Crimson

Go To Sleep

Seven crimson splatters against my jumper and the boy was still. He had put up a good fight, he had refused to die and for that I’d let him live. If I could restrain myself that is.

I started humming under my breath as I surveyed my options. I couldn’t take the heart because unfortunately that would kill him, and I’d already resolved in my mind to keep him alive. I felt like a boy at a cafeteria, idly murmuring a tune as he took one food or another.

As always I took my favourite, a kid’s dessert. I bit into his kidney with a delightful squelch that sent shivers of delight up my spine and I gave a light hearted giggle. The taste of the fatty blood about to be purified and the cleaned blood of the kidneys electrified different parts of my tastebuds and I tilted my head back, moaning as the blood dripped down my chin.

I wasn’t a clean eater I could say now. I wish I was. I wish I could catch all the sickly sweet blood that dripped off my jaw, or ran down my neck. But alas I could not. I closed my eyes, revelling in the taste.

‘Still hungry?’ Jeff asked from behind me. I felt myself growl low in my chest, my body automatically hunching over the fallen boy as I protected my prey from the mouths of the unworthy.

I answered by greedily licking the blood on my face and even sneaking some from the body. I moaned again and forced myself to back from the body, to pull my sewing kit and stitch the open wound together, crudely but effectively.

I stood and looked at Jeff. He did not flinch as I smiled, revealing the chunks of flesh between my teeth. He rolled a second body over his feet, and giggled when the face was cast into the light.

I kept my expression carefully neutral as I surveyed the weeping burns where the eyes once were and crusted over smile. I looked up at Jeff and gave a shy smile and hoped my gratitude was gotten across.

‘I think this will work EJ!’ He laughed again, and the healing scar tissue around the slits on his cheek ripped again, blood spilling down his jaw. He wrinkled his nose in frustration but did not feel the pain as he scraped his fingers down the rest of the scar, removing all healing tissue and popping it into his mouth.

‘EJ?’ I asked, watching the disappearing skin with something akin to desire. I was hungry.

‘Eyeless Jack!’ He winked. ‘The name suits right?’

I shrugged and hooked my hands around the small waist of the dead girl, dragging her mangled corpse across the pavement towards me. I whipped my razor out from the pocket and flicked it open, creating a soft snick as it slid out and the light danced across the silver and wet crimson blood alike, not seeming to care what is brightened as it moved down the blade. It made me smile.

I placed the blade at the centre of her ribcage, gently moving it down the spattered material of her shirt until I felt the soft give of her solar plexus, a bundle of nerves in her abdomen. It was there my knife slipped through skin and cut downwards in a surgical slit. I didn’t hesitate to choose which delicacy I would devour.

†             †             †

Life was simple for a psychopath like me. Kill, eat, kill. Maybe I’d even sleep everyone once in a while. It was three days later when I found the boy I’d spared again and I came home whistling, having saved his heart in my pocket.

I walked in. Jeff sat atop the shelf cross legged, his eyes closed. I couldn’t blink to clear the eyes I didn’t have.

His eyes snapped open and he grinned, tilting his head 90 degrees and giving me the most sinful grin I’d ever seen, next to him was something crimson and white, something that made my stomach rumble.