started puking my guts out, as usual.

It only ever hits me after it’s all over. Little fragments and snapshots flash into view with every gasp of breath I take. It feels so surreal, like I was never there, and somehow somebody else had planted these obscene images in my head. Lurid, horrible things, things I cannot bear to look at, but they are there… in my head… and I cannot escape them.

What have I done?

            I stare down at my hands and see her blood staining my skin. So much blood. How can so much blood pump through one person? It doesn’t seem possible… My shirt is completely drenched and I can feel it stick to my skin. The sickening feeling makes me shudder slightly in the cold night wind.

            Anita Turner was a thirty two year old Lawyer when I found her walking out the backdoor of her expensive apartment. But I knew her when she was just a sixteen year old student at Summerville High. She hadn’t changed. She still didn’t know my name.

‘Who are you’, she had said. ‘A nobody’ I had answered. She recognised me then. She looked so scared.

Everyday, this nobody would board the 8am bus to the job he hated. Everyday, this nobody would be yelled at, treated like s**t, and left un-thanked. And Everyday, this nobody would be remind himself he was no better of now than when he was a teenager at Summerville High.

They used to call me names, and they used to beat me. Bruises over bruises. Bruises at school and bruises at home.

There was nowhere I could run to. There was no safe place to escape to.

Day in, and day out, it was the same old story. They hated me because I was quiet, and they hated me because I was different. I was the freak, the weirdo, the outcast. The guy everybody loved to hate.

I did nothing… well… until now.

Anita Turner was one of those people who had wronged me so many years ago. Anita Turner was one of those people who had to pay the price.

            I stood over her for awhile and saw her body was a tangled mess of flesh and blood that protruded from her ripped and badly stained white shirt. Her face was the only thing that still looked human. I raised my arm to wipe the blood splatter from my brow before picking up my axe again. “Now you’ll know what it feels like, Anita,” I smiled down at her. “They’ll look at you and they won’t see you,” I raised my axe and a cold little shiver runs down my spine, “You’ll just be a nobody, a blur of flesh and blood and bone,” My axe came crashing down on her face.

            I saw my mother then, choking on the ground and breathing in and out with sharp, heavy breaths. I remember cradling her head in my hands after my father ran out the door and out of our lives forever. I remember the way she smiled up at me as the life faded from her eyes. The blood from my forehead dripped onto her face and she blinked a few times before muttering a quiet “It’ll be okay baby,”

           

            Blood drips from my face in small little circles that stain the glass that encases the picture of her that I hold in my hands. But it’s not my blood. “It’ll all be okay,” I whisper to her and close my eyes. In my mind there is a list that’s growing ever shorter as the months roll by. A smile appears on my lips in the darkness of my apartment, another name is scratched off that list. “It’ll be okay,” I whisper quietly to myself then, though I know it will never be okay until his blood drips off my skin. Not until I see his eyes staring up at me, nearly popping out of their sockets in an expression transfixed in horror. Not until I see him in a mess of skin and blood and bone.

            Only then will the killing stop.

            When I come to the end of my list.

Author's Note

It's really dark, and i have to apologise if you feel disturbed by it... i certainly did... and i wrote it!
It was worth the experience anyway!

Reviews

[Alexander]

This is enthralling. You shouldn't apologize; just because something is dark doesn't mean it isn't beautiful. It's bloody and alluring and angry, and lovely. An enchanting piece.
Z