Samantha lay with her eyes closed when her father came in to kiss her on the forehead. She watched the crack at the bottom of the door for her parent’s bedroom light to go out. She listened for her mother’s thunderous snoring, the sound that signalled her lapsing into one of her brandy comas. The killer drove down Steeple Street at a virtual crawl, turned down North Wood Road, then let the car roll until he came to the tree with the distinctive lime green slash painted on the trunk. Should anyone stumble upon it, they would probably dismiss it as the product of bored urchins and poorly stored house paint, thanks to the red and yellow slashes he painted on several other trees. As it turned out, the only other people in the woodland that night were a couple of teenagers in a Celica, and they were far too occupied with their own illicit activities to notice.
If anyone else, say for example local law enforcement, should happen along, it would be the naked girl bouncing on her groaning boyfriend’s lap to the muffled musical accompaniment of Pilot who would attract immediate attention, providing a distraction that would allow enough time to give the second girl to die in the woods today a proper burial.
Samantha took off her bunny slippers and crept along the hard ground in her bare feet. She felt perfectly calm. She turned off her father’s torch as she passed the Celica, not feeling the slightest bit inclined to press her nose up to the window – if people wanted to dance in their cars in the middle of the night,that was their business. There was something far more intriguing waiting for her at the end of the tracks that stretched beyond the rocking green car, and the person who made them had also inadvertently signposted directions to his whereabouts along an avenue of trees. She put the torch into the pocket of her shorty pyjamas and allowed the iridescent red and yellow stripes to light her way.
A mound of soft earth lay directly beneath the single green striped tree, but Samantha would have found the spot without the aid of a marker. It was the finish line from her race with the faerie. She had known from attending a couple of funerals with her parents that the woman would be buried, but how to dig her up was something she hadn’t considered until now. When she stuck her hand into the dirt as deeply as she could and touched nothing, she resolved to come back the next night with her father’s trowel.
She scrambled behind a tree when another car came along, sure her father had gone into her room to check on her and, finding her missing, knew exactly where to begin the search. She couldn’t afford that. Daddy was her only grown-up advocate, the only thing standing between her and the home for naughty girls to which her mother wanted to send her. When the car got to within a metre of her hiding spot, she let out a quiet breath from behind her hand. It wasn’t Daddy’s bottle green station wagon that momentarily caused pictures of kiddie prison to flash in her mind; it was a black T-bird. Whenever Daddy took his car in for a quick once-over at the garage, he would always stop to admire the gleaming classic that the boss parked out front for all the world to see. But it wasn’t the man in the grease-stained blue coveralls Samantha last saw lovingly brandishing a polishing rag who stepped out of the car now. It was his apprentice mechanic, who also happened to be his son.
The reason Samantha didn’t recognise him before was that he was driving a plain old sedan that looked almost exactly like every other plain old sedan in her neighbourhood and came in various shades of brown. The thought that The Mechanic had taken his father’s car without permission gave an added sense of danger to the adventure that he and, by extension she, was embarking on, and her pulse juddered with the thrill of it all.
Then the supposedly dead woman The Mechanic had hoisted over his shoulder began to scream, and the excitement was almost too much for the both of them. He was a muscular man, but the woman very nearly brought him to his knees with a barrage of girly kicks and punches. His fear soon gave way to anger, tripling his strength and making his victim feel weightless as he picked her up by the shins and swung her face first into the tree trunk that was her predecessor’s makeshift headstone.
The sickening thud of skull meeting wood, and the consequent thud of the body attached to it hitting the ground wasn’t loud enough for anyone not in the immediate vicinity to hear, but The Mechanic still felt a twang of anxiety. He took five paces away from the body in a southerly direction toward the spot his intuition was leading him. After a moment’s pause, he darted behind the unmarked tree, ready to make short work of the dumb bastard who’d probably come out here to consume some imported vegetation in the peace and tranquillity of nature, never dreaming that running into the coppers wouldn’t be the worst way for his night to end.
The Mechanic’s vigilance garnered him a cotton ball. The oddity of the find pricked his curiosity and he picked it up, only to discover that it was a dirty, half-mangled rabbit’s tail. He tossed the grim talisman over his shoulder with a smirk and went about his business; rabbits were hardly a rarity in these parts, and even the healthy ones didn’t have the deftness of hand required to operate a rotary telephone. He returned to the car and took his father’s tools from the back seat. With the patience of a surgeon, he cut the body into several dozen manageable pieces, matching each part to the appropriate tool so as not to litter the scene with any more gore. Once the job was completed to his exacting standards, he took his father’s shovel from the boot of the car and used it to dig up his first victim, then he went over to the unmarked tree and dug a much deeper hole where both ladies could be deposited while the little white rabbit watched him from under the T-Bird.
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