Snow is falling heavily again as Lydia’s deep red Mustang pulls into the hotel parking lot and eases to a stop. She switches off the engine, but makes no move to open the door. Snowflakes settle on the windshield. All is quiet, though not quite silent. The distant sounds of human activity are muffled, as if smothered by a vast duvet that has fallen over the world. Lydia closes her eyes and allows herself to tumble gently into that inviting space between wakefulness and not, her tired, still-hungover brain slipping away from her like a boat still tethered to a jetty let free to drift.
A loud thump on the window right next to her pulls her back to the waking world with a sharp intake of breath, her heart thumping as she whips her head around, leaning instinctively away from the sound. She can see a hand in a black leather glove emerging from the sleeve of a long, dark grey overcoat. Then the coat bends at the waist and Alex’s face appears in the window.
“Jesus Christ,” Lydia yells, yanking the door handle and shoving it open hard as Alex dodges out of the way, “are you trying to give me a heart attack?”
“A little jumpy, are we?” The smirk on his face only fuels her temper.
“You get off on scaring women?”
“You wanna know what I get off on?”
Lydia glares at him so fiercely that he takes a step back, holding his hands up in apology, and Lydia notices for the first time that he’s carrying a thick manila envelope. “What’s that?”
“Just a little present,” he says nonchalantly, “but if this is a bad time…”
“Don’t play games with me,” Lydia pulls her leather jacket tighter around herself, “I’m cold and tired and I just want to go inside and…” she breaks off, glancing towards the hotel entrance. “How did you know where to find me, anyway?”
Alex makes a face as though the question is beneath him.
“Did you call around all the hotels in the city or something?”
“Only the seedy ones.”
Lydia shoves him hard and he takes a step back. “Asshole.”
“Hey,” Alex waves the envelope, “do you want your present or not?”
“Can we do this inside, Alex? It’s freezing.”
“That’s a tempting offer,” he grins, “but unfortunately I can’t stay. Bad guys to catch, you know.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I felt bad about this morning.”
Lydia’s face wrinkles in confusion. “What about it?”
“Well, you snuck out of my place without so much as a goodbye, so I figured I must have done something to upset you.”
“Is this how it’s going to be?” Lydia folds her arms. “’Cause I gotta tell you, the whole clingy vibe does nothing for me.”
“Clingy?”
“You’re making a fuss because you didn’t get a goodbye kiss?”
“Wow.”
“What?”
“You’re colder than this snow.”
“I will be if you don’t hurry this up.” She nods at the envelope. “You gonna give me that or what?”
“Take it.” He hands the thick package over. “No, no, don’t open it now, you can thank me later.”
Lydia’s fingers, already half-way inside the envelope, halt and then retreat. She shrugs, smooths the flap closed, and turns towards the hotel. “Alright, see you later.” After a few paces she stops, feeling Alex’s eyes still on her, and looks over her shoulder. “When?”
“Huh?”
“When will I see you?”
“I, uh…”
Lydia rolls her eyes. “Tomorrow?” she flippantly remarks.
“I’m rotating to nights tomorrow.” He looks disappointed.
“During the day then.”
“Not going to see Devere again?” There’s a definite note of jealousy in his voice, and Lydia savours it.
“There you go again.” She smiles, slyly.
“What are you talking about?”
“Clingy.”
“You’re ridiculous, you know that.”
“Pick me up here around midday,” she says, already walking away again.
“I haven’t said yes yet!” Alex calls after her, but Lydia just waves goodbye without turning around or breaking stride until she’s disappeared inside and out of sight. She knows leaving him wanting more will only work in her favour.
*
The heavy, brown envelope lands on Lydia’s bed with a soft thump, and she throws her bag and jacket into a chair before stooping to fetch a bottle of water from the minibar. The rows of tiny liquor bottles make her shudder, and she shuts the door on them hard before twisting the bottle top and gulping down the cool liquid, its soothing properties radiating from her stomach to her brain in seconds.
Setting it down on the bedside table, she falls onto the soft mattress and pulls the envelope towards her, reaching inside with those elegant fingers and extracting the contents. It’s a folder, stuffed thick with documents and worn thin at the edges, deep blue in colour, bearing upon its front the badge of the Decanten Police Department and underneath that, written in black marker pen, the name of its subject: Jason Devere. A broad smile spreads across Lydia’s lips. “Thank you, Alex,” she whispers, opening it up and beginning to read.
As she scans page upon page of police reports, witness statements, forensic reports and crime scene descriptions, one thing becomes crystal clear: the media coverage of the Krimson Killer didn’t even begin to do justice to the full horror of these events. She knows, for example, because the papers reported it, that the eight-year-old Dimitroff twins, Ivan and Elena, had their skin flayed and swapped one with the other. But the newspaper reports never detailed the gruesome, surgical precision with which Jason Devere had carried out this task. That he had carefully removed and switched their eyes. That he had posed the children to match a photograph of them playing on the living room floor on their birthday, with the exact same toys, balloons, cards. And, Lydia physically recoils from the file as she reads, that they were both alive when the process began.
