He had laid waste to the bodies and minds of dozens of women in his twenty year career. Slight or plump, short or tall, beautiful or homely; the physical allure of the women was of as little importance as their names. Sex alone did nothing for him. Not that he didn’t pleasure them. He gladly took their breasts into his mouth, tasted them, and gave them release in as many different ways and as many times as they asked him to, his dormant sex awakened by the knowledge that this was just the preamble to the final act. He wanted them happy, relaxed, depleted when he finally came for them. That was when the real intercourse began. Arousal was watching their expressions change as he wrenched away the warmth of afterglow. Foreplay was listening to them beg for their lives as he methodically prepared his tools in front of them. Thrust was inflicting pain, then taking it away, then inflicting it again, his muscles contracting and relaxing in time with theirs as they struggled beneath him. The duration of this stage varied, dependent upon the stamina of his partner. Some women could hold on for hours; particularly the ones with families to go home to. One of them even pretended to be enjoying the experience, thinking it would turn him on. It had the opposite effect, and when it became apparent that picking up where he left off was going to be quite impossible, he yanked her back by the hair and slit her throat without so much as a grunt of impatience.
Climax was a lottery. As with sex, his basic physiology guaranteed he always got to where he was headed, but the difference between his sex life and his work life was in the details. Every woman was the same when he was fucking them. Their reactions were so derivative of one another, it was almost as though they were parodying themselves, and he had to fight to keep himself from laughing out loud. Dying was what separated them. It was when they realised that not only were they about to die, but that they were going to die like this that true terror set in. It was only in terror that they were authentic, and only then did they really interest him. A bombastic woman he met at a pub turned silent at the sight of her own blood pooling at her feet. A quiet, simple woman he befriended at the library had the presence of mind to scream her name, address and phone number repeatedly in the hour it took her to die, and he found her ridiculous faith in the gallantry of her fellow man so divine, he could barely hold himself back until she finally went.
His last client, (that was what he called them), was a sixty-four year old who had actually picked him up. He wasn’t strictly into caricatures, but when he walked into the over twenty-eight’s bar that night, he did have a certain kind of woman in mind, and just when he was about to give up, she found him. She was taught, a little too lean around the legs and buttocks, and had long auburn hair that was too lustrous to be true. As was her personality. He listened patiently for two hours as she regaled him with tails of her misspent youth in Europe while playing footsie with him under the table.
‘Did you backpack?’
She waved the suggestion off with wide-eyed disdain.
‘Oh God, no! Only hippies and deadbeats backpacked, darling. My father treated my best girlfriend and I to the trip after I graduated. I think he was hoping I’d find out that the world was a big, scary place so that I’d run home, marry a nice boy, and be taken care of by his family’s money for the rest of my life. Little did he know I was fearless.’ She drained the contents of her wine glass.
‘Some of the things I got up to would curl your toes.’
‘I bet.’
‘And you’d win. Shelley and I met two lovely Italian men at a bar, and they took us to a party at their villa. Well, Shelley was positively convinced that Marco, the real looker of the two, liked her. I proved her wrong.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I sat on his lap when she left the room to get a drink, and we’d already gone by the time she came back. I took him back to the hotel room and, well, let’s just say that Shelley found herself sleeping in the hallway that night. She called her father and begged him to wire her the fare home the next day; all tears. Poor thing never could stand competition.’ She flagged a waitress down and ordered another drink, the memory of humiliating her so-called best friend not dampening her spirits in the slightest.
He feigned amusement. ‘Did she ever speak to you again?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘No, but it was no great loss. She was no fun. And she never could handle the fact that I was prettier and more popular. You know, you remind me of a lovely guy I met in France. Gorgeous thing, he was. Tall, athletic,’ she laughed wistfully, ‘found out just how sporty he was when we went parking out by the Seine. That was an hour and a half I’ll never forget…neither will he, I suspect.’
‘So you were a wild one, huh?’
The waitress brought over her drink, which she took and slammed down in one deft movement. She put the glass back on the table and tipped him a wink.
‘Still am.’
He leaned forward and smiled.
‘Good to know.’
She reached into her handbag and pulled out her keys. Dangling on the end of the key chain was a miniature disco ball.
‘So,’ she whispered, ‘now that you have me, what do you plan to do with me?’
Once they were inside, she more than lived up to her own hype, and her abilities were such that he was pleasantly surprised to find himself enjoying the sex as much as she was; so much so that he actually considered not killing her. But later, as she approached rapture for what would be the fifth and final time, she dug her immaculately manicured talons into his back and whispered in his ear.
‘That’s it, Baby; come for me. Come for Mama.’
He clamped his eyes shut, looking for all the world like he was in the throes of ecstasy, and stopped himself from killing her right there and then by mentally flipping through the catalogue of cruelty that had been with him since adolescence. Dozens of scenarios came to mind, but none of them were ghastly enough to help him finish. Then he opened his eyes and saw her gorgeous auburn hair fanned out behind her on a pillow, and he came almost as hard as he had with the simple woman. He held her until she fell asleep, then set about quietly ransacking her laundry cupboards until he found what he was looking for. The idea was one of such genius, he was willing to wait all night if that was how long it took for her to wake up. As it happened, she was only asleep for two hours before her rabid libido kicked in again and she started pawing at him. He stroked her lovely, lustrous hair.
