I was born to kill. Even as a child, a little boy no more than seven, I strangled my neighbor’s cat and then burned their house down. I left the body of their beloved pet strung over their mailbox. The police never figured out that I did it, a mere child next door.
But like many things in life, my addiction spiraled out of control. Just killing animals or starting fires would not make the nut. I wanted something more hands-on, more personal, and most of all, I wanted people. I hated humanity, every single disgusting person on this planet- except for myself, of course, because I was different from all the weak, babbling masses. I know myself to be superior, the Overman predicted by Nietzsche.
I killed my first homeless man when I was sixteen. I stabbed him. He screamed, flailing, trying to get up and stumble down the dark alleyway, but I ran quickly behind him, stabbing him in the back a few more times. He fell down, gasping and pleading, and I flipped the bastard over with my shoe and knelt down to finish the job.
I wrapped my gloved hands around his throat, tightening and tightening. I felt his thready, rapid pulse beating, beating so fast it seemed like his heart must explode. And then it started to slow, then stopped. I felt the life go out of him, the last heartbeat, the last dying gasp after I had taken my hands away. His lips had turned blue and his eyes bulged out of their sockets. It felt sublime, absolutely pure power and control, an almost sexual rush that made all the colors in the world seem bright again.
But after a couple days, the colors faded back to their dull, monotonous tones, the sounds grew distant again, the good feelings faded away like puddles under the summer sun. And I began to think about the next one, plan the next one. I began to think about the future.
My IQ tested in the genius range multiple times. When I took the SATs, I scored nearly a 2200 out of 2400- which put me in the top 1% of the US population. In hindsight, I wish I could have done things differently. I wish I could have used that intelligence to get a good job, lots of money, a mansion, maybe some power over the disgusting masses of humanity that swarmed all over the world. But instead, I followed my dreams. I followed the dark path that inevitably led to where I am now.
It all started last night, at about 11 PM. I had strangled a prostitute to death and thrown the body in my trunk. Then, whistling to myself, I went through my music collection and found what I was looking for- Norwegian Black Metal, a band named Burzum. The shrieking and fast guitars always got my blood up. Blaring “Beholding the Daughters of the Firmament” on repeat, I lit up a cigarette, starting my car and pulling out of the graveyard where I had taken the young hooker, under the pretense of paying her for sex. I had no real interest in sex, however. It always seemed extremely dirty and disgusting, and who could possibly be worthy of someone like me?
So instead, I had asked her to get out of the car, to go to a nearby stone slab where one could lay down flat. When she sat down on it, asking me what I wanted to do, I pulled out a hammer I had tucked into the back of my pants, hidden under my loose button-down shirt. I smashed it into her head with a satisfying crack. I heard the bone fracture as the metal of the hammer made a slight ringing sound. She had gone flying backwards off the stone slab, losing consciousness for a few moments. But by the time I had walked over to her, her eyes had opened once again. The eyelids fluttered, her stare flicking to the left and right rapidly, as if searching for help that would never come. I knelt down and finished her disgusting life. Her deep, brown eyes keep meeting mine, as if asking, “Why?” As if I needed a reason.
I knew of a nature reserve nearby with a dirt road leading into it. It sometimes had a chain lock on it at night, but I always kept a pair of bolt cutters, and then I’d drape the chain back over the gate, so that any passing travelers would think the lock intact.
The nature reserve looked so beautiful in the day, but at night, it looked eerie. The crooked branches of the trees reached into the narrow dirt road, scraping at my car and windows with a slight screeching noise. A foot trail to the left led to the top of a small mountain where people went to admire the view of the surrounding hills and forests. But I went straight, deeper into the forests. Eventually the dirt road ended, and I got out, grabbing my flashlight and shovel from the trunk. I gave the dead body of the hooker, now wrapped in a white sheet, a disparaging look before turning away and slamming the trunk closed again.
I walked out a couple hundred feet from the road, not on any human or deer trail but randomly crashing through brush and prickers and spiderwebs. I never buried bodies anywhere near a trail. I dug a fairly shallow grave, maybe four feet deep. It still took me quite a while, and by the time I felt confident the hole looked deep enough, I found myself covered in sweat, my shirt sticking to my skin. Sighing, I walked back the way I had come, opened up the trunk, and slung the body of the dead woman over my shoulder.
She couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds, while I weighed nearly 200, but getting that awkward, unwieldy 120 pounds through pricker-bushes and past thick brush proved very difficult. After I got a little way into the woods, I started just dragging her by her feet, unsnagging all the thorns that kept threatening to rip the sheet into shreds. By the time I got back to the hole, the sheet had slashes and rips all through it. I was breathing heavily, totally exhausted and grateful to be done with the hard part. I threw the body down the hole and turned to grab my shovel to fill it back in.
And yet, when I looked behind me, the shovel had disappeared. I hadn’t seen so much as an animal this whole time, so I looked around frantically. I had to be alone out here, at 3 in the morning in a nature reserve many miles long. I felt someone grab my arm, and I screamed.
