Satisfaction flooded the man as he plunked the unconscious young woman down on the ground on his usual cliff, the new moon making it difficult to see anything.
He rubbed a spot on the side of his throat, feeling the slight sting.
This woman, unlike most of the others, had turned and fought, instead of freezing in dumbstruck fear. She had long fingernails that she’d used to scratch at his neck, and the tiny marks had bled a little.
But she hadn’t been able to stop him from punching her hard enough to send her flying to the floor.
And there was another thing.
They’d never catch him.
The cops sure thought they had, oh yes, but everyone in this run-down hole of a town were fools.
Was he in jail? No, he was still as free as any man could be.
Instead, he was here, on the dark cliff, waiting for the miserable girl to wake up so he could kill her properly; killing someone who was asleep was no fun at all. No, it was much, much more satisfying to kill them the moment they awoke, to see in their eyes the absolute and complete terror of what they knew would be their fate in the seconds to come.
When her eyes blinked open, slowly, groggily, the man saw her release a muffled cry of fear and puzzlement at the rag across her mouth and the ones binding her hands and feet, before he lifted the knife, blood pounding in his ears, and brought it down into her.
She didn’t scream as they usually did, just a soft grunting sigh of pain as she bent over into the blade, before the man pulled it out, feeling jubilant.
With the cops on his trail, it was a relief to be able to control one thing: who lived and who died in the miserable town.
The man looked up abruptly at the sudden snapping of branches being shoved aside, twigs being stepped on, and there on the cliff with him, suddenly stood a little child.
What was her name? The oddly-placed thought surfaced in his twisted mind as he stared at her. He had a feeling he should know, but he didn’t, the word slipping from his grasp.
Instead, they stared at each other, him in barely disguised surprise and still radiating fury, her in open-mouthed horror.
“No! No! Murderer! You’re the murderer!” she screamed, her young voice shrill with horror. The little girl turned to dash away, but the man, understanding her intentions as though she’d spoken them, lunged forward the length of his body and snatched the child by the collar of her shirt.
She shrieked when she felt herself stop, and twisted around to try to scratch at his face with her small and painless fingernails.
There, there, do it now.
Without thinking, he raised his knife-hand, already splattered in blood, and drew the polished edge across the child’s throat in a swift jerk.
Her screams, which were still very much audible, faded to a peculiar gushing sound as her vocal chords ceased to function, as blood poured into her lungs and out of her neck.
The man dropped her, leaping backwards. The girl toppled over, her chest heaving in panting efforts to breath past the rent in her throat.
And then she died with a final twitching motion.
This time, there was no triumph, no adrenaline, no releasing rush, only panic.
He killed whom he wanted, where and when he wanted, not little children who had the misfortune to stumble upon him in the middle of the heinous act.
He didn’t control the girl who’d found him, he didn’t control the circumstances. The appearance of the child made him feel like he had already lost that control.
And he killed women, not children. For some reason, despite the dozen or more (or maybe less, he didn’t count anymore), people he had murdered, the act of slitting a child’s throat seemed to do more than make him ‘just a killer’, just someone who, once he killed his first girl in a flurry of fury and rage could not stop.
The man shuddered and stumbled backwards, slamming his spine painfully into the back of the iron guardrail, where he sat in a daze.
It was just a girl, he tried to reason with his frozen mind, just a girl like all the other ones you’ve killed before.
Somehow, this was different.
Killing the child wasn’t a proclamation of his rage like all the others before had been.
Killing her had been nothing more than…an accident. No, worse than that.
It was nothing more than the animal instinct to protect his own hide.
Some part of him knew, reasoning in a tiny whispering part of his mind, that he almost wanted to be discovered. Because if he was, then he’d be forced to stop, in prison. He’d be freed from the nameless blood-lust that powered his night time killings; the terror would end.
But with the death of that girl, it was over, for he knew he’d never be able to willingly turn himself in.
The man released a shaky breath, standing up. The ground seemed terribly unsteady as he glanced down at the child.
He bent and wiped at a streak of blood that had trickled from her mouth and stained her dainty chin, the motion done almost tenderly, in painful regret.
Then the man bit back the urge to scream at the sky, hating what he’d done, what he continued to do…hating himself, and dashed away from the two bodies as fast as he could.