‘You’ve made me feel something tonight I never thought possible, and I’d like to reward you.’
‘Oh yes, and what’s my reward?’
He pulled out a satin scarf she had bound him with earlier. ‘It’s a surprise.’
He tied it on and led her blindfolded down the hallway into the bathroom. He opened the shower door slowly, intentionally letting it squeak to give her a false clue as to what his intentions were. He caressed her breasts with one hand, and reached for a plastic restraint with the other. She threw her head back and moaned, and he took that as his queue. He stroked her hair again, then abruptly grabbed a handful of it and yanked it back. She yelped.
‘Hey! Take it easy, gorgeous.’
He let go without offering an apology. He made it a point never to speak at this stage in proceedings. There was no need for banter once a woman had given in to him. He slipped his trusty restraints onto her wrists and pulled them on tightly. She smiled.
‘That kind of surprise, is it?’
Her smile waned a little when she felt the click and pull of similar restraints holding her feet in place.
‘Getting a little scared now, lover. How ‘bout you tell me what you have planned?’
He carried her into the shower and sat her down on the dining chair he had placed directly under the shower head while she was sleeping.
‘What the hell? Where’s that smell coming from?’
He gagged her with her own dirty underwear, turned on the taps, and quickly got out of the shower, closing the glass door behind him as four litres of hospital-strength bleach and two tubs of borax rained down on her. Half of her precious hair was already yellowish-white by the time the chemical cocktail started eating at her skin. She attempted to scream, but the muffled noise that came out made it sound as though she was enjoying herself, and since she had been making that kind of noise for hours without any of her neighbours beating down her door, it was highly unlikely anyone within earshot was going to show up now. She sprang up out of the chair, only to collapse in a heap on the marble tiles. He lined her toilet seat with paper and sat down and watched her fight and flail until the hopelessness of her situation dawned on her, and she curled up in a ball and cried. He reached down and stroked himself.
He stopped just beyond the halfway point, when he realised she wasn’t crying anymore.
Gingerly, he picked up the leaves of toilet paper and flushed them. He got up and walked over to the shower, praying for her not to be dead. The very reason he had chosen this particular method was to turn her into the very things she had always been terrified of becoming – old and ugly. He wanted her to think she would have at least another twenty years of unwelcome attention to look forward to, so that by the end, she would beg for death. Depriving her of it was supposed to be the real pay-off. He couldn’t allow her to die. Not yet. He turned on the exhaust fan, then picked up her wooden bath mat and placed it in front of the shower. He knelt down on it and leaned in, just close enough to be able to see whether her chest rose and fell. Nothing. Panicked, he got up and grabbed the rubber gloves he had draped over the towel rack after toying with the shower and slipped them on. He knelt back down and pulled her head back to look into her eyes. There was no regret, no pain, no terror. All that reflected back at him was peace. The kind one achieved by dying after suffering a long illness. But she hadn’t suffered; didn’t know what it meant to suffer. The only one suffering was him. He had waited two years for this. Two years of planning, preparation, and anticipation.
He shoved his fist into his mouth, biting down hard until the blood ran down his arm. He wanted to scream; curse the foul bitch’s soul and leave her hanging for eternity. But he didn’t. Instead, he wrapped her body in a blanket and stuffed it into the trunk of his car, used the remainder of the bleach to clean the bathroom, dressed himself, picked up his unopened bag of tools, (which was actually a briefcase), and left the house, quietly shutting the door behind him. He drove to the site of a shopping centre currently under construction, and dumped the old woman’s body onto a pile of crates. Suddenly, a vision came to him of the appalled faces of the builders who would find her in the morning, and his sex stirred. He headed for his car at a run, intending to drive around until he found a suitably private public bathroom in which to find his release. He grabbed at the door handle, realising too late that he had forgotten to depress the tiny button on his key chain that unlocked the car and disabled the alarm. He fumbled in his pocket for the chain, and managed to press the button and get into the car in just enough time to cut off the screech of the siren, but it was too late. The shock robbed him of his joy and he lurched in his seat as it left him.
Life after a client was one of pleasantly dull routine. He would go to work, pay his bills, cook dinner, watch television, and enjoy a drink or five on the weekends. It was the life of a man moving on after the end of a relationship. But he couldn’t move on this time. He wasn’t sleeping, which made him constantly late for work. That meant missing out on sales, which eventually got him fired. That put him into debt for the first time in his life, and made eating anything that didn’t come from a can a luxury he couldn’t afford. All he saw on TV was women. Whether they were goddesses, victims, or vigilantes, they always won, and seeing as beer wasn’t on his shopping list these days, he couldn’t rely on it to pacify him. In short, his life had gone to Hell, and there was only one way out.
That was what led him to Her.
ns 15.158.61.51da2
