Please understand I am not a psychopath, gangster, or violent person. I did this to write about it in my novel. If you are a fellow author looking for some hands-on experience like myself, don’t worry about your physical strength. I am not particularly tall or strong but everything went smoothly.
I recently self published my novel, Death to Us All, and decided to write this post about the process behind it as a little marketing project. It’s about a man named Dale, who deals with grief and violent tendencies that surface after he loses his wife and child in a car crash.
Before I proceed with the details, I think it’s important to tell you all why I did this so that no misconceptions will arise. Simply put, fiction writers don’t understand what they are writing. The average author has never been shot, seen explosions, been drugged, woken up in a jail cell, or understand how secret government organizations work; thus, many do not see success. Aside from fantasy, the stories people actually want to read come from the real world: someone’s own experience, complete with accurate and reliable details.
I also think if a story comes from someone’s own experience, that makes it far more reliable and valuable.
So, when I reached the climax of my story — when Dale kills his boss — I realized the best course of action was to kill somebody myself. However, I ran into some difficulties.
Dale had a vendetta for his boss, but I chose someone I had nothing against for two reasons. First, I did not want to get caught or be a suspect if I killed someone I didn’t like. Second, I figured that I could just convince myself this stranger was my enemy and pretend to feel what Dale felt. While I was robbed of the full experience as I hoped, it was a satisfying enough substitute.
The woman I ended up choosing worked at my local grocery market about five minutes away from my house. This isn’t a confession, so I’m not going to tell you her name, but I think I can get away with a physical description. She wore thick square glasses and looked Asian—Thai, maybe? She didn’t have an accent, so I figured she was second generation. Her hair was long and black, stopping just at her waist, and she often put it up into a ponytail. Living so close to her work made it very easy to watch her, and there were so many customers everyday that I was confident she wouldn’t be able to recognize me no matter how many times I showed up.
Every few days I’d walk down to the market, grab a cart, and walk around the store aimlessly, though I spent most of it in the vegetable area right by her register, watching her. I always had some groceries in my cart — frozen food, beer, anything cheap, really — and pretended to look for something just in case anybody happened to be looking at me.
I liked to pretend I was Dale. I even dressed up as him when I went to the store and did my little routine. The hustle and loud commotion of people walking around, pushing carts, and talking was easy to imagine as a rowdy office. Occasionally, when I’d pass by someone, I’d greet them by their name and try to make small talk. It didn’t matter if it was really their name or not. They were just my coworkers in another department that I didn’t know very well.
Most of the time, though, I was watching her. I studied her behaviors, how she spoke to people and reacted when a customer was being rude, and laughed to myself when I overheard a joke she made to a coworker. Killing someone is a really personal thing, you see, so I wanted to try and feel like I knew her as much as possible. Dale was killing somebody he’d known for four years, and even though I couldn’t know her for that long before I did it, I wanted to be friends with her. I never talked to her directly, but I hope she had a fondness for me, too.
I’d come either when the store opened or when it was minutes away from closing to figure out how long her shifts were and what days she usually worked. It took me two weeks to piece everything together. She worked from 10 a.m to 3 p.m most days and 4 p.m to 8 p.m on the weekends. She drove a black 2008 Honda Accord and always parked in the same spot by a row of shopping carts. I liked to imagine a large office building in place of the one-story grocery store, and did my best to ignore all the rogue shopping carts.
I was nervous about following her home. It was easy to be a blank face in the crowd of a busy store, but trailing somebody in a car was a little more risky. Plus, I didn’t want her to report my license plate or anything if she started catching onto me.
Instead, I bought a magnetic tracking device off Amazon and put it under her car. It came with this app that tracked where the car had been for the past 24 hours and I was pleasantly surprised with how well it worked. Checking my phone to see where she’d been everyday, even when I didn’t go to the store, made me feel so much closer to her. She even frequented a bakery that I like to go to. Shame the battery on the thing only lasted three days.
Anyway, I found out where she lived and drove by her neighborhood to scope out her house when she was working. Even with its ugly, peeling teal paint, the house was pricey— two stories and a remarkable lawn full of colorful potted plants.
When I saw it for the first time, I got worried that she had a roommate. Nobody could live in a higher-end home by themselves working at a grocery store. There was no car in the driveway, but it was possible her roommate was out of the house when I stopped by. If she had a roommate, it’d make things a lot more complicated and, to be honest, the thought took me out of it a little. I didn’t want anybody to get in my way. Dale wouldn’t have, either.
