(AN: This was based on a dream I had a while back, and I've kind of lost motivation on it, but if anyone wants me to finish I gladly will :) )
Killer
I had a dream last night.
Blood on the walls, pouring off his hands as he scrapes them over damp stone. Hidden places and hidden clues and the tidy security of the world interrupted.
He took them from stairs. Always stairs, his favorite target; see someone climbing with a spring in their step and hope in their eyes, make sure they never get where they want to go.
The museum immortalized him. It was groundbreaking, and oh-so-controversial; the conservatives were outraged. This isn't a place we want to take our children, they said. This is glorifying the monster. Its perpetrators smiled and soothed with everything they had. Think of it as a guidebook, they would say, and one we hope you won't need much longer. Study him. Study his patterns; learn his habits. Knowledge is power.
What they never confessed was that they wanted the building to stand forever. It was the brainchild of several of the craziest architects in the business, the back rooms a maze of tunnels and trapdoors like the mind of a serial killer, the outer walls forming a simple but highly symbolic rectangle.
He had a certain flair, the more honest of us had to admit. I was sure if you met him face – to – face he was charming. But the cases on display in the cynics' morbid temple were, undeniably, the work of someone akin to the ones who lived under your bed as a child. Every child had new nightmares after that year. The nation had, as our illustrious leader stated, been gripped by a terror unheard of since the famous Jack himself stalked the streets of London.
The skulls never survived. I'm not sure how the curators had gotten ahold of the bodies of the victims, but there they were, in their smashed and pulpy glory. The oldest had slipped away twenty months ago, the most recent just last week, and every one of them had a pile of shattered bones where the head should be. The most gruesome stories were only ever floating whispered rumors. The display cards just said, “Cause of Death Unknown.”
They said he had a tunnel he liked to use just for this. They said he had superhuman strength, that he picked the bodies up (already dead, hopefully) and swung them like sacks of meat against the walls until nothing could be recognized as human.
Like I said; flair.
I went to the museum on April 1, 2013, with family in tow. My oldest cousin had been put on the case, and had been meaning to scour the museum for clues for quite some time. The rest of us just tagged along.
We went two days after Emily Mason lived.
She had wanted to be a movie star, before, and she took the rocket ride to fame just as she had dreamed. Overnight she became the talk of every news show and her face was plastered, nose smashed and cheeks drooping and cranium so horribly dented I was sure she had to be a zombie, on magazine covers worldwide. Humans as a species seem unable to let the grieving mourn in peace. She was the first victim ever to have survived him, and of course she wished she had died.
I hadn't wanted to visit her. My cousin bribed me first, and then threatened me, saying if I saw his work up close I'd be more careful walking home at night. I sat in the corner of the hospital room emitting waves of sympathy I knew she didn't need or even particularly want.
She had gone out to buy groceries, humming to herself as she walked down familiar streets and turned to cut through a park, sauntering down a concrete stairway with her mind far away on some movie set. She remembered as her foot hit the third step the danger of stairs.
She said he was on her like a lightening bolt, jolting out from under the trees, knocking her right off her feet as they collided. She said it was, in a twisted way, like the greetings she got from her boyfriend whenever he managed to roll back into town; full of enthusiasm and excitement.
“I think he enjoys it,” she said, voice low and toneless as a ghost's. I glanced at her heart monitor; the needle was jumping up and down with suspicious keenness. “He really does. It's like a hobby to him, frightening people.
“And that place-” She paused to shudder. I saw the flush of revulsion creeping up her throat and relaxed a little, convinced for the moment that she really was alive. “God, it was like every disgusting subway tunnel in Manhattan combined, then shrunk down to the size of a hallway and left to rot for thirty years. And him, he's the worst part of it, hideous mask and a knife-”
“Mask?” my cousin interrupted, sounded crestfallen. “Ah. You – you didn't see his face then?”
I rolled my eyes, humiliated by association. “Of course not. He's a pro. He wouldn't make it that easy.”
He glared, and I flinched, but Emily merely turned her head a fraction, aiming her unfocused eyes in my direction. Her breath slouched raggedly out of bruised and broken lips. I noticed for the first time how still she was. Anyone else, especially being questioned by a detective, would fidget and twitch every time they stretched the truth. She couldn't move like that; every inch of her was bandaged or bruised. She didn't even seem to have the energy to lie. My limbs tingled and stung just looking at her.
Most definitely, absolutely, positively a monster, I thought.
Later I walked back home alone, to fetch the family, to visit the temple, to pay our dues to the beast. The gaping holes of alleys seemed darker than before, and I thought I could have drowned myself in the shadows.
Emily Mason was found on a warm, sunny morning at half past eight, lying in a sheltered gutter, bleeding out. She was painted in shades of black and blue and twisted like a pretzel, bones snapped like twigs out of fragile sockets. Whoever found her called the police as soon as their trembling fingers could dial the number, and then was violently sick over a bush.
He must be getting careless, leaving a body out for the world to see, and a live one at that.
The nurse stormed in when she started to cry, complaining about shameless officials disturbing her patients, and urged us out as she jabbed a needle into Emily's IV bag. Through the fog of injury and painkillers most of the poor thing's words came out as a mumble.
My cousin says he heard “last words,” in it somewhere, so off we went to hunt.
“Last words,” he'd said, with a superior smirk, “is a police secret. It seems that the killer likes to taunt his victims just before he offs them. We've found traces in several of the deceased's computers of self-erasing messages projected directly onto their screens.” He lowered his voice in an effort to sound ominous. “He appears to be adept at remote hacking.”
I tried to coax an example out of him, but he muttered something about “the delicacy of a young woman's mind” and “horrors” and slouched away, his shoulders sunken under an oversized coat.
If he was trying to protect me from horrors, he shouldn't have brought me here.
All the way across town, thirty minutes in the back of a smelly cab, to look at rotting meat and blood – chilling charts on a dais surrounded, ironically, by stairs. Seventy minutes to read and comb through everything within reach, ten seconds to decide there was no way I was setting foot on any of those steps. It's terrifically hard to make your way through normal life once the stairs become something to fear.
