Mouse - Rewind

Chapter 2

When the night finally started to set in Ba Reum took a deep breath. He had mentally prepared himself for what was to come. He hardened his heart and his eyes and centred himself.

He took out the dark mouth mask and cap, which he had quickly grabbed before he had left his house earlier. Putting those on felt a bit like a ritual and helped to put his worries to the side.

For now only the hunt mattered.

It was luckily a dark night, the moon almost completely invisible. His clothes had been dark, not the black ones he usually preferred when he was doing these things, but dark enough to blend into the shadow.

He had no mirror to look in, but he knew from experience that he would be unrecognizable in the darkness.

Only when they looked at him from close by would they recognize him, but if his plan worked out, there was only one person who would have the opportunity to see him from that distance.

He started his treck towards the abandoned factory which he had chosen for his first murder, sticking to the shadows when possible, not going to fast because of the uneven path in the darkness.

Everyone thought that the boxer had been his first kill, but that was a lie. It was his first kill to go against God, expressing his challenge to the deity. But before he started with those, he had wanted to make sure that he truly was the monster he thought he was.

He still remembered the exhilarations when he saw his first murder on the TV news. An homeless man, just a bit older then a child really, probably end of his teens, begin twenties. Ba Reum had stalked him already for the past few days, remembering going past all those abandoned buildings, to try to find an isolated prey, so that he could safely experience his first kill.

The police had concluded he had been killed by a gangster mob and was never associated with his kills.

He still remembered the exertion of catching his prey and then the loss of blood and the cleaning afterwards. The way his heart beat in excitement to hear the bones break everytime he hit the man with a baseball bat. The way the eyes grew dull when the throat was slit.

Ba Reum shuddered, trying to ban those feelings from his head. It was still difficult to remember the joy he had felt back then and the horror he experienced right now. Luckily, he arrived at the factory, which made his mind focus more on the matter at hand.

He had made sure that he got here before his younger self arrived. He looked around for a bit, and found a shrubbery that would give him good cover and had an excellent vantage point over the abandoned building.

He tried to remember the exact time when he would have committed this crime, but he couldn't recall it. Normally he could, but he had been so overcome with the joy of enacting his fantasies, that he hadn't paid attention to things like what exact hour it was back then.

Still, it probably wouldn't be long now. The night was at his darkest, so now it would be one of the safest moments to strike.

Ba Reum shifted slightly from his spot, making sure none of his limbs fell asleep. He could see the flickering light from a fire in one of the windows, knowing that the homeless man was there.

Suddenly he saw a movement a bit further and he was jarred to see his younger self walking over the pathway, dressed in black, a cap and mouth mask. His sneaking sucked back then, but at least he had the sense in dressing inconspicuously. That habit hadn't changed.

He kept still, seated in the bush and staring at the form that was walking by. His younger self gave no sign of having seen anything out of the ordinary.