I drove by three times over the next week, all when she was away from home, to see if there was ever a car in the driveway. There never was.
Still, it bothered me that one woman lived in such a big house. I think I was about to cry tears of joy when I found out through some Facebook threads that her grandparents had passed away and left it to her.
Speaking of which, it hadn’t really occurred to me to look at her social media pages at the time, since I was just getting to know her, but at that point I felt confident enough to look through all her posts. It wasn’t tricky finding it; her name (which I learned from the nametag she wore) is fairly uncommon. Mostly she uploaded pictures of her cats. One was named Charlie, and he was orange, and the other was gray and named Corduroy. They were very cute. I was relieved that we were both cat people, because I didn’t want to deal with any dogs trying to play hero when I broke in. For a nice little touch, I added that Dale’s boss had two cats of the same colors.
All of this had put a lot of stress on me, by the way. This wasn’t a walk in the park. There were plenty of times my immersion was broken and I had to desperately justify it in my mind so I could still feel like Dale. The key part of this all was getting into character. So I became him. I drank every night until I felt sick if I didn’t have whiskey in my coffee. I thought like he did, stopped doing hobbies he wouldn’t do, and went out to buy myself new clothes I imagined he would wear. It worked well. By the end of the month, I was horrible. Exasperated. Ready to break.
It was perfect.
Dale would kill his boss after the workday was done, when the man was drunk and sleeping, sprawled over his office desk and unable to fight back. So I would kill her when she was asleep as well. I’ll spare you all the details of the intricate process of how I got in; just know the important part is how I felt when I killed her.
When I got in, my legs weak and wobbly, like they’d give out at any moment. I thought it was just delighted anxiety. It was similar to stage-fright, I suppose. I was going to take on a role and perform a show. Even though my shoulders were tense, and I noticed more than once that I was gritting my teeth and had to actively force myself to relax as I made my way through the dark house, I felt a kind of playful excitement, like I was a kid pulling a prank on my friend.
The white rugged stairs were right by the front door. I made sure to unlock it before I climbed up. I know it’s common for stairs to be carpeted, but as I went up, I couldn’t shake the feeling it was fate. Carpet meant no squeaky floorboards - or sound at all, for that matter, if you were careful.
I was.
She kept her door slightly ajar so her cats could go in and out of her room while she slept. I know that because I do that, too. It’s funny, isn’t it? How alike we were, I mean.
My gloved hands were shaking when I pushed on the door open, painfully slow. I didn’t want to make it creak or swing it open all the way in case she woke up and tried to run away. I stood there for God knows how long, nudging the door barely open, cringing at every squeak. I imagined I was opening the door to Dale’s boss’s office.
I slipped in after it looked like I could reasonably fit through the opening. I could see her outline in her bed, a human-sized shape of blankets and pillows.
But it wasn’t her. Not really.
No, it was my asshole of a boss who blackmailed me to stay at the company. Who refused to let me quit, who forced me to stay here at a horrible, dull fucking job where everybody looked at me like I was crazy. And there he was, snoring loudly with the side of his face squashed on his desk, stacks of papers and stray paper clips all over the floor.
I pulled the knife out of my pocket and flicked it open, but I wasn’t afraid. No. I was excited. So excited I couldn’t breathe. Something clawed and itched at my mind, wild and hungry, and I couldn’t feel my body when I threw him out of his chair. Everything was so loose and quick and spiraling.
He woke up with a startled cry. I was on top of him in an instant, raising my blade and thrusting it down hard. I was surprised how easy the knife went in! I thought it’d be much more difficult. Running through him felt akin to cutting a piece of raw chicken. It was kind of elastic, too, his skin stretched over the blade like rubber. He tried to scream, and I really couldn’t have that, so I stabbed him again, and again, and again.
I couldn’t hear anything. My heart was pounding in my throat so hard I thought it would burst. I don’t remember if I stopped when he fell silent or not. I just remember finally yanking and tearing the knife out of his flesh, and the smell of blood hitting me all at once. Smelling somebody else’s blood, God…I get shivers just thinking about it. There was blood all over me, too, sticky and warm and beautiful.
The chaos made it so easy to see him. But now, everything was still, and I caught a glimpse of her. I left before he faded away any more.
As soon as I got home, I started writing. Didn’t even bother cleaning up—it’s not like I had to. Nobody lives with me. I’d captured the feeling of crazed mania perfectly and I had to get it down with it fresh in my mind.
While I could still smell it. While I could still taste it.
Even now, I’m shaking while I’m typing this.
Haha.
Please go read my book.