Spinning around, I saw the body of the dead prostitute. The shredded remnants of the white sheet lay in the hole still, but she had crawled out. One of her eyes was swollen shut, purple and black. She had clear dark handprints around her throat, and crusted blood covered the area on the side of her head where I had hit her with the hammer. And yet she somehow stood here in front of me.
“Come, come,” she said in a hissing voice, “don’t be afraid, Leon. I’m not your plaything. I’m just using her body so we can have a little chat.”
“Where’s my shovel?!” I asked frantically. I know, in hindsight, what a stupid question it was, but my brain had shut down from surprise and overload by this point. The dead girl just ignored my outburst and kept on talking.
“My name is Foras. My master has been impressed by your work. He would like to see you, in fact.” The dead girl grinned, her blood-stained teeth flashing under the bright LED of my flashlight. The grin looked like something sick, something evil and twisted. Then the dead girl grabbed my arm again, the freezing cold skin on her hands pressing against my arm, and I felt myself falling.
I closed my eyes, but I think I somehow fell right through solid ground. A few seconds later, I felt it stop, the butterflies in my stomach still fluttering. I opened my eyes slowly and found myself in a deep underground cavern with torches along the walls and blazing fires scattered throughout. I looked over and saw a bloodless, sheet-white man now had held my arm in the same way the dead girl had. Blood-red irises surrounded his pupils, and his limbs looked twisted and inhuman, his fingers unnaturally long and pointed.
“You have done very well,” Foras said. “No reason to be afraid. My master just wants to make you an offer.”
“An offer?” I asked.
“Yes, you’ll see.” He let go of my arm. I felt the blood rushing back into it. Then he started walking forwards, towards a blazing inferno a few hundred feet away. Black smoke billowed out of it, going up through the many holes in the ceiling to whatever world lay above. As I neared it, though, I realized I could see eyes in that fire. They looked like black holes in the middle of all that heat and light, two floating black eyes staring directly at me. I stopped in my tracks. Foras turned around, snarling.
“Go forward!” he screamed, and I did. When I got within a couple dozen feet of the eyes, I heard a new voice.
“Ah, Leon. Leon Arora. I have watched your work with interest,” the voice said, booming from everywhere and nowhere around me.
“What work?” I asked, though I knew. The eyes seemed to smile, and I heard an insane laughter echoing all around me.
“Well, let’s go over it, shall we?” the voice asked. “I am not omnipotent, but I know many things. Far more than anyone knows.
“First murder: you stabbed and then strangled a homeless man to death in Hartford. You left his body in the alleyway. Unsolved. Police have no leads.
“Second murder: you kidnapped a prostitute from Boston and then burned her alive deep in the forests of the Berkshires. Unsolved. Police have no leads.
“Third and fourth murders: you waited for two hikers on the Appalachian Trail. When they walked by, you shot both of them to death and left their bodies sprawled on the path. Unsolved. Police have no leads.
“Fifth, sixth and seventh murders: you found a rural home in the middle of Maine, took a drill and screwed all the doors shut. Then you soaked the entire outside in gasoline and burned the house down. Three of the family members inside died from suffocation and burning, including the father, mother and their 2-year-old daughter. One of them, a boy of seven, escaped by jumping out a window and breaking his leg. Unsolved. Police have no leads.
“Eight murder: another prostitute kidnapped from Boston. You injected her with acids and bleach before strangling her and dumping her body in the Berkshires, again. Unsolved. Police have no leads.
“Ninth murder: you used a hammer to fracture the skull of a prostitute from Hartford and then strangled her and buried her in a nature reserve in Massachusetts. Unsolved. Police have no leads.” The voice stopped, an eerie silence descending on the cave. I turned to look at Foras, who smiled wide at me, showing far too many sharp teeth.
“I don’t…” I said. “I never did any of that.” The voice laughed.
“Everything is fine, my young friend. I have no problem with your work. In fact, I only brought you down here to offer you a job,” the voice said.
“Who are you, even?” I asked. “What kind of job?”
“Ah, how rude of me,” the voice said, a note of suppressed glee still in its booming voice. “My name is Samael. We are looking for hard-working people like you, though our work is slightly more intellectual than strangling prostitutes. But we pay well. A million dollars per contract.”
“A million dollars to kill a single person?” I asked, incredulous. I had been doing it for free all this time.
“Indeed. Do you agree?” I nodded eagerly.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “Where do I sign?”
***
I found myself back in the nature reserve, alone again. The dead body of the woman was back in the pit, laying on the tattered rags of the sheet. My shovel had even returned, though not where I originally put it. I saw it laying flat underneath a bush ten feet away. I finished my work quickly and returned home.
When I got there, I found a note, written in a beautiful, old-fashioned cursive script. The note lay on my kitchen table, all the doors and windows still locked, with no sign of forced entry. Sighing, I walked forwards and read it.
“To Leon,
“Your first task is to kill the old woman at 747 Angel Trace Road. She is home now.” I frowned down at the note, flipping it over and seeing nothing on the back.