She sits back, takes a deep breath and reaches for her water. This is going to be more difficult than she thought. Not because of the death, she’s written about death before. Not because of the wickedness, that was an inherent part of any premeditated murder. Not even because these were innocent children. No, there is something else here, something quite new to her. A level of pleasure that this killer seemed to take in his work. A pride he felt in its presentation. This wasn’t just torture. It wasn’t just murder. It was a performance, each one different, each so repulsive and sickening in its own way that it makes her uneasy in a way Lydia has never experienced before. A feeling that burrows beneath the surface of both body and mind. A discomfort of the soul.
She leans forward, turns over the page and finds herself staring at a photograph of the two children, just the way the police found them. Just the way their parents had found them. At a glance, they look quite normal, alive, posed mid-action as though playing on the floor. Only a closer look reveals the fresh scars, the ever-so-slightly sagging skin and hollow expressions. They look like badly made dolls. They were alive when he did this to them. Lydia feels the hot sickness boil suddenly up inside of her like an erupting volcano and dashes to the bathroom just in time.
Get a grip, she chides herself, rinsing her mouth with water and then dabbing it dry with a warm hand towel. It’s not going to get any easier. She isn’t wrong. Over the next few hours, she experiences second-hand horrors that most people could not conceive of in their darkest nightmares. Human beings tortured, sliced, crushed, twisted, even liquefied, all in the most deliberately painful ways that their killer could formulate. All made an example of; a spectacle for his audience.
Me, she thinks with a pang of guilt and horror. I’m his audience.
The last, and most recent case in the file is that of an eighteen-year-old girl, Alice Redmond, a student at the city’s art college. Alice, like the Dimitroff twins, had been flayed alive, but only her torso. Her skin, stretched and pinned like a canvas, painted upon with her own blood; a swirling pattern, a crimson void. She was probably still alive, the coroner notes, when her killer jammed the paintbrush he used through her eye, deep into her brain, and then posed her as if she had painted the picture herself, brush still protruding from her head.
Lydia closes the file and pushes it away from her. Now that she knows what it contains, the paper itself seems to exude malevolence and right now she wants to be as far away from it as possible. Sliding purposefully off the bed, she snatches it up, crosses to the dressing table, pulls open a drawer, crams the file inside and slams it shut again. It strikes Lydia suddenly, with those images staining her cranium, that the Jason she knew, that the Jason she had been questioning and examining didn’t seem capable of such horrific acts. It felt… inconsistent, in a way that made her uneasy. Lydia felt she never wore self-doubt well; the shade didn’t complement the rest of her character. Now looking up into the mirror, for a split second she doesn’t recognise the face staring back at her. She’s never seen that expression upon it before. Fear and nausea have robbed it of its usual confidence and composure. She crouches to open the minibar and retrieves two small bottles of vodka, twisting the top off one with shaking fingers and tipping it down her throat. It’s empty in seconds. I’ll regret that in the morning. But she doesn’t care. She won’t sleep otherwise.
Carrying the second bottle back over to the bedside table, she sets it down and then strips off her clothes, tossing them onto the chair where her jacket lies before slipping between the cool sheets. She twists open the vodka and then reaches for her phone while she drinks. No messages. She feels a pang of irritation that Alex would leave her with this package of nightmares and not even bother to check on her. Who’s clingy now? Lydia curses herself and turns out the light as the warm tingle of the alcohol begins to numb the fringes of her consciousness.
*
High-heeled footsteps echo through the dark corridors of Mortem Asylum. Either side of Lydia as she walks, the walls are shifting, writhing, a fleshy tapestry of silently screaming faces. She tries not to look, her pace quickening, her footsteps growing louder. Ahead of her is a door, and through its tiny window she can see bright, white light. As she approaches it, a dark figure moves in the room beyond. Lydia hesitates. The walls begin closing in on her, stone grinding on stone, the squirming, howling faces pushing towards her. She dashes to the door, fumbling the handle and then, just as she feels the breath of those terrible faces on the back of her neck, tumbling through it and falling to the floor.
She hears the door slam shut behind her, and as she looks around a strong arm grabs her around the throat, lifting her clear off the ground. She screams, struggles, fights, kicks, claws, but it’s no use. The strong figure carries her to a steel table in the centre of the room and slams her down on it, his hand pinning her down by the throat, and a bolt of fear shoots through her as she sees the wolf-like face of Jason Devere looming over her, his lips curling into a sly smile.
Lydia squirms desperately, but his grip is like a vice. He grabs one of her wrists and drags it to the edge of the table where a heavy iron manacle on a chain rests. “No!” Lydia chokes as she feels the metal close around her flesh.
“Yes,” the killer growls softly in her ear as he forces her other arm to the far side of the table and clamps that one too. “You’re mine now.”
“Please,” Lydia begs, still fighting desperately to free herself, the bloody images of the Krimson Killer’s victims racing through her mind. “Please don’t.”
“Oh come now,” Jason moves around the table so that he’s looming over her head, “fair’s fair. You wanted to get inside my head, didn’t you?”
“No.” Lydia starts to cry, her legs still twisting and kicking in vain.
“Well, now I’m going to get inside of yours.” He raises his hands high above her, and Lydia sees that he’s gripping a huge meat cleaver, its polished steel glinting eerily in the bright, fluorescent light.
“NO!”
The blade plummets towards her, propelled with brutal force, and in a split second she feels its impact, feels the sharp edge cut through her, hears the sickening crunch of her own skull.
Lydia wakes, sitting bolt upright in her pitch-dark room, screaming.