The Nightmare Book

The Knife Collector

My roommate collects knives. He stores them all three glass cases; tiny pocketknives to huge, shiny carving knives to hunting knives and fishing knives and knives that apparently date back several centuries.

He is very enthusiastic about his collection, and I try to share his interest in the only way I can, which is to nod thoughtfully as he speaks and occasionally say "Ah," or "Cool" or "Nice".

The occasional guest would typically be just as interested as I was, and would sit down to listen to the history of machetes and butterfly knives.

There were three such guests, Dave, Clyde and Hank (although we called him Moose) who would visit me frequently. Being my childhood friends, they were always thrilled to see me, although they grew apprehensive about the dude with the knives.

"Look at him," said Moose on a particular Thursday afternoon, watching my roommate clean a USMC combat knife. "Is that all he cares about?"

"Leave him alone," I said, but deep down, I agreed that my roomate's obsession had been going too far lately. He would stay up for hours, cleaning and sharpening his knives, getting only a few hours of sleep each night.

"He needs a new hobby," said Clyde. "I can't stand it when he goes on about the history of a piece of cold iron."

And my roommate came over and show us the newest item in his collrction, as he always did, yet on this particular Thursday afternoon, his eyes were very dark and his hands were very clumsy. I should have known from the cuts on his face and hands that he was too sleep-deprived to be handling weapons, and I tried to tell him to put the damn thing back in the case where it belonged, but that didn't stop poor old Dave from getting cut on his face. The cut was on his left cheek, barely touching his lip and already oozing blood. Dave claimed he was fine, but I saw the look in his eye reflected on the knife.

And so of course it was Dave who came up with our brilliant plan. That night, my roommate decided that he ought to go to bed at a normal time. The three boys and I decided that it was a good time to look through his knife collection. They were simply oh-so fascinating. We sorted through them, pointing out the ones we liked the best, because of course we could go on and on and on and on about how wonderful these things were.

We stood on all four corners of the bed silently, each with a hunting knife in our hands. And once we had him pinned down to the bed and he tried to scream, we stuffed his mouth with our socks.

We took the time to show him each and every knife in his collection, and we took the time to tell him what it was and where it came from in this painstaking detail. We also told him exactly where we would cut and stick each one.

When we had gone through every knife in his collection, we told my roommate "Goodnight," and washed our hands.