“Ah, fuck,” I said, feeling tired and worn-out. I didn’t know if I had to do it right now, but I figured I might as well. By tomorrow morning, I could have a million dollars cash in my possession, as long as I took out this old hag.
I went to the bathroom and popped a couple caffeine pills to wake myself up. I looked in the mirror, seeing dark circles under my eyes. I shook my head and flicked off the light. I went to the bedroom and got what I think of as a “kill kit” together- a ski mask, handcuffs, a crowbar, a knife, a drill, screws, rope, zip-ties, needles, chemicals, a lighter and a small canister of gasoline. That seemed to cover all the bases. If I couldn’t get in, I could always try drilling her doors closed and burning the house down with her inside. If she truly was that old, then the chances of her finding a way out in time seemed nil, especially if I got more gasoline and soaked the entire outside of the building first. I usually put the most gas on the windows of the first floor, to prevent the people inside from using them when the fire started.
But when I got to the house, I found the front door unlocked. This was a rural area, and perhaps people just felt so safe that they didn’t feel the need to lock their doors. Whatever the reason, I found myself ecstatic. This task would be even easier than I thought.
I had rubber sneakers on with cloth wrapped around them, to muffle my footsteps as much as possible. I also used gloves, a hair-net, a ski mask and totally black clothes that covered every inch of my body. I didn’t want to take the risk of having a single hair fall around the crime scene, a hair which had my DNA and could potentially be used to put me in prison for the rest of my life.
The house was pitch-black. I took a small pen-light out of my pocket, shining it around. Strange, twisted statues lined the hallway. I saw a metal sculpture of a woman being burned at the stake, her eyes wide and panicked, her mouth opened in an eternal shriek as the steel representations of flames licked the bottom half of her body.
Next to that, I found one of a man who looked similar to the Elephant Man, with maybe a touch of Sloth from the Goonies mixed in. He had bulging muscles underneath the scarred tumors and fibrotic tissue growing all over his body, but his smile looked genuine and innocent. In one massive hand, he held a baseball bat with nails coming out of them on all sides.
I heard a creak from upstairs. My breath caught in my throat. I turned rapidly, but I was still alone. I decided I better go upstairs now and finish this. There was no reason to press my luck by staying here any longer than I absolutely had to.
I went up the stairs as fast as I could without making a sound. In one hand, I had the huge, recently-sharpened butcher’s knife I liked to use for this kind of work. As I got to the top, I shone the pen-light around and, to my horror, I saw an old woman standing there in the upstairs hallway, just staring at me and grinning. It was the old woman Foras had shown me a photograph of before I left the cave, I knew. She looked like a walking corpse, with stringy, greasy white hair sticking up from her head, deep sunken eyes and that same, insane smile she had in the photo.
I ran forwards, raising the knife to stab her. But she didn’t flinch, didn’t scream or try to run. She just stood there, grinning.
“I’ll wipe that fucking grin off your face, you crazy old bitch,” I said, plunging the knife deep into her stomach. She didn’t respond, except to grab my arm and twist it, still smiling. She pulled me close to her mouth and whispered in my ear.
“If it was that easy to kill me, don’t you think I would have done it myself by now?” she asked in a grating, raspy voice. Then she kept twisting. I felt a searing agony in my left arm as the bone snapped and popped out the skin. I began to shriek, trying to kick and punch at the old woman, but it felt like fighting a metal statue.
Blood poured out of her stomach, but it looked black and smelled like rotting meat. As I looked down at it, I saw countless white maggots writhing and dancing in the rancid fluids. That was when true horror filled me. I had always thought myself to be above fear, that such weak emotions only came from the subhuman masses, but my experience in that cursed house changed that forever.
She let go of my hand quickly. I stumbled back, slipping on the pool of rancid blood and falling. The old woman jumped on top of me in an instant. I thought she meant to kiss me as she lowered her face towards mine. As I opened my mouth to scream, I felt something wet and warm dribble into my mouth. I began to choke and gasp, reaching in my pocket for a syringe full of hydrochloric acid. Without hesitating, I popped off the cap and shoved it into her eye, pressing down on the plunger. She hissed like a snake and fell off me, and I ran faster than I ever had in my life, grabbing at my broken arm. I ran all the way to the car and sped out of there at a hundred miles an hour, spitting as I went, trying to spit out the rancid taste of the blood she had spewed into my mouth.
I needed to go to the hospital, but I went home first to get all the incriminating possessions off my person. I certainly wasn’t planning to go dressed in all black with someone else’s blood on my face. It would raise too many questions. But my arm throbbed in total agony. It was some of the worst pain I had ever experienced in my life, and the fear still stayed with me. I wondered if the woman would come hunt me down.
But as I went into the bathroom to clean myself off, I looked in the mirror. Opening my mouth, I saw maggots squirming in my throat and threw up a torrent of black blood into the sink.
As I looked down at my broken arm, still bleeding where the bone had stabbed through the skin, I realized with horror that my blood had also turned black and rancid. The blood that leaked out of my body had tiny, swarming maggots in it and stained the sink with foul streaks.
And I knew I was changing.