Alive

Chapter 7: Small Favours

I waited across the street from her apartment and when she left for her evening walk I ran to her door and picked the lock. When you can whizz through high school, getting straight As without revising, you have a lot of spare time to spend on YouTube learning nifty little tricks like that.

I waited in her bedroom, and looked around. I found some drawings on her desk with her name scribbled in the corner of the pages. Elizabeth.

When I heard her key slide in the lock of the front door I hid under her bed, luckily for me she wasn't like most people who shoved all of their random bits under the bed, out of sight out of mind. I lay there for about 15 minutes and then she walked into her room, after checking the door was locked 3 times, of course.

From my position I had a clear view of her reflection in the long wall mirror. She started to undress, and I felt bad for watching, but now I find it hilarious. I was hiding under her bed, waiting to kill her, and the only thing my conscience flagged up was that I shouldn't be looking at her while she took her clothes off. Say what you will about my moral compass, but I maintain that I'm not a pervert... just a killer. But she did have an amazing body.

When she turned her back to the mirror I silently got out from beneath her bed and stood up. I wore a mask that time, just in case she'd escaped and gone straight to the police, she wouldn't be able to tell me anything about my face. But later on she talked me into taking it off.

"Who the fuck are you?" I thought she'd scream. I was a stranger in a halloween mask standing in her bedroom holding a knife towards her, but instead she asked me who I was.

"What, no scream? No attempt to attack me?"

"Who are you? And why are you in my bedroom?"

"Unfortunately for you, I'm here to kill you."

"Why?" What the hell was with this girl? She was having a calm, rational conversation with the killer in her home.

"Because I want to. I need to. It's nothing personal, I'm just... Different to most people, and so are my needs." She looked at me for a second, narrowing her eyes.

"Why me?"

"I've been following you. You're beautiful, and I want you. So I'm going to kill you."

"Aw jee thanks, I'm flattered." There was a biting sarcasm to her voice

"I don't think you understand this situation. You should be begging for your life, showing me respect in the hope that I'll spare you."

"What's the point? You've made it perfectly clear that I'm not gonna make it out alive, so I may as well wind you up a little first."

"Yeah, umm about the whole 'not making it out alive' thing... You don't seem very worried about that."

"I'm not. People die. What is there to live for in this fucking dump anyway?"

"You're not normal are you?" She laughed at that.

"Well fuck, you know it's bad when the girl threatening to kill you for no other reason than personal pleasure thinks you're weird."

I thought that she was probably trying to get out of it somehow, though I couldn't make sense of her reaction, I didn't believe that she genuinely just didn't care she was going to die. I thought that maybe she'd called the police without me noticing, and was saying all this while they were listening on the other end of the phone. That's when I snapped.

My first victim, I'd spent weeks making sure this would be perfect and here she was, looking me dead in the face, laughing at me. It wasn't supposed to be like this. I swung at her and she fell to the ground, holding her face.

"Shut up!" I screamed at her and the anger in my face seemed to scare her and for the first time since I'd confronted her, she seemed to finally grasp the severity of the situation. I threw her onto the bed and tied her hands to the headboard with steel wire.

Rope seems too easy, in the movies the victim always slowly wears down the material until it breaks or they undo the knots that were supposed to be impossible to undo. I wasn't taking any chances. The more you struggle under the fine, sharp pressure of steel wire, the harder it becomes, the more pain you cause yourself.

"Look can you please just do me a favour?"

"And here I was thinking you were getting the hang of the victim role. I don't think you should be asking for favours right now."

"Please." Tears started to soak her red cheeks.

"Please just make it fast. I don't want any pain. Just kill me and get it over with."

I looked at her for a minute and the visions flooded my mind of everything I could do to her. All of the skin that was exposed as she was now wearing pyjama shorts and a t-shirt. The knife in my hand would've so easily glided through her long, tanned legs. It would've danced along her thin arms. I would've gasped in marvel as the dark red blood painted patterns along her body and pooled beneath her, soaking into the mattress.

But instead I chose to humour her request. I would kill her quickly. Not because she had asked me to, but because I had chosen to. She had presented me with a second option and I had decided to take it. I was still in control.

"Fine."

"Thank you." She breathed, I hadn't noticed she was holding her breath as she waited for my reply.

"And..." She hesitated as if scared to ask anything else, fearing that if she pushed too far I'd change my mind about killing her quickly.

"Can you take the mask off?"

"Why?"

"Well you're about to kill me. You're ending everything and you're the last person I'm ever going to see, so I want to really see you."

I considered it for a while, and since she was already tied down with no chance of escaping, I figured it couldn't hurt. I took it off and for a fraction of a second a small smile surfaced on her parted, red lips.

I climbed onto the bed and positioned myself above her, the knife in my hands raised above her chest, her heart. As she lay there looking at me, I wondered what in her life had touched her, tainted her, to the point where she accepted that she was about to die with no struggle, no protest. I would've asked her but the truth was, I was afraid that if she told me, it would stop me from doing what I was about to do.

Maybe she had suffered the same awful things that I had. Maybe she would understand me and I her. Maybe, despite my lack of empathy and remorse, I wouldn't want to kill her, because I liked knowing that someone like her existed. Someone who wasn't afraid of me, but understood that I was to be feared. Someone who understood that people like me are the way we are because of things that are out of our control.

Maybe not. Maybe finding out her story wouldn't have changed anything, but I couldn't take that risk.

In the moments before I plunged the knife into her chest, her eyes drifted over to the rows of books on her bookshelf.

"It's kinda poetic. Like Romeo and Juliet."

"I'm not exactly an expert on Shakespeare's work, but I'm pretty sure they both died. And I'm going to walk away from this tonight, my heart beating as sure as yours is right now."

She stared up at me with her almost golden eyes and in a quiet voice whispered,

"Maybe so, but I get the feeling you're already dead inside."